Greek default threatened as Syriza balks at further social cuts

Robert Stevens

Greece has moved closer to a default on its debt, following the breakdown in negotiations Thursday evening. They were the latest in more than five months of talks between the Syriza-led government and the European Union, European Central Bank, and International Monetary Fund (IMF), formerly called the “troika” and now the “institutions”.

On Friday evening, Syriza leader Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras told parliament he could not sign the “absurd” and “irrational” proposal handed to him the previous day.

The measures were also opposed by Association of Greek Industries president Theodoros Fessas, with whom Syriza has cultivated close ties in recent years. Speaking Friday to the BBC, Fessas said the creditors’ demands were “quite high” and contained “harsh” measures.

At the talks in Brussels, European Union Commissioner Jean-Claude Juncker and Eurogroup head Jeroen Dijsselbloem, presented Tsipras with five pages of proposals demanding further austerity measures amounting to billions of euros. These were based on a further seven page list of “Prior Action” to be taken by Greece “in consultation with EC, ECB/IMF staff”.

The document consisted of a list of policy ultimatums including pension cuts, VAT sales tax increases, privatisations, public administration reforms, labour market reforms, a welfare system review and the opening of “restricted” professions to competition. All of this had to be either effective from July 1, or in the process of being enacted.

In the manner of colonial overlords, the proposals concluded with the instruction to Greece that “Any legislative or other action on the above policies will need to be done in agreement with the institutions. More generally any policy measures with a potential impact on the achievement of the programme objective, as assessed by the institutions, will only be made in agreement with the institutions.”

At the talks, Tsipras presented Syriza’s own 47-page list of reforms, which were thrown out and denounced as “vague.”

Prior to the talks, a number of senior European politicians—including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, her Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, and Dijsselbloem—insisted that Greece carry out the necessary measures.

Dijsselbloem warned Tsipras that the creditors, to whom Greece owes more than €300 billion, would not meet him “halfway”. Merkel told CNN, “Greece has to be willing to undertake the necessary reforms” and undertake “harsh measures.”

On Friday, prior to Tsipras’ speech in parliament, Syriza informed the IMF that Greece would not meet a debt repayment of €300 million that fell due that day. It would instead bundle that and other payments due to the IMF, totalling €1.6 billion, and settle the debt later in the month. The Athens stock market fell sharply, losing up to 5 percent at one stage.

Talks between Greece and the “institutions” are on a knife edge. The EU is placing escalating pressure on Tsipras as he attempts to work out an austerity program that will satisfy the demands of finance capital and that he feels he can present to the Greek people. Broad sections of Syriza, around its Left Platform, have warned that to accept and impose the terms on offer would be political suicide.

The failed talks coincided with a new report pointing to the social destruction in a country already bled dry. Two academic economists, Tasos Yiannitsis and Stavros Zografakis, estimate that the average Greek household has lost almost 40 percent of its income during the past five years. More than 23 percent of the loss was in direct income. Nearly a third of the population (31.1 percent) now live in poverty.

A glimpse of the seething anger of workers was highlighted by Britain’s DailyTelegraph who published an article Friday headlined, “Piraeus, where Syriza isn’t left wing enough”. It reported that dock workers at the Piraeus port, leased to the Chinese company Cosco, were protesting against pay cuts and worsening working conditions. It cited one worker who said, “They got rid of workers’ rights. They got rid of everything, there is nothing.”

In truth, it is not just Piraeus where Syriza is not seen as “left enough”. Aware of a growing mood of resistence, including recent strikes and protests, last month Adedy, the public sector trade union, called its first national strike of this year. The trade unions and Left Platform fear the development of an independent social and political movement of the working class, and that the illusions they peddled on behalf of Syriza prior to the election would not survive a deal signed on the terms demanded by the institutions.

As a result of the impasse, over the past few days there has been a flood of media speculation that Greece missing Friday’s IMF payment could result in a split in Syriza, a possible referendum on the proposals of the institutions, or elections in the near future.

Greece’s growing mountain of debt, now standing at 180 percent of GDP (up from 125 percent in 2009), cannot be paid back by the bankrupt state. BBC Economics Editor Robert Peston wrote on the eve of last week’s talks, “In the highly unlikely event that Greece could generate a 2 percent or 3 percent surplus year-in and year-out without its economy shrinking further (which few economists would anticipate), it would take around half a century for Greek public sector debt to fall to a level regarded as sustainable.”

He posed the question, “A half century of austerity? In what modern democracy would that be regarded as a realistic option?”

There is an increasing sense in the ruling circles, including within Syriza itself, that cuts on this scale can be only be imposed by dictatorial means. Editorialising Wednesday, the Guardian, which is supportive of the institutions giving Greece a few concessions and some ability to manoeuvre, warned of the political implications of not doing so amid growing anger in the population.

A few billion euros were on offer, “on a take-it-or-leave-it basis”, it stated. “Before risking a ‘leave it’, they need to ask themselves who it is they want to deal with. An iron law of modern European history runs thus: extreme economics leads to extremist politics. A line can be drawn from the Versailles treaty to the breakdown of the Weimar Republic. Eighty years on, a similar phenomenon is at work.” (emphasis added).

At the same time, Syriza is abandoning its token criticisms of police, as it relies more directly on the security forces to defend itself from popular opposition. Interior Minister Nikos Voutsis recently visited a police van outside his ministry to tell officers that Syriza was relying on them to do their job, “albeit not heavy-handedly,” according to Kathimerini .

Police have been asked to discreetly guard Syriza’s offices, the party’s Avgi newspaper, the Culture Ministry, and Tsipras’ home in Ano Kypseli. “We want to be close to targets but not to be visible,” one officer told the paper.

Social inequality and American politics

Andre Damon

Last week the New York Times released the results of an opinion poll, conducted in collaboration with CBS News, showing overwhelming and growing popular opposition to social inequality in the United States.

The details of the poll are striking. Asked whether “In today’s economy, everyone has a fair chance to get ahead in the long run,” for example, 61 percent of participants said that “just a few people at the top have a chance to get ahead,” compared to 35 percent who said that “anyone can get ahead.” Significantly, the percentage of people who chose the latter response has fallen by 17 percentage points since a similar poll conducted in early 2014.

Even more strikingly, 66 percent of participants said that “the distribution of money and wealth in this country… should be more equal,” compared with only 27 percent who said it was fair. The margin between the two responses was 39 percentage points.

When the question was put a different way, the results were even more pronounced. Asked whether social inequality is a “problem that needs to be addressed now, a problem but one that does not need to be addressed now or not a problem,” only 17 percent of respondents said that social inequality was “not a problem.”

Similarly, 68 percent of those polled said they favored raising taxes on people who earn more than $1 million a year, and 71 percent of respondents said they favored raising the federal minimum wage. Eighty percent favored requiring employers to offer paid leave to parents of new children and employees caring for sick family members, and 85 percent favored requiring employers to offer paid sick leave.

Polls such as the one carried out by the Times are always an imperfect reflection of the actual state of public opinion. Moreover, other surveys have consistently found that Americans significantly underestimate the actual level of social inequality. If anything, therefore, the results understate the overwhelming hostility of the population to the essential feature of American and indeed world capitalism: social inequality.

The widespread opposition to social inequality in the United States stands in sharp contradiction to the policies pursued by the entire political establishment. Indeed, the presidency of Barack Obama, who presented himself in the 2008 election as the champion of the “middle class,” has seen one of the most precipitous increases in social inequality in US history.

During only the first four years of the Obama presidency, the top 0.1 percent of the population increased their share of US wealth from 19 percent to 22 percent, while the top 1 percent of income earners in the US took in 95 percent of all income gains since 2009.

The enrichment of the financial elite has paralleled an enormous decline in US median household income, which has fallen by 12 percent, with a typical household earning $6,400 less per year in 2013 than it did in 2007.

The immense growth of social inequality over this period has been the direct result of the policies pursued by the Obama administration, which has sought to make the working class pay for the financial crisis that erupted in 2008 while protecting and expanding the wealth of the financial oligarchy.

The concerns within the ruling class over the implications of its policies can be seen in efforts to promote figures such as Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” running as a Democrat in the 2016 election. Sanders, who rhetorically denounces social inequality, is in fact a thoroughly conventional bourgeois politician.

The stated opposition of Sanders to social inequality is entirely of the same character of that of Obama: i.e., purely rhetorical. His candidacy is merely an attempt to keep the growing opposition to social inequality and the capitalist system within the confines of the Democratic Party.

Whatever the rhetoric of figures such as Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, there exists no section of the political establishment that supports any genuine reduction in social inequality. The most telling example is perhaps de Blasio, promoted as a champion of “progressivism” within the Democratic Party, who last month announced a series of measures hiking housing fees for low-income New York City residents while moving to privatize sections of public housing.

What none of these figures can acknowledge is that the growth of social inequality and the unprecedented concentration of wealth is a product of the capitalist system that they all defend, a system that is based on the subordination of all aspects of life to a financial aristocracy that controls the entire political system.

In contrast to the pseudo-left defenders of the Democratic Party, who have sought to present race and gender as the most important social categories, the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) has insisted that the growth of social inequity is the central political issue in contemporary society. The ICFI has insisted that social inequality is itself the expression of the division of society into two great classes; the working class, the vast majority of the population, and the ruling class.

The opposition to social inequality expressed in the New York Times poll is a product of both the objective reality of world capitalism and the experiences that the American working class has made over the past eight years.

But this spontaneous sentiment must be given a conscious political program, based on the understanding that the fight against social inequality is a revolutionary question that is inextricably tied to the independent political mobilization of the working class against capitalism. The creation of a genuinely egalitarian society means the overthrow of the capitalist system and its replacement with socialism and the democratic control over economic life.

What’s Brewing between Afghanistan and Pakistan?

Rajeshwari Krishnamurthy

On 29 May, media reports stated that Afghan President Ashraf Ghani issued a strongly-worded letter to the Pakistani government. The letter demands tougher Pakistani action against terrorism, increased counter-terrorism cooperation between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and in a stern tone, notes that if Pakistan fails to deliver on fighting the prolonged and now increasing insurgency, “the window of opportunity will be closed.” Fresh reports suggest that this alleged angry letter was in fact a ‘non-paper’ exchanged between Kabul and Islamabad in April 2015  that explains some discrepancies in the demands and deliveries between Ghani and Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

Regardless, this development stands stark in the face of the past few months of seemingly apparent rapprochement Ghani was attempting with Islamabad in a bid to get Pakistan to genuinely address terrorism.

What can be made of this tone of communication that comes after him going out of the way to end the 13-year long “undeclared state of hostility” between the two countries over the past few months - moves that were extremely unpopular among his own coalition government and the general citizenry?

How did Ghani’s Rapprochement with Pakistan Play Out?
Since the announcement of the National Unity Government (NUG) in September 2014 and his induction as the president, Ghani emphasised Afghanistan’s five-circle foreign policy; he placed Afghanistan’s neighbourhood in the country’s top priorities.

He visited India much after he visited Pakistan (unlike Karzai who had closer ties with India); Pakistani Army Chief Gen Raheel Shareef visited Kabul thrice in the past seven months; Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif visited Kabul where he publicly condemned the Taliban, an unprecedented move; and last month, Pakistan, with Beijing’s support, brokered a round of talks between the Afghan officials and the Taliban in Urumqi, China.

So, did tensions exist continually as he went about to mend ties with Pakistan? Yes. A large number of Afghans distrust the Pakistani government and perceive them as insincere. However, the breaking point was triggered when the Afghan National Directorate of Security (NDS) signed an MoU with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) under which both countries would collaborate on counter-terrorism, intelligence-sharing and personnel training.

Domestically, Ghani faced intense discontent and disapproval of this MoU from government officers, former and current politicians, and the general Afghan populace. Former NDS Chief Amrullah Saleh said, “By signing this MoU the Afghan president has actually portrayed us as half-culprit and half-perpetuator. This is an irreparable mistake.” Another former NDS Chief Asadullah Khalid said, “ISI will strive to subvert the achievements we have made in the intelligence sector and will destroy them, so I consider this agreement a shameful and unforgivable act.” There have been unconfirmed reports that the incumbent NDS Chief Rahmatullah Nabil opted out of signing this MoU. The Chief Executive Officer of Afghanistan, Abdullah Abdullah, demanded a review and amendment to the contents of the MoU. In fact, staunch Ghani supporters such as MP Shukria Barakzai too strongly opposed this MoU.

This disapproval of the MoU was felt most strongly from the country’s security forces that have taken a battering in Taliban’s 2015 spring offensive, Azm. Azm is the Taliban’s most elaborate offensive since their defeat in 2001. Attacks have been taking place all over the country, especially in the Northern Provinces like Kunduz, Badakshan, Farah, Daikundi, and Southern Provinces of Helmand and Kandahar in the south; and this time, Afghan security forces are countering it without any Western military involvement.

Where is All This Headed?
Does the tone of the 'non-paper' mean Ghani’s optimism is wearing thin? The message was conveyed in April 2015 - just before the May round of talks with the Taliban. In early June, Afghan women parliamentarians and a representative of the High Peace Council partook in informal talks with Taliban representatives in Norway. The leak coincides with the kick-off of the preparations for the next round of Kabul’s talks with Taliban in Qatar, tentatively scheduled to take place in July, post Ramzan. That the travel ban on the ‘Guantanamo Five’ Taliban members who will participate in this round of talks will expire and their status is still being negotiated between Doha and Washington is pertinent here.

So, are Ghani’s overtures proving futile? Maybe; unless Pakistan re-evaluates the precarious relationship it shares with the Afghan Taliban and chooses a complete turnaround, a substantial sustainable change in the situation is unlikely.

While Pakistan has carried out some of the demands listed in the ‘non-paper’, there were hints that Islamabad may attempt to renege on their word. Former Pakistani Permanent Representative to the UN Munir Akram’s Op Ed ‘Afghanistan: fighting the odds’ is indicative.

Faced with strong dissatisfaction from the Afghan side, Akram makes the following suggestions (and likely voices the Pakistani establishment’s opinion), among other preconditions, to ensure any movement towards the Afghan demand:

1. Pakistan will have to declare support for stability in Afghanistan, even at the cost of an open break with the Afghan Taliban
2. Pakistan must use all possible levers to persuade the Afghan Taliban to engage in the peace process, including direct action against dissident commanders.

And other actions sought are:

1. Afghanistan must retract the bounty on Mullah Omar
2. China’s support the peace process via offering economic incentives to ‘regional states’, among others
3. Dissenting voices from the NUG and Karzai’s circle must be quelled.

He is probably hinting that tasks 1 and 2 are too radically far from Pakistan’s current approach to achieve. Ghani’s might try to take recourse in China’s supposed leverage over Pakistan, but at the moment, Beijing appears to be falling short of that by a bit.

So, were Ghani’s advances based on his own ill-informed calculations? Yes, he did ignore the general negative sentiment towards his over-enthusiastic efforts for rapprochement with Pakistan. The 'non-paper' raises a lot of questions - regarding his plan of action as well as Pakistan’s capability (irrespective of the nature of intent) to deliver on their promises. And this episode confirms that fissures between the two countries run too deep and are too complex to be resolved with mere one-sided optimism.

Is there A Single Development Model That Works?

Jon Kofas

Capitalism And Development Models: The question of "Development Models"

In the post-Communist era now more than two decades old, many people around the world are questioning what is the best economic development model? One reason for such a question is the very deep recession of 2008-present that has thrown many economies into a downward spiral of unemployment, rising public and private sector debt, and lack of rapid growth in the remainder of the decade. So, what are some models of modern economic development and to what degree do they improve people's lives, and do economic growth and development alone account for human happiness - with the broader meaning of the latter term?

The mode of production that determines the social order has been capitalism that has evolved from the Commercial Revolution in the 16th century to globalization in the late 20th-early 21st century. Under the world-system of capitalism, there have been different models of development in the history of capitalism, determined to a large degree by the shifts from the primary sector of production (agriculture, forestry, mining and fisheries) to the secondary sector (manufacturing) and to the tertiary (service) and high tech/biotechnology sector.

Before analyzing some models of economic development, it is instructive to consider the following questions about “development economics”.

a) What development model best serves the needs of the people, presumably all people and not just the financial and or political, military, bureaucratic elites?

b) Is it possible to separate politics from economics and speak in terms of pure economics instead of a system of political economy and social structure?

c) Is there such a thing as "the perfect" or 'ideal' system that can be applied perfectly in practice as it may appear in theory, whether such a system is market-based, statist, or some model based on a mixture?

d) Different countries would require to adopt variations of different models depending on their natural resources, labor force, level of current development.

e) Change is required to models of political economy to keep up with changes in the real economy and society."

f) As perfect as they may be in theory for any given society, economic models in practice do not mean very much, simply because the decision on what policies to pursue are always taken by those who command economic and political power. Add to the equation the factor of corruption and the model is coffee table reading material.

g) There is no such thing as the ideal model in theory that is not in practice a mixture of several theories. For example, is the US a "free market model" economy when in essence it has been practicing corporate welfare economics for decades? Is Indonesia a neoliberal economy under an Islamic regime, similar to Malaysia, Turkey, and now Egypt and Tunisia? Is China a statist economy or a mixed economy that allows a heavy dose of free enterprise?

Can there be a development model that serves all people based on social justice?

In the 19th century, there were a number of intellectuals from Adam Smith to Karl Marx who believed that it was possible to have an economic system that best served all people. However, Smith was an advocate of free market economic development, while Marx believed only Communism, the natural state of human beings, can best serve the people by eliminating elites, not reinforcing them.

Because people have differing views on what best serves society, that is, best serves every person equally in every respect in institutional terms, most economic models are necessarily based on what best serves interest groups within society. There are of course economic development models that claim to best serve everyone, including Socialist and Communist models, but in practice some sectors and some individuals are better served even by those models, as history has clearly demonstrated in the 20th century, than other groups in society. In short, as Jean-Paul Sartre and many others correctly maintained, there will always be elites in society, and that means that no economic model can possibly be free of that reality. Another way to view this is that there is no such thing as an economic development model that is "objective", because models are rooted in everything from investment to terms of trade that invariably benefit certain groups and not society as a whole.

Should GDP growth be the sole criteria for human happiness?

It is true that in world public opinion polls the top ten "happiest countries" are those that we consider developed economically, that is, those with diversified economies and high incomes. This is an indication that in the age of materialism where the value system is rooted in wealth and the security provided to maintain it people believe their happiness hinges on things associated primarily with material possessions. However, national economic growth and development do not necessarily translate into individual happiness, if a percentage of the population, anything above 10%, lives in chronic poverty.

Moreover, human happiness is also predicated on spiritual fulfillment for many non-Western societies. In the early 1970s, Bhutan rejected GDP as the sole criterion for progress, asserting that quality of life, social progress and the psychological well being of people are significant indicators to take into account. The Bhutan example became the UN standard as well. Although this is something that can be used as distraction by those trying to justify socioeconomic injustice by arguing why do people need material improvement when they have spiritual fulfillment, it is important to note that we cannot use the Western material criterion alone for it does not reflect the human experience worldwide.

Defining "Development"

The term development in economics does not mean the same thing for an advocate of "dependency theory" as it does for a monetarist. Nor does it necessarily mean the same thing for an advocate of sustainable development in India vs. one in Canada. For this reason, I need to lay some groundwork for this synoptic perspective of what the term means to intellectuals and politicians who do not share common views.

1. Centrally-planned models.

The old Soviet centrally-planned economy from the 1920s until the early 1980s was a model in which the command economy was rooted. The government decided on productivity and investment by sector as well as absorption of the surplus labor force from one sector by the other, not to satisfy consumer demand, but rather to meet the greater societal or national needs as the state defined them. In varying degrees, this model became a prototype for Eastern Europe after 1945, and for Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea, and China under Mao.

Development was measured by the state in terms of meeting production quotas, though in practice, the bureaucracy falsified reports to make productivity appear much better than it was. In the end, such a non-consumption-geared economy did not translate into rising living standards across the board, but it did absorb the surplus labor force and it tried to meet essential needs such as housing, health, and education. Command economies had enormous problems, not only because their civilian economies failed to meet mass consumer demand, but also because of the emphasis on durable goods focus vs. consumer goods, and heavy military spending that absorbed resources otherwise needed for the civilian economy. In practice, the politically-connected elites (the 'new class' linked to the Communist Party) benefited, while the broader masses lagged behind and lacked basic freedoms that many of them valued, such as freedom of worship, expression, and others that are common in open societies of the Western World.

2. Quasi-statist and neo-corporatist models.

Government permits free enterprise, but invests heavily in certain industries and/or subsidizes others even if they show chronic deficits instead of profits, because it deems it is in the 'national economic' interest. It is difficult to argue that quasi-statism and neo-corporatism, both of which are inter-related and have many aspects to them, are alike in South Korea as in Brazil, or in Russia as in Argentina and Venezuela. The common denominator is heavy government involvement in investment with the intent to promote certain sectors, trade regulation intended to promote national capitalism and not permit international capital to determine economic planning, and strengthening the state structure so that the private sector, especially foreign capital does not have a dominant role.

After the Second World War, a number of countries, including Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, among others, began to adopt 'top-down' development models so they can help build sectors such as steel industry, shipbuilding, and others. This model in varying degrees found expression in Brazil, Argentina after 2001, post-Communist Russia, even Spain in the late 1980s-early 1990s before the wave of neoliberalism swept the EU that had itself aspects of corporatism and quasi-statism as a regional bloc rooted in heavy subsidies of certain sectors.

The quasi-statist model is also operating in a number of countries as different as Norway and Saudi Arabia. There is the Norwegian development model, (to some extent also practiced in other Scandinavian countries) essentially a variation of Keynesian economics, is rooted in a strong state structure that relies on a solid welfare state with a private competitive sector backed by the social-democratic state.

The benefits of this model are that there is a sense of national control over the economy, vs. foreign capital control, thus it is an issue of national sovereignty prevailing in the age of globalization. Another benefit is that the state helps to plan for the country's future with the intent of long-term development that presumably would meet the needs of the majority of the people. Moreover, the nation retains a strong national capitalist class that is able to compete internationally instead of becoming subservient to exporters from developed core countries.

How well has this model worked? The examples of South Korea, Taiwan, all of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) indicate that the national economies experience phenomenal growth. This does not mean, however, that the wealth is evenly spread across the population.It is true that South Korea, and Taiwan developed a middle class on the basis of this model and it is also true that the fastest middle class growth is taking place in the BRICS. However, the world's largest percentage of poor live in the BRICS. With the promise that national economic growth and development will some day in the future translate into individual prosperity the quasi-statist countries can continue to operate as they do until such time as the broader masses rise up and demand results filter down to them.

3. Neo-classical (free enterprise) model.

The classical free enterprise system theory of Adam Smith and its apologists in the 20th century, from the neo-classical advocates (Robert Solow and T. W. Swan) to Milton Friedman and the Chicago School that rejected Keynesian economics in favor of rigid monetarism that is an integral part of the neo-classical movement. Productivity and capital accumulation based on a fiscal system that favors capital, allows maximal freedom of capital movement and investment and limits organized workers' rights that inhibit capital expansion and accumulation are at the core of this school of thought.

With many variations, the neo-classical school and its advocates ranging from supply side economics to neoliberalism and monetarism as expressed by IMF-World Bank economists as well as purists of the classical theory made a major comeback in the 1980s and they have triumphed ever since. In practice, the theory never worked as its advocates claim, because the state became a vehicle to transfer massive income from the welfare state to corporate welfare, thus a form of statism was part of this model. Moreover, the model in practice proved to have many flaws as it permitted numerous scandals from banking to corporate corruption and investor fraud on which fortunes of the very few were built at the expense of the general economy.

The market-oriented growth and development model is presumably one that takes place under an open, free and democratic society where free market forces trade, invest and consume with minimal government intervention. This is the theory. In reality, the role of government is very heavy in every aspect from monetary to fiscal policy, and society is not nearly as free and open as one would argue in theory. The quasi-police state methods of the US, everything from illegally tapping into the private phone records of millions of people to denying due process to anyone that government has the right to brand terrorist indicate a slippery slope toward authoritarian capitalism. "The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs..."

Putting aside the reality that economic models necessarily work within a political system that makes all kinds of lofty claims about what best serves "the people", let also consider that many people actually believe that if the "national economy" is performing well, so will they, because they identify with the nation-state, even though they as individuals may be in the lower socioeconomic strata and derive no benefits from any growth and development. This is the case in many countries, most notably the US. The latest (June 2013) Department of Labor report shows that labor costs are the lowest since 1947 when the US began keeping records. Hourly compensation continues to sink, most notably in the manufacturing sector that was historically the best-paying sector for workers. This trend of downward socioeconomic mobilization has been a reality for the past three decades, but the US economy continues to develop and grow, though without such development translating into income growth for the middle class and workers.

There are variations of authoritarian capitalist models found in many non-Western countries such as Saudi Arabia but also in a number of African nations. This model allows for free enterprise, it rests on one or very few sources for economic growth and development, and it has a strong state monopolized by authoritarian regimes, invariably more corrupt than countries where there is some semblance of checks and balances. There is the Indonesian, Malaysian, Turkish model of neoliberalism under Islamic regimes; something that is now spreading across other Muslim nations, including Tunisia and Egypt. This model is an integral part of the neoliberal one under globalization.

Clearly, there are models today that result in tremendous GDP growth, but that does not translate to upward socioeconomic mobility and the qualitative and quantitative growth of a middle class. For example, the result of globalization, especially from 2007 to the present, is that the middle class in the US and EU has been shrinking, while it has expanded in Asia and to some degree in Latin America and parts of Africa. Therefore, versions of the neoliberal model of development that the US and EU have been pursuing has resulted in downward socioeconomic mobility for the most advanced nations as well as semi-developed ones in Southern Europe. Nevertheless, more than half of the middle class in in North America and EU, while the vast majority of the poor are in the non-Western world.

According to OECD statistics, "In 2009 the middle class included 1.8 billion people, with Europe (664 million), Asia (525 million) North America (338 million) accounting for the highest number of people belonging to this group. ... The size of the “global middle class” will increase from 1.8 billion in 2009 to 3.2 billion by 2020 and 4.9 billion by 2030. The bulk of this growth will come from Asia: by 2030 Asia will represent 66% of the global middle-class population and 59% of middle-class consumption, compared to 28% and 23%, respectively in 2009..."

One paradox in economics is that it is possible to have growth without development (vertical growth), or growth accompanied by underdevelopment as in the case of African, Latin American and some Asian countries that are relying on one or two export products, while using the proceeds to import everything else. This kind of dependency has been characteristic of the core-periphery divide in the capitalist world system for the past five centuries; for there is a vast difference between an undeveloped country enjoying self-sufficiency and an underdeveloped that one that is financially, commercially and industrially dependent on the advanced capitalist (core) countries. Moreover, there is a vast difference between a country experiencing ephemeral growth owing to the availability of some export product –let us say oil – and sustainable development that leads to diversified economic development and greater self-sufficiency.

Conclusions

The idea that there is any model that can possibly reflect "human behavior" and its idiosyncratic proclivities assumes that there is such a thing as a "uniform generic model" of human behavior, rather than "atomic action constraints, as determined genetically and by cultural conditioning". In fact, the reason I argue that there cannot be a perfect model, is because I made certain assumptions about human nature, namely that the irrational tendencies play a far greater role than the rational.

This is a very old argument rooted in the philosophical debates that goes back to the 17th century (Hobbes and Locke) and continuing in the Age of Reason as well as the 19th century when Marx and Mill who relied on the rationalist tradition to formulate significant political theories on which society could build. In short, just as a scientific theory can provide solid and unquestioned answers, similar philosophical models of political economy could do the same, at least this was the assumption. But can scientific certainty be applied to economic models, given that they must in the end apply to human beings that are neither neutrons nor algebraic equations? Are the domains of economics, political science, sociology and social science as "scientific" as mathematics, chemistry and physics, or are we ultimately dealing with a question of societal structure based on a social contract? To what degree is the social contract itself modeled after rationalist assumptions, as was the case for both Jon Locke and Karl Marx and F. Engels, is a legitimate issue. However, the matter of societal organization, mode of production, is subject to historical dynamics (dialectical materialism, to be sure, but certainly not limited to it).

Is there a single development model that works best to serve the people of all countries around the world; like us say the neoliberal that IMF, World Bank, European Central Bank, US and EU governments are promoting globally as the panacea? Economic development models, whether like that of the US, or regional bloc one like the one of the European Union, are always designed down to the smallest detail to serve and promote the privileged socioeconomic and political elites, within the boundaries of what the middle class and working class will tolerate so there would not be social unrest or revolt.

Development models under capitalism are not intended to foster greater upward socioeconomic mobility, but to further concentrate capital in the hands of the privileged elites that enjoy policy influence. The social safety net, social welfare measures within varying degrees that have been in place in many countries around the world are now threatened by the neoliberal model that encourages the erosion of welfare measures amid an era of downward pressure on wages and limited opportunities for youth suffering high unemployment. These are explosive social conditions that could result in social upheaval if the trend continues.

Lower global poverty, gender equality, basic education and health care, and a sustainable future for all people are desirable goals of many human-centered rather than market-focused people for the past two centuries. The question is which development model can achieve such goals i9f the political economy is structured to serve narrow class interests. Not any time in the near future, or in the next half century do I expect systemic changes in the neoliberal political economy. On the contrary, statistics indicate that there is regression in the areas of social progress. Why? I repeat that people who have economic and political (military/police) power always prevail, while the broader masses of the population, middle classes and workers continue to demand social justice. The social dialectic (Marxian-based "dialectical social theory") leads me to conclude that concessions will be made to the broader masses only when absolutely necessary to preserve the status quo.

The Futility Of Expecting Peace And Honesty Under Capitalism

Lionel Anet

During pre-capitalist civilisation, competition and its avoidance was its hallmark, it’s the reason for the strata that separated the people who could do and have whatever. But no mater, competition will occur when there’s inequality. Capitalism has gradually replaced the inherited stratified static society with a fluid one controlled with competition for wealth, measured with fiat money. That intensified the competition, which increased the clout of winners to boost their share of the world’s wealth and political power. We can live with unfairness within human society even with its wars, but nature can no longer sustain that life style, therefore, we can’t either.

Then, we must drastically reduce our demands on nature or die. The most wasteful and destructive activities are preparation for high tech wars, and the fighting to test the weaponry, and take assets, all of them are incredibly destructive so, its peace or perish. Nevertheless wars are an important part of civilisation; furthermore capitalism has evolved to a global status, therefore we could regard wars as revolutions. Those conflicts by their nature are very messy with unknowable outcomes and inflicting unbearable pain on people and nature. To save an environment that can sustain 9 billion people, we must have peace; but, it’s impossible to have peace in competitive societies that’s also changing the climate to an unliveable one.

Competition for wealth and power has a feedback loop, which is, having succeeded in a competitive endeavour that brings more wealth; it therefore increases the chance of winning in more of the same due to the extra power that wealth brings. To avoid the advantage of that extra wealth brings to a few individuals; up to 1970s it was contradicted by the negative feed backs the governments imposed on wealth, mainly taxes. But neoliberals reversed that by giving positive feed backs to the wealthy. This has changed the ratio in the wealth distribution in society where in 1970s we reach the minimum difference between the rich and poor, while today we are getting to the maximum divergence of wealth tolerable. Negative feedbacks such high rate of taxes on high earners and to avoid difficulties and conflicts - positive feedback, which is, society spending on health, education, public transport, and food supply such as fresh fruit and vegetables. That’s essential for peace

Peace for social beings is a state of cooperation where individuals can take pleasure helping each other so that we can all share in the participation of receiving and giving, as a part of nature. Where the success of an individual is regarded as a success for everyone and ones feeling of security is enhanced by how well others are doing, furthermore, because it’s both safe to be honest and with no obvious benefit to be dishonest people will tend to be more honest even for a psychopath.

On the other hand when money is so important as it is today, competition for it is the key to success and the more one has the more important one is and the more power one has especially in democracies. Capitalist democracies are the most competitive social system to ever exist, and cartels, monopolies, and trusts are the ultimate winners of competition. The goal of business is to be above competition, which is to have a competitive advantage preferably a monopoly, and that’s the logical outcome of competition. As neoliberals took over the economy, industrial worker had fraternal relationships that held them together; that was gradually replaced with competition within that working class.

Competitive relations have conflicts that are either overtly violent or covertly mean; they contrast with peaceful relationships that are cooperative, supportive, safe, and predictable. Unlike competition, cooperation doesn’t require forsaking ones feeling of comradeship, because we then see people as potential friend instead of probable enemies. While to be successful in a competitive milieu requires a deceptive friendliness, secrecy, ruthlessness, hard work, focuses on one’s success, cunningness, and looking for winnable conflicts.

We have never experienced peace during civilisation; we only have had times of supressed violence, which we call peace. Therefore, it’s hard for us to think of peace as anything but the absent of war, which still has the supressed conflicts for dominance, and that’s not peace because the conflicting tension within competition is still there.

What we need today is honesty; we already have the knowledge to ensure our survival and a good life for all. Knowing is of no use, unless we have the right equipment, or system to use that knowledge, for instance before people used the wheel they had the knowledge of it, but they didn’t have the material for the axle, they had to wait until iron axle were made. Today we have the knowledge to save ourselves but we don’t have the socioeconomic system to implement it.
When one considers our population is due to reach 9 billion by the middle of this century, with a degraded environment especially water resources, the options to maintain life for today’s young is limited. The only way we can survive is to attain a state of peace throughout the world. As pointed out that condition can only be achieved when we have rescinded our need to compete and renew relations that are fair and honest. It’s necessary to achieve that state of fairness, so that all people in a common endeavour worldwide are able to be adequately fed and housed, without destroying nature of its life.

A sustainable socioeconomic system can only be, at this stage, fair and honest, because of our overpopulation that will overwhelm the degrading resources. We will need to stabilised and then reduce our population to below half of what it will be. Not an impossible task, although it may never have been achieved voluntarily, but it’s a necessity now. People can and have achieved remarkable feat when there’s a clear need for action and if we have that common need to survive we will all survive cohesively, or we all perish competitively.

The knowledge in the world community is there that would enable us to survive. But our political and ‘economic’ leaders have more immediate concerns to acquire more power to maintain or raise their position in the system. Not realising it, in pursuit of that on a global scale will annihilate them, their family and their opponents. No one has a long-term interest in maintaining the status quo, in today’s terms it might mean even less than a few decades.

Capitalism’s controling agent is competition, which numbs honesty and that dominates all fields of life, resulting in gross unfairness, which is a twin of dishonesty. The twins are inseparable as are the twins of fairness and honesty; ‘fairness’ in capitalism is the right to exploit people, preferably legally.

The continuing increasing dishonesty sanction by the system is justified by our education. We have tertiary courses in public relation; their main job is the difficult task of convincing people to do what is against their interest. In conjunction with that is the government pursuit work, of deception, like spending on offensive military hardware and calling it defence.

Competition has a further important asset for the few billionaires, it sets the tone of society, which glorifies and envies winners and despise losers. But that is accepting a disparity in the allocation of all resources, which is the right to have more power than others, with a better life style, good health care, able to get better legal advice, and so on. Competition’s purpose is to create inequality of importance, which in capitalism are wealth and power, and that is unfair and is not only dishonest, but the competition justifies and glorifies the exploitation.

Renewable Energy Will Not Support Economic Growth

Richard Heinberg

The world needs to end its dependence on fossil fuels as quickly as possible. That’s the only sane response to climate change, and to the economic dilemma of declining oil, coal, and gas resource quality and increasing extraction costs. The nuclear industry is on life support in most countries, so the future appears to lie mostly with solar and wind power. But can we transition to these renewable energy sources and continue using energy the way we do today? And can we maintain our growth-based consumer economy?

The answer to both questions is, probably not. Let’s survey four important sectors of the energy economy and tally up the opportunities and challenges.

The electricity sector: Solar and wind produce electricity, and the fuel is free. Moreover, the cost of electricity from these sources is declining. These are encouraging trends. However, intermittency (the sun doesn’t always shine, the wind doesn’t always blow) still poses barriers to high levels of solar-wind electricity market share. Grid managers can easily integrate small variable inputs; but eventually storage, capacity redundancy, and major grid overhauls will be necessary to balance inputs with loads as higher proportions of electricity come from uncontrollable sources. All of this will be expensive—increasingly so as solar-wind market penetration levels exceed roughly 60 percent. Some of the problems associated with integrating variable renewables into the grid are being worked out over time. But even if all these problems are eventually resolved, only about one-fifth of all final energy is consumed in the form of electricity; how about other forms and ways in which we use energy—will they be easier or harder to transition?

The transport sector: Electric cars are becoming more common. But electric trucks and other heavy vehicles will pose more of a challenge due to the low energy density of battery storage (gasoline stores vastly more energy per kilogram). Ships could use kite sails, but that would only somewhat improve their fuel efficiency; otherwise there is no good replacement for oil in this key transport mode. The situation is similar, though even bleaker, for airplanes. Biofuels have been an energy fiasco, as the European Parliament has now admitted. And the construction of all of our vehicles, and the infrastructure they rely upon (including roads and runways), also depends upon industrial processes that currently require fossil fuels. That brings us to . . .

The industrial sector: Making pig iron—the main ingredient in steel—requires blast furnaces. Making cement requires 100-meter-long kilns that operate at 1500 degrees C. In principle it is possible to produce high heat for these purposes with electricity or giant solar collectors, but nobody does it that way now because it would be much more expensive than burning coal or natural gas. Crucially, current manufacturing processes for building solar panels and wind turbines also depend upon high-temperature industrial processes fueled by oil, coal, and natural gas. Again, alternative ways of producing this heat are feasible in principle—but the result would probably be significantly higher-cost solar and wind power. And there are no demonstration projects to show us just how easy or hard this would be.

The food sector: Nitrogen fertilizer is currently produced cheaply from natural gas; it could be made using solar or wind-sourced electricity, but that would again entail higher costs. Food products—and the chemical inputs to farming—are currently transported long distances using oil, and farm machinery runs on refined petroleum. It would be possible to grow food without chemical inputs and to re-localize food systems, but this would probably require more farm labor and might result in higher-priced food. Consumers would need to eat more seasonally and reduce their consumption of exotic foods.

In short, there are far more challenges associated with the energy transition than opportunities. There are potential solutions to all of the problems we have identified. But most of those solutions involve higher costs or reduced system functionality. Moreover, the energy dynamics of the transition itself will pose a challenge: where will the energy come from to build all the solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, electric blast furnaces, and solar cement kilns that we’ll need? Building the fossil-fueled energy producing-and-consuming infrastructure of the modern world has been by far the greatest construction project in human history. It took over a century, and it’s still a work in progress. Now we’ll have to replace most of this vast infrastructure with something different—different energy generators, different cars, trucks, roads, buildings, and industrial processes, using different materials (no petroleum-based plastics, no asphalt). All of this will take time, money . . . and energy.

And there’s the rub. Where will the energy come from? Realistically, most of it will have to come from fossil fuels—at least in the early-to-middle stages of the transition. And we’ll be using fossil fuels whose economic efficiency is declining due to the depletion of existing stocks of high-quality oil, gas, and coal. Again, this implies higher costs. Why not just use renewables to build renewables? Because it would be slower and even more expensive. Yet the faster we push the energy transition, the more energy will have to be diverted to that gargantuan project, and the less will be available to all the activities we’re already engaged in (running the transport, manufacturing, communications, and health care sectors, among others).

The issues surrounding the renewable energy transition are complicated and technical. And there are far too many of them to be fully addressed in a short article like this. But the preponderance of research literature supports the conclusion that the all-renewable industrial economy of the future will be less mobile and will produce fewer and more expensive goods. The 20th century industrial world was built on fossil fuels—and in some ways it was built for fossil fuels (as anyone who spends time in American suburban communities can attest). High mobility and the capacity for ever-expanding volumes of industrial production were hallmarks of that waning era. The latter decades of the current century will be shaped by entirely different energy sources, and society will be forced to change in profound ways.

That doesn’t have to be a bad thing. The globalized consumer society was always unsustainable anyway, and we might be happier without it. But unless we plan for the post-growth renewable future, existing economic institutions may tend to shatter rather than adapt smoothly.

The fossil fuel and nuclear industries have an understandable interest in disparaging renewable energy, but their days are numbered. We are headed toward a renewable future, whether we plan intelligently for it or not. Clearly, intelligent planning will offer the better path forward. One way to hasten the energy transition is simply to build more wind turbines and solar panels, as many climate scientists recommend.

But equally important to the transition will be our deliberate transformation of the ways we use energy. And that implies a nearly complete rethinking of the economy—both its means and its ends. Growth must no longer be the economy’s goal; rather, we must aim for the satisfaction of basic human needs within a shrinking budget of energy and materials. Meanwhile, to ensure the ongoing buy-in of the public in this vast collaborative project, our economic means must include the promotion of activities that increase human happiness and well being.

Enough Of Erdogan: Verdict In Turkey Election

Farooque Chowdhury

Tayyip Erdogan’s dream of turning an all powerful president has been stalled by the Turkish voters. The just concluded parliamentary election experienced the voters’ negation of a dreaming sultan. To many, it’s a victory over political corruption. Erdogan was seeking a two-thirds majority to turn the country into a presidential governing system.

The voters’ voiced, as the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) co-chair Selahattin Demirtas told journalists in his first post-election speech: All people who are for freedoms, all the oppressed, all workers, all women and all minorities, had won together. He said: “It’s a joint victory of the left.” HDP’s crossing of election threshold – 10% – was a major victory for the left-leaning party.

The Turkish president Erdogan’s plan of assuming all encompassing powers received a major blow in the election as his conservative Justice and Development Party (AK Party) failed to win a clean majority in the election. The electoral hurricane has destroyed the AKP’s authoritarian rule for 13 years. The party was hopeful of a smooth win, and impose a stronger strangle on the Turkish life. But the party failed to secure 276 seats, the requirement for single-majority in the parliament.

The election, hopefully, is going to begin a new phase in Turkey-politics as it jolts the draconian domination. The main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP)’s leader Kemal Kılıcdaroglu told his supporters: The election results mark the end of an era in Turkey. “We ended an era of oppression through democratic means. Democracy has won. Turkey has won,” said the CHP leader. The same expression was made by the CHP spokesperson Haluk Koc: “Erdogan was the real loser of the election. The real winner of this election is democracy. Turkey has won, Erdogan has lost.”

The AKP with its single-party majority in parliament was imposing its repressive and divisive policy. It was tearing down fundamental values the society nurtured for long. Its arrogance was throwing out every consideration.

The election was not fully peaceful and fair. HDP was made target of violence since campaign days. Its workers and supporters were victims of scores of physical attacks during campaign days. One of its campaign bus drivers was murdered. A bomb attack killed the party’s three supporters in Diyarbakır.

The ruling party – AKP – used, it was alleged by HDP, all state powers. Ann-Margarethe Livh, Sweden’s housing and democracy commissioner said there were “blatant instances of fraud” and international election observers had been threatened before the election. Election observation team from Sweden was threatened at gunpoint by “soldiers with automatic weapons” in the southeastern province of Bingol. According to Livh, the Swedish election observation team was told they had two minutes to leave the area. Livh said having international observers threatened was also a huge threat to democracy.

During counting of votes coming from abroad, a group claimed that some ballots were thrown into the garbage at the Ankara Chamber of Commerce. Police had to intervene to stop a resulting fist-fight between party officials. Cars without license plates were found waiting. Police said the cars belonged to them. But Istanbul Governor Vasip Sahin confirmed the cars without license plates cannot belong to police. The opposition camp claimed that there was fraud in the vote counting process.

The country’s Human Rights Association has issued a preliminary report on incidents of electoral fraud during the election. To some observers, Turkey’s election system is “the world’s most unfair election system”.

Reports of widespread fraud across have emerged. Observers detected many attempts to commit electoral fraud. There were allegations of unfair means in a number of provinces including Istanbul, Izmir, Diyarbakır and Bursa. An official in charge of a polling station in İstanbul was caught for placing pre-sealed votes for the AKP in a ballot box. A police officer in Ankara was caught while allegedly attempting to vote for the third time. A group of people carrying pre-sealed ballots for the AKP were detained in Izmir. HDP supporters and polling agents were detained. No lawyer and reporter were allowed into a number of polling stations, and ballots having no official seal were recovered.

But the assaults, threats and other unfair means failed to stop the voters’ rejection. Issues of economy and ideology cast their shadows on the election. Playing religious card in politics is an old AKP-game. But that didn’t paid back dividend.

Funny issues also cropped up. There was allegation that Erdogan had golden toilet seats at his new lavish presidential palace. However, the Turkish president denied the claims and angrily asked the main opposition leader whether he had been cleaning the palace’s toilets. Mehmet Gormez, head of the Directorate of Religious Affairs had to return the 1 million Turkish Lira ($435,000) official car, which was purchased for him. Public and opposition parties strongly criticized the religious leader’s car-affair. Erdogan sent him another Mercedes from the his fleet. Erdogan slammed his political opponents during campaign although the presidency is a non-partisan position.

At a number of public events Erdogan used religious book as campaign material. He routinely slammed national and international media outlets, and threatened journalists. He recently attacked The Guardian and The New York Times and German newspaper Die Zeit. He said Die Zeit “went berserk”. He misquoted The Guardian. To him The New York Times is ruled by “the Jewish capital.”
Erdogan once threatened a journalist that the journalist would have to pay a “heavy price” for a news story. A number of reporters were sent to prison. Hundreds of persons including cartoonists, students and even a model were prosecuted for “insulting” Erdogan since he was elected president in August 2014.

But economy was playing against Erdogan. Massive infrastructure projects, roads and airports failed to save the Turkish leader. The world’s 17th largest economy was worsening. The economy expanded at an average annual growth rate of 4.5%. The 2008 and 2009 were bad years. In 2010, the annual growth rate was 9%. But it slowed down to less than 3% last year. Unemployment has increased. It’s now more than 10%.

The working people in Turkey are facing harsh condition. There is demand for raising minimum wages. There is need for increasing employment and export in the worsening economy. And, there is demand for freedom of expression.

The election results may push for an early election. The ruling party may go through a leadership change.

Two important questions are to be dealt with: the Kurdish question, and the foreign policy. The Kurdish issue is undeniable.

The AKP’s 7 election manifesto said: “Turkey’s foreign policy has been successful in an incomparable way with those of previous governments.” But there is debate on the policy. The AKP’s policy has not made Turkey a determining power in the region although it tried to that direction. The country experienced isolation.

The journey began in the Taksim Square. It began with the question of a few hundred trees, an environmental issue. Repression, and use of force beyond proportion failed to deter the forces of democracy in Turkey. But still there is a long way to go as the election is an intermediate stage in the politics of Turkey.

The End of Higher Education as We Know It

Henry A. Giroux

The academy is entering a dangerous time. Academics now find themselves entering a time when a more comprehensive politics that deals with the rise of authoritarianism through a variety of related fundamentalisms–economic, religious, political, and educational–is being overlooked as a result of an emerging limited and depoliticizing politics of civility and trauma. This is not meant to suggest that dehumanizing behavior and injurious forms of trauma do not matter and should not be addressed. What is disturbing is when such incidents lose their sense of specificity and connections to wider political and economic forces and become universalized and all-encompassing.

Frozen in time and space, this narrow view of politics functions largely to inflict injury against a broader politics and its myraid victims rather than respond to such injuries within a context in which they can be truly addressed. If a politics of civility substitutes conformity and the personal for the political, the politics of trauma collapses the political into the therapeutic. In both cases, the personal universalizes its own narrow privatizing interests and smothers dissent, elevates conformity and the therapeutic as the most viable political practice and in doing so fuels a form of political purity that undercuts any type of broad-based pedagogy of disruption.

As John and Jean Comaroff argue, under a neoliberal regime of affective management, “the personal is the only politics there is, the only politics with a tangible referent or emotional valence.” Under such circumstances, the political value of marginalized groups to narrate themselves is often shut down by critics on the faux left and militant right who refuse to connect the injuries of racism, sexism, and homophobia, among others, to larger political, economic, and cultural structures.

Knowledge and pedagogical practices that were once condemned as uncivil are now criticized as causing mass trauma- hence legitimating the move from a reactionary cultural capital that celebrates conformity to one that trades in fear while claiming to be part a fight against injustice. In the end such discourses are not only anti-intellectual, depoliticizing, and essentialist, but also fuel the ability of the right wing to use their
massive cultural apparatuses to point to progressives as authoritarians who are against any viable notion of free speech. Conservatives such as David Brooks trade in this kind of discourse only too willing to portray leftists as the real extremists in American society. It gets worse. What gets lost in the discourses of civility and privatized trauma are those larger injuries of poverty, homelessness, racism, ecological devastation, and mass incarceration. That latter get erased in discourses wrapped in a kind of comforting quietism and universalizing of personal trauma that demands not just the suppression of dissent or the erasure of disturbing images and discourses, but any attempt to explore systemic structural reforms. This is a particularly dangerous position to take given the full-fledged attack now being waged by right wing politicians against the all vestiges of dissent, tenure, and the notion of the university as a democratic public sphere. Academics and their progressive allies need to flip the script and embrace a notion of the political that addresses those authoritarian forces ushering in truly dark times.

The closing down of free speech in higher education, the collapse of critical thought into a repressive, privatized affective, corporatized pedagogy that celebrates ideas, values, and representations that are comforting rather than unsettling, the defunding of higher education, the rise of a corporate driven managerial administrative class, the casualization of faculty, and the now aggressive attack on tenure in Wisconsin and other places should come as no surprise to progressives. This is a truly disturbing trend and historical conjuncture because it suggests a comprehensive authoritarian politics that cannot be addressed merely through the discourses of personal injury and individual responsibility. This current attack on higher education is a central project of the financial and neoliberal elite and dates back to the Trilateral Commission and the Powell Memo of 1971.

The attack on higher education as a democratic public sphere and the formative culture of questioning and critical scholarship it supports has been under attack under the regime of neoliberalism since the late 1970s. Reagan channeled McCarthyism and John Silber fired anyone on the left at Boston University. What came next was a reversal of the sixties–protest and large scale social movements became fractured, either falling prey to political purity, or simply accommodating themselves to power. And as academics have retreated from engaging larger public issues in their work and became more and more insular the attack has intensified, unchecked in many cases.

That kind of insularity is now dangerous, whether it hides behind academic silos, disciplinary specialization, or the jargon of theoreticism. The very conditions which make intellectual labor possible have been under siege intensely since the neoliberal revolution began at the end of the 1970s. The ranks of full-time faculty have been decimated and yet there is no national social and political formation fighting these assaults. Students are drowning in debt and still we have only a scattered response among faculty. Well, now the corporate elite and ideological barbarians have come for tenure and this attack will spread like wild fire

What is needed to counter this attack is not political purity or the fracturing of the left into discourses of personal injury. What is needed is much more. That is, unless academics begin to mobilize and join forces with other social movements, unions, young people, students, and others willing to see such attacks as part of a larger war against the social state, it is not unreasonable to conclude that any remaining vestige of democracy in the United States will disappear.   Academics need to embrace their rolls as public intellectuals and social activists. It is time for them to wake up and organize for a university that addresses crucial social problems, fights ferociously to give power back to faculty, joins with adjuncts to create full time positions and tenured positions for all faculty, join with students to address the forgiving of student debt, and begin and national movement for free public higher education. Such demands are far from radical and they are incomplete, but they certainly point to a new beginning in the struggle over the role of higher education in the United States. As I have said many times, resistance is not an option, it is a necessity.

Western Callousness in Syria

Vijay Prashad

Two Ambassadors to Beirut, Lebanon, from major European countries, chastised me early last year for my reports for The Hindu and Frontlineon Syria. They said that these reports exaggerated the role of extremists, notably al-Qaeda affiliates and the newly emboldened Islamic State (Daesh). Stalemate was the tenor of the Syrian civil war, and Daesh had not yet burst into public consciousness (that would happen when its forces seized Mosul, Iraq, in June 2014). These Ambassadors, well-informed in their own right, felt that the Syrian rebels would soon deliver the knockout blow against the government of Bashar al-Assad.

The policy implication of such a view is that the West, led by the United States, continued to provide diplomatic support to the Syrian opposition and to funnel arms and logistical support for the various fighters. Criticism of this strategy was met with the canard that the critic was an apologist for the Assad government. Pipelines of money and arms to these rebels from the Gulf Arabs, Turkey and the West enabled them to persist in a war that seemed on the surface to be headed more towards a bloodbath than a clear result. Massacres on all sides shattered the social landscape of Syria. Peace manoeuvres by the United Nations had few takers, and thus resulted in the resignation of two well-regarded envoys (Kofi Annan and Lakhdar Brahimi). War remained on the agenda, and peace was regarded as naïve.

A sober reality

A U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) intelligence report from August 2012 suggests, however, a much more cold and sober reality. The report came to light in mid-May because of a lawsuit brought by the conservative group, Judicial Watch, with regard to the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. A senior intelligence official, who cannot go on the record, said that the report is only one among many. Other reports would likely have contradicted its assessment — although it is one that is highly informed and was circulated across the intelligence community. The DoD assessment, coming a year into the Syrian civil war, is sober. “Events are taking a clear sectarian direction,” it notes. “The Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria.” The Muslim Brotherhood, largely weakened in Syria by the crackdown in 1982, was the least of these (although it had a disproportionate role in the exiled political opposition coalition). The most important fighters were the Salafists and al-Qaeda in Iraq, who, the DoD notes, are “familiar with Syria. AQI trained in Syria [in the mid-2000s] and then infiltrated into Iraq.”

The most startling assessment in the report is its recognition that AQI has roots on both sides of the Syria-Iraq border. “Their sectarian affiliation unites the two sides when events happen in the region,” it says, and the porousness of the Syria-Iraq border will “facilitate the flow of materiel and recruits”. Iraq had already become the sanctuary and recruiting ground for AQI’s actions in Syria (under the name of Jabhat al-Nusra) and the Syrian chaos became a catalyst for emboldened actions inside Iraq. “If the situation unravels,” wrote the DoD analysts, “there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria.” This is precisely what occurred with the 2013 seizure by Daesh of the provincial capital of Raqqa, a major conduit along the Euphrates River. The DoD even forecast that such a situation would create “the ideal atmosphere for AQI to return to its old pockets in Mosul and Ramadi”. This is what happened in 2014 (Mosul)and 2015 (Ramadi). Daesh, the DoD wrote, “could also declare an Islamic State through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria”. The foresight is chilling. The callousness of U.S. policy is that despite such an assessment the U.S. government continued to support the “rebels,” who had now largely been recruited into extremist groups. U.S. President Barack Obama’s refrain — “Assad must go” — was not shared by these DoD analysts, who suggested that Assad’s “regime will survive and have control over Syrian territory”. The exiled opposition hoped to create “safe havens under international sheltering, similar to what transpired in Libya”. But those “safe havens”, located in areas that the DoD had already seen as al-Qaeda and Daesh territory, would hardly have provided the base for a moderate opposition to Assad. By 2012 it was unlikely that the UN Security Council, burned by the adventure in Libya, would provide international cover for another dangerous escapade. Unwilling to back away from the maximum position against Mr. Assad, the West denied, in public, that the rebels had been overrun by the extremists and continued to fan the flames of a heartless war.

No negotiating space

Former U.S. Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford, whose commitment to the maximum (“Assad must go”) position was illuminated by his presence at the early demonstrations, has now come to the conclusion that the moderate opposition should “negotiate a national political deal to end the conflict without Assad’s departure as a pre-condition”.

The absence of such negotiating space was precisely what blocked the political dialogue in the early years of the war. It now appears as if the U.S. had intelligence that their public narrative was false, and that a more modest approach toward Syria’s future could have prevented both the large-scale suffering and the expansion of Daesh.

The credibility of the West’s ambassadors, who have far too much power to frame this conflict, is, at best, strained. The West, the Gulf Arabs and Turkey, with their diplomatic and military assistance, kept the fires of the conflict burning, creating the conditions for the rise of the extremists. That this coalition should now be seen as the fire-fighters of the conflict is mystifying.