Bees And Other Pollinators Are Facing Extinction

Katie Valentine

The report, released Friday by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), is a two-year assessment of the threats facing pollinators — both vertebrates, such as birds and bats, and invertebrates, such as bees, butterflies, and other insects. It noted that, in some regions, 40 percent of invertebrate pollinator species are so threatened by myriad environmental impacts that they’re facing extinction, with butterflies and bees seeing the highest risk. Among vertebrates, 16.5 percent of species are threatened by extinction worldwide. Pollinators are a major group: there are 20,000 species of wild bees across the globe, the report notes, and many of them haven’t been identified yet.

Pollinators are also a hugely important group of animals. Almost 90 percent of wild flowering plants depend on pollination by animals, and 75 percent of food crops around the world depend on pollination. Globally, $235 – $577 billion worth of global crops are affected by pollinators each year, the report found.

“Without pollinators, many of us would no longer be able to enjoy coffee, chocolate and apples, among many other foods that are part of our daily lives,” said Simon Potts, co-chair of the assessment, said in a statement.

IPBES, which looked at existing research to compile the report, cited pesticides and disease as two threats posed to pollinators, especially managed honeybees. Varroa mites, for instance, have become a plague on honeybee colonies. They attach themselves to bees and suck out their circulatory fluid, weakening the bees and spreading dangerous diseases. Pesticides, especially the widely-used neonicotinoids, have been found to damage bees’ brains and contribute to bee losses. The Environmental Protection Agency in January released findings on one neonic pesticide, imidacloprid, the most commonly-used neonic in the United States. The agency found that, when applied to certain crops, the pesticide was harmful to bees. The EPA is still looking into three other neonicotinoids.

The organization also listed land use changes, climate change, and invasive species as threats to pollinators. Land use changes can turn wildflower-covered fields into fields of just one or two crops, a switch from a high-nutrition landscape to a lower-nutrition one. And climate change can lead to a shift in peak nectar flow for flowering plants. If managed honeybees miss this nectar flow — if they’re delivered to beekeepers too late, for instance — the hive can be weakened. The report also found that climate change has already shifted distribution of bumblebees and butterflies and pollinator-dependent plants.

The report lists several approaches to help protect pollinator populations, including creating more pollinator-friendly landscapes, with diverse flowering plants, and reducing use of pesticides by finding more pollinator-friendly forms of pest control. There are efforts to do some of these things already: last October, for instance, the U.S. Department of Agriculture set aside $4 million to help farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners plant wildflowers, native grasses, clover, buckwheat, and other pollinator-friendly plants on their lands. Scientists and beekeepers are also researching new ways to protect bees against varroa mites and other threats: beer hops have been found to repel the mites, and mushroom juice, too, could help protect bees against diseases.

Inside The Church Of The Pro-GMO Activist

Colin Todhunter

Last year on Twitter, Monsanto Vice President Robert Fraley provided a link to an article that implied those who are suspicious of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), among other things, are confused, motivated by ideology or misinformed as a result of access to the ‘university of Google’, or they are simply conspiracy theorists. Fraley asked why people doubted science and seemed to be taking a swipe at critics of GMOs, who the GM sector and its mouthpieces like to depict as dealing in fear mongering and relying on ‘pseudo-science’.

The industry and its assortment of pro-GM activists in science and the media have a view of the world that requires the public to bow to some kind of scientific priesthood whose knowledge and opinions should never be questioned (listen to this recent presentation from the Oxford Real Farming Conference - from 17:00). They require us to have unquestioned belief in science’s ability to solve humanity’s problems. Deference and faith are key to the creed.

The problem is that rich corporations and individuals have manipulated the idea of science and have been able to distort scientific research. They have translated their vast financial influence into political clout and the control of science and scientific institutions. The result is that science institutes, research programmes and practitioners now too often willingly serve the interests of powerful corporations. Far from liberating humankind the control of science and scientific research and media-led rational debate in the public sphere have become a tool of deception.

The reason why so many people doubt science is because they can see how science is corrupted and manipulated by powerful corporations. It is because they regard these large corporations as unaccountable and their activities and products not properly regulated by governments.

Sociologist Robert Merton highlighted the underlying norms of science as involving research that is not warped by vested interests, adhering to the common ownership of scientific discoveries (intellectual property), promoting collective collaboration and subjecting findings to organised, rigorous critical scrutiny within the scientific community. Secrecy, dogma and vested interest thus have no place.

The reality is, however, careers, reputations, commercial interests and funding issues all serve to undermine these norms.

Twisted science, altered truth

In 2014, US Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack called for “sound science” to underpin food trade between the US and the EU. Consumer rights groups in the US are pushing for the labelling of GMO foods, but Vilsack said that putting a label on a foodstuff containing a GM product “risks sending a wrong impression that this was a safety issue.”

Despite what Vilsack would have us believe, many scientific studies show that GMOs are indeed a big safety issue and what’s more are also having grave environmental, social and economic consequences (for example, see this about GM and pesticides in Argentina, this on how GM agriculture is drive ecocide and death in South America and this about the overall efficacy and impacts of GM).

By not wanting to respond to widespread consumer demands to know what they are eating and risk ‘sending a wrong impression’ (doublespeak to English translation: sending out the right impression about GM being a fundamentally flawed and corrupt endeavour), Vislack is trying to close down debate about issues that his corporate backers find unpalatable: labelling would allow consumers to reject the GMOs being fed to them. By attempting to side-line any genuine open discussion of GM in this way, the aim is to conveniently shut down any criticism of this technology and suppress scientific, political and public debate about it.

And have little doubt that the term ‘corporate backers’ applies in this case: big agribusiness has captured, or at the very least seriously compromised, key policy and regulatory bodies in the US, Europe, India and in fact on a global level (see this regarding control of the WTO).

The concept of ‘sound science’ is being manipulated to deceive and disguise the underlying agenda: GM as a strategy by global agribusiness to control intellectual property and global supply chains.

At the same time that Vilsack and others refer to some high-minded notion of ‘sound science’, they are actively striving to debase it along with its actual practice. The industry carries out inadequate, short-term studies and conceals the data produced by its research under the guise of ‘commercial confidentiality’, while there is enough research that highlights the dangers and potential harmful effects of its products (see this and this). It has also engaged in fakery in India, bribery in Indonesia and smears and intimidation against those who challenge its interests, as well as the distortion and the censorship of science (see this and this).

With its aim to modify organisms to create patents that will secure ever greater control over seeds, markets and the food supply, the GM sector is only concerned with a certain type of science which supports these aims. If science is held in such high regard by these corporations, why in the US don't they label foods containing GMOs and throw open their studies open to public scrutiny, instead of veiling them with secrecy, restricting independent research on their products or resorting to unsavoury tactics?

If science is held in such high regard by the GM sector, why in the US did policy makers release GM food onto the commercial market without proper long-term tests? The argument used to justify this is GM food is ‘substantially equivalent’ to ordinary food. This is wrong (see this as well). Substantial equivalence is a trade strategy on behalf of the GM sector that neatly serves to remove its GMOs from the type of scrutiny usually applied to potentially toxic or harmful substances.

The reason why no labelling or testing has taken place in the US is not due to ‘sound science’ having been applied but comes down to the power and political influence of the GMO sector and because a sound scientific approach has not been applied.

The sector cannot win the scientific debate (although its PR likes to tell the world it has) so it resorts to co-opting key public bodies or individuals to propagate various falsehoods and deceptions. Part of the deception is based on emotional blackmail: the world needs GMOs to feed the hungry, both now and in the future. This myth has been taken apart (see this, this and this). In fact, in the second of those three links, the organisation GRAIN highlights that GM crops that have been planted thus far have actually contributed to food insecurity.

Research, peer review and vested interests

People’s faith in science is being shaken on many levels, not least because big corporations have secured access to policy makers and governments and are increasingly funding research and setting research agendas.

“As Andrew Neighbour, former administrator at Washington University in St. Louis, who managed the university’s multiyear and multimillion dollar relationship with Monsanto, admits, “There’s no question that industry money comes with strings. It limits what you can do, when you can do it, who it has to be approved by”." Kamalakar Duvvuru

The reality is Monsanto is funding the research not for the benefit of either the farmer or the public, but for its own commercial interests.

Ultimately, it is not science itself that people have doubts about but science that is pressed into the service of immensely powerful private corporations and regulatory bodies that are effectively co-opted and adopt a ‘don’t look, don’t find approach’ to studies and products (see this and this) or are simply being pressured by the GM industry to come up with findings that it finds acceptable; or in the case of releasing GMOs onto the commercial market in the US, bypassing proper scientific procedures and engaging in doublespeak about ‘substantial equivalence’ then hypocritically calling for ‘sound science’ to inform debates.

We need look no further than the report Seedy Business to see how science is swayed, bought or biased by agribusiness. This is done by, for example, suppressing adverse findings, harming the careers of scientists who produce such findings, controlling the funding that shapes what research is conducted, the lack of independent US-based testing of health and environmental risks of GMOs and tainting scientific reviews of GMOs by conflicts of interest.

This is a point that Claire Robinson develops:

"It’s no surprise that many public scientists and organizations ally themselves with the GMO industry, as they rely heavily on industry funding. GMO companies have representatives on university boards and fund research, buildings and departments. Monsanto has donated at least a million dollars to the University of Florida Foundation. Many US universities that do crop research are beholden to Monsanto. Some academic scientists own GMO patents and are involved in spin-off companies that develop GM crops... Universities have become businesses and scientists have become entrepreneurs and sales people."

The same interests are moreover undermining the peer-review process itself and the ability of certain scientists to get published in journals – traditionally, the benchmark of scientific credibility. Powerful interests increasingly hold sway over funding, career progression as a scientist, journals and peer review (see this and this, which question the reliability of peer review in the area of GMOs).

Consider what The Lancet Editor in Chief Richard Horton said in 2015:

“The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.”

Peer-review is often referred to as the ‘gold standard’ by with which we should measure the validity of knowledge. As a result, non-peer-reviewed articles, reports or research is too often cast aside in favour of a process that, despite what some would like us to believe, is massively distorted by commercial and career-related interests.

As already noted, powerful corporations fund research programmes and institutions and, by implication, provide a mapped-out career progression for individual scientists.

Through funding, they can shape the research agenda: which issues are to be examined and which are not, as well as how research is to be carried out. They are also able to divert funds to certain scientists and can suppress certain findings and bring pressure to bear on institutions and individual scientists. Corporations may also fund or hold sway over journals, as the Seralini affair showed, and peer reviewers themselves often have career or funding interests and have a stake in pushing a certain technology and thus side-lining certain findings or individual academics.

Scientist as priest: uninformed personal opinion masquerades as fact

Scientists do themselves or science no justice when they spout rhetoric in support of GM. Although they may be respected within their own particular discipline and are highly qualified, they seem to think it is therefore legitimate for them to offer uniformed personal opinion on virtually any other issue - and to be regarded as expert sources.

Regardless of the fact that scientists may know about genetic manipulation and the impacts on a particular organism in a laboratory, we should hold them to account when they say that Greenpeace should be held accountable for crimes against humanity because it is resisting GM technology. We should hold them to account when they attack agencies or individuals on the basis that they are acting like totalitarian political regimes that were responsible for the deaths of millions merely because they disagree with GM and offer credible arguments and science to support their claims about the negative impacts of this technology.

Since when did having a PhD in molecular biology or an associated field make someone an expert on political systems or the history of Cambodia, the USSR or some other country, which they are implicitly referring to when making such a ridiculous statement?

Since when did a molecular biologist become an expert in political economy and, more specifically, on trade and development, commodity markets, debt repayment, land speculation, export-oriented oil-dependent agriculture, sustainable agriculture, the dynamics of structural inequality and poverty or any of the other issues that impact on global and regional food security and create food deficit areas?

When they talk about feeding the world and attack critics of GM in the way they do, they want to promote the notion that a bogus and flawed techno quick-fix GMO solution is paramount and will suffice. Or perhaps it is highly convenient for them to overlook all of the above issues, which in reality, not in the fantasy world of the pro-GMO scientist, determine humanity's ability for feeding itself effectively and properly.

The reality is that this rhetoric is an attempt to shut down any criticism. It is also designed to side-line legitimate analyses of the root causes of hunger and poverty, genuine solutions for productive, sustainable agriculture that can feed humanity and those who argue for them.

Readers might want to peruse this entertaining take-down of pro-GMO activist-scientists who seem to think they are experts on everything. The author states:

"... they are in fact not scientists at all but corporate propagandists. They do nothing but knowingly tell lies, claim knowledge where they have none, and... confuse the nature of every issue. All the while they sanctimoniously insist that anyone who lacks formal scientific credentials is unqualified to speak about GMOs. (This of course... doesn’t apply to corporate executives or pro-GMO politicians and media flacks.) The best proof of this... is that literally none of them... stays within the bounds of their own disciplines when pontificating about GMOs... every credentialed pro-GM activist evidently feels free to spew the most ignorant, idiotic opinions on any subject imaginable, no matter how unqualified they are according to their own credentialist standard."

Although the flamboyant style is done to maximise impact, the writer is making some key, valid points. For example, see this for a more sober account of Kevin Folta's utterances on issues beyond his expertise.

And yet, people like Richard John Roberts, Anthony Trewavas, Shanthu Shantharam and others like pro-corporate/GM media mouthpiece Jon Entine ('The Chemical Industry's Master Messenger') or pro-corporate/GM political mouthpiece like the UK’s Owen 'Green Blob' Paterson seem to think some emotive talk about critics of GM engaging in crimes against humanity, stealing food from the poor, engaging in pseudo-science or some other sound bite designed for public consumption is fine.

If there is one thing these pro-GMO activists are truly expert at is passing off ill-informed rhetoric for expert opinion, while hiding behind a science PhD. This is nothing but spin that is designed to blur the lines between fact and fiction, science and propaganda.

Some people seem quite incredulous that people could doubt science.

Perhaps Robert Fraley should try to convince us why we should not. And while he's at it, he might want to contemplate why we should take anything he or his company says, does or promotes as 'science' given its decades-long history of deceptions, cover ups and criminality.

Détente And The New Cold Wars, A Global Policy Perspective

Karl Meyer

The essential key to addressing real threats to international security and peace, as well as to resolving smaller wars and regional conflicts, is to reverse the present trend toward Cold Wars with Russia and China. The world needs active cooperation among the United States, Russia, China and other influential countries, through agreement and cooperation within the United Nations framework. We need to return actively to the vision set forth in the United Nations Charter, and abandon the fantasy of unipolar world domination.

The possibility of war between nuclear armed powers is returning as a real threat to the security of people all over the world. Climate change, waste of limited resources, and the economic pressures of excess population growth on the carrying capacity of Earth are fueled by military spending. These threats are felt first by the most economically vulnerable regions and countries. They also drive local civil wars and regional resource and territorial wars.

In our view, the expansionist exceptionalism of United States neo-imperialist policies is the principal driver in the renewal of Cold War hostilities among the United States, Russia and China.

To solve these problems will require agreement and cooperation among all affected countries, with strong leadership by the world’s major powers. Given the present Charter structure of the United Nations, this means, at the very least, the five permanent members of the Security Council.

The policy fantasy that stands in the way of addressing major world problems cooperatively is the idea among ignorant or venal politicians that the United States can retain and expand the boundaries of “sole superpower” domination that was achieved briefly after the collapse and dissolution of the Soviet Union. The most damaging foreign policy error of Presidents Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama, all foreign policy novices, was that they yielded to entrenched bureaucratic military/ industrial/ Congressional/governmental establishment advice and pressure to take advantage of temporary Russian weakness, and the less developed military strength of China, in order to extend the military umbrella of NATO membership into Eastern Europe and Central Asia. They pushed to ring the frontiers of Russia with new alliances, missile sites and military bases, and to extend military alliances and bases around the Pacific perimeter of China. These actions have sent a very aggressive and threatening message to the governments of Russia and China, which are getting stronger every year, and are pushing back.

A second harmful error of the Bush and Obama regimes has been their belief that they could take advantage of popular unrest and revolts in Middle Eastern countries to knock off dictatorial governments and, by aiding oppressed rebel groups, establish friendly client governments in these countries. They failed to secure a stable, reliable client government in Iraq, in fact brought in a government more influenced by Iran. They are well on the road to a similar failure in Afghanistan. They failed miserably in Libya, and are failing in a terribly tragic way in Syria. How many successive tragic failures do U.S. policy elites have to experience before learning that they have neither the right nor the capability to control the future political development of these countries. Each country must sort out political and economic arrangements according to its unique balances of power and social context, without excessive outside interference. Those forces that have the strength and organization to prevail do not intend to become subservient neo-colonial clients of the United States, once their temporary need for patronage has been resolved.

United States policy must stop poking and provoking Russia and China along their frontiers, and return to a strategy of seeking negotiated peaceful coexistence, and balancing of regional interests among the major powers, the United States, Russia and China, with appropriate respect for the interests of secondary powers, India, Pakistan, Iran, Brazil, Britain, Germany, France, Indonesia, Japan, etc. (Incidentally, in spite of their horrible, homicidal record of brutalizing the people of weaker countries, Nixon and Kissinger were balance-of-power realists who advanced a strategy of détente, and negotiated weapons control treaties with Russia and China, and Reagan acceded to Gorbachev’s initiatives, leading to the end of the earlier Cold Wars. These gains have been undermined by the policies of succeeding administrations.)

With active cooperation among the great powers and large reductions in wasteful competitive military spending, all countries could cooperatively address the threats from climate change, water shortages, regional underdevelopment, and economic pressures caused by population growth. They might also resolve civil wars and smaller scale regional wars (such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Palestine/Israel and Ukraine) through unified international pressure for negotiated settlements based on power sharing among all major political factions and forces within each country.

Peace movements and civil society movements cannot dictate the policies of governments or multi-national corporations. Our role, through agitation and education, is to restrain their abuses of power as much as may be possible, and to influence the political context of their decision making as much as may be possible, through mass organization and mobilization.

A Coherent Explanation of Obama's Foreign Policy

Eric Zuesse

Foreign policy is both economic and military. An interpretation of U.S. President Barack Obama's foreign policy will be presented here that explains both his economic and his military decisions to-date, and that shows he's been carrying out the policies of his predecessors in office.

On economic matters, he has turned out to be the most ambitious ‘free-trader' of any U.S. President: he has proposed three gigantic international-trade treaties, two with North Atlantic countries (TTIP for products and TISA for services), and one with Pacific countries (TPP), not only in order to serve America's aristocracy at the public's expense (an international “race-to-the-bottom” in terms of workers' wages, and race to the top in terms of stockholders' profits and executive pay) (like NAFTA on steroids), but in order to extend the NATO military alliance against Russia, to include now these trade treaties as a companion economic alliance against Russia (to reduce Russian trade with Russia's biggest market, which is Europe).

Obama's economic initiative with North Atlantic countries is even more intensive than his one with Pacific countries, because his TTIP & TISA would be economic treaties that would extend the North Atlantic Treaty, or NATO, directly from the military realm into the economic realm. With his TTIP & TISA, Obama is pursuing, essentially, a NATO economic  alliance to complement the military one — virtually the same members as NATO. TPP is less important, because that treaty attempts to isolate China, not Russia — and Russia is to be conquered before a conquest of China can be even seriously considered (in some future U.S. Presidency, though Obama is also ratcheting-up the military hostility against China).

NATO was formed in the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty as being nominally an anti-communist mutual-defense treaty against the Soviet Union. But when the Soviet Union and its communism, and that communist group's equivalent of the NATO mutual-defense treaty, their Warsaw Pact, all disbanded in 1991, NATO continued on, now as being a purely anti-Russian military alliance. In 1990, the representatives of U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush had told Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union that NATO wouldn't expand eastward toward Russia, wouldn't try to do to Russia what Nikita Khrushchev had tried to do to the U.S. in the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 (place nuclear missiles right next door), and Gorbachev accepted those assurances and disbanded the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact on that basis, but GHW Bush had actually lied there, and NATO not only continued on, it went right up to the very borders of Russia — exactly what the GHWB Administration had promised that the U.S. would never do. 

U.S. President Bill Clinton continued this GHWB policy of conquering Russia bit-by-bit by bringing into NATO the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland — a direct violation of Bush's verbal promise to Gorbachev. However, Bush had actually intended  this violation: Bush had told both Helmut Kohl of Germany and Francois Mitterrand of France that the promise made to Gorbachev was only a lie, and that as far as fulfilling it, “To hell with that — we prevailed, they didn't!” Clinton — and his successors — merely followed through on Bush's lie. Bush's son George, in 2004, brought into NATO: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia.

And that brought us to Obama's Presidency, which is increasing this assault and threat against Russia to reach now a red-hot, no longer merely Cold, War. The bloody battlefields in this war so far have been in the countries that had been allied with Russia: Libya, Syria, and Ukraine. But the Cold War against Russia became hot in Ukraine first. That's where Obama crossed Vladimir Putin's red line.

Russian leader Putin had long set as his red line that the U.S. mustn't extend its NATO to include Ukraine, which has the longest border with Russia of any European country: 1,576 kilometers. If the U.S. is going to attempt a blitz-attack against Russia from next door, then Ukraine would be the most-dangerous country from which to launch it, and NATO membership for Ukraine would be the key to such success.

In February 2014, Obama arranged a coup that overthrew the Russia-friendly and democratically elected President of Ukraine and replaced his government by one that's headed by the rabidly anti-Russian Arseniy Yatsenyuk. Obama's operative who selected Yatsenyuk, Victoria Nuland, during the buildup to the coup, explained that, “Since 1991 [the breakup of the Soviet Union] .. we've invested over five billion dollars to assist Ukraine” to “build democratic skills and institutions” (which Ukraine already had, and which Obama — via her — was now tearing down). When she mentioned “1991,” she was thereby acknowledging  that GHWB had actually begun the overthrow of Ukraine. It was an exceedingly bloody coup d'etat in Ukraine, and Putin had always said that if Ukraine were to be added to NATO, that would be totally unacceptable — but now it was already in the process of happening.

Immediately, the nuclear-arms race was resumed. This was very good for America's ‘defense' contractors such as Lockheed Martin, but not only for them. Right behind Nuland on the platform when she spoke of “1991” (see that video) was the “Chevron” sign; and Chevron was the American oil-and-gas company that bought the rights to explore for oil and gas in western Ukraine — the area of Ukraine that had voted the most strongly against  the man whom Obama overthrew. (Chevron thus bought the safest  gas-rights. The locals there were happy to have a U.S. company exploring there.) Subsequently, a son of U.S. Vice President Joe Biden became appointed by the Ukrainian owner of Ukraine's largest gas-exploration company in eastern Ukraine, to become a board-member. (That area was extremely hostile towards the United States, angry against the overthrow, and the residents there demonstrated against that company's fracking and wanted to shut them down.) The American VP didn't object that his son might become a billionaire from America's Ukrainian coup — this was considered acceptable by the Obama regime and the aristocracy that it served (most of the U.S. public were never even informed of the now-booming Ukrainian-U.S. corruption).

The overthrow of Ukraine's democratically elected President (who had been corrupt himself, just as all  of Ukraine's post-Soviet leaders had been) was an effort by Obama not only to take over Ukraine but to further isolate Russia, virtually all of whose former Warsaw Pact allies were by now now firmly in the anti-Russian NATO camp.

However, Obama had actually been preparing for a renewed war against (now) Russia (no longer against the Soviet Union and communism), ever since he first became President in 2009, when his Administration responded to Syria's drought-provoked 2008 request for food-aid not with food but with scheming to overthrow also that ally of Russia. And, then, Obama dusted off an old CIA plan from 1957, which had been drawn up by the mastermind of the successful 1953 overthrow of Iran's freely and democratically elected progressive President Mohammed Mossadegh (replacing him with the brutal Shah); and, in this 1957 plan for Syria, the secular Ba'athist Party that ruled Syria was to become replaced by Saudi-allied Sunni fundamentalists — but this plan was placed on-hold until an appropriate time, which finally arrived during the Obama regime, when the widespread ‘Arab Spring' demonstrations added fuel to the fires of Syria's drought.

That 1957 plan was itself a part of a longstanding CIA program.

After Putin responded to those recent foreign invasions of Syria by Saudi-backed jihadists, by Russia's starting on 30 September 2015 an all-out bombing-campaign against those tens of thousands of foreign invaders, Saudi Arabia and its fundamentalist-Sunni ally Turkey tried to draw the United States directly into an all-out invasion of Syria against both the Assad government and its now-committed Russian ally.

In response, the Saud family teamed up with their Sunni-fundamentalist ally-and-NATO-member Turkey, to seek Obama's support for an all-out ‘Western' invasion of Syria to defeat both Assad and Russia, as well as to defeat two other allies of Assad: Iran and its Hezbollah ally in Lebanon.

President Obama then reached out to the leaders of various European NATO member-nations, to seek at least one of them to join with the U.S. in making this not only a fundamentalist-Sunni invasion to overthrow and replace Syria's Ba'athist government — the only remaining secular government in the Mideast. Thus far, Obama has failed to find any; and he seems unwilling to join the Sunni-Islamic countries as the only non-Islamic invader. However, Obama's Secretary of State, John Kerry, is threatening to complete the 1957 CIA plan without Europe's participation, if there's no other way to do it. And the aristocracy's Council on Foreign Relations recently headlined, “Divide and Conquer in Syria and Iraq; Why the West Should Plan for a Partition.” That ‘partition' or breakup of Syria is the 1957 CIA plan. But that threat seems likely to be pure bluff from Kerry. After all, Kerry himself also says,“What do you want me to do? Go to war with Russia? Is that what you want?” He doesn't want that. And he wasn't bluffing when he said that he doesn't. And Obama seems to recognize that the U.S. and NATO need at least several more years in order to have all the pieces in place for it to be launched.

As regards Ukraine, Obama seems to have given up there, too. Ukraine is being left to rot, into perhaps sequences of regime-replacements and spiraling chaos: it's a wrecked country.

The end-result of Obama's foreign policies, thus far, is to turn Russia's allied nations into failed states. Whether his successor as the U.S. President will be satisfied with that (after all: it does hurt Russia), or else will ‘go for the gold' (as Obama has thus far unsuccessfully tried to do) and resume the active quest to conquer Russia, might depend upon whether Obama can get his ‘trade' deals passed and implemented; because, if that effort fails, then one would be hard-pressed to see any way in which the 1990-Bush-initiated war against Russia will be won, short of some sort of desperate nuclear invasion, for which Russia might be sufficiently well prepared so that whomever the survivors of that war would be (including even the top stockholders in firms such as Lockheed Martin) would wish they weren't survivors. After all: what would any currency be worth then? Maybe enough to buy a gun and bullet to finish oneself off. Even for those corporate CEOs, their golf-days would be over, and only grim days would remain. But that's when the true stature of such American Presidents as GHWB, Clinton, GWB, and Obama, would likewise become clear — to those survivors, or at least to the ones that don't have the gun, or the bullet, or otherwise haven't yet expired. It's like the recognition-of-truth that people such as Palestinians, or Auschwitz-victims, or ISIS-victims, might have in their final moments. But here it would be happening even to the few aristocrats who cause such things to occur. Wouldn't that be “a refreshing change”? After everything is said and done, and no one is around to enjoy it? But, anyway: it would be a change, and it would also be ironic. However, no one would be around to enjoy even the irony of it.

Obama has been carrying out a bipartisan Republican-and-Democratic foreign policy; it's the policy of America's aristocracy. Its results have been horrible for the world, but they'll be even worse if it succeeds. Not only will there then no longer be democracy (but instead a global government by international corporations), but if it succeeds all the way, there won't even be much of anything except universal misery and mass-death. It is, unquestionably, an extremely ambitious foreign policy. Thus far, it seems to be entirely in accord with the foreign policy of the Saud family. However, that may be about to change: perhaps Obama, and the United States, will simply quit its alliance with the Sauds, and separate from them. But, will Europe separate from NATO? If not, then the anti-Russia policy will continue even if the Sauds' alliance with the U.S. comes to an end.

Perplexity and divisions mark G-20 meeting

Nick Beams

Finance ministers and central bankers from the G-20 group of countries, covering more than 80 percent of the global economy, have started a two-day meeting in Shanghai, China, amidst the worst economic outlook since the immediate aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

The meeting takes place against the backdrop of fears that any semblance of economic stimulus provided by an ultra-low interest rate regime and quantitative easing, through which central banks have pumped more than $5 trillion into the global financial system, has run its course and the spread of negative interest rates is making a bad situation worse.

Consequently, in the lead-up to the summit, a series of economic institutions have called for a switch in policy, with an emphasis on government spending on infrastructure projects to make up for the shortfall in investment, which is running well below pre-2008 levels in all the major economies.

Last week, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) pointed to the need for such measures. It was joined Wednesday by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which called for “bold multilateral action” to boost growth and contain risks in a briefing note issued for the G-20 meeting.

In its summary of the overall situation, the IMF said “the global recovery has weakened further amid increasing financial turbulence and falling asset prices”. Economic activity slowed towards the end of 2015, and the valuation of risky assets dropped sharply, increasing the likelihood of a further weakening of the outlook. The IMF did not revise down its estimates for global growth, but it indicated this was likely at its April meeting.

It voiced concerns about what it called “China’s transition to more balanced growth”—a reference to the slowdown in the Chinese economy—and pointed to “signs of distress” in other large emerging market economies, particularly as a result of falling commodity prices.

“These developments,” it said, “point to higher risks of a derailed recovery, at a moment when the global economy is highly vulnerable to adverse shocks.” To counter these dangers, it said the G-20 had to “act now” to implement growth strategies and plan for coordinated demand programs to boost public investment.

An even gloomier analysis of the world economy was set out in a column by Financial Times chief economics commentator Martin Wolf on Wednesday. He began by noting that “the world economy is slowing, both structurally and cyclically.” In other words, on top of a downturn in the business cycle, there are also longer-term processes which are lowering economic growth.

Wolf cited the OECD report, which pointed out that the global economy was growing at the lowest pace in five years. “Behind this is a simple reality: the global savings glut—the tendency for desired savings to rise more than desired investment—is growing and so the ‘chronic demand deficiency syndrome’ is worsening.” In other words, no amount of financial stimulus is going to boost investment in the real economy.

In fact, from the very outset, despite the assertions that cheap money would provide a boost to growth, its real aim was to shore up the position of the speculators and banks who brought the world economy to the point of meltdown in 2008 and enable them to continue the vast looting operation that has transferred trillions of dollars into the hands of the ruling financial elites at the expense of the working class.

There is now a growing realisation that these massive money-printing operations have done nothing to boost global growth but have only fuelled the growth of socially-destructive parasitism and speculation, creating the conditions for another financial crisis, the consequences of which would be even more serious than that of 2008–2009.

Reflecting the growing perplexity in ruling circles over economic policy, Wolf commented: “No simple solution for the global economic imbalances of today exist, only palliatives.” Given that “palliative” care is most often associated with someone suffering from a terminal disease, placed in a hospice with no prospect for a cure, this is a revealing assessment of the state of global capitalism.

Warning that the effect of further quantitative easing would be to lower currency exchange rates as each country sought to increase its exports, in a policy that is “bound to blow up,” he insisted the only alternative was fiscal policy, that is, increased government spending to boost demand. This meant a break from what he called the “lunatic” obsession with austerity.

In reality, the actions of the global policymakers arise from the insanity of the present social order based on the profit system and the division of the world into rival and conflicting nation-states. Indeed, even as the IMF and OECD call for international economic cooperation, all the global powers, led by the United States, are sharply expanding military spending in preparation for global military conflict with their rivals.

This is why the calls by the IMF and other bodies for a coordinated policy will fall on deaf ears as each of the major powers pursues its own interests, insisting that the global crisis is the responsibility of its competitors.

The tone was set by US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew. He discounted an emergency G-20 response, calling for China to do more to boost domestic consumption and for countries in Europe running a surplus, in particular Germany, to carry out fiscal stimulus.

“These last few months have made clear that weakness in demand globally is a problem that can’t be solved just by everyone looking to the United States,” he said, declaring that real economies were doing better than financial markets thought. “This is not a moment of crisis. Don’t expect a crisis response in a non-crisis situation.”

Likewise, all the other major powers look to their own interests. The German ruling elite is strenuously opposed to fiscal stimulus in Europe, arguing that such demands from the US will lead to a weakening of its financial system and thereby strengthen the position of American banks against their German rivals.

A Japanese official warned that, while financial markets needed “something refreshing,” there was little prospect of a global deal and “no magic bullet.” The Japanese government would like to see further stimulus, but in the rest of the world, not in Japan where the debt to gross domestic product ratio is among the highest in the world. China, too, would like to see further stimulus but is constrained at home by mounting debts and the instability of its financial system. And so the list goes on.

The austerity program is not a product of defective thinking on the part of the ruling elites as all the would-be reformers of global capitalism claim. It is a class policy imposed in the interests of definite social forces. Directed by the ruling corporate and financial elites, it is aimed at weakening the position of the working class, through unemployment, wage cuts and attacks on social conditions as one of the central mechanisms for increasing profits.

Whatever the immediate outcome of the G-20 meeting, and whatever declarations to take action emerge from Shanghai, this program will be intensified in the coming period as the crisis of the global capitalist system deepens and the divisions between the major powers widen.

Tens of thousands homeless in Fiji cyclone disaster

Oscar Grenfell

The death toll from Cyclone Winston, the category five storm that struck Fiji last Saturday, has risen sharply in the past days as authorities have made initial contact with outlying islands and remote areas that were the hardest hit.

This morning, the official death count stood at 44, but is expected to continue to increase. Many people remain unaccounted for, and entire regions have been left with virtually no assistance. According to media reports, at least 122 people were injured during the storm, with around 45 hospitalised.

The cyclone, the worst-ever recorded in the Southern Hemisphere, has created a mounting humanitarian catastrophe, with up to 45,000 people homeless or staying in temporary evacuation centres. That is nearly 5 percent of the country’s entire population of one million.

According to Radio New Zealand, a spokesperson for the Fijian government, Ewan Perrin, indicated that the official number of people displaced by the storm had risen by 20,000 on Wednesday alone, as contact was established with heavily affected areas. Perrin said some 22,000 people were living in evacuation centres in the country’s Western Division, another 16,000 in the Central Division, 4,000 in the Northern Division and 3,000 in the Eastern Division.

People are being housed in makeshift and often overcrowded accommodation in schools and churches, which are ill-prepared to meet their most basic needs. There is little prospect they will be able to return to their flattened homes in the near future.

Entire districts were levelled by the cyclone, with hundreds of homes decimated and basic infrastructure down. In Rakiraki district on the north coast of the main island, Viti Levu, over 1,000 homes were destroyed.

Villages have been wiped out on many of the smaller islands. In at least one village on Koro, among the worst affected islands, all 90 houses and structures, including a church, school and local administration building, were demolished.

Joseph Hing, a UNICEF worker, wrote that Koro “looked like someone took a torch and just burnt from one side to the other.” Describing his team’s approach to the island on Tuesday, he said: “As we sailed closer, we started to smell the dead carcasses of livestock that were floating past the ships. When we smelt those, we knew that this disaster was really, really bad.”

Thousands of people are now endangered by a lack of clean drinking water, potential food shortages and the threat of disease. In many areas, power and running water have yet to be restored, and roads are badly damaged. Wells, which are a primary source of water for many villages, have been contaminated with mud and debris, while the structures that cover outdoor latrines have, in many cases, been torn off by the gale-force winds.

Aid organisations have warned of the threat of an outbreak of disease, including Dengue fever and the incurable Zika virus. Both are spread by mosquitoes, which are proliferating in pools of stagnant water from the storm.

The cyclone has had a devastating impact on the impoverished country’s economy. Finance Minister Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum said yesterday the storm has resulted in more than $1 billion in damage. In some areas, as many as 100 percent of crops have been destroyed, threatening longer-term food supplies and livelihoods. The sugar industry, which employs 200,000 people, is expected to lose $83 million from the disaster, with industry figures saying it is too late to replant damaged crops.

There is reportedly growing anger over the social crisis and lack of assistance. Vinesh Naidu, whose home was largely destroyed in northern Viti Levu, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on Wednesday he is living in one leaky room with his wife, daughter and mother. Two of his fingers will need to be amputated as a result of injuries suffered during the storm.

Naidu expressed frustration over a lack of government aid. “We can see helicopters are coming, just making rounds and going but there is no help,” he commented. “At least if they can give us some water. Even if we don’t eat we can at least drink water and fill our stomach.”

The humanitarian catastrophe in Fiji, a British colony from 1874 to 1970, intersects with the growth of geo-strategic tensions in the region, stemming from the US-led military build up throughout the Asia-Pacific. As in previous such disasters, Australia and New Zealand, the two regional imperialist powers, are using the havoc wrought by the cyclone to test out an expanded military presence in the region.

On Thursday, the Australian government announced it would dispatch to Fiji the HMAS Canberra, the country’s first amphibious assault vessel, launched in November 2014. Four Globemaster cargo planes, helicopters, Orion surveillance aircraft and 32 Australian defence personnel were sent to Fiji earlier in the week. New Zealand sent a C-130 Hercules military plane and surveillance aircraft.

The Australian Defence Magazine described the deployment of the HMAS Canberra as “a huge test for the Navy’s new amphibious ... asset.” In 2013, the Australian Strategic and Policy Institute, a government-funded think-tank, noted that the development of vessels with amphibious capabilities was critical for Australian operations in the South Pacific, given that countries in the region “often have low-grade infrastructure, especially in terms of ports, wharves and cranes, let alone airports.”

Washington, and its junior partners in the region, Australia and New Zealand, have previously registered their hostility to Fiji’s close ties with China, and media commentators have expressed concern over two Russian shipments of arms to Fiji this year. In a show of support, China gave $100,000 to the Fiji Red Cross, making it the first country to send aid, according to Chinese state news agency Xinhua.

The Australian ruling elite is using the latest disaster as a dry-run for future operations throughout the South Pacific. It is also undoubtedly watching to see if the havoc created by the cyclone will produce a political crisis for the military-backed Fijian government of Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama, which has had tense relations with Canberra.

An article in the Diplomat on Thursday pointedly noted: “Last year, Cyclone Pam made a direct hit on Vanuatu, devastating the country. In the months after the storm, Vanuatu’s political system nearly imploded, with a quarter of the parliament jailed on corruption charges.”

The newly-released Australian Defence “White Paper” which calls for a dramatic expansion of military expenditure, labelled a “secure nearer region” in the South Pacific as one of Australia’s core “Strategic Defence Interests.” It warned: “Instability in our immediate region could have strategic consequences for Australia should it lead to increasing influence by actors from outside the region with interests inimical to ours”—a clear reference to China and Russia.

US social crisis overshadows 2016 presidential election

Patrick Martin

The primary campaigns to select the presidential candidates for the Democratic and Republican parties move into the decisive stage over the next four weeks, when two-thirds of all state primaries and caucuses will be completed. Eleven states have primaries on Tuesday, March 1, followed by Michigan and Mississippi on March 8 and Florida, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio on March 15.

The American media gives round-the-clock coverage to the minutiae of capitalist politics—the insults and smears and lies hurled back and forth between the various representatives of big business seeking the nominations of the two parties. But very little attention is being paid to the conditions of life facing the working-class majority of the American population.

The reality of life in America for working people is drastically at odds with the official picture of a society in the seventh year of a slow but steady economic recovery, in which the population is generally prosperous and certainly not in desperate straits. The seething anger among working people, expressed in only a very limited and distorted way in the presidential campaign, is the product of intractable and deepening economic and social tensions.

Numerous reports released during the first two months of 2016 document the staggering dimensions of the social crisis facing working people in the United States. A majority of Americans have too little savings to pay for an emergency expense of $1,000. One in four US adults is burdened by debts caused by medical expenses. More than one million working people are being cut off food stamps. One million retirees face pension cuts dictated by the Obama administration.

Of all these social disasters, only the lead poisoning catastrophe in Flint, Michigan has become an issue in the presidential campaign, for the most cynical of reasons—to present the crisis, falsely, as a race issue, rather than one facing the entire working class, white, black and immigrant.

Another report on the social crisis was publicized Thursday on the front page of the New York Times. A study by a recently established think tank, the Economic Innovation Group, found that more than 50 million Americans live in communities—defined by postal ZIP codes—that are severely distressed economically.

The study used measures of education, poverty rate, unemployment, housing vacancy rate, median income and trends in employment and business formation to calculate figures for economic distress, showing that tens of millions “continue to feel left behind by the economic recovery.”

It identified the ten worst urban areas, in terms of economic distress, as (in order): Cleveland, Detroit, Newark, Toledo, San Bernardino, Stockton, Milwaukee, Buffalo, Memphis and Cincinnati. The state of Texas had the largest number of people living in distressed ZIP codes, 5.2 million, while the state of Mississippi had the highest proportion of its population living in distress, 40 percent.

In the most distressed 20 percent of ZIP codes, the study found, “nearly a quarter of adults have no high school degree, over half of adults are not working, and the median income is only two-thirds of the state level.” Since the 2008 Wall Street crash, these ZIP codes lost on average 6.7 percent of their jobs and 8.3 percent of their businesses. Their housing stock was on average more than 50 years old.

Contrasting the economic conditions in the distressed areas with those in high-income, high-growth areas (ZIP codes located mainly in the centers of finance and high technology, including New York City, Boston, Dallas and the San Francisco Bay Area), EIG executive director Steve Glickman observed, “It’s almost like you are looking at two different countries.”

Other studies document the failure of the state and federal governments to provide a social “safety net” adequate to meet the needs of working people. The majority of those who receive some form of public assistance have jobs, many of them full-time, but they earn so little that they cannot make ends meet. A majority of low-paid workers, those making $12 an hour or less, depend on some form of public assistance, principally food stamps and Medicaid.

Wages for the working class as a whole are stagnating. For the last quarter of 2015, total employment costs, the broadest measure of wages and benefits, rose a paltry 0.6 percent, bringing the total increase for the year to 2.1 percent. Only the plunge in oil prices, which has sharply reduced the cost of getting to work, has offset the impact of rising prices for necessities like food, education and medical care.

Extreme social distress has gone hand in hand with an immense growth in social inequality. The policies of the Obama administration have ensured a virtually unlimited stream of cash into the banks and financial system, and the wealth of the top 1 and 0.1 percent of the population has returned to pre-crisis levels.

Summing up data that has previously been reported on the WSWS, a recent article in Foreign Affairs noted, “[T]he share [of wealth] owned by the top 0.1 percent [increased] to 22 percent from nine percent three decades ago. In 2011, the top one percent of US households controlled 40 percent of the nation’s entire wealth.”

The states voting during the month of March include virtually the whole of the South, the most impoverished region in the United States. Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia and Virginia hold primaries March 1, while Kentucky and Louisiana do so four days later. Later in the month come Mississippi, Florida and North Carolina.

Billionaire Donald Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—herself a multimillionaire with close ties to Wall Street—are favored to sweep the Republican and Democratic primaries in the South. Yet these representatives of the American financial aristocracy are separated by an unbridgeable economic and social gulf from the working people of that region.

Trump, Clinton and the other big business politicians will jet from rally to rally, and spend tens of millions on campaign advertising. Meanwhile, the appalling living conditions faced by millions in the South were put on display as a series of major storms ravaged the region, destroying flimsily-built homes, particularly in impoverished rural areas where manufactured homes and trailers are commonplace.

The recent closures of Wal-Mart stores across the region will reportedly create three new “food deserts,” neighborhoods where residents “will lack any place that sells fresh produce and meat once the last of the Wal-Mart stores slated for closure turns off the lights.” This includes parts of Arkansas, where Clinton was once first lady and served on the board of directors of the retail giant.

No section of the political establishment, from Trump to Democratic Party candidate Bernie Sanders, has any solution to the social crisis confronting the vast majority of the population. Both Trump and Sanders have in different ways sought to appeal to immense social anger—the former by promoting anti-immigrant and racist bigotry, the latter by calling for a “political revolution” that boils down to promoting the Democratic Party, which for the past seven years has presided over a historic transfer of wealth from the working class to the rich.