KAS Media Africa Scholarship 2017 for African Journalists – Masters or Bachelors at University of Witwatersrand

Brief description: KAS Media Africa is offering a university scholarship to a promising, young (under 30) sub-Saharan African journalist to do a full-time Honours or Masters Degree at the University of Witwatersrand’s Journalism Programme in Johannesburg in 2017.

Application Deadline: 31st August 2016.

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: All African countries

To be taken at (country): University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

Eligible Field of Study:

About the Award: The Media Programme Sub-Saharan Africa has been in business since 2002 as part of the KAS’ global Media Programme.

Acting within the advancement of democracy and the formation of opinion, our activities concentrate on a regional bias and its multilateral approach. Our aim is to cross-link media’s local stakeholders to one another as they acquire knowledge and an understanding for their neighbouring countries and also learn from the methods, working processes and experiences of their colleagues in order to implement them in their own local or national environment (best practice).

Offered Since: 2002

Type:  Bachelors, Masters Degrees

Eligibility: 

• Candidates should be under 30 years old, working as a journalist in a sub-Saharan African country and fluent in English.
• For Honours, candidates must have at least three years’ working experience and either an undergraduate degree or pass an entrance test.
• For Masters, candidates must have a degree equivalent to the BA Honours in Journalism (or related field) and at least three years’ working experience.
• Candidates must work closely with KAS Media Africa during their stay in Johannesburg and write a bi-monthly narrative report on their study progress.

Selection Process: 

• Candidates should make themselves available in mid-September for an interview by skype or telephone and be willing to sit a test exam.
• The decision on the award will be made before the end of September 2016.
• Successful candidates will be expected to complete an online student application and supply all the necessary documentation, including a SAQA assessment.
• The application for a student visa will be the responsibility of the candidate, who must begin the process before mid-November 2016.
• The academic year starts in the beginning of Feb 2017, and ends with the submission of research in November or the following February. The successful candidate should plan to travel in late January 2017.

Number of Awardees: 1

Value of Scholarship: The scholarship includes:

• University fees
• Return flight to Johannesburg
• Monthly stipend of 5 000 ZAR
• Accommodation fees for student housing
• A one-time payment of 2 500 ZAR for study material

Duration of Scholarship: Duration of course

How to Apply: Candidates need to submit:

• A motivation letter
• A CV
• Writing samples
• At least 2 letters of nomination/reference by a senior journalist, publisher or academic

Visit Scholarship Webpage for details

Award Provider: Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (KAS) Media Africa

Holding Monsanto to Account: the People’s Tribunal in The Hague

Heidi Chow

As one of the world’s leading seed and chemical companies, Monsanto’s activities affect us all.

Its best-selling weedkiller is made from a chemical called glyphosate that the World Health Organisation has found to probably cause cancer. Yet its use is now so widespread that traces are found in one out of every three loaves of bread in the UK.

That’s why earlier this year, in the lead up a EU decision about whether to relicense glyphosate, we mounted public pressure on decision makers through our Monsanto honest marketing campaign.

We sent out thousands of spoof labels to individuals which ended up on supermarket shelves across the UK telling the truth about Monsanto’s products and their corporate power. Our campaign was part of widespread opposition across Europe, which resulted in a rejection of the automatic 15-year relicense in the EU, as expected by Monsanto. Instead, glyphosate was only relicensed for 18 months pending further research.

Unbelievably, selling toxic chemicals to the mass market is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Monsanto’s appalling record. Monsanto is at the forefront of pushing a model of agriculture that takes control away from small-scale farmers as well as causes environmental damage. Monsanto maintains it market dominance by getting farmers hooked onto its expensive weedkillers and seeds that have be purchased every year from Monsanto.

Not only is this costly for cash-strapped subsistence farmers, but it’s unnecessary. Scientific evidence shows that organic, non-chemical methods are effective for growing healthy food as well as better for the environment. Being able to keep, save and exchange a wide range of seeds also helps maintain biodiversity, assists with climate adaptation and supports resilience in farming.

Putting Monsanto in the dock

It’s for these reasons that civil society groups from around the world are holding an international ‘people’s tribunal’ to hold Monsanto to account for its impacts on communities and the environment.

Additional ‘crimes’ being put before this people’s tribunal include Monsanto’s history of producing toxic chemicals for warfare, its well-documented manipulation of scientific evidence, misleading and dishonest marketing campaigns and underhand lobbying efforts to promote its products.

The Tribunal will be held at The Hague and conducted by legal professionals and practicing judges. It will consider whether Monsanto is guilty of the following:

* Violating the right to a healthy environment; the right to food; the right to health and academic freedom. These rights are enshrined in legal texts such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the 2011 Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.

* Complicity in war crimes for supplying herbicides to the US military for Operation ‘Ranch Hand’ during the Vietnam War (see photo). This will be considered under the Rome Statute, which allows the International Criminal Court (ICC) jurisdiction to try alleged perpetrators of crimes against humanity, genocide and war crimes.

* Committing ecocide – this concept, which is gaining currency in international law, is understood as “causing serious damage or destroying the environment so as to significantly and durably alter the global commons or ecosystem services upon which certain human groups rely.” The Tribunal will also examine whether the Rome Statute should include this crime.

Despite the legal frameworks being used in the Tribunal, the outcomes will not be legally binding as there is currently no mechanism to bring criminal charges against a company like Monsanto. Instead, the significance of the Tribunal will be largely symbolic in order to demonstrate how a corporation could be brought to account.

A UN treaty on business and human rights?

The arguments brought against Monsanto will demonstrate the problems of corporate-controlled agriculture, which will apply to other agribusinesses too. The Tribunal’s work will also give victims and their legal counsel the arguments and legal ground for further lawsuits against Monsanto within their national jurisdictions. Experts and witnesses from around the world will come to the Tribunal to give testimony and Monsanto has been invited to give its defence.

Corporate power and the pursuit of profit at the expense of human rights, environmental protection and democratic processes lies at the heart of many of the social and economic injustices that the world faces today. Efforts to constrain this power have been given a fresh impetus through a UN initiative to set up an international, legally binding mechanism to regulate corporations.

A UN treaty on business and human rights could enforce minimum standards for corporations to abide by and failure to do could lead to legal action. The potential for curbing corporate power would be huge but it would also take many years to achieve.

In the meantime, the Monsanto Tribunal will not only expose the consequences of Monsanto’s activities on livelihoods, health, human rights and the environment, but will also demonstrate to the world what could happen if citizens were able to hold corporations accountable.

Moving Stones and Speaking Trees: the War in South Sudan

Anna Martin

In 2012 John Kerry declared in a Senate Foreign Relations Committee Hearing that the United States had “helped midwife the birth of this new nation” of South Sudan. His choice of verb—soon to become fashionable—is revealing, not only about the motivations and world view of the speaker and government he represents but it also raises the question of what child was brought into the world. What does the word reveal? To begin with, the “midwife” peddlers delete the South Sudanese from their long, traumatic history of liberation struggle against the North, dating back at least to the Torit Mutiny of 1955, blithely skipping over the fact that the United States was actually on the side of the oppressors. In fact, when the SPLM/A (Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army) was founded in 1983, the Khartoum government was Africa’s biggest recipient of US aid and arms. The relationship only soured after the First Gulf War when Khartoum supported Saddam Hussein and, especially, after 9/11 when it was known that the regime had harbored Osama bin Laden.

There has been plenty of foreign interference in South Sudan, going at least as far back as the Egyptian slave raiders of the third millennium BCE, all the way through to nineteenth-century Christian missionaries, the ineffectual regime of Governor General Charles George Gordon who, the British believed, as Deborah Scroggins writes, brought “peace and orderly government” (p. 53) to a territory as big as Western Europe before he ended up beheaded, and the toxic meddling of the British Lonrho (“Investing in the growth of Africa”) mining tycoon Tiny Rowland, who bankrolled politicians all over the continent in the 1980s and supported both North and South Sudan in order to prolong the war because, that way he believed, he would get access to mineral-rich zones away from government control. The US, then, cannot claim all the glory but it certainly played its part in the birth pangs of the independent state of South Sudan. This“nationhood by whatever means necessary” was helped along by a bunch of, let’s say, forceps wielders, among them the powerful US Israeli lobby (after all, South Sudan is a good customer of Israel’s surveillance and weapons technology, and in 2013 it promised it would sell oil to Israeli companies) and, naturally, homegrown US oil interests, especially given the strong foothold of China in the country and, notably, of the Chinese National Petroleum Corporation.+

The cozy relationship between Washington, UN and South Sudanese elites is an important background to Nick Turse’s new book, Next They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan, because it at least partly explains the awful silences he addresses. The Center for Public Integrity has shown that the government of South Sudan spent $2.1 million on Washington lobbying and public relations firms from 2014 to the end of 2015, trying to brush up its image while some five million of its people were in dire need of humanitarian assistance and about 20% had fled their homes. Unable to pay its civil servants, the “government” that needed the image makeover is intermittently headed, in a highly volatile partnership, by Salva Kiir and Riek Machar, Dinka and Nuer respectively, with a long history of enmity which they both periodically whip up by manipulating tribal sentiments among their factions inside (more or less) the SPLA, which is purportedly the new country’s “regular army”. They also got a bit of freebie air-brushing by the head of the much-criticized, failing-to-protect UN mission, UNMISS, Hilde Johnson, who has a penchant for referring to her high-up friends as “cadres”, “freedom fighters” and “comrades”. There are other cover-up buddies such as a decades-old clique of US-based policy wonks who called each other names like “Emperor”, “Deputy Emperor” and “Spear Carrier”, at least two of whom are now special advisors to Kiir.

In fact, in terms of what are usually thought of as government functions, the South Sudanese variety can hardly be called a “government”. For more than two decades, small empires in the day-to-day running of the country have been conquered by sundry humanitarian organizations (many run by American evangelical Christians) shaping a sort of “republic of NGOs” (for more on this, see Haiti). The anti-governance repercussions are far-reaching because the NGOs may have taken over state powers but they do not have the capacity for dealing with nation-wide problems like emergency response in a catastrophic situation of actual or perpetually looming civil war and its attendant disasters of famine, hunger, refugees and the unburied dead. In one of the most heavily armed countries of the world, stockpiling weapons with no policy for managing the excess has clear priority over health, education, public service, infrastructure and especially justice.

Turse’s book is essentially about justice. He gives a voice to today’s victims of the latest round in centuries of foreign interference which, since it must be concealed behind words like “midwife” or President Obama’s description of the new era ushered in by two rival warlords as a “time of hope”, also means that sufferers must be silenced or, equally horribly, never mentioned, even when dead. So “[…] year after year, President Obama provided waivers to sidestep the 2008 Child Soldiers Prevention Act by which Congress prohibited the U.S. from providing military assistance to governments filling their ranks with children […]”, in order to keep up political and military backing for known war criminals. It was a gamble of “looking the other way” (p. 72) or prettying up the unspeakable that would have dreadful results in the civil war which broke out in South Sudan in 2013. The pain described by Turse’s informants is unbearable and it is even worse knowing that western governments knowingly loosed the “blood-dimmed tide” of a ghastly birth. No wonder Turse quotes fromMacbeth, “Blood will have blood” (p. 11).

The lines immediately following Macbeth’s prophecy—“Stones have been known to move, and trees to speak. / Augurs and understood relations have /[…] brought forth / The secret’st man of blood”—well describe the distressing task Turse has set himself with this book. When gravestones move and trees speak, when the guilty are brought to justice, then the dead may have a measure of justice. And when the crimes are so heinous that there are no gravestones, the trees, the augurs and “understood relations” must whisper the truth. “They’re not supposed to kill old ladies” (Bor, p. 45); “We had to hide the past by collecting all the remains […] (Mayor of Bor, p. 56); “They gave me a gun […] I followed big men around” (Osman, 15, p. 66); “I want to go to school” (Zuagin, child soldier, maybe 15, p. 70); “They lined us up outside of a building and started shooting at us” (Nuer man, Malakal, p. 93); “They shot the [baby] boy in front of his mother” (woman in Bentiu, p. 119); “Watch how we will rape your daughter” (government-allied militiamen to a woman in Unity State, who raped the younger daughter, set her on fire and raped another daughter, pp. 119-120). Listen to the “understood relations” here for they give a portrait of the “government” which Hilde Johnson wants to support with more international “engagement”.

Even the bodies must be silenced. No one knows how many there are, who they are or where they are. But “Naming the Ones We Lost” is an unfunded volunteer-reliant, project aiming to do just this, “since neither the government, nor the opposition, nor any foreign NGO, aid organization, or civil society group has bothered to identify the victims of South Sudan’s conflict”. This “one-of-a-kind work”, Turse says, “is meant to plant the seeds of accountability in this otherwise justice-barren land” (p. 105). The ages of the first seven victims, three generations, on a “spreadsheet of pain, regret and loss” read by Turse, were 11, 81-85, 15, 12, 28, 31-35 and 14 (p. 105). Imagine what they meant to their families, their communities. But this is lost on all the NGOs which have declined to support the project. However, the South Sudanese human rights activist Edmund Yakani does. “This argument—peace first, justice later—doesn’t work. Peace is a result of justice.” (p. 73). The mere idea is so dangerous that Yakani is in danger from none other than the “National Security Service” but, “Quitting is not an option” (p. 111). Among his many projects of trying to bring justice to South Sudan is a database, an “encyclopedia of horrors” (p. 107) compiled from “South Sudan Eye Witness Declaration Forms” consisting of pages of detailed questions.

For all the beautiful words of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, many peoples have no rights, not even to be named after they are murdered by government forces. You only have to do a thought experiment, transferring the experience of the mother who saw two daughters raped and one of them set alight to the streets of Chicago, London or Berlin and imagining the outcry. What Nick Turse describes happened in South Sudan…. It is not as if the South Sudanese are any less eloquent than their fellow humans in the West. They are simply not heard because very few people think their suffering is significant enough to know about and others who do know about it need to silence it.

Nick Turse is a most honorable exception. A South Sudanese reporter who could not speak (because, in South Sudan, journalists are harassed, imprisoned, abducted and murdered) asked him to “write the first draft of this history” although he had another book in mind. He accepted the challenge and took a step towards justice in this devastated country. However, in a recent interview he says, “Long-standing grievances have basically just been papered over. I am hoping against it, but I fear that in the coming months or years we are going to see the country collapse back into conflict. I fear it could be even worse than what happened in 2013. I hope against hope that I am wrong about this, but I fear that war will return to South Sudan.”

The present situation of Kiir’s temporary triumph over Machar and ongoing seething tribal grievances among the “freedom fighters” lamentably seems to forebode that he is right to fear. And if war once again returns to South Sudan, who is going to be responsible for the wellbeing of the child that was so wanted but so roughly, so irresponsibly “midwifed”?

Black Americans and Police State Fascism

Margaret Kimberley

The word fascism has reappeared in the American popular lexicon thanks to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. The word is used to keep progressive Democrats in a state of fear should he win, but its existence in this country right now is rarely discussed.

If Trump became president and was indeed a fascist he wouldn’t bring anything to the country that is not already in existence for black Americans. Fascism is practiced against them on a daily basis. They are at risk of police interaction, arrest and even death for committing the most minor infractions or for no infraction at all.

Korryn Gaines was shot to death by police in her own home near Baltimore, Maryland. Her five year-old son was also shot and injured. Ms. Gaines came into contact with police initially because of a traffic violation and a dispute with her boyfriend. Every day thousands of people are given tickets or make accusations against one another but rarely do they have an expectation of ending up dead as a result.

Arrest warrants are the first line of defense for the police, who are the 21st century embodiment of the slave patrol. If black people are lucky they may have to pay a fine or suffer some inconvenience, if unlucky they are killed.

The Baltimore police used maximum force and disregarded accepted police practice meant to de-escalate such situations. They broke down Gaines’ door and cut off her Facebook feed. As is typical, their much vaunted body cameras were turned off and the dead woman was deprived of any means of defense or telling of her story. The only version of events comes from the people who killed her.

Death is the worst result but not the only means of keeping black people under physical control and in a state of humiliation. A recent video from a Kentucky courtroom shows an unidentified black woman suffering the cruelties of the police system. She was arrested for not completing a diversion program after a 2014 shoplifting charge. The only logic to arresting someone for this violation is cruelty for its own sake and the proof of that played out in the courtroom.

The woman arrived at court wearing only a pair of shorts. She reported that she had been denied feminine hygiene products and clean pants.  The judge dismissed the charges but not before lecturing the woman. “The fact that you’re in custody is your fault. You gotta come to court. But once you were arrested, the rest of this is completely inhumane and unacceptable and I’m very sorry that you had to go through this.” She added, “This is not normal. I’ve never seen this.” Of course this treatment is normal and happens all the time. Her arrest for a minor offense was normal and so was the denial of her human rights in an American jail. Actually the humiliated woman may be considered lucky. It was recently revealed that 6,900 people died in custody in Texas jails and prisons in the last ten years.

All of the tools which are supposed to protect the public from this system are useless. Paul O’Neal (*link O’Neal) was summarily executed by Chicago police while driving a stolen car. Again their cameras were turned off during the shooting. But once they felt safe, they recorded themselves rejoicing over their kill, giving one another high fives. One complained, “Fuck, I’m going to be on desk duty now for 30 days.”  The nonchalance is logical. The officer has no reason to fear anything worse.

Body cameras and other “reforms” won’t save black people’s lives because they are meant for public relations purposes only. The system in this country spends large sums of money, passes legislation and empowers the police to do what they like to black people. The suffering is quite intentional.

All the videos in the world won’t upend the brutality of the laws enforced against black people. It matters not whether a victim complies, or has hands up, or is armed, or is unarmed, or opens a door, or speaks, or doesn’t, or flees, or stays put, or does or doesn’t resist arrest. The police are a constant threat to black lives because the system demands it.

There will be no end to the body count without serious discussion about the ways in which racism is supported and encouraged. None of the supposedly non-fascist politicians dare lay a finger on the modern day slave system. Occasionally white people die at the hands of police, too. But that is considered a small price to play to keep the racial hierarchy in order. There is no hope of ending the carnage without first understanding the system we have and calling it what it is. Black Americans have always lived under fascism.

Spotting the Havoc Wreaked by Climate Change

Dave Lindorff

I took a long hike today through a local nature preserve. It was a humid 96° F with the heat index, thanks to the humidity making it feel like 110° — too hot to work on the stone re-pointing job I’m doing on our old stone house. I needed some nature, though, after spending the last few weeks reading and writing about our insane political situation, with Republican Donald Trump, a con artist posing as a fascist and denouncing minorities and immigrants and Hillary Clinton, a Democratic war-monger, corrupt and probably richer than Trump, posing as a people’s advocate.

Wandering down a path into the woods and following a local stream, though, I found myself getting more troubled than before. These woods, where I’ve walked for years, used to be filled with myriad species of birds — water birds, hawks, songbirds and others, and insects — dragonflies, butterflies, bees and flies of all kinds, as well as frogs, turtles and snakes. I’d usually return from such walks to report having seen a baltimore oriole, a blue heron, a garter or a water snake, a large snapping turtle or one or another kind of hawk. I wouldn’t even report on the butterflies, as they were myriad.

Today though, the forest was quiet. Occasionally I’d hear the sound of some unidentifiable bird, probably a starling or sparrow, but bird sounds were rare. Sightings too. I heard no cries from bluejays or crows, saw no hawks or waterbirds — not even mallard ducks, and heard no songbirds. I saw one small painted turtle sunning itself on a fallen tree in a dammed up part of the stream — a spot that used to be covered with turtles on a day like this. And I heard no frogs, which might explain the lack of any herons or other wading birds. The two creatures I did see were a deer (these apex mammals seem to have made the suburbs home, with no available predator except the automobile to diminish their numbers, and with grass and suburban flower gardens providing abundant food) and a beautiful solitary orange Monarch butterfly, which was flying with more purpose, in almost a straight line down the pathway, than I’ve ever seen a butterfly fly (perhaps it is on it’s lonely way to Mexico hoping to find a mate?). Other than that, there were almost no bugs too. That’s really scary, since bugs, besides pollinating plants, provide that basic protein source for most larger animals up the food chain. I had read that bugs of all kinds are in a dramatic decline all around the globe, and it certainly looks like it if they aren’t even pervasive in a nature preserve where there is no insecticide being used, where grass isn’t cut, and undergrowth is left alone.

I had noticed this decline earlier when we were up in the Catskills where we have a summer house. The streetlight in front of our property, which used to be enveloped in literally thousands of moths, flies and flying beetles during late spring and early summer months, to the delight of the brown bats that dove into the cloud again and again filling their bellies each night, these days is devoid of insects, which is astonishing and, when one thinks of it, terrifying.

As I walked through the nature park, where biting creatures — deer flies and horseflies — used to harass me in years past, I was only visited by one horsefly, which I dispatched as it landed on my arm, thereby worsening the dearth of insects and causing me to feel a little guilty about it.

I returned home angry. How can we, as Americans, be even contemplating the idea of installing at such a moment of crisis in mankind’s history, either of two candidates who don’t really give a damn that we are destroying the earth’s ability to sustain human life, or for that matter, most of the astonishing ecosystem that has evolved over hundreds of millions of years of evolution? Trump denies that climate change is real, while Clinton, vastly funded by a banking industry that finances the industries that are destroying the earth, by energy companies, power companies and automotive companies that are doing the actual destruction, has no intention of taking dramatic action to halt the pumping of more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

President John F. Kennedy, looking out the Oval Office window on a rainy day during the depths of the Cold War, asked his science advisor if the rain outside was contaminated by radioactive fallout. Upon hearing a “yes,” he decided, to the shock of his military advisors, to unilaterally call a halt to open-air nuclear testing, and to get the Russians to do the same — which they did. But I’m afraid both the major party candidates running for president this year are such power-hungry narcissists that they are incapable of doing the one thing that might save us, which would be to wake up one morning in the White House next year and, recognizing the looming disaster of climate change, to call for a halt to any further removal of hydrocarbons from the ground.

Both Clinton and Trump have demonstrated that they are damaged persons who crave power at any price and who are not going to risk losing power by doing anything that would anger or threaten the acquisitive aspirations of the ruling elite of the nation.

We are, to put it bluntly, f**ked. I can see it just walking through the Trewellyn Nature Park, where it’s abundantly clear that things have reached a point of crisis already. We in the US, the largest contributor to climate change if one considers not just the present but our historical record, cannot wait another four years, much less eight years or longer to take dramatic action.

That monarch butterfly I saw — the only one I’ve spotted all summer here in southeastern Pennsylvania or up in the Catskills, both places they used to be rampant only a few years ago — had the right idea, I suppose: get the hell out of here! But then, if it manages somehow to make it to the monarch meeting place in Michoacan, a province in Mexico’s central highlands, it may find the ancient pine forest where its forebears used to gather, turning the trees orange with their multitudes, gone. It turns out that local farmers, desperately poor as NAFTA has destroyed their local subsistence farm economy, are cutting and burning the pine forest there and planting avocado trees [2], in hopes of earning a better income from that high-priced fruit than from the corn that for generations they used to grow for local consumption. But included among the forest they are destroying to satisfy insatiable first-world guacamole demand in the US and Europe is the butterfly reserve that the monarchs rely on.

Rachel Carson kicked off the environmental movement back in 1962 with her book Silent Spring. She was focusing then on the destruction of songbirds by the pervasive use of pesticides. But what I saw on my park stroll was a silence even deeper. It’s not just the birds that are gone now, it’s almost every living creature in the woods! The plants are still there, but as the pests that threaten them — many of them invasive results of globalized trade like the ash borer, the gypsy moth, oak wilt fungus, etc. — attack trees that are also being stressed by climate change with its season-changing warm periods and its periodic droughts — that may not be true for long.

Hillary Clinton has it all wrong. When it comes to taking on global warming, what we need is not “incremental change.” We need radical change, and we need it now.

How To Break The Power Of Money

David Korten


Our current political chaos has a simple explanation. The economic system is driving environmental collapse, economic desperation, political corruption, and financial instability. And it isn’t working for the vast majority of people.
It serves mainly the interests of a financial oligarchy that in the United States dominates the establishment wings of both the Republican and Democratic parties. So voters are rebelling against those wings of both parties—and for good reason.

As a society we confront a simple truth. An economic system based on the false idea that money is wealth—and the false promise that maximizing financial returns to the holders of financial assets will maximize the well-being of all—inevitably does exactly what it is designed to do:

1. Those who have financial assets and benefit from Wall Street’s financial games get steadily richer and more powerful.
2. The winners use the power of their financial assets to buy political favor and to hold government hostage by threatening to move jobs and tax revenue to friendlier states and countries.
3. The winners then use this political power to extract public subsidies, avoid taxes, and externalize environmental, labor, health, and safety costs to further increase their financial returns and buy more political power.

This results in a vicious cycle of an ever greater concentration of wealth and power in the hands of those who demonstrate the least regard for the health and well-being of others and the living Earth, on which all depend. Fewer and fewer people have more and more power and society pays the price.

A different result requires a different system, and the leadership for change is coming, as it must, from those for whom the current system does not work.

Awareness of system failure is widespread and growing.

Awareness of system failure is widespread and growing. We see it in the rebellion against the establishment wings of the major political parties. We see it as previously competing social movements join forces to articulate and actualize a common vision of a new economy. We see it in varied and widely dispersed local citizen initiatives quietly rebuilding the relationships of caring communities. We see it in millions of defectors from consumerism, who by choice or necessity are living more simply.

Analysis of the sources of the system failure, however, rarely goes beyond vague references to capitalism, neoliberalism, Wall Street, and immigrants.

Most of us have been conditioned by corporate media and economics education—along with the basic fact that we need money to buy the things we need or want—to accept the pervasive, but false, claims that money is wealth and a growing GDP improves the lives of all.

It rarely occurs to us to challenge these claims in our own thinking or in conversations with friends and colleagues. So they persist and allow the corporate establishment to limit the economic policy debate to options that sustain its power.

To build a truly coherent movement with the necessary strength to replace the failed system with one designed and managed to self-organize toward a world that works for all, we must challenge its bogus claims as logical and practical fallacies. And simultaneously affirm the self-evident truth that:

We are living beings born of and nurtured by a living Earth. Life exists—can exist—only in living communities that self-organize to create the conditions essential to life’s existence. Money is just a number, an accounting chit we accept in exchange for things of real value because we have been conditioned to do so almost from birth.

We who work for peace, justice, and sustainability have the ultimate advantage. Truth is on our side. And the deepest truths, those on which our common future depends, live in the human heart. Let us each speak the truth in our own heart so that others may recognize and speak the truth in theirs. Together we will change the human story.

Why Intervention Is Worse Than Dictatorship

Nauman Sadiq

Let me take this opportunity to make it clear that I am in no way sympathetic towards the unrepresentative Middle Eastern dictators in general and Bashar al-Assad in particular, but in order to assign blame for the wrongdoing in Syria, we need to remind ourselves of the elementary distinction between the constant and variable factors.

Bear in mind that Bashar al-Assad has been ruling Syria since 2000, and before that his father had ruled over Syria for another 30 years. I do concede that Syria was not a democratic state under their rule but it was at least a functioning state. The Syrian crisis that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and made millions of refugees dates back only to 2011, something changed in Syria in that fateful year and it was obviously not Assad since he has been ruling since 2000, and up to 2011 at least people were not dying or migrating en masse out of Syria.

Therefore, though I admit that Assad is responsible for dictatorship, heavy handed tactics and forceful suppression of dissent in Syria, but he is not responsible for all the killings and violence, except may be in self-defense; for all the casualties and population displacements, the “change or the variable” that was added to the Syrian equation in 2011 has primarily been responsible.

Now if that variable is the Islamic jihadists then why did the Western powers nurtured them, when the latter are ostensibly fighting a war against terrorism (Islamic jihadism) at the same time? And if that variable is the supposed “moderate rebels” then what difference does it makes whether their objectives are enforcing Shari’a or “bringing democracy” to Syria?

The goals of the “Syrian Opposition,” whatever its composition may be, are irrelevant in the context of preventing a humanitarian disaster that has reduced a whole a country of 22 million people to rubble; in other words, the first priority of the so-called “humanitarian interventionists” in Syria should have been to prevent all the killings, violence and mass migrations irrespective of the objectives for which the Syrian militants have been fighting.

It can be very easy to mislead the people merely by changing the labels while the content remains the same – call the Syrian opposition secular and nationalist “rebels, militants or insurgents” and they would become legitimate in the eyes of the audience of the Western mainstream media, and call the same armed militants “jihadists,or terrorists” and they would become illegitimate.

How do people expect from the armed thugs, whether they are Islamic jihadists or secular and nationalist rebels, to bring about democratic reform in Syria or Libya? And I squarely hold the powers that funded, trained, armed and internationally legitimized the Syrian militants as primarily responsible for the Syrian crisis.

For the whole of last five years of the Syrian civil war the focal point of the Western policy has been that “Assad must go!” But what difference would it make now to the lives of the Syrians even if the regime is replaced when the whole country now lies in ruins?

Qaddafi and his regime were ousted from power in September 2011; five years later Tripoli is ruled by the Misrata militia, Benghazi is under the control of KhalifaHaftar who is supported by Egypt and UAE, and Sirte has become a new battleground between the Islamic State-affiliate in Libya and the so-called “Government of National Accord.”

It will now take decades, not years, to restore even a semblance of stability in Libya and Syria; remember that the proxy war in Afghanistan was originally fought in the ‘80s and even 35 years later Afghanistan is still in the midst of perpetual anarchy, lawlessness and an unrelenting Taliban insurgency.

Notwithstanding, in political science the devil always lies in the definitions of the terms that we employ. For instance: how do you define a terrorist or a militant? In order to understand this we need to identify the core of a “militant,” that what essential feature distinguishes him from the rest?

A militant is basically an armed and violent individual who carries out subversive activities against the state. That being understood, now we need to examine the concept of “violence.” Is it violence per se that is wrong, or does some kind of justifiable violence exists?

I take the view, on empirical grounds, that all kinds of violence is essentially wrong; because the ends (goals) for which such violence is often employed are seldom right and elusive at best. Though, democracy and liberal ideals are cherished goals but such goals can only be accomplished through peaceful means; expecting from the armed and violent militants to bring about democratic reform is preposterous.

The Western mainstream media and its neoliberal constituents, however, take a different view. According to them, there are two kinds of violence: justifiable and unjustifiable. When a militant resorts to violence for the secular and nationalist goals, such as “bringing democracy” to Libya and Syria, the misguided neoliberals enthusiastically exhort such form of violence; however, if such militants later turn out to be Islamic jihadists, like the Misrata militia in Libya or the Islamic State and al-Nusra Front in Syria, the credulous neoliberals, who were duped by the mainstream narrative, promptly make a volte-face and label them as “terrorists.”

Truth be told, democracy as a ground for intervention was invented by the Machiavellian spin-doctors of the Western powers during the Cold War. Here we must keep the backdrop inmind, the whole world was divided into two camps vying for supremacy and global domination: the communist and the capitalist bloc.

The communist bloc had a clear moral advantage over the latter; using its rhetoric of social justice, revolution of the proletariat and communal ownership of the modes of production, it could stir up insurgency against the status quo anywhere in the world, and especially in the impoverished Third World.

The capitalists with their “trickle down” economics had no answer to the moral superiority of the communist bloc. That’s when the Western propagandists came up with democracy and human rights as grounds for intervention and to offset the moral advantage of their archrivals vying for global supremacy.

Since then, and even after the dissolution of Soviet Union, it has become a customary tactic in the Western playbook to bomb a country, reduce it to rubble and then hold sham elections in the absence of political culture and representative institutions, like political parties, in order to legitimize the intervention and include the occupied territory in the neocolonial sphere of influence. Whether it’s Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, the same exercise has been followed ad nauseam to create a charade of justice and fair play.

Fact of the matter is that the neocolonial powers only pay lip service to the cause of morality, justice and humanity in the international relations and their foreign policies are solely driven by the motive to protect their national interest without any regard for the human suffering in the remote regions of the world.

More often than not, it isn’t even about protecting their national interests, bear in mind that the Western powers are not true democracies; they are plutocratic-oligarchies catering to the needs of their business interests that wield a disproportionate influence in the governmental decision-making and the formulation of public policy. Thus, the real core of the oft-quoted “Western national interests” has mainly been comprised of the Western corporate interests.

The Dark Secret Of Israel’s Stolen Babies

Jonathan Cook

Nazareth: It is Israel’s darkest secret – or so argues one Israeli journalist – in a country whose short history is replete with dark episodes.

Last month Tzachi Hanegbi, minister for national security, became the first government official to admit that hundreds of babies had been stolen from their mothers in the years immediately following Israel’s creation in 1948. In truth, the number is more likely to be in the thousands.

For nearly seven decades, successive governments – and three public inquiries – denied there had been any wrongdoing. They concluded that almost all the missing babies had died, victims of a chaotic time when Israel was absorbing tens of thousands of new Jewish immigrants.

But as more and more families came forward – lately aided by social media – to reveal their suffering, the official story sounded increasingly implausible.

Although many mothers were told their babies had died during or shortly after delivery, they were never shown a body or grave, and no death certificate was ever issued. Others had their babies snatched from their arms by nurses who berated them for having more children than they could properly care for.

According to campaigners, as many as 8,000 babies were seized from their families in the state’s first years and either sold or handed over to childless Jewish couples in Israel and abroad. To many, it sounds suspiciously like child trafficking.

A few of the children have been reunited with their biological families, but the vast majority are simply unaware they were ever taken. Strict Israeli privacy laws mean it is near-impossible for them to see official files that might reveal their clandestine adoption.

Did Israeli hospitals and welfare organisations act on their own or connive with state bodies? It is unclear. But it is hard to imagine such mass abductions could have occurred without officials at the very least turning a blind eye.

Testimonies indicate that lawmakers, health ministry staff, and senior judges knew of these practices at the time. And the decision to place all documents relating to the children under lock untl 2071 hints at a cover-up.

Hanegbi, who was given the task of re-examining the classified material by prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has been evasive on the question of official involvement. “We may never know,” he has said.

By now, Israel’s critics are mostly inured to the well-known litany of atrocities associated with the state’s founding. Not least, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from their homeland in 1948 to make way for Israel and its new Jewish immigrants.

The story of the stolen babies, however, offers the shock of the unexpected. These crimes were committed not against Palestinians but other Jews. The parents whose babies were abducted had arrived in the new state lured by promises that they would find in Israel a permanent sanctuary from persecution.

But the kidnapping of the children and the mass expulsion of Palestinians at much the same time are not unrelated events. In fact, the babies scandal sheds light not only on Israel’s past but on its present.

The stolen babies were not randomly seized. A very specific group was targeted: Jews who had just immigrated from the Middle East. Most were from Yemen, with others from Iraq, Morocco and Tunisia.

The Arabness of these Jews was viewed as a direct threat to the Jewish state’s survival, and one almost as serious as the presence of Palestinians. Israel set about “de-Arabising” these Middle Eastern Jews with the same steely determination with which it had just driven out most of the area’s Palestinians.

Like most of Israel’s founding generation, David Ben Gurion, the first prime minister, was from Eastern Europe. He accepted the racist, colonial notions dominant in Europe. He regarded European Jews as a civilised people coming to a primitive, barbarous region.

But the early European Zionists were not simply colonists. They were unlike the British in India, for example, who were interested chiefly in subduing the natives and exploiting their resources. If Britain found “taming” the Indians too onerous, as it eventually did, it could pack up and leave.

That was never a possibility for Ben Gurion and his followers. They were coming not only to defeat the indigenous people, but to replace them. They were going to build their Jewish state on the ruins of Arab society in Palestine.

Scholars label such enterprises – those intending to create a permanent homeland on another people’s land – as “settler colonialism”. Famously, European settlers took over the lands of North America, Australia and South Africa.

The Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has observed that settler colonial movements are distinguished from ordinary colonialism by what he terms the “logic of elimination” that propels them.

Such groups have to adopt strategies of extreme violence towards the indigenous population. They may commit genocide, as happened to the Native American peoples and to the Australian Aborigines. If genocide is not possible, they may instead forcefully impose segregation based on racial criteria, as happened in apartheid South Africa. Or they may commit large-scale ethnic cleansing, as Israel did in 1948. They may adopt more than one strategy.

Ben Gurion needed not only to destroy Palestinian society, but to ensure that “Arabness” did not creep into his new Jewish state through the back door.

The large numbers of Arab Jews who arrived in the first decade were needed in his demographic war against the Palestinians and as a labour force, but they posed a danger too. Ben Gurion feared that, whatever their religion, they might “corrupt” his Jewish state culturally by importing what he called the “spirit of the Levant”.

Adult Jews from the region, he believed, could not be schooled out of their “primitiveness”. But the Zionist leadership hoped the next generation – their offspring – could. They would be reformed through education and the cultivation of a loathing for everything Arab. The task would be made easier still if they were first detached from their biological families.

Israeli campaigners seeking justice for the families of the stolen babies point out that the forcible transfer of children from one ethnic group to another satisfies the United Nation’s definition of genocide.

Certainly, the theft of the Arab Jewish children and their reallocation to European Jews chimed neatly with settler colonialism’s logic of elimination. Such abductions were not unique to Israel. Australia and Canada, for example, seized babies from their surviving native populations in a bid to “civilise” them.

The “re-education” of Israel’s Arab Jews has been largely a success. Netanyahu’s virulently anti-Palestinian Likud party draws heavily on this group’s backing. In fact, it was only because he dares not alienate such supporters that Netanyahu agreed to a fresh examination of the evidence concerning the stolen babies.

But if there is a lesson to be drawn from the government’s partial admission about the abductions, it is not that Netanyahu and Israel’s European elite are now ready to change their ways.

Rather, it should alert Israel’s Arab Jews to the fact that they face the same enemy as the Palestinians: a European Jewish establishment that remains resolutely resistant to the idea of living in peace and respect with either Arabs or the region.

White House seeks to cover up Central American migrant crisis

Andrea Lobo

The Obama administration announced on July 26 a deal with the Costa Rican government, which has agreed to receive 200 asylum-seekers at a time for six-month periods from the Northern Triangle of Central America (NTCA), which includes El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.

While the press and some advocacy groups have treated this measure as either a symbolic gesture or a promising step towards a resolution to the migrant crisis, it is actually an effort to cover up the current escalation in the attacks against social conditions in Central America, which goes hand-in-hand with the US-led militarization of their repressive governments.

As part of the deal, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has offered to carry out the selection process; however, the refugees will still have to go through a security screening by their local governments for consideration.

A State Department representative commented: “By themselves, today’s actions will not solve this challenge, but are steps in the right direction and are a further example of the United States’ commitment to resolve the situation.” Similarly, the UNHCR expressed that the “announcement puts forward a solid foundation for a regional response.”

The New York Times praised Obama’s expansion of “its efforts to protect migrants fleeing dangerous conditions” and criticized Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s rival on this topic. “The expansion was denounced by Republicans, and it sharpened a contrast with Donald J. Trump, who has centered much of his presidential campaign on a call to shut out immigrants,” the paper stressed.

The Times does report, however, that only 600 Central Americans have been allowed to come into the US as refugees since the large influx began in 2014.

Meanwhile, Washington continues to fuel the humanitarian crisis in the NTCA, forcing thousands more to seek shelter and better living conditions, just as they do in the Middle East and Africa.

UNHCR estimates at least 146,000 applicants for asylum this year from the Northern Triangle, compared to 109,800 for 2015. The figures include tens of thousands of children. The publicity stunt of taking in 200 temporary refugees makes the Costa Rican government a direct accomplice in the inhuman treatment of NTCA refugees by US imperialism, for which the deterrence and criminalization of migrants is only a means to securing a more vulnerable and exploitable immigrant workforce domestically in the US and south of the border.

The same occurs in Costa Rica on a smaller scale. Over 400,000 immigrant workers, close to 10 percent of the total population and mostly from Nicaragua, are deliberately kept by employers to work informally so as not to have to pay them decent salaries or make contributions to their social security. Migration laws passed in the country since 2010 to expedite legalization of their work status have done virtually nothing to change this; for instance, the Migration Policy Institute reports that less than 2 percent of agricultural employers have registered for the program.

After Costa Rica and other Central American governments closed their borders to Cubans and limited the flow of African and Haitian migrants trying to reach the United States in March, about 3,000 were forced to use dangerous routes and risk getting killed, kidnapped, assaulted, or scammed by coyotes to continue on their way. Last week, ten African migrants were found dead in Lake Nicaragua. Hundreds of others are living in exposed and unsanitary shelters scattered across the impoverished regions next to the borders in Costa Rica, leading to the death of one of them in May from pneumonia.

Announcing the deal with Obama, Costa Rican public officials have focused on asserting that no criminals are coming, that this supposedly charitable action will cost the heavily indebted state little to nothing and that the refugees will be leaving quickly. The minister of the interior, Sergio Alfaro, emphasized that this is just a temporary measure until the applications for refugee status in the US, Canada and Australia get processed.

“The profile of people that will come is part of an arrangement of the environmental, community, and LGTB leaders that are being persecuted and threatened in their countries by criminal organizations like gangs,” commented Carmen Muñoz, vice minister of the interior.

This casts some serious doubts about the claims by the UNHCR that their selection will be based on the most vulnerable asylum seekers. It seems that the selection will be a response to the scandals surrounding the murders of activists, particularly that of Honduran activist Berta Cáceres and two of her colleagues killed this year.

Last month, the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG) published a study on the increasing pressures on migrants and communities in the NTCA, particularly due to US immigration policy and the worsening violence and poverty at home.

It reports that the United States has outsourced most of its border control efforts to Mexico, which deported 166,000 Central Americans compared to about 75,000 from the US.

Mass migration is fueling sexual slavery, the study mentions, estimating 50,000 current victims just from Guatemala, and thousands others being kidnapped for ransom, while authorities intentionally deport rescued victims quickly to avoid criminal proceedings.

During the past three years, the NTCA countries have suffered more homicides than the US, which has more than 10 times their population. The ICG report quoted a Salvadoran woman migrating: “Now there are gangs everywhere. Only the rich people are safe.”

A 2015 UN survey found that 64 percent of women migrating from Central America and Mexico said they or a close relative had been directly threatened.

Because of the large boost that remittances give to the NTCA countries’ GDPs, preventing migration is not “functional” for their political agendas, according to Danilo Rivera, a Guatemalan economist. The remittance income of 17 percent worth of GDP for Honduras and El Salvador and 10 percent for Guatemala contrasts with the less than 2 percent of GDP in social spending for youth by each government.

The ICG’s recommendations, however, are either counterproductive or ignore the interests of the ruling elites and the vulnerability of most NTCA migrants and communities.

The organization’s proposal for reducing detentions and deportations and expanding “community-based violence prevention programs” clashes with the reality of imperialist super-exploitation and the militarization of the state forces. Only increasing “prosecutorial capacity” against corrupt officials and criminal groups is viable and already underway. The latter efforts are led by the US State Department chiefly to secure legitimacy of its client regimes in response to mass protests during the last two years against impunity and corruption.

US imperialism has consistently sought to cover up its role historically and at present in creating the social crises that have pushed thousands to seek refuge outside of the NTCA, with the Costa Rican and other Central American ruling elites as accomplices.

The 1984 Cartagena Declaration on Refugees was adopted by all Central American countries and Mexico in response to the humanitarian crisis provoked by the civil wars between the US-backed dictatorships and the bourgeois nationalist guerrilla movements in El Salvador and Guatemala, as well as between the CIA’s contra mercenaries and the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. The document came to define those fleeing from “generalized violence” as refugees, but none of the agreements were binding and they failed to even mention the US responsibility for the mass flight.

During the 1980s, the massacres of entire villages in those three countries, mostly by the US-backed contras and regimes, reached levels of genocide against the Mayan population in Guatemala and intensified the mass impoverishment of the population, leading to a large amount of people seeking refuge.

During this period, the number of migrants fleeing was reflected in a massive growth of Nicaraguan immigrants in Costa Rica, from 45,918 to 226,374 between 1984 and 2000.

In 1987, Costa Rican President Oscar Arias led the talks that resulted in the Esquipulas II Declarations, formally initiating the peace negotiations to end the Contra war. Arias won the Nobel Peace Prize that same year.

The Reagan administration rejected an initial version of the agreement in 1987 because it legitimized the Sandinista government, but it came to accept a second version in February, 1988, which called for the “definitive halt” of US military assistance to the contras. However, this didn’t stop the CIA from continuing to supply the contras until the Sandinistas lost the elections in 1990 to a conservative coalition, which included the Communist and Socialist parties.

Nicaraguan president and Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega wrote a book during this period of negotiations in 1988, where he pleaded: “Before responding to my proposal for bilateral dialogue, don’t precipitate yourself President Reagan, reflect, and let God show you the way towards peace and to stop harming Nicaraguan people. Thank you.”

The ICG study states that between the 1990s and 2000s, the US deported 250,000 convicted criminals back to the NTCA. The gangs formed by those deported, the continued impoverishment and militarization of the regimes, particularly in the NTCA, along with the drug-trafficking routes built during the civil war and the empowerment of drug barons with the aid of the CIA, have brought back civil-war levels of violence and migration.

A recent study, published by Costa Rican state universities, titled “The State of the Region,” reveals that US-led militarization and regional impoverishment have intensified in recent years. They found that US military and police assistance increased gradually from $16 million yearly in 2004 to $125 million in 2015, bringing the total during the decade to $768 million.

In turn, all the US client regimes, including those led by the former “anti-imperialist” guerrillas in El Salvador and Nicaragua, have continued to buy large amounts of weapons and military equipment from Washington, amounting to over $2 billion regionally between 2004 and 2014. While 75 percent of these arms were purchased by Honduras, the second buyer was Costa Rica with $142.6 million.

At the same time, the percentage of socially excluded homes (insecure or no jobs, low schooling, and little to no access to social security) in Central America increased from 36 to 39 percent between 2009 and 2014. Regionally, six out of every ten households are poor, suffering from unsatisfied basic needs and/or living under the official poverty line.