Western Xenophobia, Islam And The Third World

Jon Kofas

Xenophobia in the West

Xenophobia has been on the rise in the last two decades in the Western World and it has influenced the political arena not just of conservative parties moving toward a more right wing course, but even centrist ones under pressure to “protect” the nation from perceived external threats. Is rising xenophobia a reflection of rising nationalism and conservatism in the age of globalization, or is it a reaction to a tangible threat posed by non-whites from the Third World, some who are Muslims, trying to settle in the West and diluting the “purity” of white Judeo-Christian society? Would the Western media, politicians and xenophobes of our era react the same way if instead of Muslim refugees and undocumented Mexican workers the migrants were from the Scandinavian countries?
Because they come from the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, Western xenophobia assumes racist characteristics, while humanitarianism is tossed aside no matter what the Vatican and the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees have to say on the matter. In other words, it is not the immigrant and refugee to which many in the Western World object, but that “outsiders” are perceived as a threat to the “purity of the native culture” diluted with influx of people with different skin color, culture and in many cases religion.

Many European analysts have been warning that the influx of immigrants, especially Muslim refugees fleeing war-torn Syria and Iraq, could tear apart the European Union as one after another member is becoming more nationalistic and tries to protect its national borders and its economic and cultural integrity. Just as many Europeans are concerned about the immigrants undercutting the continental bloc that has taken decades to build, many US analysts agree with politicians from both the Republican and Democrat party contending that illegal immigration from Mexico and Central America undermines security and takes away jobs from American citizens. Anti immigration arguments on either side of the Atlantic have become part of the political arena. Right wing populist politicians embrace positions not much different than one would expect from neo-Nazis, thus moving the xenophobia debate issue into the core of what would be otherwise mainstream politics.

What exactly is the scope and magnitude of the so-called European Muslim refugee problem that has its causes in Western military intervention in Muslim countries and in Mexican illegal aliens? Of the 4.5 million Muslim refugees mostly from Syria and Iraq, an estimated 850,000 have crossed from Turkey for various European destinations. Of those, the US has accepted 2,290 in the last five years to join the approximately 3.3 million Muslim Americans that make up about 1% of the US population .http://www.factcheck.org/2015/11/facts-about-the-syrian-refugees/

As a percentage of the total population, Muslims in France are 7.5%, Netherlands and Belgium, 6% each, Germany 5.8%. Greece 5.3%, UK and Sweden at 4.6% each, Italy and Slovenia 3.6% each, Bulgaria 13.7% and Russia 10% with the largest total number of 14 million. The total Muslim population in the European Union is 19 million or 3.8% of the total. US Muslim population is roughly 1% of the total, or 3.3 million. This compares with 11.4 million illegal aliens, of which about half are from Mexico owing to the common border. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/17/5-facts-about-the-muslim-population-in-europe/

In the age of the US-led war on terror, which has replaced the old East-West conflict, xenophobia reflects not just a deliberate political orientation and cultural prejudice owing to ignorance on the part of xenophobes. At the same time, right wing politicians and businesses have been using the issue to deflect attention away from structural problems society faces owing to downward socioeconomic mobility. However, this is also a manifestation of a far-reaching anxiety on the part of the mainstream society, the media, and the political and social elites. It clearly signals that they lack the means to forge a broad popular consensus around the weakened political economy. Therefore, xenophobia as a means of scapegoating becomes a convenient tool toward that goal.

Migration of people from poor countries, especially Islamic ones in the last decade or so, is symptomatic of imperial policies that the West has been pursuing toward non-Western countries and most certainly not the result of any clash of civilizations as many would opportunistically argue. After all, Muslims co-existed harmoniously with all religions for many centuries from the Emirate of Cordoba in the mid-8th century until the early 16th century when the Spanish Christians expelled the Moriscos (Moors) of Granada to the Kingdom of Castile, Extremadura and Andalusia between 1568 and 1571.

If one deconstructs the “clash of civilizations” theory it is evident that behind it rest Western views of hegemony and transformation policy intended to perpetuate the Islamic countries and indeed even the non-Islamic developing nations under permanent political, economic and strategic dependency on the West. After all, the entire Islamic world was under European colonial control that transformed into a neo-colonial relationship after WWII when the US became the world’s preeminent superpower. Moreover, the long-standing Israel-Palestinian conflict in which the US has always sided with Israel against the Palestinians and their Muslim allies has helped to mold xenophobia in the form of Islamophobia. The Iranian Revolution in 1979 that attempted a neutral course between East and West was another step in molding Western anti-Islamic views. This was followed by the US decision to use counterterrorism as the pretext to perpetuate the military industrial complex and Cold War policies after the end of Communism.

Although in the first part of the 21st century, Western xenophobia is associated largely with Muslims, xenophobia is hardly a new phenomenon in politics and culture. Naturally, the influx of Muslim refugees primarily from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya into Europe has intensified not just strong sentiment among racists, but exacerbated the xenophobic rhetoric in the political arena and media. Serving as a convenient distraction from practical solutions to society’s systemic problems because it scapegoats migrants, xenophobia engenders fear about a specific tangible enemy. Instead of pointing to the structural flaws in the political economy, politicians and media point to someone to hate for undermining society – the Syrian refugee family that is a potential terrorist, the Mexican family that takes away American jobs and feeds off the welfare system.

Europeans and Americans hardly have a monopoly on xenophobia and this is not a recent phenomenon considering there is evidence of it throughout history in many parts of the world. There are more than 700 books and several thousand articles on this subject that has been prominent from the Golden Age of Pericles in 5th century Athens to the so-called post-racial Obama era that has in reality experienced a sharp rise in xenophobia. Just as the Athenian city-state had formalized the status of foreigners known as Metics and treated them as lesser citizens, the modern state is not much different in so far as it has the power to marginalize legal and illegal immigrants from the mainstream as well as project a negative image of them to society regardless of their contributions to the economy and culture.

Besides fear, ignorance and the irrational in human beings prompted by media indoctrination that molds the dominant culture, mainstream institutions from businesses to churches do their part to keep xenophobia in the public debate. However, the relative decline of the Western middle class and rise of the Asian economy, especially China amid a new Gilded Age when capital is so thoroughly concentrated accounts for the rise of xenophobia. In other words, when the middle class fears its future and that of its children it does not blame the capitalist economy under globalization and neoliberal policies but refugees and immigrants who take low-end jobs to survive in their adopted land.

‘Scapegoating psychology’ becomes an integral part of the mainstream because it is simply politically and socially unacceptable to challenge the root causes of mass migration from poor and politically unstable countries to richer and more stables one. “In scapegoating, by definition, the enemy must be weaker than those on the attack — which is why even at the height of the financial crisis, popular anger at bankers never became as strong as current Islamophobia. It’s the same as the way a guy who’s treated as a drudge at work then finds his “strength” by abusing his wife. The more that Muslims can be made to feel like outsiders, the more those who have defined them as other can feel empowered.” (Paul Woodward, “Scapegoating-psychology and rising xenophobia in America” September 14, 2010) http://warincontext.org/2010/09/14/scapegoating-psychology-and-rising-xenophobia-in-america/

Besides the mass psychology of scapegoating that the media and politicians create and perpetuate, the world-economy’s weakened core in northwest Europe and US plays a catalytic role in convincing a segment of the masses that their “real enemy” is not caused by domestic and foreign policies intended to continue capital concentration at the expense of the vast majority. The shifting capitalist core from the West to East Asia affects the Western social structure in so far as middle class living standards historically high in industrialized countries have been sliding downward in the past four decades and they are unlikely to improve. In fact, downward socioeconomic mobility will continue across the entire Western World. This trend will only exacerbate xenophobia and afford the opportunity not just the right wing, but even mainstream bourgeois political leaders to blame influx of immigrants for all calamities befalling society. It serves the interests of the political and economic elites to blame the illegal immigrants and Muslim refugees rather than fault the political economy that results in downward socioeconomic mobility.

The “war on terror” has added to the culture of fear surrounding xenophobia that only makes it more legitimate rather than an issue neo-Nazis and other extremists espouse. This allows xenophobes to argue it is all about national security and their ideological position has nothing to do with underlying racism. When the state is itself xenophobic and racist in its policies despite employing democratic rhetoric to present an image of an open society, why would the masses, at least a segment of them, be much different? This is as true in the US that leads the world in “war on terror” with policies intended to justify the continuation of the waning Pax Americana, as it is for the European countries.

As an integral part of a “Nativist” ideology, xenophobia has become part of the mainstream because it has the stamp of legitimacy from the state that rhetorically opposes it but whose policies and practices promote it not just domestically but globally. Although it could be argued this is just a case of nationalism, there are degrees of nationalism ranging from moderate to neo-Nazi aspects that have become part of the political mainstream both in Europe and US.

European and US Protest of illegal immigration

In an open society citizens ought to have the right to protest for just about anything. However, only as long as such protests do not translate into: a) random vigilante acts; b) populist rhetoric of stereotyping and demonizing entire groups of people that leads to social and institutional marginalization; c) becomes a pretext for racist policies targeting minority groups; and d) impedes social justice in the rest of society and/or runs counter to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) of which all Western nations are signatories.

If social justice is a fundamental right for the protester of illegal immigration and refugees, it is equally the case for the immigrant who has basic human rights according to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Does this mean that the US and EU must open their doors widely for all to enter? Of course no country can possibly have a complete open door policy. However, the advanced capitalist countries are in the position to pursue policies that do not force people from their native lands where they desire to live with their loved ones. Such policies range from economic exploitation to warfare, from supporting authoritarian regimes to regime change operations; all which are the root causes of mass migration whether from Islamic countries to EU or from Mexico and Central America to the US.

It is essential to ask why there was a low level of inter-European immigration from the promulgation of the Schengen Agreement in 1985 until 2010, and why such a sharp rise after the EU led by Germany changed the inter-dependent integration model that essentially relegates the southern and Eastern European countries to virtually neocolonial areas of the northwest core region. Just as significant, why do we have so few Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans, and Libyans trying to cross over to Europe before the US and its NATO partners intervened directly or covertly in these countries to topple their regimes and destroy their countries in the process?

While the Europeans are concerned about Muslim refugees, the US whose military solution policies caused the crisis is constantly warning about terrorism threats. At the same time, the US is also focused on the Mexican and Central American illegal immigration. One cause for the Mexican and Central America immigration is the chronic uneven terms of trade between the US and its southern neighbors. This means that the value of labor south of the Rio Grande is much lower to the benefit of more affluent US consumers and domestic and foreign corporations realizing higher profit margins because of low wages. After all, the goal of neoliberal policies is to reduce “wage costs” and raise profit margins globally. These economic refugees are created by Western policies as much as the political ones in the Muslim counties.

Globalization under neoliberal policies since the Reagan-Thatcher decades of the 1980s has actually contributed to the rise of xenophobia ideologically and pushed the issue into the mainstream. This is because of the steady decline of the middle class that feels threatened by low-wage immigrant workers taking jobs considered undesirable by the native population. Despite the fact that immigrants usually take low-paying jobs, there is no shortage of protests against them, even against their babies born in the US. This is because of fear and prejudice but also because the media and right wing politicians directly or subtly promote cultural biases of religion, race, and ethnicity.

The situation is not very different in Europe where people of color, invariably Muslim from Africa and Asia, work for much less and live in ghetto areas. In major European cities such as Paris, London, and Brussels there are ghettos because there is systemic, institutional and cultural racism and xenophobia against people already on the margins of society. Europeans of course have had the long-standing experience of racism with the Romani (Gypsy). For centuries gypsies have survived on the margins of the institutional mainstream. They have engaged in legal and illegal activities, as one would expect of a nomadic people not integrated into the mainstream. It is not a stretch of the imagination for xenophobes to place gypsies and Muslims in the same category and attribute to them stereotypes rooted in Social Darwinism.

Naturally, “political correctness,” yet another treacherous brick on Liberal society’s wall of hypocrisy, does not permit them to be as bluntly xenophobic as neo-Nazis. In many respects, the liberal political mainstream is even more dangerous than the conservative that is more open in its criticism of illegal aliens. This is because the liberals maintain a façade of the open society concept but legislate to discriminate. If there is social upheaval, and sociopolitical polarization, as far as the liberal and conservative mainstream is concerned it is not because the richest people are engaged in tax evasion; it is not because banks are laundering money and corporations are engaged in bribery while receiving government subsidies, including the European Central Bank propping them up buying corporate bonds. The fault rests with the lumpen-proletariat, gypsies, and Muslim refugees who lack the social, political and cultural respectability of the elites causing structural problems in society.

If popular protests were to focus on the root causes of the Muslim refugee crisis in Europe and the illegal alien issue in the US instead of demonizing the migrants, it means that people would then turn their attention to government policies rather than blaming the victims of those policies. However, the politicians and the media manipulate public opinion so that people focus on the Syrian man carrying his daughter in his arms while trying to cross the border from Greece into Macedonia so he can reach Western Europe.

Islam and Democracy

Fear of Islam is a manifestation of a long-standing successful political propaganda in the Western mass media and political arena. If we simply stick to the empirical evidence we find that Islamic countries are not invading Western ones; Islamic countries are not exploiting the Western World through multinational corporations in every sector from energy to minerals; Islamic countries are not trying to overthrow Western governments because they want to install puppet regimes in Washington or London; Islamic countries are not forcing a transformation policy intended to exploit not just the economy but all of society in the West as the latter has been doing for decades in Muslim countries. The West has manufactured fear of Islam just as it manufactured fear of Communism because there is a struggle for Western hegemony on a world scale.

There is no doubt that Islam like Judaism and Christianity has doctrinal biases that favor men over women and promote sociopolitical conformity. There is no doubt that those practicing Islam are just as hypocritical when it comes to the gap between what they preach and what they practice no different than Jews or Christians. The idea that Islam as old organized religion is somehow much different from Judaism and Christianity implies ignorance of its doctrines on the part of those making such an argument.

The idea that Islam is incompatible with democracy implies a cultural and political bias that relegates Islam to an inferior religion than Christianity and Judaism. If Islam is indeed incompatible with democracy, then all religions are as well because Islam is hardly much different than the other two monotheistic religions. Besides, how often do Western politicians ask if Israel under a majority Jewish population is a theocratic or secular society considering it behaves as a theocratic state with the full backing of the US and EU while systematically persecuting Palestinians. If Israel behaves like a Zionist state in its policies, why has the argument about the inherent contradiction between Judaism and democracy not been raised in the West, except by a handful of intellectuals?
If democracy implies unfettered materialism, consumerism, and hedonism, then many in the Islamic world reject the identification of democracy with such values. But so does Pope Francis who is as critical as many Muslims about the Western decadent value system rooted in materialism. If democracy means violating the national sovereignty of other nations, toppling their regimes, interfering in their internal affairs, then Western nations would fit the profile in this respect much better than Islamic nations. Oddly enough, the imperial powers have no qualms about violating the national sovereignty of developing Muslim and non-Muslim nations on which they impose economic, political, strategic and cultural hegemony, but they vigorously protest the symptoms of imperialism that include economic exploitation and refugee conditions owing to societal instability that results in emigration on the part of people seeking safer and improved conditions in the country that caused problems in their homeland.

The glaring contradiction and hypocrisy of xenophobia inexorably intertwined with underlying racism is that the hegemonic power invokes its own right to self-determination and democracy but then denies it to the nation and people of countries whose population is fleeing hardships caused primarily but not exclusively by the hegemonic power. Even worse, Western xenophobes raise the question of compatibility of Islam and democracy, thus blaming the victim of imperialism for the absence of democracy.

US proposals to force out illegal immigrants

The political rhetoric about Mexican illegal immigration is as hollow and hypocritical as those advocating it for the simple reason that illegal immigrants are the cheapest labor force that capitalists exploit in every sector from farming to construction to domestic work. It is hardly ironic that politicians who take such a position usually have or had illegal aliens work for them. While most Republicans have a harsh anti-immigrant policy, Democrats support low-cost labor force coming from south of the border rather than sending them back or building walls as Israel has done in the West Bank to isolate Palestinians.

According to US official studies, the cost to the US GDP if undocumented workers are expelled would be $850 billion in a period of 10 years, adding $40 billion annually to the federal budget deficit. One could argue that $40 billion increase in a deficit of $19 trillion is not significant, just as the $850 billion additional boost in GDP over ten years. However, in an international competitive environment and downward pressure on working class and middle class incomes, those figures are important .http://fortune.com/2015/01/29/does-it-cost-more-to-keep-illegal-immigrants-in-the-u-s-or-to-deport-them/

There is no doubt that the monetary cost of physically deporting, let alone building a wall would be very high versus the benefits US businesses derives from cheap undocumented laborers. It is hardly surprising that labor unions are against such workers who take any job for below minimum wage scale, thus putting downward pressure on wages of American citizens. Some of the union workers direct their anger toward the undocumented workers rather than the employers who hire them at below minimum wages, just as they direct their anger at technology that replaces them rather than the employer who keeps wages low and politicians who refuse to raise the minimum wage.

Main differences between the Syrian and Mexican immigration

Europe’s refugee problem is monumental in comparison to that of the US-Mexico immigration issue. However, the common denominator in both cases is the obtrusive presence of Pax Americana as manifested in military action in Syria and economic policies in Mexico. Besides differences in scope, the obvious differences between Syrian and Mexican immigration are that the former are fleeing a war-torn country where the US, its European allies, Turkey and Saudi Arabia tried to overthrow the Assad regime in order to determine the regional balance of power. In the case of Mexico, a nation “so far from God and so close to the US”, the issue is strictly economic conditions of a very corrupt country with detrimental social conditions that some people try to escape. Because politicians and the media in the US lump together the so-called “immigration problem”, and because Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump’s characterization of Mexicans as criminals and Muslims as terrorists, many people hardly bother with nuances of immigrant groups or the causes for their endeavors to reach the US.

In September 2015, Eskinder Negash, former chief of the Federal Office of Refugee Resettlement stated that he had no serious concerns about allowing Syrian refugees into the US. By contrast, a number of Republicans at the federal and state level have argued in favor of a ban of such refugees, while they are also in favor of very tough measures against undocumented Mexican workers. In many cases, they link the two arguing that terrorists can and do come through the US-Mexico border thus posing a security threat. This fear mongering find fertile ground to fester like a disease that grows across America when middle class incomes keep dropping and the cost of living rises. http://cnsnews.com/news/article/penny-starr/former-obama-official-threat-admitting-syrian-refugees-us-11-million

CONCLUSIONS

From the early overseas voyages of the Portuguese in the 15th century until the US-NATO direct and insurgent operations in a number of Islamic countries (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Yemen), the predominantly Christian West has engaged in colonial and neo-colonial domination to secure markets, geopolitical and strategic hegemony over non-Western, non-Christian countries. In an interview with a TV network in February 2015, State Department official Marie Harf stated that the US government understands a military solution to Islamic terrorism is a futile exercise and only by addressing the root causes such as poverty and injustice, absence of social justice and human rights could there be progress. She argued that: “We cannot win the War on Terror, nor can we win the war on ISIS by killing them. We need to find them jobs. We need to get to the root cause of terrorism and that is poverty and lack of opportunity in the terrorist community.” This candid admission illustrates that US government is well aware of the real causes and plausible solutions, but chooses the military option for various reasons that in turn create other problems such as refugee crises in the Middle East and xenophobia in the West. https://counterjihadreport.com/2016/03/20/islamic-encroachment-the-western-poverty-and-lack-of-education-syndrome/

Of course, Latin America is predominantly Christian, but the US considers it its “sphere of influence” since the US-Mexican war in the 1840s that gave us the “Manifest Destiny”, a long-standing doctrine running at the core of US foreign policy ideology. Like the Islamic countries that Europe initially subjected to colonial and neo-colonial conditions, and the US followed the European pattern of imperialism after 1945, similarly Latin America has been subjected to colonial and neo-colonial conditions under the patron-client integration model that permeates NAFTA and various other trade agreements inter-American economic relations.

The changing demographics in the Western World clearly determine the level of xenophobia probably as much if not more than the steady downward socioeconomic mobility of the last four decades. Many xenophobes believe that the dilution of their “white race” will be contaminated and they will become a minority in the future so their culture will be bastardized and slowly effaced. Fear of losing their national/ethnic/religious/cultural identity because they could eventually become a minority is inexorably linked to the declining middle class and lack of prospects for upward mobility for the next generation. When xenophobes talk about “taking back our country”, or “restoring its values and honor”, or “preserve our heritage”, they are referring to underlying fear that cultural diffusion is the enemy when it comes in the form of people of a different race, ethnicity, and culture. Throughout civilization the process of cultural diffusion that takes place primarily through migration has been the catalyst for societal progress while isolation has been the catalyst for backwardness, decline and fall. Xenophobes and other varieties of racists clinging to the phantom of “purity” in race, ethnicity, and culture fail to recognize this reality tested throughout history across the world, thus inviting the demise the civilization they are trying to preserve.

Gagging The Scientists: Britain’s Proposed Rules

Binoy Kampmark

Has the British political establishment had an atrophying episode on the science front? Suggestions that this might be the case came last week when there were suggestions that a gag of Britain’s scientists might be in the works. The Cabinet Office had busied itself with proposals in February that, if implemented, would prevent organisations from using tax-payer funds to lobby parliamentarians.

Initially, the ban would have covered academics, effectively eliminating them from the public debates on such matters as transport, genetic modification, stem-cell research, climate change and energy. It would also effectively siphon and control the award of grant money in tighter fashion.

The point would be to target the logical conclusions to be drawn from certain research that might, just might, lead to a particular policy change. The more relevant the research, the greater the need to keep matters shut. The perverse outcome of such a move would be to effectively open the field to various lobby groups keen on skewing the angle and controlling the discussion.

As Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy argued, such changes would “make it much more difficult for independent university experts to advise ministers and civil servants, and hence make it easier for lobbyists, companies and campaign groups to divert policies towards vested interests instead.” In such an abhorrent vacuum, the disgusting will thrive.

This prompted a storm of protest from a group that all too readily capitulates in the face of government bullying. Up to 20,000 academics signed a petition taking aim at the policies, and asking for an exemption. The confusion was compounded by a blurring between the lines of lobbying and scientific research.

On Tuesday, Lord Bridges of Headley, parliamentary secretary for the Cabinet Office, announced that exemptions would be put in place with respect to national academies, research councils and the Higher Funding Council for England.

As astronomer royal Martin Rees observed, the delay in making the exemption was baffling. “This clarification is welcome but should have come sooner. It’s regrettable that it was preceded by months of confusion and ambiguity that generated needless anxiety, ill-feeling and time-wasting.” In the cautious words of Sarah Main of the Campaign for Science and Engineering, “We now need to the detail right to make sure this solution works for all government and all of science.”

Gagging the loquacious scientist has been the business of authorities for centuries. Galileo’s views on celestial matters were shut up because of attitudes distinctly at odds with the Church (Less known is the fact that he was not quite as radical in knowledge as others make out.)

Modern democracies have certainly been twitchy on the subject of allowing scientists to speak readily. They are the moral irritants who wish to see the record kept accurate. In 2013, Canadian scientists were given a good old dressing down in cases where they apparently spoke without ministerial approval. The tendencies were already being observed as far back as 2008.

The measure was motivated in large part by the Harper government’s persistent love affair with extractive industries, though its consequences were far reaching in their absurd applications.

Canadian biologist Steve Campana gave an example of how extensive the ban was in a discussion with CBC News. Something as seemingly inoffensive as discussing techniques behind aging a lobster, a point applicable to the fishing industry, could not see the light of public discussion.

Another scientist in Canada’s employ, pseudonymously named Janet, told Motherboard about the screening conducted by a “media officer” of her work. These officers were naturally faceless creatures, operating a general account, and filtering, editing and adjusting information at will.

There were “a list of ‘hot-button’ issues that can’t be mentioned, like climate change, or the oil sands.” This went so far as to urge the particular scientist in question to refrain from using specific phrases or any matter linking the findings to an industry.

The effect of such none-too-subtle gagging (or muzzling, as it has been termed) was to effectively reduce such scientists as Janet to a state of unwarranted imbecility. Ignorance had to be feigned for the greater government good. “They’ve told me: ‘Say you don’t know the answer to that question,’ even if I do. They make me look like an idiot.”

The freshly-elected Trudeau government has repealed the measure. Navdeep Bains, Canada’s Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, made the point that “government scientists and experts will be able to speak freely about their work to the media and the public. We are working to make government science fully available to the public and will ensure that scientific analyses are considered in decision making.”

Good for Trudeau and his new government, but the recent behaviour in Britain on matters of lobbies remains a potential threat to broader discussions of science. Even in bastions of democratic discussion, enemies of enlightenment can thrive with viral menace.

Coexisting In Peace And Harmony With Earth's Biodiversity

Pratap Antony

“What have they done to the earth? What have they done to our fair sister? Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her. Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn. And tied her with fences and dragged her down” ~ Jim Morrison

Earths resources are being wantonly destroyed due to human greed, ignorance, cruelty and sheer recklessness. Our demands around energy, food production and agriculture are destroying surface vegetation, degrading soil structure and fertility and impeding water filtration.

Our impact on the planet has been so profound that biodiversity (the variety of life on earth), forests, earth, water, air, animals, plants, fungi, micro-organisms, are being consumed faster than nature can replenish them. And due to the speed of our impact and the global scale of our activities on Earths resources over the last 250 years, we have inexorably changed the chemistry of the oceans and the character of our soils and the atmosphere; we now face a worrying scarcity of critical resources.

Human activity has degraded, and continues to degrade the environment.

Mining, damming, agriculture, industrialisation, deforestation and so-called development have lead to air and water pollution, elevated carbon dioxide levels and reduced biodiversity. Local ecosystems and the biosphere have been diminished, i.e. human interference has caused the depletion of many natural resources.

Mining - Metals, bauxite and other minerals which co-exist in earth are vital to the well-being of Earth itself. Mining causes permanent and irrecoverable damage to the environment. Mining not only lays bare the land, but makes this land uninhabitable due to the excavation, quarrying and obliteration of precious bio-diverse lands and forests! Mining-waste - dust and atmospheric pollution generated infiltrates and makes its way into water and air and annihilates and drives away animals and plants, birds and bees in a wide area surrounding it. This destruction produces a profound and lasting affect not only on the local ecology, but also on our health and safety.

Water – Fresh water in rivers and lakes is under threat - from dumped industrial and chemical wastes, untreated sewage, fertilisers, medicinal and chemical residues, sediment and toxin-laden run-off. Oceans are now devoid of over 95% of its larger predatory fish, due to over fishing. Coral reefs are degrading almost everywhere due to warming and acidifying seas. Discarded plastic ends up killing and sickening marine life.

Dams - Large Hydroelectric dams not only endanger crops, but also, by immersing fertile riverbank land and surrounding pasture and forest land for the catchment’s basin area, fertile lands, once teeming with life and biodiversity, turn saline over a period of time. The dams themselves, after all the time taken to construct them, and the damage done to the biodiversity and people of the area, become unproductive due to siltation in a short period of time! Dams also dry out river zones that are essential for the survival of people of the area that depend on farming, fishing, gathering fruits, and raising cattle - their traditional means of sustenance. Large dams displace people, rivers, forests and pasture-lands which are the natural wealth of our planet.

Biodiversity which is critical for the survival of the ecosystem is slowly being bled to death. Human activity within the last century has rapidly diminished the diversity of life forms and many species are faced with extinction. Habitat loss due to deforestation and human development has long posed a threat to our Earth.

Food production - comes with a hefty carbon footprint due to damage caused by deforestation and the use of fertilizers and pesticides which pollute our land and water. On top of that, the increased demand for food has given scientists the excuse to try out dangerous experiments; manipulating plant DNA to produce disease resistant crops. GMO (genetically modified organisms), are generally not a good idea, as GMO crop growing and food products pose serious threats to the environment and biodiversity, and when consumed, to animal and human health.

Energy – Fossil fuels are the cause of environmental problems. Yet for our short term requirements of energy, we’re destroying our planet, turning it un-inhabitable, hostile and not-fit-for-human survival. We have to face up to the environmental problem of cleaning up or replacing the burning of fossil fuels that we have been using since the Industrial revolution in the 18th century, with renewable resources, and by developing and adopting clean and renewable energy.

Waste - Modern environmental threats due to technological advancement are, electronic products such as computers, laptops, television sets and mobile phones that are discarded resulting in the release of hazardous materials such as lead, mercury, heavy metals and many other toxic substances into the environment. Besides these, the use of man-made pesticides, herbicides and fungicides can consequently kill, harm and damage our ecosystem, our health and our well-being.

Nuclear waste: There are 31 countries with nuclear reactors. Consequently, there are 31 countries in danger of lethal and irreversible danger due to radiation and radioactivity and its continuing impact on health, water and the environment, during and after production of Nuclear energy - from the mining of uranium > to its transportation > to its use during the process of production > waste during production > transportation > and storage of nuclear waste.

Climate change is real, and it is influenced by human activities. Humanity has released ample greenhouse gases into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution in the 18th century, and even more over the last 40 years. Due to compromised environment, we are now starting to feel the effects on our ecosystem. Climate change is becoming more and more obvious in an inevitably warmer world, where there are more frequent ‘extreme’ weather conditions, more floods, more droughts, more cyclones, more hurricanes, heavier rainfall over short periods, less rainfall over longer periods, rising seas, more wildfires, reconfigurations of coastlines, and many more changes of the things that are not in our control than we can imagine.

Consumption - A four-year analysis of the world's ecosystems sponsored by the Worldwatch Institute found that over-consumption has pushed 15 out of 24 ecosystems essential to human life "beyond their sustainable limits". Our insatiable desire for more is moving the planet toward a state of collapse that may be "abrupt and potentially irreversible". John James

Corporatisation – Throughout the world, Corporations buy politicians and keep them safely in their pockets. Large corporations are relentlessly taking over and dictating terms to governments of many states and countries on our planet, naturally, for their own self interest and profit.

Large Corporations take control of mining, petroleum/fossil fuel exploration, retailing, energy, housing and agriculture by taking over fertilisers, pesticides and through the control and industrialisation of GMO (Genetically Modified Organisms). They keep governments in servitude while they get access to our hard earned money and taxes and gamble away our futures. They increase their empires and their profits at public expense without public knowledge. And then they rape and plunder our environment and drive us towards catastrophic climate change and global warming.

Development – Development and ‘corporatisation’ are tied together. The word or idea of ‘Development’, as peddled by politicians is ‘loaded’. Because to politicians, ‘development’ always means, the development of large corporations; industrialists, manufacturers, builders and developers, who build and develop large projects and manufacture products, and commodities.

This idea of development, ostensibly for the benefit of the common people, benefits the already rich and the privileged; it benefits city-dwelling, high-salary employees, industrialists and businessmen, but it does not benefit the vast majority of people who need all the help that they can get, just to survive.

Development works best when it is bottom up. But, it is more lucrative and easy for politicians and economic thinkers to think of top-down development

What should do we do to make amends?

. We must practice harmony, co-existence and mindfulness with intelligence and with a generous spirit. We are nature’s companion and not its boss. We are dependent on nature. Nature is not dependent on us.

. Our companionship and co-dependence with nature is important for our continuing co-evolution and co-existence. Humans are just passers by, a fleeting transitory part of Earth - sharing Earth’s generosity for a short while! Earth, will adapt to changes and evolve with, or without us and continue much after humans cease to exist.

. Strip ourselves of the mindset that we have a special position and therefore, special rights to dominate and exploit earth and comprehend deep within our minds that we do not have any right to manipulate and control nature.

. Be conscious of our responsibility to give back to nature in equal measure whatever we take from it.

Our survival strategy –Embrace reciprocal altruism, compassion and ahimsa – non-harm.

US President Obama warns against Britain leaving the European Union

Robert Stevens

US President Barack Obama arrived in Britain Thursday night for the start of a three-day state visit. Officially, it was to join celebrations on Queen Elizabeth II’s 90th birthday. Its real purpose, however, was for Obama to make the most forthright intervention possible in support of Britain voting to remain in the European Union (EU) in the June 23 referendum on UK membership.

Obama set out the standpoint of the US administration in his article published Friday in the pro-Conservative eurosceptic Daily Telegraph newspaper. Headlined, “As your friend, let me say that the EU makes Britain even greater”, the column was an unprecedented intervention by a US president into political events in the UK.

Obama’s article noted that in 1939, “[US] President Franklin D. Roosevelt offered a toast to King George VI in the White House”, and “[N]early 80 years later, the United Kingdom remains a friend and ally to the United States like no other. Our special relationship was forged as we spilt blood together on the battlefield.”

Obama bracketed the EU alongside the main capitalist institutions formed in the post-war period under the leadership of the US: “From the ashes of war, those who came before us had the foresight to create the international institutions and initiatives to sustain a prosperous peace: the United Nations and Nato; Bretton Woods, the Marshall Plan, and the European Union.”

In the run-up to his visit, the Leave campaign had denounced any intervention into the campaign by the US president, with Boris Johnson, the Conservative mayor of London stating it was “plainly hypocritical for America to urge us to sacrifice control—of our laws, our sovereignty, our money and our democracy—when they would not dream of ever doing the same.”

Obama noted the hostility his trip had fuelled among sections of Britain’s ruling elite, saying, “I realise that there’s been considerable speculation–and some controversy–about the timing of my visit”.

Such is the concern of significant sections of the US ruling elite of the economic, political and military implications of a UK break from the EU, that Obama made a full-scale attack on the various claims of those in the Leave campaign who support a Brexit (British exit from the EU).

America had fundamental and strategic interests at stake in the referendum, Obama wrote, adding, “the outcome of your decision [the referendum vote] is a matter of deep interest to the United States.

“The United States sees how your powerful voice in Europe ensures that Europe takes a strong stance in the world, and keeps the EU open, outward looking, and closely linked to its allies on the other side of the Atlantic.”

Obama’s stressed that the challenges of “terrorism and aggression; migration and economic headwinds… can only be met if the United States and the United Kingdom can rely on one another, on our special relationship, and on the partnerships that lead to progress [emphasis added]”.

It was critical that these alliances were maintained to facilitate the global plans of US imperialism, under NATO auspices, Obama wrote, citing specifically NATO provocations against Russia.

The US and Britain “must work to resolve political conflicts in the Middle East–from Yemen to Syria to Libya–so that there is a prospect for increased stability”, Obama wrote. He continued, “We must continue to invest in Nato– so that we can meet our overseas commitments from Afghanistan to the Aegean, and reassure allies who are rightly concerned about Russian aggression”. The “full array of these challenges” is to be the subject of further discussions with Prime Minister David Cameron and an “informal” meeting with Cameron and the leaders of France, Germany and Italy in Hanover, Germany on Monday.

In advance of these discussions, Obama stressed, “even as we all cherish our sovereignty, the nations who wield their influence most effectively are the nations that do it through the collective action that today’s challenges demand [emphasis added]”.

A central argument of the Leave campaign is that the UK will remain a strong economic and political ally of the US even if it leaves the EU. Obama torpedoed such claims, warning that EU membership was critical to the UK’s “special relationship” with the US and, indeed, any status it retained globally.

Without the UK’s alliance with the US as an EU member state, Britain would be cut down to size and risked irrelevance, Obama warned. Stressing repeatedly that Britain’s relations with the US and the EU “magnified” the UK’s “voice”, he wrote, “So the US and the world need your outsizedinfluence to continue – including within Europe [emphasis added]”.

In a challenge to the Leave campaign’s projections that the British economy faced a tumultuous decline by remaining in the EU, Obama said, “When it comes to creating jobs, trade and economic growth in line with our values, the UK has benefited from its membership in the EU–inside a single market that provides enormous opportunities for the British people.”

The US president was even more direct in the press conference held later that day with Cameron. The UK will go to the “back of the queue” for trade deals with the US if it leaves the EU. Warning of the dangers of “strains” and “faultlines” in the EU, he reiterated the importance of European countries giving over 2 percent of GDP to defence spending, as required by NATO.

If Obama’s strident tone was an unprecedented intervention by the US into British political affairs, the belligerent response to it by the eurosceptics was no less so.

In an article posted also Friday in the Sun newspaper, owned by the billionaire oligarch Rupert Murdoch, Johnson insinuated that Obama was anti-British by virtue of his Kenyan heritage.

Some had said that, upon becoming president, Obama had removed a bust of Britain’s wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill, from the White House. Johnson wrote, “Some said it was a snub to Britain. Some said it was a symbol of the part-Kenyan President’s ancestral dislike of the British empire- of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender.”

Johnson’s revival of these claims is a purposeful attempt to align himself with the most ultra-right sections of both the US and UK establishment. The US Tea Party, the so-called birthers and Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump have all claimed that Obama was born in Kenya and is therefore not eligible to become president.

More specifically, Johnson’s remarks deliberately echoed the statements of Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party, who co-heads the anti-EU Grassroots Out campaign. Farage said, “I know his [Obama] family’s background. Kenya. Colonialism… It’s just that you know people emerge from colonialism with different views of the British. Some thought that they were really rather benign and rather good, and others saw them as foreign invaders. Obama’s family come from that second school of thought and it hasn’t quite left him yet.”

He added, “Mercifully, this American president, who is the most anti-British American president there has ever been, won’t be in office for much longer, and I hope will be replaced by somebody rather more sensible when it comes to trading relationships with this country.”

That a leading member of the Conservative Party is prepared to write in such an openly hostile manner to a serving US president is extraordinary. It underscores the extreme tensions that are developing internationally, under conditions of global economic slump and the drive to militarism and war.

Divisions with the Cameron government and the Conservative Party more generally over the EU referendum are already febrile, with more than 100 MPs out of 330, and a majority of the wider party in favour of a Brexit. Despite the government authorising a pro-Remain mailshot, at a cost of £9 million, being sent to every household in the UK last week, the latest polls show the Remain and Leave camps almost neck and neck.

The Guardian commented that Obama’s visit marked “the end of a week which started with the Treasury publishing its 200-page report on the economic costs of Brexit, and it means that Remain/Number 10 have now fired two of the most powerful missiles in their arsenal. If Obama and the fear of perpetual relative poverty can’t win the referendum for Cameron, it is hard to know what can.”

UN refugee agency confirms mass drownings in Mediterranean

Martin Kreickenbaum

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) have now confirmed that a refugee boat went down earlier this week between the Libyan port of Tobruk and the Greek island of Crete. Both organisations, based on the testimony of 41 survivors, estimate that up to 500 refugees died in the disaster.

The horrific loss of human life was first reported almost a year to the day of the worst refugee tragedy in the Mediterranean thus far. On 18 April, 2015, 800 refugees drowned when their boat capsized near the Italian island of Lampedusa.

A year ago, European Union officials and government heads declared their shock and sorrow and the media reported the disaster in detail. Now they barely take note of a similar horror. The broadcast media and press have relegated the story to the back pages.

Unlike the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 in March 2014, when a huge area of the Indian Ocean was searched for months for any sign of wreckage, not a single ship was sent to check for survivors following initial reports last weekend. Only days later did Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi announce that he would send the coast guard to search for bodies and the wrecked boat.

The silence over the deaths of the refugees, who fled from war, violence and crushing poverty in Libya, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia to seek asylum in Europe, can be explained only by the fact that their deaths are seen as a price worth paying. Thousands of migrant drownings in the Mediterranean are, for the ruling elite, a necessary part of their policy of sealing the EU’s borders to deter refugees.

The reports of the 41 survivors collected by the UNHCR and IOM give a sense of the terrifying scenes that unfolded during the tragedy. “Two-hundred-and-forty of us set off from Libya, but then the traffickers made us get onto a bigger wooden boat around 30 meters in length that already had at least 300 people in it,“ said Abdul Kadir, a Somali.

As the refugees were being transferred, the larger boat capsized and rapidly sank. It remains unclear whether the larger vessel also set off from Libya or from Alexandria in Egypt. At least one of the survivors said he had started his journey not from Libya, but Egypt.

The 41 eye-witnesses managed to survive only because they had either not been transferred to the larger boat, or had managed to swim back to the smaller one. They included 37 men, three women and a three-year-old child.

“The testimonies we gathered are heartbreaking,” said IOM Athens Chief of Mission Daniel Esdras. A survivor named Mohammed said, “I saw my wife and my two-month old child die at sea, together with my brother-in-law… The boat was going down... down... All the people died in a matter of minutes. After the shipwreck we drifted at sea for a few days, without food, without anything. I thought I was going to die.”

According to the eye-witnesses, the traffickers continued the voyage with the survivors until the ship’s engine broke down. It is not clear whether this was caused by mechanical failure or if the traffickers deliberately sabotaged it. They issued an emergency call and disappeared in a small speedboat.

Although the emergency call was received in Rome and transferred to the Greek Coast Guard, it took three days before the freighter Eastern Confidence, sailing under a Philippine flag, pulled the refugees from the sea 95 nautical miles southwest of the Greek city of Pylos and brought them to the port of Kalamata.

There, the 41 survivors--23 Somalis, 11 Egyptians, six Ethiopians and one Sudanese--refused to disembark and demanded to be taken to Italy. This was entirely justified, as shown by a Greek policeman who cold-bloodedly told the BBC, “They will be deported. They don’t come from Syria.”

The details now known about the tragedy stand in stark contrast to the claims of the Greek, Maltese and Italian coast guards, which were still declaring on 17 April that they had no information about an incident and had not forwarded an emergency call. At that point, the Philippine freighter already had the survivors onboard.

A Greek coast guard spokeswoman told Migrant Report at the time, “There was no such incident off Greece. I think the information is incorrect. Whatever the case, this did not happen in Greek waters and nobody was rescued off a vessel with 400 to 500 people onboard.”

This indifference to the deaths of hundreds of refugees is a direct result of the EU’s ruthless policy of sealing its borders. The EU has declared the protection of its external borders to be a principle, as if the refugees represent an invading army. The European Union and Europe’s governments are responsible for the latest mass fatalities in the Mediterranean.

They have largely abandoned all sea rescue programmes, even though the border protection agency Frontex warned in 2014 that this would lead to an increase in fatalities, as a recent report by London’s Goldsmith College documented. Despite this, the EU ended the Italian coastguard’s Mare Nostrum mission, which rescued 150,000 refugees from the sea and brought them to Italian territory. It was replaced by the Frontex Triton mission, the goal of which is repelling refugees.

After close to 1,200 refugees died in two tragedies last April, many migrants sought to reach Europe via the Balkan route. Following the sealing of Balkan borders and the dirty deal struck between the EU and Turkey, many refugees are trying once again to reach Italy by means of the dangerous voyage across the Mediterranean.

The refugees already confront extreme danger in Libya. The militias in control of the country since the NATO war for regime-change in 2011 treat refugees brutally, detaining them in internment camps and abusing and torturing them. Traffickers are taking new routes as a result of the EU’s EUNAVFOR Med Sophia military mission on the Libyan coast.

“There were hardly any movements of refugees off Tobruk,” Ruben Neugebauer from the voluntary organisation Sea Watch told Austria’s Der Standard. But due to Sophia, the traffickers use entirely new routes, where there is nobody in the area to assist. The shortest trip to Lampedusa, if all goes well, takes between 10 and 12 hours. By contrast, from Tobruk or Egypt it takes up to 13 days.

British migration researchers Heaven Crawley, Nando Sigona and Franck Düvell pointed out in an article for the Conversation that the increasing number of fatalities is the result of the militarisation of coastal regions, which forces refugees to take ever more dangerous routes, sometimes overnight, in smaller, even less safe boats. Although the risk of discovery is reduced, so is the possibility of being rescued in an emergency. This applies to the Mediterranean between Libya and Italy and the Aegean Sea between Greece and Turkey.

Some 25,000 refugees have landed in Italy so far this year, around twice as many as in the same period last year. The number has risen dramatically in the past four weeks. According to official figures, 851 refugees have drowned during the crossing. In the Aegean, where the flow of refugees practically stalled in April, 367 refugees have drowned.

US backs police purge in Honduras

Andrea Lobo

As part of an executive decree approved April 10, Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández announced the closing of the police headquarters in Casamata and a purge within the National Police, after recent documents suggest that high-ranking members of the force were involved in the killings of three leading anti-drug officials between 2009 and 2013.

The Honduran daily, El Heraldo, published the documents, which were prepared by the General Inspectorate of the National Police and the Directorate of Police Intelligence. They revealed that a drug lord ordered the murders, several police chiefs concealed the files, and the inspector general’s office of the police and the security minister attempted to prevent the Honduran attorney general from carrying out an investigation since members of the ruling National Party would be implicated.

The Honduran police apparatus has come under increasing pressure since the murders of the indigenous leaders Berta Cáceres and Nelson García, and now these reports on the National Police have pushed the conservative National Party government to make some changes and allow for greater involvement by international and local investigators.

However, the purge in the National Police is consistent with increasing militarization and repressive measures in the interests of the Honduran oligarchy and imperialism.

President Hernández stated that his government will, “either eliminate the National Police or create one that gains the confidence of the people.”

As part of the purge, the president formed a Special Commission for the Cleanup of the National Police made up of three civilians, who will work with the Ministry of Security in carrying out “confidence tests” to determine whether police officers stay or go.

Nevertheless, the security minister, Julián Pacheco, revealed that they already have a predetermined list of 1,400 police officers to fire, which would represent 10 percent of the entire force. If they don’t voluntarily leave before they get fired, the ministry’s spokesperson said, they will lose all retirement benefits. At least 32 middle ranking officials have already been asked to retire or have taken the initiative themselves.

Even though the police director, subdirector, and several other high-ranking officers are being allowed to participate in the purge and restructuring only to resign afterwards, other police officers can be dismissed “without justification.”

These measures parallel those made between 2012 and 2015 after police agents connected to organized crime killed a group of university students in 2012.

According to a report made by the now defunct Commission for the Reform of the Public Security System, after spending $7 million, the government investigated less than 15 percent of the 12,000 police during that period. Other than the two police agents directly involved in the murder of the students, who went to prison, only 3 percent of the 230 police officers proved to be connected to organized crime were fired.

According to a security analyst, Marco Tinoco, the 2012 cleanup “was at first just an internal conflict among high ranking officials for control of power within the police. Some police were fired, but only those of lower ranks.”

On April 14, the New York Times described the latest documents as “a chilling portrait of impunity at the very top of Honduras’s police hierarchy: the unchallenged power to carry out assassinations and force a cover-up of the investigation.” The article concludes that the new Support Mission against Corruption and Impunity in Honduras (MACCIH) will likely challenge the Honduran president’s resistance to investigate his government’s involvement in organized crime.

MACCIH, proposed in February and approved by the Honduran Congress in March, is an OAS-led and US-backed commission designed to bring back national and international credibility to the government of the local oligarchy and its repressive institutions.

Impunity is by no means limited to police officers, but rather extends to virtually all of organized crime in the country. The Honduran NGO, Alliance for Peace and Justice, and the Violence Observatory of the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH) reported last year that only 9 percent of homicides get investigated and only 4 percent lead to convictions.

The same National Police being purged, supposedly for corruption, has also participated in the terrorization of those who actively opposed the US-backed military coup in 2009, when ex-president Manuel Zelaya was forcefully deposed.

Since then, the coup regime’s few attempts to investigate the crimes committed by security forces against demonstrators—described by Human Rights Watch as resulting in “various deaths, numerous injured and thousands of arbitrary detentions”—have been merely for show. They have led to only 20 cases being documented by the OAS-backed Commission of Truth and Reconciliation, and to a single arrest related to the coup. In 2014, former army Colonel José Arnulfo Jiménez was sentenced to five years in prison for using a military contingent to shut down television channel 36 on June 28, 2009, the day of the coup.

On top of the hundreds of death threats, persecutions and executions, according to COFADEH, the Committee of Families of Missing Detainees in Honduras, the coup was followed with “militarized roadblocks that affected 16 departments in the country, illegal and prolonged curfews, airport closings, and the immobilization of buses by shooting at their tires.”

The tactics used since the coup against civilian opposition, leading to the deaths primarily of workers and youth, are being orchestrated by the same military and police officials who used them during the Central American civil war in the 1980s, when torture and political killings were rampant.

The state’s armed forces are still the main props for US imperialist interests in the country. Since the coup, the security forces have given direct orders to their ostensible commanders-in-chief—presidents Roberto Micheletti, Porfirio Lobo, and Juan Orlando Hernández.

The purge in the National Police is being directed largely by the US State Department, with the support of the oligarchical elite.

The US ambassador in Honduras, James Nealon, confirmed that Washington is actively participating in the restructuring of the police. “This is the moment to work together to clean up the police, so that you can have the police you deserve,” said the ambassador in a video released by the office of the Honduran president.

Washington is using the issue of corruption as a means of gaining greater control over the Honduran government and its security forces.

These efforts are being carried out in conjunction with the $750 million being spent by the US government in its Alliance for Prosperity in the Northern Triangle (El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala).

Underlying this campaign are broader geo-strategic considerations, particularly combatting the rise in Chinese influence and investments in the region—like the $20 billion interoceanic railway a Chinese company has agreed to build in Honduras.

The regional corollary to US imperialism’s belligerent pivot to Asia has been an active campaign to destabilize the bourgeois nationalist “left turn” in Latin America, which has gone hand-in-hand with the growth of Chinese trade and investment. The deposing of Zelaya, who had forged friendly ties with the Chavez government in Venezuela, was part of this campaign.

The US still retains a 70 percent share in total foreign direct investment (FDI) into Honduras. The high dependence on US capital has been accompanied by attacks on the living standards and basic rights of the Honduran working class.

According to the UN Economic Commission for Latin America, ECLAC, the 2008 crisis led to a massive growth in FDI into backwards economies and a tripling of yearly speculative portfolio investments to $96 billion in Latin America. The agency notes that, while FDI profitability fell in most of the region, in Honduras it showed increases in 2012 and 2013, leading to a surge in FDI, equivalent to 57 percent of the country’s GDP in 2014 compared to 36 percent in 2007.

During Lobo’s administration, the US Embassy offered to finance and helped create a military police force with four battalions. Then, after Hernández came to power in 2013, with the promise “to put a soldier in every corner,” the Military Police was officially instituted and became active in January 2014.

The ambassador’s promise of a “police you deserve” was directed to foreign investors and the local oligarchy. The police they need, not deserve, is a militarized one prepared to suppress all tensions caused by the country’s mounting inequality, even if that requires killing and terrorizing protesting workers, peasants, and indigenous people.

The government’s security and military budget increased 55 percent in 2015 to $593 million.

According to a 2015 Oxfam report, the average Honduran multimillionaire (with at least $30 million in assets) makes 16,460 times the median yearly salary of a person in the lowest quintile of the population, the most unequal ratio in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The report also stated that the business elite has acquired public assets by “leading public entities into bankruptcy—CONADI’S case [the National Investment Corporation]—increasingly channeling public resources into private enterprises—ENEE [National Electric Energy Company] and Public Health’s cases—or simply eliminating the competition for the private sector—Hondutel’s case.”

Public spending in health, one of the lowest in the region, is equivalent to just 80 percent of the $650 million in estimated tax write-offs for the wealthy.

ECLAC estimated that only 34 percent of teenagers in the poorest quintile are attending school, compared with 73 percent of those in the top quintile, the highest difference in the region. With increasing unemployment and over 60 percent of the population living in poverty, many workers and youth are forced to choose between joining criminal organizations or fleeing the country.

Panama Papers implicate Pacific Island states

John Braddock

The leaked documents from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, which exposed the global network of tax havens used by rich individuals, politicians and companies to hide their wealth, have implicated a number of Pacific countries, including New Zealand, Samoa, Niue and Vanuatu. According to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which obtained the documents, Niue and Samoa are Mossack Fonseca’s fifth and six most-used tax havens.

The activities of Mossack Fonseca and its clients in the Pacific shed some light on the predatory nature of tax havens. The micro-states are targeted by financial sharks because of the impoverished Pacific islands’ desperate need for foreign “investment.” Their isolation and relative backwardness also make them useful for semi-legal and illegal dealings.

Malakai Kolamatangi, Pacific director at New Zealand’s Massey University, told Radio NZ last week that “the problem we’ve got in the Pacific, is the lack of the ability to generate income.” He said “this type of activity,” offering dubious financial services, had been going on for a long time in Samoa, Niue, Vanuatu, Cook Islands, Tonga and Nauru.

Washington had applied pressure on the region to “clean up its act” after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York, raising questions over whether money laundered in the Pacific had links to terrorism. However, Kolamatangi declared, if there were “remnants of these tax havens or tax avoidance and tax evasion schemes still in the Pacific, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

Tax havens are a significant factor in deepening global inequality, both within and between countries. The impact of financial crime and tax evasion on the poorest countries is devastating. According to one estimate by the Global Financial Integrity group, $US1 trillion a year is diverted from public funds in developing countries.

The Pacific island elites, which are generally based on systems of patronage, inherited title, seniority and family ties, are notoriously corrupt. Protests involving hundreds of people erupted last June outside Nauru’s parliament over government corruption. In November 2006, riots caused widespread damage, deaths and injury in Tonga amid deepening hostility toward the country’s absolute monarchy and its lucrative business interests.

The main imperialist powers in the region—the US, France, Australia, New Zealand and previously Britain—bear principal responsibility for this state of affairs. A century of colonial rule, ruthless exploitation and periods of military domination—including the decade-long Australian-led RAMSI operation in the Solomon Islands—have left the island countries impoverished, underdeveloped and fragile.

The use of tax havens in the Pacific first came to notice in New Zealand during the early 1990s with the case of the Cook Islands and the “Winebox” scandal—named after the container in which the documents were discovered. New Zealand corporations and financiers were found to have evaded their tax obligations by using bank accounts in the Cook Islands, a New Zealand dependency. One scheme involved a subsidiary of European Pacific (EPI), owned by prominent NZ merchant bankers Michael Fay and David Richwhite. The Cook Islands government received $NZ50,000 but in return EPI got a New Zealand tax credit of $2 million.

In Nauru, tax haven activities took off during the 1990s as phosphate deposits, the island’s main source of income, began running out. According to NZ-based Pacific affairs correspondent Michael Field, 450 banks were registered to a single Nauru mailbox, which acted as a money laundering front. Victor Melnikov, deputy chairman of the Russian Central Bank, said in 1999 over $US70 billion of Russian mafia money had been laundered through Nauru. Field claims that a third of these paper banks were of Middle Eastern origin, including Al Qaeda fronts.

In Samoa, hundreds of shell companies operate through the country’s branch of Mossack Fonseca. The Panamanian company set up in Samoa in 2004, after it quit Niue, taking advantage of Samoa’s laws covering international financial operations that had been in place since 1987.

Leaked emails showed that Mossack Fonseca urged the Samoan government to stall Australia’s request to sign a Tax Information Exchange Agreement, although Samoa eventually signed. They also showed that Samoa’s High Commission in Australia routinely assisted Mossack Fonseca in creating shell companies, including in other countries, such as the United Arab Emirates and Uruguay.

Samoa’s government said last week that 10 licensed trustee companies, including Mossack Fonseca, currently operate under its international financial centre. It said the practice was “legal and common.” Samoa prided itself on “leading efforts to ensure the conduct of businesses was regulated and supervised in compliance with international standards.”

However, the head of Samoa’s Money Laundering Prevention Authority, Maiava Atalina Ainuu-Enari, issued a warning last month to money launderers. “One professional money launderer can move tens, or hundreds of millions of tala [the Samoan currency] out of, or through, Samoa in a matter of minutes,” Maiava said. He vowed to shut them down, in order “to reduce the harm caused to Samoans by money laundering and the crimes that generate laundered funds such as drug crime, corruption, tax evasion, fraud, scams and extortion.”

In the case of Niue, Mossack Fonseca won a 20-year exclusive right to operate offshore companies in the tiny island state in 1996. The firm wrote the legislation governing foreign business operations for Niue’s parliament. Mossack Fonesca’s co-founder Jürgen Mossack told Field in an interview in New Zealand in 2000: “We figured that if we had the exclusivity, we would avoid the price wars because in offshore jurisdictions there is a lot of competition going on.” Mossack, who defended the legality of his actions, said Niue was chosen because he wanted a location outside the Caribbean, in an Asia-Pacific time zone and part of the British Commonwealth, with no “scandal” attached.

Niue made just $NZ150 for every international company set up through Mossack Fonseca. Some 6,000 accounts were established, earning Niue around $NZ1 million a year over eight years. According to Field, “Niue sold itself cheaply,” but nobody else was offering “that kind of money.” Niue registration offered “total secrecy and anonymity,” with no need to file annual returns, according to Mossack Fonesca’s former web site. Lawyer Peleni Talagi, daughter of the current prime minister, was the firm’s agent.

Niue’s activities, Field says, attracted close attention from the OECD and the G-8 nations, as well as New Zealand. The US State Department’s 1999 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report declared: “Niue’s thriving offshore financial sector has been linked with the laundering of criminal proceeds from Russia and South America.” Mossack Fonesca’s use of Niue as a tax haven peaked in 1999, five years before it relocated to Samoa.

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Sharp rise in US suicide rate

Kate Randall

The suicide rate in the United States has increased sharply since the beginning of the current century, according to federal data released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The increase is led by a particularly sharp rise in suicide among middle-aged white people, especially women.

The study by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics follows recent reports documenting a decline in life expectancy among whites and sharp increases in lifespan divergences between rich and poor in America. As with life expectancy, the incidence of suicide is a key barometer of the health of a society. The rise in the rate at which people choose to take their own lives is yet another indication of the social crisis gripping America.

The new data shows that the age-adjusted suicide rate in the US jumped 24 percent between 1999 and 2014, from 10.5 per 100,000 people to 13 per 100,000 people. The figures show a 1.0 percent annual increase in suicide between 1999 and 2006 and a 2 percent yearly rise from 2007 to 2014. In total, 42,773 people died from suicide in 2014 compared to 29,199 in 1999.

The accelerated rise in the suicide rate from 2007 to 2014 coincides with the Great Recession and its aftermath and demonstrates the tragic impact of economic distress on significant layers of the population. Other contributing factors cited by the study’s authors include rising drug addiction and overdoses, growing divorce rates among older Americans, increased social isolation and a health care system ill-equipped to deal with mental health issues and suicide prevention.

Over the period of the study, the suicide rate for women aged 45-64 jumped by 63 percent and by 43 percent for men in the same age range. White middle-aged women had a shocking 80 percent increase in suicide during this period, three to four times higher than for females in other racial and ethnic groups.

Suicide rates for non-Hispanic black females rose by 0.8 percent among women 45-64; the rate for Hispanic women in this age group rose by 0.7 percent. Non-Hispanic black males were the only racial and ethnic group of either sex to have a lower suicide rate in 2014 than in 1999, declining by 8 percent.

The suicide rate in the American Indian and Alaska Native population surged from 1999 to 2014, rising by 90 percent for women and 38 percent for men. Among this group, 188 women and 348 men took their own lives in 2014.

Suicides among men were still more than three times the rate among women in 2014, but the study shows that the gap between the genders is closing. The higher rate among men is in part attributed to a higher suicide success rate through the use of firearms, fatal jumps and other methods.

Although based on a small number of suicides when compared to other age groups (150 in 2014), the suicide rate for females aged 10-14 had the largest percentage increase, tripling from 0.5 per 100,000 in 1999 to 1.5 per 100,000 in 2014. The suicide rate increased for women in all age groups except those 75 and above, where it declined by 11 percent.

Suicide rates for males were also higher in 2014 than in 1999 for all age groups under 75 years. However, despite an 8 percent decline for men 75 and older, this age group saw the highest rate of suicide in 2014, with 38.8 per 100,000, or 3,106 male seniors, taking their own lives.

The data shows that from 1999 to 2014, the percentages of suicides involving firearms and poisoning declined, while those involving suffocation increased. For both males and females, about one in four suicides in 2014 was attributable to suffocation, which includes hanging, self-strangulation and other methods of asphyxia. Experts note that such suicides are difficult to prevent as almost all people have the means to carry them out.

Poisoning was the most common method of suicide for women in 2014, making up about one-third of all female suicides. Poisoning agents include prescription opioids, heroin and other toxic substances. While accidental overdoses from opioids have skyrocketed in recent years, purposeful fatal overdoses have also increased.

The most frequent “other” suicide methods for females in 2014 were falls (2.8 percent) and drowning (1.4 percent). For males, “other” methods included falls (2.2 percent) and cutting or piercing (1.9 percent).

According to the CDC data, 33,113 people committed suicide in 2014. Suicide is one of the 10 leading causes of death for Americans. While death rates for major killers such as some cancers and heart disease have seen a long-term decline in recent decades, the suicide rate is rising precipitously.

Psychiatric conditions--including depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia--as well as other chronic medical problems undeniably play a role in suicide. The lack of access to high quality, affordable medical care leads to isolation and marginalization for increasing numbers of those in need of counseling and treatment.

The intersection of these very real medical and mental health issues with the economic devastation faced by millions in 21st century America is pushing increasing numbers of people over the brink. While the Obama administration declared economic “recovery” from the recession in mid-2009, the reality is starkly different for the vast majority of Americans today.

The new CDC study does not break down the incidence of suicide by income level, but its victims are undoubtedly predominantly poor, working class and lower middle class, similar to those in recent studies on US life expectancy.

America is a society in which growing numbers of people survive on low-wage, part-time, temporary and contingent jobs, often holding down two or more jobs to make ends meet. Working families are burdened by soaring medical costs and rising mortgage or rent payments. Many college graduates are saddled with debt and unable to find secure and decent-paying work. Veterans suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome. Retirees are unable to survive on paltry Social Security benefits. Millions have been driven out of the labor market and subsist at the margins of society.

This reality does not enter into the current presidential campaign debate. While “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders rails against the “billionaire class,” the main aim of his campaign is to divert growing anti-capitalist sentiment among workers and young people back into the confines of the Democratic Party. A longtime ally of the Democrats and defender of capitalism, he has pledged to support the Democratic frontrunner, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a personification of militarism and corruption, should she secure the nomination.

Billionaire businessman Donald Trump, the likely Republican candidate, promotes a fascistic and anti-working class agenda, scapegoating immigrants and Muslims. None of the candidates of the political establishment have answers to the economic and social crisis and the personal toll it takes on working people and youth.