How Turkey, Iran, Russia and India are playing the New Silk Roads

Pepe Escobar

Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Hassan Rouhani will hold a summit this Wednesday in Sochi to discuss Syria. Russia, Turkey and Iran are the three power players at the Astana negotiations – where multiple cease-fires, as hard to implement as they are, at least evolve, slowly but surely, towards the ultimate target – a political settlement.

A stable Syria is crucial to all parties involved in Eurasia integration. As Asia Times reported, China has made it clear that a pacified Syria will eventually become a hub of the New Silk Roads, known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – building on the previous business bonanza of legions of small traders commuting between Yiwu and the Levant.

Away from intractable war and peace issues, it’s even more enlightening to observe how Turkey, Iran and Russia are playing their overlapping versions of Eurasia economic integration and/or BRI-related business.

Much has to do with the energy/transportation connectivity between railway networks – and, further on the down the road, high-speed rail – and what I have described, since the early 2000s, as Pipelineistan.

The Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, a deal brokered in person in Baku by the late Dr Zbigniew “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski, was a major energy/geopolitical coup by the Clinton administration, laying out an umbilical steel cord between Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey.

Now comes the Baku-Tblisi-Kars (BTK) railway – inaugurated with great fanfare by Erdogan alongside Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Georgian Prime Minister Giorgi Kvirikashvili, but also crucially Kazakh Prime Minister Bakhytzhan Sagintayev and Uzbek Prime Minister Abdulla Aripov. After all, this is about the integration of the Caucasus with Central Asia.

Erdogan actually went further: BTK is “an important chain in the New Silk Road, which aims to connect Asia, Africa, and Europe.” The new transportation corridor is configured as an important Eurasian hub linking not only the Caucasus with Central Asia but also, in the Big Picture, the EU with Western China.

BTK is just the beginning, considering the long-term strategy of Chinese-built high-speed rail from Xinjiang across Central Asia all the way to Iran, Turkey, and of course, the dream destination: the EU. Erdogan can clearly see how Turkey is strategically positioned to profit from it.

Of course, BTK is not a panacea. Other connectivity points between Iran and Turkey will spring up, and other key BRI interconnectors will pick up speed in the next few years, such as the Eurasian Land Bridge across the revamped Trans-Siberian and an icy version of the Maritime Silk Road: the Northern Sea Route across the Arctic.

What’s particularly interesting in the BTK case is the Pipelineistan interconnection with the Trans-Anatolian Gas Pipeline (TANAP), bringing natural gas from the massive Azeri gas field Shah Deniz-2 to Turkey and eventually the EU.

Turkish analyst Cemil Ertem stresses, “just like TANAP, the BTK Railway not only connects three countries, but also is one of the main trade and transport routes in Asia and Europe, and particularly Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan ports. It connects Central Asia to Turkey with the Marmaray project in Istanbul and via the Caspian region. Along with the Southern Gas Corridor, which constitutes TANAP’s backbone, it will also connect ports on the South China Sea to Europe via Turkey.”

It’s no wonder BTK has been met with ecstatic reception across Turkey – or, should we say, what used to be known as Asia Minor. It does spell out, graphically, Ankara’s pivoting to the East (as in increasing trade with China) as well as a new step in the extremely complex strategic interdependence between Ankara and Moscow; the Central Asian “stans”, after all, fall into Russia’s historical sphere of influence.

Add to it the (pending) Russian sale of the S-400 missile defense system to Ankara, and the Russian and Chinese interest in having Turkey as a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

From IPI to IP and then II

Now compare the BTK coup with one of Pipelineistan’s trademark cliff-hanging soap operas; the IPI (Iran-Pakistan-India), previously dubbed “the peace pipeline”.

IPI originally was supposed to link southeastern Iran with northern India across Balochistan, via the Pakistani port of Gwadar (now a key hub of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, CPEC). The Bush and Obama administrations did everything to prevent IPI from ever being built, betting instead on the rival TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) – which would actually traverse a war zone east of Herat, Afghanistan.

TAPI might eventually be built – even with the Taliban being denied their cut (that was exactly the contention 20 years ago with the first Clinton administration: transit rights). Lately, Russia stepped up its game, with Gazprom seducing India into becoming a partner in TAPI’s construction.

But then came the recent announcement by Russian Energy Minister Aleksandr Novak: Moscow and Tehran will sign a memorandum of understanding to build a 1,200km gas pipeline from Iran to India; call it II. And Gazprom, in parallel, will invest in unexplored Iranian gas fields along the route.

Apart from the fact of a major win for Gazprom – expanding its reach towards South Asia – the clincher is the project won’t be the original IPI (actually IP), where Iran already built the stretch up to the border and offered help for Islamabad to build its own stretch; a move that would be plagued by US sanctions. The Gazprom project will be an underwater pipeline from the Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean.

From New Delhi’s point of view, this is the ultimate win-win. TAPI remains a nightmarish proposition, and India needs all the gas it can get, fast. Assuming the new Trump administration “Indo-Pacific” rhetoric holds, New Delhi is confident it won’t be slapped with sanctions because it’s doing business with both Iran and Russia.

And then there was another key development coming out of Putin’s recent visit to Tehran: the idea – straight out of BRI – of building a rail link between St. Petersburg (on the Baltic) and Chabahar port close to the Persian Gulf. Chabahar happens to be the key hub of India’s answer to BRI: a maritime trade link to Afghanistan and Central Asia bypassing Pakistan, and connected to the North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC), of which Iran, India and Russia are key members alongside Caucasus and Central Asian nations.

You don’t need a weatherman to see which way the wind blows across Eurasia; integration, all the way.

The Influence of Israel on Britain

Brian Cloughley

Last year the online publication Foreign Policy Journal published ‘The Best Congress AIPAC Can Buy,’ in which it was made clear that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee led a pro-Israel grouping that “is probably the strongest, best organized and most effective lobby network in Washington DC. For the 2015-2016 election cycle, the pro-Israel network has already dispensed $4,255,136 in contributions.”  Then in August 2017 Global Research went further and deeper by stating that “AIPAC (formerly the American Zionist Committee) is a high-powered, multi-financed, multi-faceted, political pressure group working exclusively in the interests of six million Israelis and NOT for the welfare or benefit of 320 million Americans. It not only influences US legislation but raises massive sums of money in order to ensure that the House of Representatives and the Senate are both populated by members who support AIPAC’s political and economic agenda as a priority over that of the United States of America.”

It couldn’t be more obvious that a foreign country is interfering dramatically in the governance of the United States. But it doesn’t stop there, because even crisis-ridden Britain receives the creepy attention of Israel’s activists.

The government of the United Kingdom is in a state of turmoil, mainly because it lacks authority as a result of holding an election in which the Conservative party was unexpectedly dealt a severe blow to its pride and popularity. Since then its indecision and incompetence have been complicated by scandal, of which the latest involved enforced resignations of two cabinet ministers, one because he indulged in sexual harassment, and the latest, the overseas aid minister, Ms Priti Patel, because she told lies to the prime minister about a visit to Israel.

Ms Patel admitted her actions “fell below the high standards expected of a secretary of state” which was certainly the case, because she told lies;  but her low standard expeditions appear to have involved some intriguing antics.  It was reported that in August she went on “a secret trip to Israel with a lobbyist, during which she held 12 meetings, including one with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, without informing either [Prime Minister] May or Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary.”  It is amazing that she could have imagined that British intelligence services would not report her movements and meetings in the daily brief, but this did not stop her telling the Guardian newspaper that “Boris knew about the visit. The point is that the Foreign Office did know about this, Boris knew about [the visit to Israel]. It is not on, it is not on at all.  I went out there, I paid for it, and there is nothing else to this. It is quite extraordinary. It is for the Foreign Office to go away and explain themselves.”

But it wasn’t the Foreign Office that had to explain things, because this was yet another squalid deception by a grubby little politician — for whatever reason she may have had to try to disguise her motives.  Her assertion that “I went on holiday and met with people and organisations  . . . It is not about who else I met, I have friends out there,” didn’t ring true, and the media discovered a whole raft of deceit.

Not only did she have a dozen meetings with “friends” in Israel, but, as revealed by the Sun newspaper, “on September 7, Ms Patel met Israeli Minister for Public Security Gilad Erdan for talks in the House of Commons. Then, on September 18, she met Israel’s Foreign Ministry boss Yuval Rotem while in New York at the UN General Assembly. Ms Patel would not last night [November 6] disclose what the meetings were about.  She had seen both men in Tel Aviv in August . . .”

She was accompanied on her Middle Eastern holiday by an agent of influence of Israel, Lord Polak, who attended all her meetings with Israel’s best and brightest,  including Prime Minister Netanyahu. And Polak went with her to New York, with his flight being paid for by the Israeli consulting firm ISHRA, which “offers a wide range of client services.”  Polak was also present when she had undisclosed discussions with the Israeli Minister for Public Security in the House of Commons before she went to New York.

Lord Polak didn’t have far to walk to the House of Commons because he is a member of the adjacent House of Lords, Britain’s unelected upper chamber of Parliament, which is a travesty of democracy. It makes a mockery of social equality and far too many of its members are generous donors to political parties or failed politicians who have been “kicked upstairs” to well-recompensed relaxation as compensation for years of political toadying. There are 800 members of the House, making it the second-largest legislative assembly in the world, after China’s National People’s Congress (and it has to be borne in mind that China has a population of 1.3 billion as against Britain’s 65 million).

In short, the House of Lords is a farcical disgrace.  But it still has much influence, because there is a great deal of money sloshing around, and there are people and political parties who control this money — like the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI), an organisation that the Financial Times (FT) reports has “an estimated 80 per cent of Tory MPs as members.” And it is no coincidence that Lord Polak “spent a quarter of a century as head of the CFI . . . He quit as director in 2015 to join the House of Lords, but has remained the group’s honorary president.”

CFI is a wealthy organisation which the FT notes “has given £377,994 [495,000 US dollars] to the Conservative party since 2004, mostly in the form of fully-funded trips to Israel for MPs.”  Not only that, but it gives large individual donations to Conservative members of parliament — and does anyone imagine for a moment that any politician so favoured is going to say a single word against Israel in any forum in any context?

They’ve been bought.

The CFI’s deep-pocket generosity includes holding an annual London dinner, at which last December the prime minister not only referred to Lord Polak as “the one and only Stuart Polak” but noted there were over 200 legislators present and declared she was “so pleased that the CFI has already taken 34 of the 74 Conservative MPs elected in 2015 to Israel.”

Money is the most important feature of UK-Israel relations, and May was thrilled about “our countries’ biggest-ever business deal, worth over £1 billion, when Israeli airline El Al decided to use Rolls Royce engines in its new aircraft.”  It all comes down to money, and Israel, in receipt of oceans of cash from the United States, can splurge it where it wants.

Last year it was announced that the US “will give Israel $38 billion in military assistance over the next decade, the largest such aid package in US history, under a landmark agreement signed on [September 14]” which includes an annual amount of $3.3 billion in “foreign military financing.”

Britain can’t give Israel any money, as it is itself in a poor financial situation, but it tries to make up for lack of cash by unconditional political support. It doesn’t matter to Britain’s government that Israel is in violation of nearly 100 UN Security Council resolutions, most of them requiring its withdrawal from illegally occupied Arab lands.  Don’t expect the United Kingdom to criticise the Israeli fiefdom.

The love-fest between Britain’s Conservative party and the state of Israel is not only unhealthy but suspiciously personal. There is little wonder that the British government has done its best to sweep the sordid Patel affair under the carpet, and that the intrigues of Lord Polak are being kept very quiet indeed.

Lord Polak is chair of the advisory board of TWC Associates, a “boutique consultancy specialising in the development of political strategy”, which lists among its clients several Israeli defence companies, including Elbit Systems which specialises in defence electronics.

In 2012 it was disclosed that TWC and Elbit Systems were involved in the appalling British “Generals for Hire” scandal when Elbit’s UK chairman told undercover Sunday Times reporters that TWC could gain access to government “from the prime minister down.”  In this particularly revolting instance of corruption the British retired Lieutenant General Richard Applegate, then Chairman of TWC, boasted that TWC had enormous influence, through its connections with Conservative Friends of Israel.  He declared that “We piggy back on something, and please don’t spread this around, to do with basically Conservative Friends of Israel . . .  do a series of discreet engagements using advisers to gain access to particular decision makers.” Just as Ms Patel was doing in Tel Aviv and London and New York, with the shadowy but authoritative guidance of the creepy Polak.

There is a lot that is wrong in the United Kingdom at the moment, but the Israeli scandal is the most squalid pantomime so far revealed in the tenure of the present administration. The prime minister is desperate to conceal her government’s intimate association with Israel, and is achieving success by deflecting media attention away from the machinations of the Israeli lobby and selecting other targets. Her attack on Russia in a bizarre diatribe at a London banquet on November 13 was indicative of panic, but the headlines were obtained and the grubby Israel drama faded away into the background.

In the words of Prime Minister Theresa May on November 2, just as news of the Patel scandal was breaking, “We are proud to stand here today together with Prime Minister Netanyahu and declare our support for Israel. And we are proud of the relationship we have built with Israel.”

The British public will never know what Patel, Polak and all the other agents of influence were scheming to achieve, or what sinister fandangos they may get up to in the future, but we can be certain that the Britain-Israel alliance will continue to prosper. The United States has “the best Congress AIPAC can buy,” and Britain’s legislators are right up there with their transatlantic colleagues. They have no scruples and no shame, but seem to have plenty of cash.

ISIS Last Stand; End Times for the Caliphate

MIKE WHITNEY

“There can be no doubt about it, the ISIS of just two years ago was the most powerful, well-led, generously-armed and resource-efficient paramilitary force in modern history, having carved out for itself an empire between two sovereign states and devastating their armies in the process. However, this is no longer so. The days of the Islamic State consuming Syria like a cancer are over.” The Defeat of ISIS, Andrew Illingworth, Almasdar News

Russia and its allies have expelled ISIS from its last urban stronghold in Syria. Now the Syrian coalition will turn its attention to the numerous hotspots around the country where al Qaida-linked groups have dug in waiting for the Syrian Army to make its final push.

On Monday, Lebanese media reported that the Syrian Arab Army (SAA), joined by combat troops from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Hezbollah, recaptured the city of Abu Kamal in Deir Ezzor province. The city was the last bastion for the terrorist group, ISIS, which, at one time, controlled a vast swathe of land stretching from northern Iraq to central Syria. Now the group has been chased from its last urban hideaway and scattered across the arid wastelands like a nomadic tribe wandering the dessert. Abu Kamal was ISIS’s “last stand”, the final chance to fend off the advancing loyalist forces and reverse the course of the war. But the three-pronged attack proved to be too much for the demoralized jihadists who fled the city northward or surrendered to Syrian troops on the perimeter. Thus, ISIS no longer occupies any of the major towns or cities that once comprised the emerging Wahhabi proto-state. The group has been soundly defeated, its leadership is in tatters and the star-crossed Caliphate has met its end.

What happens next in Syria is of critical importance. Although large parts of the country remain under the control of al-Qaida-linked groups and the other Sunni militias, Russian President Vladimir Putin believes the combat part of the war is nearing its end and wants to begin preparations for a political settlement. This view is shared by the entire Putin administration including Deputy Defense Minister Valery Gerasimov. On Monday, Gerasimov said:

“The active phase of the military operation in Syria is nearly over. Thanks to our joint efforts, terrorists are being wiped out in the Al-Bukamal area in eastern Syria and along the Syrian-Iraqi border. It will only be a matter of time before the other militant groups are completely eradicated which will allow us to move on to a post-conflict settlement.”

It’s worth noting, that the western media has entirely ignored the defeat of ISIS at Abu Kamal mainly because it was the Russian-led coalition that delivered the final blow. In the current climate in the US, any facts that fail to support the anti-Russia hysteria that has swept the country, are scrubbed from publication. So while the headlines at the New York Times should have read: “Russia Crushes ISIS in Syria”, they instead focused on the trivial details of the latest sex scandal.

Post-ISIS Meetings Begin

On Monday, Putin met with Bashar al Assad in the Russian resort city of Sochi to discuss the winding down of military operations and the next phase of the 7 year-long war. The Syrian President expressed his heartfelt gratitude to the man who, by any measure, saved Syria from a fate similar to that of Libya or Iraq.

“I have conveyed to Mr. Putin and to the Russian people, our gratitude for their efforts to save our country. In the name of the Syrian people, I greet you and thank you all, every Russian officer, fighter and pilot that took part in this war.”

Putin thinks the defeat of ISIS at Abu Kamal creates an opportunity for the warring parties to hash out their differences and reach an agreement that will put an end to the fighting. There’s no doubt that Assad will be asked to make concessions he wouldn’t otherwise make to satisfy the objectives of his Russian allies. But Putin does not want Syria to become his Vietnam, he has no intention of using the Russian airforce to recapture every square inch of sovereign Syrian territory. As he’s said from the very beginning, his plans involve the annihilation of the terrorist forces operating in the country; nothing more and nothing less. This is why the outcome at Abu Kamal is so important in shaping the agenda. ISIS has been vanquished and the enclaves where the other insurgent groups are currently located, will be part of a wide-ranging mop-up operation that will end the terrorist threat in Syria for good. Security will eventually be reestablished and the government will move on to the arduous task of rebuilding its decimated cities and infrastructure. But first a settlement must be reached.

Later in the week, Putin will meet with leaders from Iran, Turkey and (maybe) Saudi Arabia. The geopolitical interests of all the parties are vastly different but not necessarily irreconcilable. Turkey, for example, might agree to withdraw its troops from Northern Syria if they are given assurances by Putin that the Kurds will not be allowed to set up an independent state on Turkey’s southern border. The Kurds might also be willing to settle for something less than “full statehood” if they are allowed sufficient autonomy to operate as a culturally independent entity. The main problem is the United States and its Israeli-Saudi allies who still want to topple Assad, partition the country, and transform Syria into another US garrison state at the heart of the world’s largest energy reserves. The defeat of ISIS has not changed Washington’s strategic ambitions or its determination to occupy Syria even after the hostilities have ended.

Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis has already stated that the US will not leave Syria after ISIS is crushed. Here’s what Mattis said at a recent press briefing on November 13:

“We’re not just going to walk away right now before the Geneva process has cracked…We’re going to make sure we set the conditions for a diplomatic solution…We have to get the UN-brokered effort in Geneva to take this thing forward.”

When Mattis was asked to provide the legal justification for the ongoing US occupation of east Syria, he said: “You know, the UN said that ISIS — basically we can go after ISIS. And we’re there to take them out.”

The United Nations never approved US intervention in Syria, but that’s probably a moot point given Washington’s abysmal record of shrugging off international law. From the look of things, the US is planning to stay in Syria for a long time, and that’s going to dampen the prospects for peace. Check this out from NPR:

“A rising number of Syrians who fled are returning to their homes, with more than 600,000 going back in the first seven months of this year, according to the International Organization for Migration.
The U.N. migration agency says that number is comparable to the number of returns spanning the entire year in 2016.

The Syrian government has been stressing that people are coming home, NPR’s Ruth Sherlock reports, and state media have been posting photos and accounts of such returns…

Most of those going home – 84 percent — were displaced within Syria. “The next highest number of people … returned from Turkey, followed by Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq,” the IOM adds.” (U.N.: More Than 600,000 Syrians Have Returned Home In 2017″, NPR)

The fact that Syrian refugees are returning home in droves further underscores the positive impact Russia’s intervention has had on restoring security across the country. The Russian president and his generals have prevented another country in the Middle East from being senselessly ravaged and plunged into fratricidal warfare. But while Putin has achieved much of what he set out to do when he launched his campaign in September 2015, US proxies in the mostly-Kurdish SDF have seized nearly all the territory east of the Euphrates creating the de facto partition that Putin hoped to avoid. How can this situation be resolved without a clash between Washington and Moscow?

It can’t be. There can be no political settlement unless the US relinquishes control over Syrian territory and abandons its misguided project to redraw the map of the Middle East. But is that really going to happen?

It all depends on Donald Trump. If Trump really wants to end the conflict, then the Saudis and Israelis will probably comply. But if Trump is convinced that Syria is merely a skirmish in a much broader war with Iran, then he might opt to double-down by establishing bases east of the Euphrates while escalating tensions in other parts of the region. Is this what the recent flare-up in Saudi Arabia was all about? Did the Crown Prince collude with Trump’s people in detaining Saad Hariri? Is the administration trying to throw more gas on the ME fire hoping to shift the attention to Tehran?

It’s possible. Trump has never tried to conceal his hatred for Iran, but how far is he willing to take it? Is he willing to take the country to war? Here’s a clip from an article by Josh Rogin at the Washington Post which helps to illustrate how members of the media (and their think tank colleagues?) are using events in Syria to make their case against Iran. He says:

“…the Assad regime and Iran are preparing for the next phase of the long-running war, in which they will attempt to conquer the rest of the country. Whether Iran succeeds depends largely on whether the United States acknowledges and then counters that strategy.

Tehran is pouring thousands of fighters into newly acquired territories and building military bases. Although U.S.-supported forces hold territories east of the Euphrates River in Syria’s southeast, as well as along the borders of Israel and Jordan in the southwest, Iran has stated its intention to help Bashar al-Assad retake all of Syria….” (“The U.S. must prepare for Iran’s next move in Syria”, Washington Post)

Does Trump believe this nonsense? Iran has not “conquered Syria”. It was invited to help support the sovereign government in its fight against jihadist outsiders who destroyed the country and killed tens of thousands of its people. Rogin’s analysis is completely divorced from reality.

Here’s more from the same article:

“[A] task force of senior former U.S. diplomatic and military officials has come up with suggestions for how Trump could prevent Iran from taking over what’s left of liberated Syria and fulfill his own promise to contain Iranian influence in the region.”

By “liberated Syria”, Rogin is presumably referring to the territory in east Syria that is currently occupied by US Special Forces and their Kurdish proxies. Here’s more:

“Most urgently . . . the United States must impose real obstacles to Tehran’s pursuit of total victory by the Assad regime in Syria,”…. the Trump administration must increase its assistance to Sunni communities lucky enough to live outside Assad’s rule and help U.S.-supported local groups hold valuable territory in Syria’s southeast…” (WA Post)

Escalate the conflict? Is that what Rogin wants: More war? And, on what grounds?

On the basis that the enemies of the Syrian government must be given carte blanche in their battle for regime change. Isn’t that the gist of what he’s saying?

Rogin again;

“… the United States should work with regional allies to stop Iran from moving weapons and troops into Syria. That would require interdicting shipments by sea and ensuring that U.S.-supported forces control key border towns in Syria and Iraq. Such moves could check Iranian aggression without triggering armed conflict with Tehran.” (“The U.S. must prepare for Iran’s next move in Syria”, Washington Post)

Rogin’s analysis reads like a science fiction novel. He wants the United States to engage in clearly illegal acts of piracy to prevent a sovereign government from assisting a neighbor in its fight against foreign terrorists. He also wants Trump to block critical land-routes that connect Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad and Tehran, effectively imposing a military cordon around the country. Rogin thinks the US has the right to arbitrarily decide these matters without United Nations approval.

This is lunacy, and yet, this is the neocon rationale for expanding the war beyond Syria’s borders. More than anything, the neocons want to drag the United States into a war with Iran. That is their Number 1 priority.

But what about Trump? What does Trump want? Does he want to be the “exalted” leader who plunges the country into another bloody world war or does he want to implement the non-interventionist policies he supported during his campaign?

Which is it?

Puerto Rico: Ruined Infrastructure and a Refugee Crisis

Vijay Prashad

Hurricanes Irma and Maria struck Puerto Rico in September-October 2017. The impact of these storms was great, but greater still are the convulsions on the island long after the storms had passed over. Puerto Rico’s infrastructure remains in tatters, with the power grid still largely dysfunctional and basic institutions such as schools and hospitals on life support. Not surprisingly, large numbers of Puerto Ricans—who are citizens of the United States—have moved to the mainland. The Centre for Puerto Rican Studies (Hunter College, New York) estimates that of a population of 3.5 million, hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans will make this journey. Already, 1,30,000 Puerto Ricans have arrived in Florida since October.

Towns and States in the mainland U.S. that are already home to Puerto Ricans have welcomed thousands more since the storms of this year. In Holyoke, Massachusetts, for instance, hundreds of Puerto Ricans have already arrived to join their families. There is little indication that these people will return to the island. Betty Medina Lichtenstein of Enlace de Familias says that it is the elderly who are likely to return, while the younger families seem to want to stay on.

The arrival of thousands of families into a State such as Massachusetts has meant that a thousand additional students have already been enrolled in Massachusetts’ public schools. School officials say that they are sympathetic to the plight of these refugees who have fled a devastated island with its educational infrastructure in a shambles.

Schools yet to reopen

Of Puerto Rico’s 1,113 schools, only 119 have reopened. The teachers’ union, Federación de Maestros de Puerto Rico, has suggested that the government has slowed down rebuilding of schools in order to push for their privatisation. They say that the plans for the rebuilding of Puerto Rico are similar to what was done in New Orleans after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when schools fired teachers and created a network of private charter schools. The Federación worries that much the same will happen in Puerto Rico. The failure to reopen schools is one sign of such a plan.

In early November, U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos met Puerto Rico’s Education Secretary Julia Keleher in San Juan. Members of the Federación marched outside the Department of Education to demand a seat at the table. It was not offered to them. Betsy DeVos and Julia Keleher did not talk to the teachers. Julia Keleher had already been pushing a plan to privatise the island’s schools, and the storms gave her and Betsy DeVos the opportunity to do so with minimal resistance. The storm, said Julia Keleher, gave the island a “real opportunity to press the reset button”. Privatisation, she suggested to a local paper, “makes sense”. About the teachers’ unions, she said that “they can go out and protest in the streets, but that doesn’t change the fact that we can’t go back to life being the same as it was before the hurricane”.

Puerto Rico and Cuba

Two U.S. Congressmen, Kevin McCarthy and Steny Hoyer, visited Puerto Rico in November to assess the situation. They found Puerto Rico “in a state of frenzied recovery”, but with people cut off by destroyed roads and fallen electric lines, with little food and little medicine and “hope for a swift recovery even scarcer”. They pledged to fight for more resources for the island to ensure not only that it can be rebuilt but also that it can withstand the next storm.

Meanwhile, a United Nations team went to Cuba at around the same time to assess the damage and recovery there. It found that the devastation was comparable to that experienced by Puerto Rico, but that the recovery had been swift. Voluntary teams rushed in to rebuild the collapsed infrastructure and the state provided insurance to agriculturalists and homeowners who had suffered damage. A decade ago, Cuba had rebuilt its power system into a series of 1,800 decentralised diesel and fuel-oil fired electric plants. The microgrid was quickly restored to full power a week after the hurricane. It is a system that has been opposed by private monopoly power companies.

Power grid collapse

In the second week of November, when the power grid should have been functional, it went down completely. The blackout was indication enough that matters could get worse for the residents. Reports from the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) suggested that 40 per cent of the grid had been repaired. But after this blackout, the grid collapsed to 18 per cent, later recovering to 47 per cent in a few days. For nearly seven weeks, the residents of Puerto Rico have been living on generators and solar panels. This includes the few schools that are open. The Puerto Rican government had chosen a small firm from Montana that had close connections to U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. This sweetheart contract earned Whitefish, the Montana firm, $300 million to repair the collapsed grid. It turned out that Whitefish had no experience in such matters. It charged Puerto Rico $319 per hour for the work of a lineman but paid the workers only $63 per hour, the rest going to the coffers of Whitefish. When news broke of such malfeasance, the government had to break its contract with Whitefish.

Death toll

Meanwhile, controversy continues over the death toll from the storm. The government says that the total death toll is 55. However, Puerto Rican officials now say that the number is likely to be 472. But even this is a deflated figure, since there is now evidence that the government encouraged the cremation of bodies of people who died during the storm. The reason given was that without power, the bodies could not be refrigerated. But they were not all tallied towards the storm and post-storm death. High temperatures, lack of clean water and spreading bacteria have taken hundreds of lives that have not been registered as part of the death toll for the storm and its aftermath. Funeral home managers point out that the numbers given by the government are not correct. Given their own challenges, hospitals have few resources to provide accurate counts.

Doctors are worried about the particularly vulnerable population of the elderly and the newborn. With stagnant water around the island and with widespread power failure, there are worries about the Zika virus spread by mosquitoes as well as leptospirosis that would have a dangerous impact on pregnant women and newborn children. Generators from the U.S. government and solar arrays from Tesla have been able to help the hospitals in certain areas, but health clinics and hospitals in the rural interior remain in distress.

Decline in population

Puerto Rico’s population has been declining over the past two decades. From 2005 to 2015, a staggering 10 per cent of the population—446,000 people—moved to the U.S. mainland. There is an expectation that an equal number will leave the island over the next few months. The same thing happened to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The city has since been remoulded as a playground for tourists and the rich. The U.S. government’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has created a programme to transport Puerto Ricans to the mainland. The island, cynics say, is being prepared to be converted into a tourist resort, with “excess” inhabitants relocated.

A Radioactive Plume That’s Clouded in Secrecy

Linda Pentz Gunter

September 29 marked the 60th anniversary of the world’s third most deadly— and least known — nuclear accident. It took place at the Mayak plutonium production facility, in a closed Soviet city in the Urals. The huge explosion was kept secret for decades. It spread hot particles over an area of more than 20,000 square miles, exposing a population of at least 270,000 and indefinitely contaminating land and rivers. Entire villages had to be bulldozed. Residents there have lived for decades with high rates of radiologically induced illnesses and birth defects.

Now, evidence is emerging of a potentially new nuclear accident and indications point once again to Mayak as one of the likely culprits. Ironically, if there was indeed an accident there, it happened on or around the precise anniversary of the 1957 disaster. The Research Institute of Atomic Reactors in Dimitrovgrad in the region is another possible suspect.

The presence of the man-made radioactive isotope, ruthenium 106, was detected in the atmosphere in early October by a French nuclear safety institute and by a Danish monitoring station, but only recently confirmed by Russia’s meteorological agency. However, the Russian authorities continue to deny that the releases came from one of their nuclear facilities and the source of the release is yet to be identified.

And the release of ruthenium 106 is a massive one, indicating a major accident, not a minor leak. The French radiological institute for nuclear safety IRSN) calculated the release at 300 Terrabequerels. To put this in perspective, it is an amount equivalent to 375,000 times the annual release of ruthenium 106 authorized for a French nuclear power plant.

IRSN has consistently downplayed the potential harm of the plume’s fallout across Europe, a position all too eerily familiar to the French, who were falsely told at the time of the April 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the Ukraine that the radioactive plume would not cross into France.

Far higher readings have been detected in the Cheliabinsk region where the Mayak facility is located, lending more credence to the theory that the notorious nuclear facility is once again at the center of a new nuclear disaster. Are the hapless people of Mayak set to be the victims once again? And if they are, have the Russian authorities even admitted to them what has happened? Or is history repeating itself?

A longtime advocate for the victims of the 1957 Mayak catastrophe, Nadezhda Kutepova, who for years fought for the rights and compensation for the people of Mayak before being forced to flee with her family in 2015, is speaking out once again. Now settled in France, Kutepova is uniquely positioned to understand not only the culture of secrecy and coverup around Mayak, but can also deliver insights into the specific operations conducted at the facility that could be the source of this latest accident.

In testimony delivered in French on November 19, 2017, Kutepova surmised that if the release of ruthenium 106 came from Mayak, then it emanated either from an accident in the fuel reprocessing plant or from a malfunction in the radioactive waste vitrification plant. Kutepova considered Mayak likely responsible because precisely around the end of September the facility was testing new equipment in the nuclear fuel reprocessing plant where something may well have gone wrong.

Kutepova related that on September 22 a train arrived at Mayak transporting irradiated fuel from a VVER reactor. Everything about this transport was new to Mayak — the train, the waste fuel casks, and the irradiated VVER fuel which had never been reprocessed at Mayak before. Emergency alarms went off at Mayak that day, Kutepova said. Furthermore, Mayak has a long history of secrecy and cover-ups and is self-regulating.

Contradictory statements from Mayak officials about the presence, or not, of ruthenium at the Mayak facility sowed further doubt about the veracity of earlier denials that Mayak was not the source of the accident and release.

The independent French radiological laboratory CRIIRAD(Commission for Independent Research and Information about Radiation) has also weighed in, sounding the alarm in particular on behalf of the residents and workers in the immediate vicinity of the still unidentified accident site. In a November 10 press release, CRIIRAD said that the radioactive releases were “considerable and came from Russia or a neighboring country.”

CRIIRAD said the absence of information was “disquieting” because if the point of origin was not known event to those where it happened, people could not be protected. The laboratory insists that the site source of the accident must be identified with all due haste. The delays and cover-ups in the days and weeks following the Chernobyl disaster resulted in many people not receiving essential help and treatment. This, CRIIRAD says, cannot be allowed to happen again. Even though two months have now passed since the mysterious accident occurred, help can still — and must — be delivered to local populations.

CRIIRAD is well positioned to challenge this level of denial, both from the Russian authorities and its own, and rightly criticizes IRSN for belittling the likely impact on France of this latest Russian nuclear accident. CRIIRAD came into being right after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, challenging the official lies and cover-ups about the plume’s transit across Europe, and mapping numerous radioactive hotspots in France, resulting from Chernobyl fallout.

However, there may be a more mercenary motive at the heart of Russia’s silence. The Mayak site is owned by Rosatom, a Russian state monopoly company that is eagerly trying to fill the overseas marketing void left by the collapsed Westinghouse and the free-falling EDF. Rosatom sees massive profits to be made through nuclear exports, in Africa especially, but also in places like Finland. Consequently, the last thing Rosatom needs is a pubic relations black eye and the company is likely to go to any lengths to suppress the truth about a deadly nuclear accident at one of its facilities.

We may never know where the ruthenium plume came from. But this event should serve as a warning. In the event of a nuclear accident, information suppression will be the norm. The nuclear industry is banking on the old axiom — what you don’t know can’t hurt you. The one thing we can all be sure of is that everything they are doing most assuredly will.

Sri Lanka: IMF-dictated budget deepens austerity and privatisation

Saman Gunadasa

Sri Lankan Finance Minister Mangala Samaraweera presented the government’s 2018 budget to parliament early this month. The budget, in line with International Monetary Fund (IMF) demands, proposes new taxes on the working masses, increased charges for government services, deregulation of the labour laws and the further privatisation of state-owned enterprises.

Samaraweera falsely claimed that new taxes in his budget were to cover the cost of “environment protection” and the “protection of public health.”

In reality, indirect taxes, paid chiefly by working people, will constitute a staggering 74 percent of the government’s tax income, while direct taxes paid by the rich will fall to just 17 percent of the total. The measures come two months after parliament passed draconian tax measures demanded by the IMF.

The budget includes the following:

* Carbon taxes levied according to engine capacity—motorcycles 0.17 rupees per day, cars 1.78 rupees and passenger buses 2.74 rupees per day

* Polyethene tax on plastic resins, 10 rupees per kilogram

* A tax of 200,000 rupees per month for a cellular phone tower, which will increase mobile call charges

* An excise duty of 0.50 rupees per gram of sugar in beverages

* Debt repayment levies that will be charged at the rate of 0.20 rupees per 1,000-rupee bank transaction

* Advertisements circulated via SMS will be charged at the rate of 0.25 rupees per SMS

* Higher alcohol taxes: 3,300 rupees per litre for spirits; 2,400 rupees per litre for beer and wine

* A 15 percent Value Added Tax on electronic goods, cameras, watches, spectacles and several other items

* Higher taxes on all vehicles, apart from electric-powered cars, which receive a nominal tax reduction

As well as these taxes, the cost of all government services, such as train transport and postal and court charges, will be lifted by 15 percent.

With these increases the government estimates that its annual income in 2018 will climb to 2,326 billion rupees ($US15 billion), up from this year’s target of 1,997 billion rupees ($13 billion).

Government expenditure next year, however, is expected to be 3,001 billion rupees ($19 billion), mainly due to debt repayments, up from an estimated 2,677 billion rupees ($17 billion) this year. The targeted budget deficit for next year is 4.5 percent of GDP. In order to comply with IMF loan requirements, this has to be reduced to 3.5 percent by 2020.

The government’s budget is aimed at raising money to repay debt and interest payments to global finance capital. According to Samaraweera, the accumulated government debt repayments for the next three years are 7,000 billion rupees ($45 billion).

Commenting on the budget measures, Fitch ratings agency highlighted the government’s compliance with IMF demands, but warned: “High government debt and the large cost of debt servicing weighs heavily on Sri Lanka’s credit profile.”

Meanwhile, Sri Lanka’s cost of living index has climbed to unbearable levels over recent months as a result of previous tax increases and various man-made or natural calamities. In October, inflation rose to 7.8 percent, up from 6 percent in August.

Samaraweera attempted to deflect attention from this increase by announcing minimal price reductions on four essential food items—potatoes, lentils, sprats and edible oil—a day before his budget speech.

As well as stepping up its assault on the living conditions of working people, Samaraweera addressed the demands of global corporations for the deregulation of labour laws and the lifting of restrictions on foreign capital’s ability to buy land.

“Complex labour laws and bureaucracy… obstructed foreign enterprises” from investing in Sri Lanka, Samaraweera declared. He called for the repeal of the Shop & Office Employees Act. The abolition of this legislation, which covers large numbers of private sector employees, would drastically worsen wages and working conditions.

The government also plans to establish several new economic zones and industrial parks for foreign investors in areas such as Milleniya, Bingiriya, and Charlemont Estate and Weligama.

In an attempt to disguise the further privatisation of state-owned enterprises, Samaraweera used the term “Private Public Partnership” (PPP) in his budget speech.

PPPs would enable “investments in infrastructure without compromising our ability to maintain a robust social safety network,” Samaraweera claimed. “We will pursue PPPs in a wide variety of sectors covering transport and highways, power, ports, water supply, healthcare, education, housing, agri-business, retail and minerals.”

The IMF demanded the privatisation of state-owned enterprises before it would release the next tranche of the $1.5 billion loan approved in mid-2016. The government has already established a PPP Unit in the finance, which is being provided with financial support by the World Bank.

Samaraweera also foreshadowed the deregulation of the country’s two principal banks: “Our state banks are now mature enough to raise their own capital from the markets. It is in this context that we will allow the Bank of Ceylon and the People’s Bank to raise both debt and equity capital,” he said. Not surprisingly, Ceylon Chamber of Commerce chairman Rajendra Theagarajah hailed the proposal.

Samaraweera also claimed that the government’s ongoing attack on free education and its plans for private universities were an “investment in world class university education” and “market oriented vocational training.”

A comment on the budget in this week’s Sunday Times was particularly revealing. “Serious discussion on the budget has been mostly favourable. Accountants, economists, industrialists, chambers of commerce and other professional bodies have viewed it favourably and been in agreement with the general thrust and objectives of the budget,” it stated.

That working people, rural farmers, fishermen, unemployed youth and students, are omitted from this assessment is no accident.

The government is acutely conscious of the growing popular opposition to its big-business policies. That is why the second largest allocation in the 2018 budget, next to debt repayments, is for the security forces whose total funding will increase to 290 billion rupees ($1,870 million) in 2018, up from 283 billion rupees ($1,826 million) this year.

Colombo, which has deployed the military against workers’ strikes and mobilised the police in violent attacks on students, the rural masses and the Tamil population in the country’s north, is preparing to escalate these assaults.

The final parliamentary vote on the regressive proposals, which Samaraweera says are “non-negotiable,” is scheduled for December 9.

Downward pressure on Australian wages becoming the “new normal”

Nick Beams 

The continued downward pressure on wages, which has led to the lowest growth rates in more than 50 years, is not a cyclical downturn but is rapidly becoming a permanent feature of the Australian economy.

While this outlook was not explicitly spelled out, it was the central conclusion to be drawn from a speech delivered by the governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, Philip Lowe, to a group of business economists in Sydney on Tuesday evening.

Lowe began his remarks by expressing something of the bewilderment which characterises central bankers and economic authorities around the world in the post-global-financial crisis environment. They confront a situation in which all their models of how the capitalist economy is supposed to work—supplying rising wages and living standards—have broken down.

Lowe began by recalling that in an address to the Australian Business Economists annual dinner five years ago he had addressed the subject of “What is Normal?”

“Five years on, we are still searching to understand what is normal,” he said. Around the world, real income growth has been unusually slow in many countries and not surprisingly “these households, including many here in Australia, wonder whether this slow growth in incomes is now the new normal.”

Lowe left the question open but the content of his speech made clear that the decline in wages is going to continue.

He presented an upbeat assessment on investment in the non-mining economy, saying business was “feeling better than it has for some time and it is lifting capital spending and creating more jobs.”

But this is not translating into improved living standards with growth in consumer spending remaining “fairly soft,” Lowe said. “For some years, consumption growth has been weaker than forecast and it has not exceeded 3 percent for quite a few years.”

This was “most likely” the result of the combination of “weak growth in real household income and the high level of household debt.” The RBA’s own forecast is for consumption spending to pick up to around 3 percent, above the average growth for the last decade, “but below the average for the period prior to the financial crisis.”

Low growth in wages had been “distinguishing feature” of the Australian economy with the wage price index increasing by just 2 percent over the past year compared to increases of between 3.5 to 4 percent in earlier years.

“Growth in average hourly earnings has been weaker still: in trend terms it is running at the lowest rate as least since the 1960s. Not only are wage increases low, but some people have been moving out of high-paying jobs associated with the mining sector into lower-paying jobs.

“We have heard from our liaison program that there has been downward pressure on non-wage payments, including allowances, and an increase in the proportion of new employees on lower salaries than their predecessors.”

While he did not elaborate, Lowe pointed to the mechanism by which low wages growth leads to a redistribution of wealth up the income scale. “Low growth in wages means low inflation, which means low interest rates, which means high asset valuations.”

In other words, significant holders of property, land and financial assets benefit directly from the low-interest rate regime which is itself in part a product of low wage growth.

Lowe’s speech pointed to one of the central reasons for the ongoing downward pressure on wages—lower economic growth and the consequent increased competition leading to the outsourcing of jobs to cheaper labour areas and the introduction of new technology.

“In the past, the pressure of competition from globalisation and from technology was felt most acutely in the manufacturing industry. Now, these same forces of competition are being felt in an increasingly wide range of service industries,” Lowe stated.

“One response to this competitive pressure is to have a laser-like focus on containing costs. Over recent times there has been a mindset in many businesses, including some here in Australia, that the key to higher profits is to reduce costs.”

The same phenomenon was noted in a speech earlier this month by the deputy governor of the RBA, Guy Debelle, on the subject of business investment.

One of the key effects of the global financial crisis has been a long-running decline in business investment, despite the fall in interest rates to record lows. For some time, this did not show up in aggregate data for the Australian economy because of large investment in mining fueled by the stimulus measures introduced by the Chinese government. But with the end of the mining boom, the Australian economy is more closely reflecting global trends.

According to Debelle, investment spending in the non-mining sector has been weaker than predicted by the RBA’s models and past relationships. Investment by small firms “has been unusually weak since the crisis.”

Since the global financial crisis, larger companies have been more risk averse and have tightened their investment criteria, preferring to hold on to cash and pay down debt rather than undertake expansion, despite falls in borrowing costs because of low interest rates.

Debelle pointed to “indications that the stock market is rewarding cost reduction rather than investment spending where payoffs are multi-year rather than immediate.”

This is an international phenomenon, most starkly reflected in the US where investment is at historic lows. The finance corporations, speculators and hedge fund that dominate shareholdings are demanding that profits be used to boost shareholder value rather than expand productive capacity.

While share buybacks in Australia are not nearly as prevalent as in the US, there is a rising trend of dividend payouts. “There appears to be a desire to have ‘excess’ capital returned to shareholders through buybacks and dividends, rather than utilising that capital with uncertain returns,” Debelle said.

This means that workers’ wages and the living standards of their families are hit in two ways. Pressure from financial investors brings relentless cost cutting through wage cuts in order to boost profits. At the same time, those profits are handed over to shareholders in the form of increased dividends rather than being used to expand productive capacity which would increase output, employment and wages.