US government lawsuit undermines Malaysian prime minister

John Roberts

The decision by the United States government last month to launch civil action to recover $1 billion in funds, said to have been looted from Malaysia’s state-owned investment fund, 1 Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), has compounded pressure on Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak to step down.

Justice Department lawyers and Federal Bureau of Investigation officials joined US Attorney General Loretta Lynch at a press conference on July 20, the day the case was filed. Officials highlighted hundreds of millions of dollars spent on gambling at US casinos, buying hotels and luxury real estate in the US and Britain, purchasing high-priced works of art and producing the motion picture The Wolf of Wall Street.

Among the allegations contained in the legal case are that members of a conspiracy, including 1MDB officials, their relatives and associates, diverted 1MDB funds using “fraudulent documents and representations” to launder “funds through a series of complex transactions and fraudulent shell companies with bank accounts located in Singapore, Switzerland, Luxembourg and the United States.” These transactions sought “to conceal the origin, source and ownership of the funds, and were ultimately processed through US financial institutions and were used to acquire and invest in assets located in the United States.”

The Justice Department statement detailed the money trails in at least three main schemes: $1 billion embezzled in 2009; $1.3 billion misappropriated from two bond offerings in 2012; and a further $1.2 billion taken from a bond offering in 2013.

Allegations were first raised just over a year ago by Malaysian news portals,The Edge and Sarawak Report , and the Wall Street Journal. Former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, as well as Malaysia’s political opposition, pointed the finger at Najib, who heads the ruling United Malays National Organisation (UMNO).

Until now Najib has not been named in any of the official investigations in the United States, Singapore, Switzerland and Luxembourg into the money-laundering operations involving 1MDB funds.

Those named in the documents are Najib’s son-in-law Riza Aziz, Malaysian financial industry figure Jho Low, who is a close associate of Aziz and Najib, Low associate “Eric” Tan Kim Loong, Khadem Al Qubaisi, who was a managing director of an Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, and US citizen Mohamed Ahmed Badawy al-Husseiny.

Najib has not been identified as such but there are 36 references to “Malaysian Official 1” (MO1), who allegedly received hundreds of millions of dollars stolen from 1MDB. It is obvious that Najib, who founded 1MDB in 2009 and has since been the chairman of its board, is the unnamed MO1.

The document itself indirectly implicates Najib. Paragraph 39, for instance, states: “Upon its formation (1MDB), Malaysian Official 1 assumed a position of authority… had the authority to approve appointments to, and removals from, 1MDB Board of Directors.” Further, “[A]ny financial commitments by 1MDB, including investments, that were likely to affect a guarantee by the government of Malaysia for the benefit of 1MDB or any policy of the Malaysian government, required, the approval of Malaysian Official 1.”

To anyone with knowledge of the scandal, the identity of MO1 is clear. In one section, the complaint quotes Malaysian Attorney-General Apandi Ali at a press conference in January, claiming that $681 million had come into Najib’s account legally from the Saudi royal family. The complaint alters the quote by inserting “Malaysian Official 1” in place of Najib, effectively equating MO1 with Najib.

The document contradicts Apandi’s account, saying that the money came from an account whose beneficial owner was Low associate Tan Kim Loong. Tracing the complex path of money transfers comprises a large part of the complaint’s evidence supporting its requests to the court for forfeiture.

The day after US lawsuit was launched, authorities in Singapore announced they had frozen bank accounts holding $184 million, of which $88 million belonged to Low and his family. They cited control failings and breaches of money laundering regulations at a number of financial institutions as part of Singapore’s investigation into illicit activities involving 1MDB.

Najib issued a statement saying the US Justice Department lawsuit “must be given space and opportunity for the judicial process to be carried out.” He added that “any individual who has been named must clear their own names,” implying that others would take the blame.

Najib and the UMNO leadership have attempted to defuse the 1MDB scandal by issuing blanket denials, purging UMNO critics, closing down Malaysian investigations into 1MDB, exercising tight control over the mainstream media and cracking down on the opposition. On June 29, Lim Guan Eng, chief minister of Penang state and secretary-general of the ethnic Chinese-based opposition Democracy Action Party, was arrested on dubious corruption charges.

The US lawsuit, however, is a blow to Najib and indicates that he is losing support in American ruling circles. Najib has enjoyed political support from President Barack Obama in return for tilting foreign policy toward Washington’s anti-China “pivot to Asia,” strengthening ties between the Malaysian and American militaries and backing the US-led Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP).

In July last year, Time magazine published an article urging Obama to “steer clear” of Najib in his search for “dependable allies in Southeast Asia.” It listed as harmful to US interests the potential growth of the 1MDB scandal, the continued jailing of opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, Najib’s overreliance on the Islamist Parti Islam se-Malaysia, the potential of French investigations into corruption involving submarine acquisition to bring Najib down, and the government’s increasing turn to police-state measures to maintain its rule.

A Financial Times editorial on August 2 bluntly declared that Najib had forfeited US support and should stand aside while the investigations ran their course. “Mr Obama should encourage all US agencies to pursue the 1MDB case to the full extent of American and international law. That applies not only to potential charges against Mr Najib and his associates, but also those involving banks and companies that have abetted the alleged laundering of more than $3.5 billion stripped from 1MDB.”

Like the Wall Street Journal, which has vigorously pursued the 1MDB scandal, the Financial Times represents the interests of international finance capital, which, under conditions of worsening global economic breakdown, cannot tolerate the “cronyism” for which Malaysia’s ruling UMNO is notorious. Such practices act as an impediment to the profits of global banks and corporations.

Report documents human rights violations in Australian refugee camps

Max Newman

A report published last month highlights the fact that the Spanish-based transnational infrastructure company Ferrovial and its financial backers are profiting from human rights abuses by operating the Australian “offshore detention centres” (ODCs) on Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island. Ferrovial currently holds the Australian government contract to run the centres, following the company’s takeover of Australian-listed Broadspectrum (formerly Transfield).

Entitled Association with Abuse, the report was authored by the Australian-based Human Rights Law Centre (HRLC) in conjunction with No Business in Abuse (NBIA), a non-government organisation. The report asserts that Ferrovial is complicit in the numerous violations of basic democratic and legal rights of the more than 1,500 men, women and children forcibly detained indefinitely on these remote islands. Most of the detainees are from Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, or are stateless.

The report documents the violation of 47 international laws, in five main categories: rights to liberty; freedom from arbitrary detention and freedom of movement; cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and inhumane conditions; right to the highest attainable standard of health; child abuse and other violations of the children’s rights and the right to security of the person.

Ferrovial, the report states, had “full, prior knowledge of the scale and severity of the human rights abuses at the core of the offshore detention regime” when it took over Broadspectrum. Ferrovial has said it will not bid for a new contract when the current one expires in February 2017. But the report urges Ferrovial, together with the Australian government, to “find an immediate alternative” with “humane” conditions for the detainees.

Ferrovial, with a market capitalisation of almost 14 billion euros, operates London’s Heathrow Airport, toll roads in North America and security services in various countries. The report calls on Ferrovial and its investors and financiers to end all involvement with the detention centres. It argues that the company is in breach of its “corporate responsibility to respect human rights” under the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which Ferrovial and its financial stakeholders have agreed to honour.

The report details that during the company’s takeover of Broadspectrum, the NBIA gave Ferrovial its 2015 report on the human rights abuses in the centres, which it had previously presented to Broadspectrum. Despite this information, and the extensive amount of public documentation of abuses at the camps, the company proceeded with its May 2016 takeover.

Though the profits that Ferrovial receives from the contract are not known, Ferrovial itself assessed that most of Broadspectrum’s earnings came from the contract. According to the Australian government’s AusTender web site, Broadspectrum (now Ferrovial) receives an average of $1.4 million a day to run the camps.

Operating the centres involves Ferrovial, as the lead contractor, “making decisions about detainee welfare, movement, communication, behaviour, accommodation, food, clothing, water, security and general conditions.” Under the contract, Ferrovial can decide whether detainees are put into solitary “managed accommodation” and authorise the use of force against detainees. This means that Ferrovial is directly responsible for the daily violations of international law.

The report highlights the arbitrary imprisonment of asylum seekers. Despite the camps being declared “open centres” in a bid to stymie an Australian High Court challenge to the legality of the camps, the detainees are still highly restricted in movement. Moreover, they have significant concerns for their safety, with reports of assaults and violence toward refugees.Association with Abuse cites indictments of the centres by medical experts and UN officials who say the detainees are intentionally subjected to degrading, cruel and inhumane treatment tantamount to torture. One cited report referred to “the deliberate provision of only extremely basic conditions as part of a systematic policy in order to deter others, and the severity of suffering caused to detainees.”

Another report by Dr. Isaacs concluded that the imprisonment of children in the centres, making Australia the only country in the world to do so, constitutes child abuse. Also proven is that the medical facilitates on the islands are substandard, referencing the death of Hamid Kehazaei who died after contracting septicaemia from a cut in his foot due to inadequate healthcare on Manus Island.

According to the report, these practices place the company at risk of a law suit under international law for crimes against humanity. In a media statement accompanying the report, HRLC advocacy director Rachel Ball said: “Any association with abuse on this scale brings with it significant operational instability, legal liability and reputational damage. It’s time for the financial sector to take immediate action and end support of human rights abuse.”

In April, moreover, the Papua New Guinea (PNG) Supreme Court found that the detention of asylum seekers on Manus Island breached the right to personal liberty in the PNG constitution, rendering their incarceration unlawful. Australia’s Liberal-National government, backed by the Labor Party, has continued the detention in defiance of the ruling.

While acknowledging that the “Australian government is the architect” of the detention regime, the report argues that the abuses would not be possible without the participation of private companies. This reflects the limited perspective of NBIA and its partner GetUp, which is to pressure companies, in their own profit interests, not to take on the lucrative contracts offered by the Australian government.

NBIA executive director and GetUp campaign director Shen Narayanasamy said: “The Turnbull government promised to keep the camps open, but it is facing an emerging global corporate consensus that no respectable business can associate itself with the gross human rights abuses in these camps.”

The political responsibility for the abuses occurring at Nauru and Manus does not lie just with the present government of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. It also rests with the previous Labor government, propped up by the Greens, which reopened the camps in 2012 for the specific purpose of cruelly punishing asylum seekers in order to stop refugees trying to find protection in Australia.

The reality is that governments across the globe are scapegoating refugees and promoting xenophobia in order to divert the mounting hostility among youth and working people to the deteriorating social conditions imposed by the corporate elite. The stripping of basic democratic and legal rights from refugees by successive Australian governments is setting a precedent to be used against asylum seekers and the working class more broadly as these conditions worsen.

More than 500 UK employers and charities benefited from use of free forced labour

Barry Mason

On July 27, the UK Court of Appeal ruled by two-to-one that the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) must release the names of the companies and organisations that benefitted from the government’s Mandatory Work Activity (MWA) workfare scheme.

Some 500-plus organisations benefitted as a result of free forced labour over a six-month period between July 2011 and January 2012.

The names include well-known high street supermarkets and shops such as Tesco, Boots, WHSmith and Superdrug as well as charities including Oxfam, Age UK and the National Trust. Several local authorities also benefitted, among them Scarborough, Whitby and Essex councils, as have a number of academic institutions.

The MWA scheme was brought in by the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government in May 2011 and ran until November 2015 when the DWP let the programme lapse. The Blair/Brown New Labour government from 2005 to 2010 had experimented with a similar scheme, the Jobseeker Mandatory Activity, piloting it between 2006 and 2008 but did not proceed further.

Under MWA, benefit claimants were obliged to do 30 hours unpaid work a week or risk being sanctioned and losing their Job Seekers Allowance (JSA) payment of around £70 a week. The placement was for a four-week period. According to the DWP, the MWA scheme was meant to target those “lacking, or failing to demonstrate, the focus and discipline that is necessary to effectively: seek out and pursue job opportunities [or] secure and retain employment”.

In 2012, the DWP itself carried out a review of the effectiveness of the MWA programme. The findings showed that the scheme did not help unemployed people get into work and did not enhance the prospects of those seeking work to obtain a proper job. Despite the overwhelming evidence showing its ineffectiveness, the DWP decided to expand the programme, forcing around 70,000 claimants a year onto it at a cost to the state of £5 million a year.

Commenting at the time, Jonathan Portes, the director of the National Institute for Economic and Social Research, which researches areas of social policy, said it was difficult to see how the findings into the effectiveness of MWA could be reconciled with the decision to expand it. He said, “At a time of austerity, it is very difficult to see the justification for spending millions of pounds on a programme which isn’t working”, adding that it appeared to have been designed to enable job advisors to punish those deemed not to be sufficiently active in looking for work.

Portes should not have been so incredulous. From the beginning, the intention behind the scheme was not to assist people to get back into employment, but as a subvention to employers. It was in line with the entire ethos of governments globally since the financial crisis of 2008—to bail out the banks and enable the ruling elite to recover their losses at the expense of the working class.

When the legislation setting up MWAs was drafted, it was explicitly stated that the intention was to boost employers’ profits. Section 48 of the 2011 official guidance explained its purpose was: “working towards the profit of the host organisation, providing that the majority of the role is dedicated towards delivery of benefit to the community”.

In 2012, under a freedom of information request, the DWP was asked to name the organisations benefiting from the use of free labour under the MWA scheme. The DWP refused to divulge the information stating that to do so would “hurt the commercial interests” of the organisations involved.

The DWP continued in the same vein after a tribunal hearing in May 2013 ruled that it had to divulge the names. It was not until last month following a Supreme Court ruling that the names were finally released.

A spokesperson from Boycott Workfare, which campaigns against the use of workfare schemes, told the Independent, “Workfare provides free labour for businesses and charities, enforced by the threat of destitution through benefit sanctions, and paid for by the public—including people on workfare. Workfare doesn’t help people find jobs: it’s just an excuse for sanctions…The organisations that benefit by exploiting the forced, unpaid work of claimants have been shielded by the DWP’s secrecy for far too long. The DWP have been using this case to deny other requests for similar information.”

Without fanfare, in November of last year, the Conservative government, led at the time by David Cameron, announced its intention to scrap the MWA scheme by spring of this year.

Since its inception, the scheme has forced around 120,000 claimants to work for their unemployment benefit. At the same time, the government announced it was scrapping Community Work Placements (CWPs)—six-month long placements, where JSA claimants would be expected to work 30 hours a week, usually for a community organisation or charity. Around 28,000 JSA claimants were put on to a CWP and forced to work for their dole money under the threat of sanctions or loss of financial support.

Other claimants are still being put on cheap/free labour Work Experience and Work Academy schemes. In theory, these are not compulsory but the reality is very different.

A posting July 10 on the Boycott Workfare web page from a Work Experience participant explained that people would have their JSA slashed if they didn’t go on the scheme.

It read, “I am currently on the Work Experience scheme at B&M in Droitwich Spa, doing over 30 hours of unpaid work for four weeks. If I do not do this I will have my Job Seekers Allowance cut. There are four people, including myself, doing forced unpaid labour here. We have been told by the job centre and B&M that only one out the four of us might be given a job after the four weeks. So three of us will be working full time and won’t even get a chance at the position, and even the fourth person might not even get the job as they say it is only ‘possible’ someone will be taken on.”

The MWA and Work Programme are just two of a series of workfare pilots and programmes rolled out/supported by the Labour Party and Tories over the last decade. These include Steps to Work—the equivalent of the Work Programme in Northern Ireland, the Community Work Placements, Day One Support for Young People Trailblazer and Mandatory Youth Activity Programme.

In 2013, the vast majority of Labour MPs refused to vote against the Tory government’s jobseekers (back to work schemes) bill, dubbed the workfare bill. Their support prevented 250,000 jobseekers, who had been found by the Royal Courts of Justice to have been exploited on a workfare scheme after working for up to 780 hours unpaid, from receiving £130 million in rebates.

The MWA scandal is yet another example of how increasingly precarious work has become. Zero-hour contracts and self-employment for minimal reward are becoming the norm. With the ongoing economic crisis, transformation of the trade unions into arms of management and the Labour Party into a pro-capitalist organization, the exploitation of workers and youth can only be intensified.

UK National Health Service forced to the brink of financial collapse

Margot Miller

The National Health Service (NHS) in England is facing a “colossal financial challenge” and “cannot deliver the required services to patients and maintain standards of care within the current budget.”

This is the damning conclusion of “Impact of the Spending Review on health and social care,” a report released July 23 by the House of Commons Health Select Committee. It underlines the parlous state of NHS finances due to endless cuts and indicates that the health service is facing an existential crisis.

The report examines the effect of the Conservative government’s spending review last autumn on health and social care and its impact on the NHS England’s Five Year Forward View strategy document. The strategy document was published by NHS chief executive Simon Stephens in 2014 and identified a projected £30 billion funding gap by 2020-2021. Stephens is a former Labour Party councillor, who later became an adviser to former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair. The strategy was promoted as a panacea for eradicating inequality in health outcomes between the rich and poor. The most deprived people, for example, can expect to live in good health nearly 17 years less than their least deprived counterparts do.

In last year’s Spending Review, great play was made of then Tory Chancellor George Osborne’s announcement that the NHS would receive an additional £8.4 billion to plug the funding gap. That figure was a lie as even Health Select Committee chair and Tory MP, Dr. Sarah Wollaston, acknowledged. Wollaston said the “increase in health funding is less than was promised by the usual definitions.”

Total NHS spending will in fact rise by just £4.5 billion—half the amount Osborne announced. The rest includes money diverted to NHS England from the Public Health grant to Local Authorities and Health Education England.

However, to even talk about an increase in spending on the NHS is misleading. To plug the funding gap, the NHS has been instructed to make savings of £22 billion by 2021, on pain of fines and takeovers by regulators.

Accepting the overarching strategy of the ruling elite that “efficiency savings” are required, the Five Year Forward View advocated Preventative Medicine as the key to realising these savings. However, the Public Health budget, which finances preventative health, is set to shrink from £3.47 billion this year to £3 billion by 2020/21.

The Select Committee concludes that neither the government nor NHS managers can provide “sustainable” ways of meeting the rising deficits.

The Select Committee findings are no less bleak when it comes to the training of new staff. Its assessment that Spending Review cuts on Health Education England come at a time when the “workforce shortfall is already placing a strain on services and driving higher agency costs” is an indictment of the criminal operation now underway to wreck the NHS.

The report describes how cuts in training for new doctors and nurses have led to staff shortages and reliance on more expensive, agency staff and that “We are deeply concerned about the effect of the cuts on the training budgets,” which takes effect next year. Nurses instead will have to fund their own training and living expenses by taking out loans, leading to debts of up to £52,000.

With one in three nurses due to retire in the next five years, and one in 10 nursing posts unfilled, ending bursaries will inevitably make worse the huge crisis in the supply of NHS staff.

The Select Committee report also expresses what is obvious to all—that the NHS cannot implement the seven-day service in hospitals and GP (General Practitioner) surgeries demanded by the government, “given the constraints on NHS resources.”

The imposition of seven-day working without the necessary extra funding has met with huge opposition from health workers and the public. Junior hospital doctors have taken days of strike action, for the first time ever, against an inferior contract that increases their hours without remuneration and compromises patient safety. They recently rejected the British Medical Association’s (doctors’ trade union) recommendation to accept the government’s final offer before they imposed the new contract.

In Reviewing Social Care, the Select Committee writes that “historical cuts to social care funding have now exhausted opportunities for significant further efficiencies in this area.” In other words, and like most other sectors in the NHS, Social Care has been cut to the bone. In what the report refers to as “delayed transfers of care,” the discharge of old people from hospital after treatment is often delayed, because there are not enough places in recuperative care homes.

The report’s final verdict on Social Care is that “increasing numbers of people with genuine social care needs are no longer receiving the care they need because of a lack of resource.”

In relation to provision for Mental Health Services, the Select Committee warns that promised extra money to achieve parity for this poor relation “could get sucked into deficits in the acute sector.”

Not only are services being cut now, but funds earmarked for facilitating the changes outlined in the Five Year Forward View are being used to cover current account deficits. The budget for capital projects is also being raided.

Hospitals have been told by NHS England that they need to take whatever action is necessary to tackle the £2.5 billion deficit this year, the largest aggregate deficit in the history of the NHS. An example of the destruction this is leading to is at Stepping Hill Hospital in Stockport, northwest England, which due to a £40 million deficit is preparing to shed 350 jobs out of total staff of 5,000. In Scotland, Tayside health chiefs are planning cuts in jobs and services over the next five years to tackle a deficit of £175 million.

Such is the determination of the government to impose austerity that Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, one of the few Tory senior cabinet members to retain his post after Prime Minister Theresa May took up office last month, has instructed NHS England to abandon long-established NHS treatment targets. Waiting times for Accident and Emergency treatment and cancer referrals will be relaxed and hospitals have been told to ignore previous safety guidelines regarding staffing levels. One nurse per eight patients now no longer constitutes the absolute minimum safety level, but is the maximum ratio allowed.

A picture emerges of an NHS near collapse. For the ruling elite, its answer is more of the same. The House of Commons Select Committee concludes, “If the funding is not increased, there needs to be an honest explanation of what that will mean for patient care and how that will be managed.”

Department of Health Director Pat Mills is more forthright—that patients may have to pay to use the NHS by 2025.

Though making a hard-hitting assessment of the crisis overwhelming the NHS, the parliamentary report was a fraudulent exercise. It is a part of a softening up process to prepare the population for the break-up and destruction of the NHS. The report does not and cannot offer any progressive solution to the funding crisis, because the Select Committee that wrote it comprises MPs from the very parties, including Labour, whose policies have led the way in attacking the NHS.

Obama’s drone-missile machinery of murder

Patrick Martin

Late Friday evening, the Obama administration released a previously secret policy document that gives general instructions to those engaged in preparing, approving and carrying out the drone-missile assassinations that have become the hallmark of Obama’s eight years in the White House.

The document, a President Policy Guidance, or PPG, was made public, albeit with extensive redactions, as the result of a protracted legal battle by the American Civil Liberties Union. Federal Judge Colleen McMahon ordered the Justice Department to release the document no later than Friday, August 5. The ACLU posted the PPG on its web site the next morning.

The 18-page document makes clear that what has taken place since Obama entered the White House is the routinization and bureaucratization of state killings. Literally any individual on the planet could be targeted for assassination by a Hellfire missile fired from a US Reaper drone.

Derek Chollet, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs from 2012 to 2015, described the atmosphere inside the Obama administration in an interview last month with the Washington Post. “[T]he use of military power—the United States killing people overseas—occurs so frequently now that it just kind of washes over the debate,” he said. “It has become almost too easy. No one even notices it any more. It’s just a constant.”

While US citizens and resident aliens (“US persons” in the language of the PPG) require specific approval by the president—unlike citizens of foreign countries, where only notice to the president is required, but not his approval in advance—there is no geographical restriction whatsoever. Nothing stops the CIA from proposing, and the president from approving, the drone missile assassination of someone within the borders of the United States.

And even the restrictions that are supposedly imposed by the document are subject to waiver at the president’s discretion. The document declares, in one of its most important passages:

“Nothing in this PPG shall be construed to prevent the President from exercising his constitutional authority as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive, as well as his statutory authority, to consider a lawful proposal from operating agencies that he authorize direct action that would fall outside of the policy guidance contained herein, including a proposal that he authorize lethal force against an individual who poses a continuing, imminent threat to another country’s persons.”

In other words, the document spells out what the president requires his subordinates to do in order to receive his approval, while reserving the right of the “Commander in Chief” to do anything he wants.

The document is filled with bureaucratic jargon reassuring the officials involved that their actions are in compliance with the law, that lawyers for the “nominating agencies”—the agencies drawing up the death lists—will review each candidate and provide assurances that their targeting is “lawful.” Moreover, assassination strikes will be authorized only if there is “near certainty” that there will not be civilian casualties.

The only “certainty,” however, is that the guidance document has been drawn up to create a paper trail exonerating the decision-makers against future prosecution at a war crimes tribunal. These officials will argue that they were assured no civilians would be killed. In turn, lower-level officials have been told what type of assurances they must provide in order to have their “nominations” to the death lists approved.

A footnote on the second page explains, “This PPG does not address otherwise lawful and properly authorized activities that may have lethal effects, which are incidental to the primary purpose of the operation.” In other words, unintended deaths, what was termed “collateral damage” during the Vietnam War, are simply not an issue. This is nothing but a blank check for killing civilians on a mass scale, as long as the deaths are explained as “incidental” to the main operation.

The PPG spells out a complex approval process. It starts with the “nominating agency,” usually the CIA or Pentagon, with recommendations approved by the CIA director or secretary of defense, then reviewed by the staff of the National Security Council, which works at the direction of the president, and finally signed off on by the “deputies committee,” a group consisting of the No. 2 officials of the Pentagon, CIA, State Department and other national security agencies, and then the “principals committee,” which brings together the senior officials of the same agencies. In the event of inter-agency disputes, or if the target is a “US person,” the final decision is reserved to the president.

The role of the NSC in this process is particularly important. This body has quadrupled in size under the Bush and Obama administrations, as day-to-day direction of national security policy has been concentrated in the White House. Besides giving the president and his closest aides a direct line to the military-intelligence apparatus, the NSC insulates the drone assassination program from outside scrutiny.

Considered part of the White House, the NSC is exempt from any congressional scrutiny as well as the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act, under the interpretation of “executive privilege” embraced by Bush and Obama and accepted by Democrats and Republicans in Congress. NSC officials, up to and including current National Security Adviser Susan Rice, cannot be subpoenaed by a congressional committee or otherwise held accountable for their actions.

According to former Obama administration officials, there are currently seven countries where drone missile killings are taking place: Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. But Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, as active war zones, do not require advance approval. They are essentially “free-fire zones” for the drone missile operators. It is unclear whether Libya was given the same status when Obama last week signed an order authorizing US bombing of supposed ISIS bases in the country.

Last month, the White House released data for the first time on civilian deaths caused by drone missile strikes, but its figures were widely dismissed as a gross underestimation by journalists and human rights groups that have investigated the program. The “official” figure of 116 civilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya is only one-tenth the estimate of the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, for example.

Like the redacted text of the President Policy Guidance document, the civilian death estimate was released late on a Friday, in a signal to the corporate-controlled media that this was information the US government preferred to downplay.

The media obediently followed orders. A few perfunctory articles appeared in newspapers on Saturday and Sunday, but there was no outcry, there were no editorials denouncing the assertion of a presidential “right to kill” without judicial process, and the Sunday television interview programs did not so much as mention the word “drone.”

Rio 2016: The “Olympic ideal” and the reality of capitalism

Bill Van Auken

“The goal of Olympism is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.” These words, which appear in the Olympic Charter’s “Fundamental Principles of Olympism,” are supposed to sum up what is referred to with sanctimonious reverence as the “Olympic ideal.”

There has never been a golden age of the Olympic games, which have for over a century served as an arena for the promotion of nationalism. The founder of the modern Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, was candid in acknowledging that he valued sport not only for its potential for advancing mankind’s development, but also for its use in preparing French men to become better soldiers in war.

With the opening of the 2016 games in Rio de Janeiro, however, the contrast could hardly be more stark between the supposed Olympic ideal and the reality of a capitalist system mired in economic crisis and social inequality and hurtling toward another world war.

The opening ceremony of the Rio games, held in the city’s iconic Maracana Stadium, was widely covered by the international news media. Less reported was a brutal attack by the Brazilian police against a demonstration organized a half mile away, called against what the protesters termed “the exclusion games.” Police used tear gas, pepper spray and stun grenades to drive the demonstrators off the streets, injuring several.

Earlier clashes were seen along the route taken by the Olympic Torch, which in one case was extinguished by a crowd of workers and youth in the coastal town of Angra dos Reis. They had turned out to protest the expenditures on the Olympics under conditions where public employees and teachers are not being paid and transit service and health care are being cut because of the deepening fiscal crisis.

In 2009, when the Brazilian government secured the 2016 games for Rio, then President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva proclaimed, “Our time has arrived.” During the same period, Lula was boasting that Brazil, whose growth rate had rebounded to 5 percent, was immune from the effects of the global financial meltdown of 2008.

Since then, the world capitalist crisis has devastated Brazil’s economy, driving the official unemployment rate to over 11 percent and sending real wages falling. Millions are threatened with being thrown back into extreme poverty in what is already one of the world’s most socially unequal countries.

Even as the games unfold, the Brazilian Senate is moving ahead with the impeachment of ousted President Dilma Rousseff on trumped-up charges of budgetary irregularities. Those moving against the Workers Party (PT) president are, like the PT itself, implicated up to their necks in the multi-billion-dollar Petrobras bribery scandal. Nonetheless, they are backed by both Brazilian and foreign capital, which wants a full change of regime in order to proceed with sweeping austerity policies under interim President Michel Temer, Rousseff’s former vice president and political ally.

In the run-up to the opening of the games, the Brazilian government heavily publicized alleged terror plots that appeared to have little if any substance. In fact, the massive security operation accompanying the Rio games is aimed not at terrorists, but at the Brazilian population itself. An occupation army of some 100,000 troops and police—twice the number mobilized for the already militarized 2012 London games—has been deployed across Rio, many dressed in combat gear, carrying assault rifles and backed by armored cars and even tanks.

This operation has been supplemented by the United States military and intelligence apparatus, which, according to NBC, has “assigned more than 1,000 spies to Olympic security,” hundreds of whom have been sent to Brazil. In addition to the CIA, FBI and NSA spooks, detachments of Marine and Navy commandos from the US Special Operations Command have been deployed on the ground.

This is the culmination of a campaign of repression that has unfolded over the past few years in tandem with preparations first for the 2014 World Cup football tournament and now for the Olympics. Violent police measures have been used to drive tens of thousands from their homes in impoverished districts targeted for development, while thousands more homeless have been swept from the streets in what amounts to an exercise in “social cleansing.” Police have killed between 40 and 50 people a month in the city over the recent period, while extra-official death squads have murdered many more. So much for the Olympics and “human dignity.”

Against this backdrop, the vast wealth expended on the Olympics, all in pursuit of enrichment and private profit, is obscene. Corporate sponsors, including Coca-Cola, Samsung, Dow Chemical, General Electric, McDonalds and others, have paid hundreds of millions of dollars for exclusive marketing rights and are spending hundreds of millions more to exploit them. TV companies have shelled out $4 billion to broadcast the 19-day event, while marketing revenues are expected to total $9.3 billion.

A relative handful of individual professional athletes will make tens of millions more from product endorsements. The days when the Olympics were a celebration of amateur sports are a distant memory.

Within the games themselves, the overriding atmosphere of social inequality is ever present. While poorer teams are dealing with substandard conditions in hastily constructed Olympic villages, the US basketball “dream team” is residing on the luxury cruise ship Silver Cloud, moored in Rio’s harbor and surrounded by police and navy patrol boats.

Meanwhile, the use of the Olympics to promote nationalism and prepare for war is as virulent in the Rio games as at any time since Adolph Hitler convened the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

On Monday, it was announced that Russian athletes will be banned entirely from the Paralympics to be held next month in Rio in connection with charges of state-sponsored doping of athletes. Earlier, 118 members of the country’s track and field team were banned under a system relegating the decision to the federations of each individual sport.

Washington, the World Anti-Doping Agency, various NGOs and the Western media have waged a virulent campaign to exclude every Russian athlete from the Rio Olympics and prevent the country’s flag from even appearing there, as part of a broader effort to paint Russia as a “rogue” nation that must be stopped by force.

The campaign to bar Russia from the games is inseparably bound up with the growing US-NATO siege of the country’s Western borders, which has been steadily escalated since the US- and German-orchestrated coup that installed an ultra-right, anti-Russian regime in Ukraine in 2014.

The sanctimonious denunciations of Russia for having corrupted an otherwise pristine sporting event reek with bad faith and hypocrisy. The anti-Russian campaign intentionally obscures the wholesale corruption surrounding the entire organization of the games as well as the rampant doping practiced by nearly every country.

The controversy, which has run in tandem with the Democratic Party’s neo-McCarthyite campaign denouncing Vladimir Putin for interfering in the US election, has been pumped up as part of the attempt to prepare public opinion for a military conflict with Russia that could quickly lead to nuclear war.

While this year’s Olympic Games will once again provide a display of astounding athletic ability by participants from across the planet, the entire event is overshadowed by a social system that is founded on inequality and exploitation, and threatens the very survival of humanity.

Need the World Worry over Trump Foreign Policy?

Chintamani Mahapatra


Never before did the American foreign policy draw so much limelight during an election year in the US as it has now. Likewise, the global anxiety over the outcome of a presidential election in the US has become more palpable today than ever in the past. Similarly, rarely have allied and rival countries of the US expressed their disquiet and angst over the foreign policy statements of an American presidential nominee as it is being witnessed during the 2016 election campaign. Yet, another new history in the ongoing US presidential election campaign is the vigorous opposition to their nominee’s positions on foreign policy issues by senior officials of his own party.

All these because of unconventional foreign policy views by Republican nominee Donald Trump that have unsettled both allies and enemies of the US to varying degrees. Trump’s prickly tongue has invited bitter invectives against him as well. Incumbent US President Barack Obama declared Trump “unfit” to serve as the Commander-in Chief of the US army. Incumbent US Vice President Joe Biden  said, “threats are too great, and times are too uncertain” to elect Trump as the next US President, since he “has no clue about what makes America great”, even though he vows to make America “great again.” Former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta have accused Trump of making “disgraceful statements that betray” the “long standing values and national interests” of the US.

When Trump questioned the usefulness of the nuclear weapons by asking, “if we have them, why can’t we use them,” his “mental stability” came under suspicion. Libertarian Vice Presidential candidate Bill Weld said “He’s a showman…a pied piper…a music man” and more seriously “the noun that comes to my mind is a “screw loose.”

Significantly, the Republican Party’s senior officials and leaders too are miffed with Trump’s foreign policy statements. More particularly, a group of former cabinet officers, senior officials and career military officials, in an open letter in the Washington Post challenged Trump’s position on Europe, NATO and Russia, saying “We find Trump’s comments to be reckless, dangerous and extremely unwise” that go against “core, bipartisan principle found in every U.S. administration….” This is where both the Democrats as well as the Republicans seem to be united against Trump.

So are some American allies. For instance, French President Francois Hollande reportedly thinks that Donald Trump’s comments are “vomit-inducing.” America’s trade partners are apprehensive about Trump’s opposition to free trade. American allies are concerned about his position that unless they pay adequately for it, they should fend for themselves in defence and security matters. The US’ neighbours appear concerned about his ideas to build walls to prevent illegal movement of people.

There is little doubt that shallow remarks and use of obnoxious language have earned Trump several enemies within his country and abroad. But will Trump, if he wins the election, build a wall along the Mexican border? Will he disband NATO? Will he ask Japan and South Korea to make nuclear weapons to defend themselves? Will he endorse the spread of Russian influence? Will he flex muscles against China? Will he walk away from trade deals his predecessors have concluded? Will he wage a unilateral war against the Islamic State?

The answer is perhaps in the negative. It is important to separate rhetoric from reality to assess the US’ role under a possible Trump administration. In the heat of the campaign, all the candidates make promises, issue statements and indulge in strong criticisms, and once a nominee wins the election and assumes office, the whole world suddenly looks strikingly different. In this complex dynamics of domestic politics and intricate web of international relations, a single American president simply cannot do what he desires or dreams or promises. This will be more applicable to Trump than to his rival, Hillary Clinton, since the former is completely raw on foreign policy/national security issues and later is a proven diplomat.

However, Trump and his campaigns have already begun to change course. He has begun to find faults with the foreign policy weaknesses of the Obama Administration, build his own vision of a world order where the US would have restored its prestige, power and economic weight in the global. He harps on making “America great again” in the backdrop of declining US influence in the world order; he wants to make common cause with Russia and give an option to China to productively cooperate or risk having its own separate path; manage the huge trade deficit and restore the manufacturing primacy to keep jobs at home; confront radical Islam and stabilise regional orders than export the Western version of democracy; concentrate on domestic developments and not on nation-building abroad. All these ideas are expected to win votes and not please allies or displease rivals abroad.

Hiroshima And Nuclear Power: The Truth Of The Matter

S.G. Vombatkere

On my grandfather’s sixtieth birthday on July 16th, 1945, the atomic bomb was tested in USA’s Nevada desert, and the world lost its nuclear innocence. Twenty-one days later, on August 6th, the experiment was live-tested on Japanese people when USA dropped a 15-kiloton Uranium-235 fission bomb on Hiroshima. The same day, the experiment was hailed in The New York Times in an article titled, “Day of Atomic Energy Hailed by President, Revealing Weapon”, in which US president Truman said: “What has been done is the greatest achievement of organized science in history”. A second live-test was conducted three days later by dropping a 21-kiloton Plutonium-core bomb on Nagasaki. In the same issue of NYT, the hitherto secret July 16th test was also reported thus: “… a group of eminent scientists gathered, frankly fearful to witness the results of the invention, which might turn out to be either the salvation or the Frankenstein’s monster of the world”.

The Frankenstein monster released on the “Day of Atomic Energy” lives and prospers in the intimate relationship between bombs and nuclear power, because weapon-grade Uranium-235 and Plutonium are products or by-products of the nuclear cycle vital for the operation of nuclear power plants (NPPs). The NYT report provides justification to shift the discussion from experiments with bombs on people to NPPs, which are essentially controlled nuclear experiments, though the nuclear industry has self-certified it as proven technology.

In experiments, things can and do go wrong. Whatever the triggering factor for accidents in NPPs, the real effects on public health and safety are hidden from the public by the secretive, government-protected nuclear industry. The Frankenstein monster bared its fearsome visage when the world witnessed accidents that could not be hidden from the public, at Windscale (UK), Three Mile Island (USA), Chernobyl (USSR) and Fukushima (Japan). When nuclear accidents cannot be hidden, the nuclear industry downplays their effects with outright falsehoods, equivocating statements and technical-political verbiage. All this even while nuclear power continues to be promoted as the best combination of safe-clean-cheap-reliable (SCCR) energy, with the additional advantage of carbon-emission reduction to mitigate global warming.

Nations with nuclear capability have enacted laws to provide a secrecy-screen to the nuclear industry, because of legislators’ blind trust in esoteric science and technology. The secrecy-screen is required precisely because of the intimate link between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. It makes the plans, projects and expenditures of the nuclear industry opaque to the public and law-makers alike. Thus the legislative body which legitimizes nuclear secrecy effectively scores a self-goal. However, the nuclear industry selectively puts out information for public consumption, spends phenomenal funds on propaganda to advertise its SCCR-energy operations and, being part of the military-industrial complex, secretly builds nuclear weapons.

The truth of the matter

In 1948, US General Omar Bradley warned:“We live in a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants, in a world that has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. We have solved the mystery of the atom and forgotten the lessons of the Sermon on The Mount. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about dying than we know about living.”

But opposition to nuclear bombs and nuclear power has been expressed right from 1946 onwards, and the arguments have become more comprehensive, cogent and forceful with the passing years. This has developed into a school of thought and peaceful action which the ruling political class, under thrall of the nuclear industry, pejoratively dubs “anti-nuclear”. However, those who oppose nuclear bombs and nuclear power are primarily concerned with problems of life, livelihood, health and safety of present and future generations of human and non-human life, and thus are pro-life rather than anti-nuclear.

The impossibility of keeping present and future generations safe from nuclear pollution (contamination) created in the past and continuing with increased vigour in the present, is a truth which the nuclear industry has consistently denied and ridiculed. The denial and ridicule is changing especially in recent times, into violent opposition by the nuclear industry to those who articulate these truths and call for shutdown of NPPs. This is happening worldwide and exemplified in India by violence in support of the nuclear industry, by Tamil Nadu police against peaceful opponents of the Koodankulam NPP by lathi-force, bullet-force, jailing protestors, and charging protestors with sedition and waging-war-against-the-state.

This brings to mind Arthur Schopenhauer’s words: “Any truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident”. Clearly, the truth about the undesirability of nuclear power is in its second stage. Transition of the nuclear industry into the third stage of this truth may happen when the questionable economic viability of nuclear power and the hollowness of the SCCR claim become apparent to the next generation of proponents of nuclear power. Sooner rather than later, the public is sure to recognize the awful reality of the nuclear Frankenstein. As the world touches the 71st anniversary of the nuclear bomb and protests against the nuclear industry multiply, Nicholas Walter’s words are apt: “No one can tell when protest might become effective, and the present might suddenly turn into the future”.

The Olympic Gold Obsession: An Australian Condition

Binoy Kampmark

Obsessions of any sort, notably of a consuming nature, are never healthy matters.  The drive to win gold, laced with a desperation often reflected in steroid consumption and psychological battering, has made the Olympic Games the least of savoury spectacles.

Even worse than the physical reduction of the athlete to mechanism and medal winning machine is the complicity towards it from the coaching establishment and hungry spectators.  Nothing is quite as terrifying as triumph – or failure – by association, the vicarious delight, or woe, the groupies feel when their chosen champion falls.  “We,” they claim, were also in the pool that day.

Australia is particularly bad on this score.  Its failure to net a monstrous swag of medals at the Montreal Olympics in 1976 was seen as a catastrophe to morale, a national disgrace. Only one silver and four bronze medals were brought home.

The characteristic approach to gold madness was typified by the near hysterical antics of Australian swimming coach, Laurie Lawrence, at the Seoul Olympics in 1988.  After Duncan Armstrong won gold in the 200m freestyle event in record time, Lawrence exclaimed effusively how,  “He did it again. Lucky lane six.”

The interviewer proceeded to ask him whether Lawrence was ready to respond to a question about how he felt.  “Mate, we just beat three record-holders.  How do you feel?”  In conclusion, Lawrence lands the fundamental blow to those who believe that the competition, not the victory, is what counts.  “Why do you think we come here?  For the silver?  Stuff the silver!”

The Lawrence philosophy was much evident during the London 2012 Olympics.  Australian swimmer Emily Seebohm had won silver in her 100m backstroke final.  Instead of congratulatory embraces, there was commiseration and grief. She had only won silver.  Apologies to parents, the coach and the Australian public followed.  To be second was to be humiliated.

With such conditions at play, it was little wonder that a 2010 survey of ethical and integrity issues in Australian sport conducted by the Australian Sports Commission and Colmar Brunton Social Research found a host of concerns: “Athletes being pushed too hard by coaches or parents”; “Negative coaching behaviours and practices” and negative administration.

A quick glance at Australia’s performance at the London Games should have punctured the gloom of the medal cravers.  The country’s athletes won eight gold, 15 silver, and 12 bronze, a highly credible 35 medals leading to an eighth placing on the table.

Broadcaster, television presenter and author Waleed Aly, writing in The Monthly, encouraged a celebration of the achievement, while regarding any gold lust as a “puerile” fascination. Those treating the performance as below par were to be treated with derision.

In the wake of that performance, deemed poor by the lucre-craving establishment, veteran Fairfax journalist Paul Sheehan would express concern at that voracious hunger for the medal count:

“Hundreds of millions of tax dollars and thousands of hours of grinding, invisible sacrifice by athletes have been compromised by an obsession with gold.  This obsession has clouded the reality that Australia has just had a brilliant Olympics.  An unambiguous success” (Sydney Morning Herald, Aug 13, 2012).

The other fallacy in boosting medal counts is the notion that high rankings actually lead to increased sports participation and a tongue wagging interest in following Olympic heroes.  The statistics regarding sport participation in England showed a decline of interest in sport leading up to the 2012 games. Nor has a figure like Michael Phelps, who dominated his swimming meets in 2008, inspired a generation of enthused swimmers.

As the Games commence at Rio, Australian journalists and the sporting establishment, led by the steely Kitty Chiller, is running the pre-emptive remarks about gold again.  Predictions are being made, the loot being divvied out.  In July, Chiller suggested that the 410-strong team would bag “15 maybe even 16” gold medals of a projected medal tally of 45, a feat that would land Australia in the top five.

Medals are being awarded even before the first events have taken place.  Even Chiller admits that, “For any country to double the number of gold in [four-year period] is a huge ask. I genuinely believe we can do it.”

The erroneous assumption made is that record holders will perform on the day and win gold.  On swimmer Cate Campbell, the ABC observed that breaking a world record a mere month before Rio made her “the favourite to win the gold in the 100 metres freestyle.”

The same network ran with the jarring headline that Australia’s swimming team were “aiming to erase memories of London.”  Readers were introduced to “the stars of the Australian swimming team hoping to rebound from the poor showing at the 2012 Olympics in London.”

Again, the grand hope will be in the pool, where Australians are always expected to excel with automatic superhuman achievement.  In Chiller’s cool words, “Yes, we’re going to rely on swimming, we always do.”  Again, they will not be prepared for the disappointment should those medals not eventuate.  The gold disease tends to be a particularly aggressive one.

Farm Hack: A Commons For Agricultural Innovation

Dorn Cox


In 2011, a community of farmers, designers, developers, engineers, architects, roboticists and open source thinkers came together in Boston, Massachusetts, to explore a simple yet radical idea – that great improvements in agriculture could be achieved by reducing barriers to knowledge exchange. They were convinced that transforming agricultural technology into a commons would result in a more adaptive, open and resilient food system, one that would reflect the values not just of the grower but of the larger community as well. The path toward a more distributed and just agricultural and economic system, this gathering of people concluded, would come into being through the collective development of new working prototypes and universal access to a constantly improving repository of best ideas and practices.

Thus began Farm Hack, an ambitious volunteer project that brought together the seemingly disparate cultures of technologists and agrarians. The start of Farm Hack came with an offer from M.I.T. to host a teaching event that could connect engineers with farmers’ needs. The National Young Farmers Coalition had just started a blog called “Farm Hack” and launched the first program, followed closely by more events held in partnership with GreenStart and Greenhorns agrarian networks and maker/hacker networks.

The Farm Hack community quickly expanded through online and in-person social networks across the east and west coasts of North America. Within three years, it became a user-driven, collaborative community of ideas and tools with many thousands of active participants. Hundreds of thousands of visitors from every continent were soon contributing tens of thousands of hours to the platform. Farm Hack has become a rapidly growing repository of agricultural knowledge, containing scores of open source designs and documentation for farming technologies and practices. In effect, Farm Hack is an emergent, networked culture of collaborative problem-solving.

Hacking has been defined as the art of coming up with clever solutions to tricky problems by modifying something in extraordinary ways to make it more useful. Hacking also means rejecting the norms of consumer culture, and imagining ways to modify, improvise, and create new, accessible, custom solutions for particular problems. Not surprisingly, both hacker and maker culture are a natural fit for the sustainable agricultural movement. Both cultures formed in response to ongoing, hegemonic attempts to control users’ access to basic technologies and other resources. Both arose from a realization that open access to knowledge is the best strategy to counter dominant industry interests. This has long been an inherent part of agriculture in general, and a critical part of sustainable agriculture in particular. On most farms, identifying a problem, thinking of a solution, testing that solution and assessing its efficacy while thinking of the next iteration is a daily practice.

Within its first year, the Farm Hack website featured documentation for over 100 innovative agricultural tools. They ranged from manufacturing instructions for newly created farm-built hardware such as garlic planters, to the remanufacturing of an “extinct” farm-scale oat huller. The community contributed designs for greenhouse automation and sensor networks and business models for organic egg enterprises.

The power of open source exchange is illustrated by the quick pace and diversity of modifications and improvements made to tools on Farm Hack. One of the first greenhouse monitoring projects was turned into an electric-fence alert system, which quickly evolved into an automation and data logging system, which then spun into businesses selling kits. An organic no-till roller made open source by the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania was quickly modified in New Hampshire, then Quebec, and then France and Germany; the latest versions being built in New York are based on German and French improvements made six months earlier. In this production model, inventors increasingly may not be able to predict the ultimate use of their tools, as the ultimate use will be collaborative and emergent.

Despite being an all-volunteer organization, operating without a budget until 2014, Farm Hack partnered with dozens of organizations, universities, open source and maker communities in the US and Europe to expand the network. In addition to providing an online forum and repository for the community’s knowledge and tools, Farm Hack has hosted in-person and online events to document and improve tools, foster sharing and build skills. In these events, the group carries on the agrarian club tradition of mixing participatory education with lots of good eating, drinking and socializing.

With growth of the community came greater financial burdens of hosting and guiding the conversations and idea exchanges. The community also needed to evolve in its role from organizing and planning, to facilitating, guiding and recruiting new contributors. Initial funding to support these needs came indirectly through the founding partner organization budgets supplemented by contributions from community volunteers. It was three years before the first general grant support was secured. A university extension program wrote a grant on behalf of Farm Hack to document, measure and extend the reach of USDA Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) funded projects.

To manage the challenges of growth and expansion in its third year, the Farm Hack network adopted a set of ten principles; participants wanted to maintain the representative open agrarian values of the network as they interacted with established power structures. The collaborative and flexible structure of the organization, and rapidly evolving tools for remote collaboration, became important ways for the organization to evolve while remaining representative and emergent. For example, a collaborative tool currently in development, by the community and for the community, is a best practices template for open source project contracting to help navigate the tension of having paid and volunteer efforts working side by side. The template is exploring the awarding of bounties and other rewards for commercial contracts, special recognition to volunteer efforts, and pooled payments or retainers on a project-by-project basis for participants.

Open Source Software Converges with Agrarianism

Farm Hack has blended a rich set of old and new traditions – the Enlightenment salon ideals of the eighteenth century and those of the open source software movement. Both believe that the natural state of knowledge is to be free. Farm Hack also looks to the Physiocratic worldview of nature-governance articulated by Quesnay, Jefferson, Locke and Franklin, who regarded the productivity of the soil, and the education of the populace to provide for their own livelihood, as necessary for liberty and the health of a culture. From this perspective, agricultural production is the root of sustainable civilization. It is not just an occupation, but a foundation for the shared cultural values of a healthy society.

Well before the Internet, Enlightenment thinkers pioneered the idea of crowdsourcing with their community-created Encyclopedie: A Systematic Dictionary of Sciences, Arts and Crafts, first published in 1751 and written with over 2,250 contributors. More than 250 years later, the contemporary open source software community is pioneering the development of networked tools, such as wikis, forums and collaborative documents, all of which facilitate social cooperation and trust. Building on these models of voluntary reciprocity, Farm Hack implicitly challenges the prevailing norms of conventional agricultural economics and research. It challenges not only what types of questions are asked in agricultural research and development, but also who asks the questions, the types of tools that are produced, and how they are financed.

The Farm Hack community believes that the tools, seeds, and techniques used in agriculture should both reflect and benefit those who intend to use them, not just those intent on selling them. Through an ongoing amateur inquiry that connects farmers with other farmers, designers, engineers, and thinkers, Farm Hack has embraced, woven together, and expanded upon preindustrial and modern hacker/maker ideals. Its open, social collaboration creates the potential for every farm to become a research farm, and every neighbor to be a manufacturer, drawing upon a global library of skills and designs.

An Alternative Template for Agriculture

From Encyclopedia of Practical Farm Knowledge, published by Sears and Roebuck, 1918. Available at archive.org.

By documenting, sharing, and improving farm tools and associated know­ledge, Farm Hack is not just framing agriculture as a shared foundational economic activity. It illustrates an alternative template for local manufacturing and provides greater citizen choice, control and local self-determination. The primary limiting factor in agriculture shifts from the (negative) extraction of scarce natural resources to the (positive) expansion of skills and systems understanding of all participants. Farmers are able to learn better ways of harnessing the complex biogeochemical flows of atmospheric carbon, water, and nitrogen into productive and resilient agroecosystems. The emphasis shifts from efficient extraction of resources to skilled regeneration of resources using all available knowledge.1See essay by Eryka Styger on the System for Rice Intensification (SRI). The focus becomes improving rather than diminishing the natural resource base.

Another contribution to the rapid expansion of Farm Hack’s community has been its reliance on the network structures and administrative tools pioneered by other open source communities, including Drupal (blogging software), Wikipedia (wiki collaboration), Open Layers (Java script software), and Apache (server software). It has been able to build trust, grow, and adapt while making its own unique contributions back to the commons. Another important tool used by Farm Hack is the Collective Impact Framework, a structured approach that allows organizations to use collaborative tools to form common agendas and adopt shared measurement tools, mutually reinforcing activities and continuous communication among diverse sorts of participants.2John Kania and Mark Kramer, Collective Impact, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Issue 73 (Winter 2011), available at http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/collective_impact. This Framework has been adopted in order to enable the community to identify and reduce overlapping, duplicative efforts, and to build upon the cumulative achievements of the broader open source community.

Farm Hack’s online platform is a prototype for implementing this framework in the context of open source agriculture practices. Just as symbiosis is as powerful an influence as competition in nature, Farm Hack believes that it can help turn the conventional agricultural research and development system on its head. By creating tools and social norms that reward, refine, test and evaluate collaborative production, it is possible to stimulate rapid, reliable community knowledge and innovation.

In 1726, Jonathan Swift famously wrote, “Whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind and do more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together.” The quote embodies Farm Hack’s partial but expanding achievement: By creating open source repositories of knowledge and technologies, it is bypassing the dominant political and economic power structures behind industrial agriculture. Farm Hack is shifting the balance from those who derive their power through the control of scarce resources and knowledge to those who mix their creative skills with nature in order to create abundance.