13 Nov 2019

Israel is Silencing the Last Voices Trying to Stop Abuses Against Palestinians

Jonathan Cook

It has been a week of appalling abuses committed by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank – little different from the other 2,670 weeks endured by Palestinians since the occupation began in 1967.
The difference this past week was that several entirely unexceptional human rights violations that had been caught on film went viral on social media.
One shows a Palestinian father in the West Bank city of Hebron leading his son by the hand to kindergarten. The pair are stopped by two heavily armed soldiers, there to help enforce the rule of a few hundred illegal Jewish settlers over the city’s Palestinian population.
The soldiers scream at the father, repeatedly and violently push him and then grab his throat as they accuse his small son of throwing stones. As the father tries to shield his son from the frightening confrontation, one soldier pulls out his rifle and sticks it in the father’s face.

It is a minor incident by the standards of Israel’s long-running belligerent occupation. But it powerfully symbolises the unpredictable, humiliating, terrifying and sometimes deadly experiences faced daily by millions of Palestinians.
A video of another such incident emerged last week. A Palestinian man is ordered to leave an area by an armed Israeli policewoman. He turns and walks slowly away, his hands in the air. Moments later she shoots a sponge-tipped bullet into his back. He falls to the ground, writhing in agony.

It is unclear whether the man was being used for target practice or simply for entertainment.
The reason such abuses are so commonplace is that they are almost never investigated – and even less often are those responsible punished.
It is not simply that Israeli soldiers become inured to the suffering they inflict on Palestinians daily. It is the soldiers’ very duty to crush the Palestinians’ will for freedom, to leave them utterly hopeless. That is what is required of an army policing a population permanently under occupation.
The message is only underscored by the impunity the soldiers enjoy. Whatever they do, they have the backing not only of their commanders but of the government and courts.
Just that point was underlined late last month. An unnamed Israeli army sniper was convicted of shooting dead a 14-year-old boy in Gaza last year. The Palestinian child had been participating in one of the weekly protests at the perimeter fence.
Such trials and convictions are a great rarity. Despite damning evidence showing that Uthman Hillis was shot in the chest with a live round while posing no threat, the court sentenced the sniper to the equivalent of a month’s community service.
In Israel’s warped scales of justice, the cost of a Palestinian child’s life amounts to no more than a month of extra kitchen duties for his killer.
But the overwhelming majority of the 220 Palestinian deaths at the Gaza fence over the past 20 months will never be investigated. Nor will the wounding of tens of thousands more Palestinians, many of them now permanently disabled.
There is an equally disturbing trend. The Israeli public have become so used to seeing YouTube videos of soldiers – their sons and daughters – abuse Palestinians that they now automatically come to the soldiers’ defence, however egregious the abuses.
The video of the father and son threatened in Hebron elicited few denunciations. Most Israelis rallied behind the soldiers. Amos Harel, a military analyst for the liberal Haaretz newspaper, observed that an “irreversible process” was under way among Israelis: “The soldiers are pure and any criticism of them is completely forbidden.”
When the Israeli state offers impunity to its soldiers, the only deterrence is the knowledge that such abuses are being monitored and recorded for posterity – and that one day these soldiers may face real accountability, in a trial for war crimes.
But Israel is working hard to shut down those doing the investigating – human rights groups.
For many years Israel has been denying United Nations monitors – including international law experts like Richard Falk and Michael Lynk – entry to the occupied territories in a blatant bid to stymie their human rights work.
Last week Human Rights Watch, headquartered in New York, also felt the backlash. The Israeli supreme court approved the deportation of Omar Shakir, its Israel-Palestine director.
Before his appointment by HRW, Shakir had called for a boycott of the businesses in illegal Jewish settlements. The judges accepted the state’s argument: he broke Israeli legislation that treats Israel and the settlements as indistinguishable and forbids support for any kind of boycott.
But Shakir rightly understands that the main reason Israel needs soldiers in the West Bank – and has kept them there oppressing Palestinians for more than half a century – is to protect settlers who were sent there in violation of international law.
The collective punishment of Palestinians, such as restrictions on movement and the theft of resources, was inevitable the moment Israel moved the first settlers into the West Bank. That is precisely why it is a war crime for a state to transfer its population into occupied territory.
But Shakir had no hope of a fair hearing. One of the three judges in his case, Noam Sohlberg, is himself just such a lawbreaker. He lives in Alon Shvut, a settlement near Hebron.
Israel’s treatment of Shakir is part of a pattern. In recent days other human rights groups have faced the brunt of Israel’s vindictiveness.
Laith Abu Zeyad, a Palestinian field worker for Amnesty International, was recently issued a travel ban, denying him the right to attend a relative’s funeral in Jordan. Earlier he was refused the right to accompany his mother for chemotherapy in occupied East Jerusalem.
And last week Arif Daraghmeh, a Palestinian field worker for B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, was seized at a checkpoint and questioned about his photographing of the army’s handling of Palestinian protests. Daraghmeh had to be taken to hospital after being forced to wait in the sun.
It is a sign of Israel’s overweening confidence in its own impunity that it so openly violates the rights of those whose job it is to monitor human rights.
Palestinians, meanwhile, are rapidly losing the very last voices prepared to stand up and defend them against the systematic abuses associated with Israel’s occupation. Unless reversed, the outcome is preordained: the rule of the settlers and soldiers will grow ever more ruthless, the repression ever more ugly.
Posted by at No comments:

How Iran-Backed Forces Are Taking Over Iraq

Patrick Cockburn

Iraqi security and pro-Iranian paramilitary forces are shooting into crowds of protesters in a bid to drive them from the centre of Baghdad and end six weeks of demonstrations that have challenged the political system to an extent not seen since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.
Police retook three bridges across the Tigris River that lead to the fortified Green Zone on Saturday and are surrounding Tahrir Square, the central focus of the protests.
In al-Rasheed Street, close to the square, police set fire to tents set up by volunteer doctors to treat injured protesters.
At least six people were killed in the latest clashes, four of them by bullets and two by heavy duty tear gas grenades fired directly at the head or bodies of protesters, according to Amnesty International.
It says that 264 people taking part in demonstrations have died since 1 October, though the Iraqi High Commission for Human Rights gives a higher figure of 301 dead and 15,000 injured.
The protests – and the merciless government attempt to stamp them out – are the biggest threat to the power of the Iraqi political establishment since Isis was advancing on Baghdad in 2014. In many respects, the danger to the status quo is greater now because Isis was an existential threat to the Shia majority who had no choice but to support their ruling elite, however predatory and incompetent they had proved in office.
The slaughter of so many demonstrators is similar to the tactics used by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in 2013 to crush protests opposing his military coup that had overthrown the elected government.
By way of contrast, there was no such violence response to street demonstrations in Baghdad in 2016 , when protesters invaded the Green Zone, or in Basra in 2018, when the government and party offices were set ablaze.
Over the last month-and-a-half, however, there has been repeated use of snipers firing at random into demonstrations or targeting local protest leaders. The people doing the killing are parts of of the government’s highly fragmented security services and factions of the paramilitary Hashd al-Shaabi or Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF) known to be aligned with Iran.
It is the Iranian leadership, and more especially General Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Revolutionary Guard’s al-Quds force and supremo of Iranian regional policy, who is orchestrating the campaign to smash the protests by sustained use of violence.
Precisely why General Qasem Soleimani decided to do so is a mystery, since the initial demonstration in Tahrir Square on 1 October was small.
The NGOs organising it had been failing for months to generate momentum.
It was the unprecedented “shoot-to-kill” policy of the authorities that turned these ill-attended rallies into a mass movement not far from a general uprising.
During the first days of the protests, protest organisers told The Independent they were at first baffled by what had happened, inclining at first to believe that the the first day’s violence, when at least 10 people were killed, might be a one-off overreaction that would not be repeated.
But the killing of protesters, counter-productive though it might be, went on.
On the day after the first shootings, bands of young protesters, looking very unintimidated, could be seen milling about the area. The authorities escalated the crisis further by declaring a 24-hour curfew and closing down the internet, a collective punishment of all 7 million people in Baghdad that could only spread support for the demonstrators.
At the same time, paramilitary groups, open in their loyalty to Iran, sent their black-clad militants into television stations publicising the protests to wreck their equipment and studios. They assaulted injured demonstrators in hospitals and abducted and threatened journalists, doctors and anybody else backing the demonstrations.
It is unlikely that this was a pre-arranged plot by the pro-Iranian paramilitaries acting on their own initiative.
Several of their leaders, whose groups were subsequently known to have supplied snipers to shoot at the street protests, were interviewed by The Independent a few days earlier.
Though they later declared that they had long detected a deep-laid conspiracy by the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the UAE to use the protests to overthrow the political system in Iraq, they did not say so at the time. Qais al-Khazali, the leader of Asaib Ahl al-Haq, a powerful paramilitary faction, said that “Iran wants a solution [in the US-Iran confrontation] but it cannot say this itself.”
He downplayed the idea that a US-Iran war was on the cards.
Abu Ala al-Walai, the head of Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada, said in a separate interview that what most concerned him was an Israeli drone attack on a weapons depot at one of his bases on the outskirts of Baghdad.
Nevertheless, the speed and cohesion with which these pro-Iranian Shia paramilitary groups reacted – or overreacted – to the protests suggests a detailed contingency plan.
“The Iranians always have a plan,” notes one Iraqi commentator.
Nor did the paramilitaries act alone: no distinct boundary line divides the PMF from state security institutions. The PMF may number about 85,000, are paid their salaries by the Iraqi government and the chairman of the PMF is Faleh al-Fayyad, the government’s national security adviser.
The Interior Minister always belongs to the Iran-supported Badr Organisation and the ministry’s Emergency Response Division, for instance, is reported to have provided snipers to shoot protesters.
In the weeks since the first peaceful march was met with extreme violence, the intensity of the repression has escalated in Baghdad and across southern Iraq.
In the Shia holy city of Karbala on one day, snipers killed 18 people and survivors were detained by pop-up checkpoints as they fled through the alleyways.
Kidnapping, disappearances, intimidation – a whole apparatus of repression – has been put in place and is unlikely to be dismantled.
Pro-Iranian pro-status quo individuals and institutions within the Iraqi political system are becoming more dominant.
Critics of the status quo, like the populist nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose coalition is the largest grouping in parliament, have fallen silent.
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani called last Friday for the security forces to refrain from using “excessive force”, but there is no sign of this having any impact.
Adel Abdul Mahdi, the Iraqi prime minister for the last year, has come out of the crisis looking ineffectual.
The Iraqi political class as a whole have evidently decided that they must stamp out the protests to preserve their interests.
The protesters in the streets – the radicalism of whose demands and the their vagueness about how they might be achieved resembles French students during the 1968 events  in France – are not able to say what they would put in place of the present corrupt and dysfunctional government. As for those carrying out the repression, they are so steeped in blood that it will be impossible for them to reverse course, not that they show any sign of wanting to do so.
Posted by at No comments:

Agrarian Crisis and Malnutrition: GM Agriculture Is Not the Answer

Colin Todhunter

M S Swaminathan is often referred to as the ‘father’ of India’s Green Revolution. In 2009, he said that  no scientific evidence had emerged to justify concerns about genetically modified (GM) crops, often regarded as stage two of the Green Revolution.
In a December 2018 paper in the journal Current Science, however, it was argued that Bt insecticidal cotton (India’s only officially approved commercial GM crop) is a failure and has not provided livelihood security for mainly resource-poor, small and marginal farmers.
The paper attracted a good deal of attention because, along with scientist P C Kesavan, Swaminathan was the co-author.
They concluded that globally both Bt crops and herbicide-tolerant crops are unsustainable and have not decreased the need for toxic chemical pesticides, the reason for these GM crops in the first place. Attention was also drawn to evidence that indicates Bt toxins are toxic to all organisms.
Kesavan and Swaminathan mounted a general critique of the GM paradigm. They noted that glyphosate-based herbicides, used on most GM crops in the world, and their active ingredient glyphosate, are genotoxic, cause birth defects and are carcinogenic. They also asserted that GM crop yields are no better than that of non-GM crops.
The authors concluded that genetic engineering technology is supplementary and must be need based. In more than 99% of cases, they said that time-honoured conventional breeding is sufficient.
In fact, Kesavan and Swaminathan argued that a sustainable ‘Evergreen Revolution’ based on a ‘systems approach’ and ‘ecoagriculture’ would guarantee equitable food security by ensuring access of rural communities to food.
Part of the pushback against Kevasan and Swaminathan has come from Dr Deepak Pental, developer and promoter of GM mustard at Delhi University. He responded to their piece with an article in September 2019, again in Current Science.
He argued that Kesavan and Swaminathan have unequivocally aligned themselves with overzealous environmentalists and ideologues, who have mindlessly attacked the use of GM technology to improve crops required for meeting the food and nutritional needs of a global population that is predicted to peak out at 11.2 billion. Pental added that the two authors’ analysis of modern breeding technologies is a reflection of their ideological proclivities.
By resorting to such statements, Pental was drawing on industry-inspired spin: criticisms of GM are driven by ideology not fact and GM is required to ‘feed the world’. Both assertions are baseless but are employed time and again across the globe by the pro-GM lobby in an attempt to discredit inconvenient scientific findings and campaigners who forward valid criticisms.
In response to Pental, Andrew Paul Gutierrez, Peter E. Kenmore and Aruna Rodrigues hit back with a piece in a November 2019 edition of the same journal, ‘When biotechnologists lack objectivity’. In it, they argue:
“The need to counter Pental is critical because of his influence as part of a lobbying force for unbridled legislation for GE technologies and as a purveyor of scare tactics that food security in India will be compromised without them.”
They continue:
“We question his failure to consider whether genetically modified crops (GMOs) are safe for human and ecological health, increase yield and quality, are rigorously tested using proper risk assessment biosafety protocols, and whether biosafety research level (BRL) mechanisms for GMOs field testing under various programmes are being implemented? These are the major themes of our rebuttal.”
The authors indicate the adverse impacts on human health of GMOs and associated agrochemical inputs and the very real risk of gene flow and other ways by which non-GM crops and seeds can be contaminated by their GM counterparts:
“Genetic contamination is of special concern in India which has rich genetic diversity of crops/plants, and yet there are ongoing efforts to release GMO herbicide tolerant mustard (Brassica juncea) in India, which is a centre of diversity and domestication of over 5,000 wild and domesticated varieties of mustard and the wider ‘family’ of brassicas that includes 9,720 accessions… We must question why regulators would ever consider approval of GMOs of native species (e.g. of Desi cottons, brinjal eggplant, mustard, rice, among others).”
As alluded to in the above extract, India has a wealth of plant species that have evolved and been adapted over millennia. The country has good-quality traditional seeds which are ideally suited for local soils, climates and pests. And these seeds are less resource intensive. We must therefore question why Pental’s GM mustard is being pushed so hard when it does not out-yield certain mustard species that India has already.
While touching on serious conflicts of interest within regulatory bodies, the authors also discuss Bt cotton and GM mustard, the commercialisation of which is currently held up due to a public litigation case with Aruna Rodrigues acting as lead petitioner.
They provide data to highlight the myth of Bt cotton success in India. However, GM promoters continue to peddle the story of Bt cotton success and aim to drive the full-scale introduction of GM crops into Indian agriculture on the back of this false narrative.
The authors explain that the current GM Bt cotton hybrids in India were indeed developed as a ‘value capture’ mechanism that enabled the seed industry to side-step intractable legal intellectual property rights: the interests of poor farmers were sacrificed for corporate commercial benefit.
In the article, data is also presented for GM mustard and the authors argue that it shows no yield advantage and its testing and evaluation have involved protocol violations.
In India, various high-level reports have advised against the adoption of GM crops. Appointed by the Supreme Court, the ‘Technical Expert Committee (TEC) Final Report’ (2013) was scathing about the prevailing regulatory system and highlighted its inadequacies and serious inherent conflicts of interest. The TEC recommended a 10-year moratorium on the commercial release of all GM crops.
Kesavan and Swaminathan, in their piece. also criticised India’s GM regulating bodies due to a lack of competency and endemic conflicts of interest and a lack of expertise in GM risk assessment protocols, including food safety assessment and the assessment of environmental impacts. They also questioned regulators’ failure to carry out a socio-economic assessment of GM impacts on resource-poor small and marginal farmers and called for “able economists who are familiar with and will prioritize rural livelihoods, and the interests of resource-poor small and marginal farmers rather than serve corporate interests and their profits.”
As we have seen with the push to get GM mustard commercialised, the problems described by the TEC persist. Through her numerous submissions to the Supreme Court, Rodrigues has asserted that GM mustard is being pushed for commercialisation based on flawed tests (or no tests) and a lack of public scrutiny. In effect, she argues, there has been unremitting scientific fraud and outright regulatory delinquency. It must also be noted that this crop is herbicide-tolerant (HT), which, as stated by the TEC, is wholly inappropriate for India with its small biodiverse, multi-cropping farms.
Rodrigues has for a long time contended that GM ‘regulation’ in India occurs in a system dogged by serious conflicts of interest: funders, promoters and regulators are basically one and the same. She argues that agricultural institutions and numerous public sector scientists working within these bodies along with a powerful lobbying force are joined at the hip in pushing for GM.
GM Silver bullet misses the target
If the pro-GM lobby is genuinely concerned about ‘feeding the world’, it should really be questioning why the world already produces enough to feed 10 million people but over two billion are experiencing micronutrient deficiencies (of which over 800 million are classed as chronically undernourished); why we are seeing rising rates of obesity, diabetes and a range of other health-related conditions; and why, post-Green Revolution, the range of crops grown has narrowed and the nutrient content of food and diets has diminished.
The answers lie with the practices, processes and toxic inputs that are integral to the prevailing model of chemical-intensive, industrial agriculture and the dynamics of the globalised capitalist food system. Throughout the world, this model has become tied to agro-export mono-cropping (often with non-food commodities taking up prime agricultural land), sovereign debt repayment and World Bank/IMF ‘structural adjustment’ directives, the outcomes of which have included a displacement of a food-producing peasantry, the consolidation of rapacious global agri-food oligopolies and the transformation of many countries into food deficit areas.
Global food insecurity and malnutrition are therefore not the result of a lack of productivity.
As for India, although it fares poorly in world hunger assessments, the country has more than enough food to feed its 1.3 billion-plus population and with appropriate policy support measures could draw on its own indigenous agroecological know-how to do so.
Where farmers’ livelihoods are concerned, the pro-GM lobby says GM will boost productivity and help secure cultivators a better income. This too is misleading and again ignores crucial political and economic contexts. For instance, to gain brief insight into the nature of India’s agrarian crisis and why farmers are leaving the sector, let us turn to renowned journalist P Sainath who says:
“The agrarian crises in five words is: hijack of agriculture by corporations. The process by which it is done in five words: predatory commercialisation of the countryside. When your cultivation costs have risen 500 per cent over a decade, the result of that crisis, that process in five words: biggest displacement in our history.”
Little surprise, therefore, that even with bumper harvests, Indian farmers still find themselves in financial distress.
India’s farmers are not experiencing financial hardship due to low productivity. They are reeling under the effects of neoliberal policies, years of neglect and a deliberate strategy to displace smallholder agriculture at the behest of the World Bank and global agri-food corporations. And people are not hungry in India because its farmers do not produce enough food. Hunger and malnutrition result from various factors, not least poor food distribution, lack of infrastructure, (gender) inequality and poverty.
However, aside from putting a positive spin on the questionable performance of GM agriculture, the pro-GM lobby, both outside of India and within, has wasted no time in wrenching these issues from their political contexts to use the notions of ‘helping farmers’ and ‘feeding the world’ as lynchpins of its promotional strategy.
Posted by at No comments:

The Greatest Scam in History: How the Energy Companies Took Us All

Naomi Oreskes

It’s a tale for all time. What might be the greatest scam in history or, at least, the one that threatens to take history down with it. Think of it as the climate-change scam that beat science, big time.
Scientists have been seriously investigating the subject of human-made climate change since the late 1950s and political leaders have been discussing it for nearly as long. In 1961, Alvin Weinberg, the director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, called carbon dioxide one of the “big problems” of the world “on whose solution the entire future of the human race depends.” Fast-forward nearly 30 years and, in 1992, President George H.W. Bush signed the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), promising “concrete action to protect the planet.”
Today, with Puerto Rico still recovering from Hurricane Maria and fires burning across California, we know that did not happen. Despite hundreds of scientific reports and assessments, tens of thousands of peer-reviewed scientific papers, and countless conferences on the issue, man-made climate change is now a living crisis on this planet. Universities, foundations, churches, and individuals have indeed divested from fossil fuel companies and, led by a 16-year-old Swedish girl, citizens across the globe have taken to the streets to express their outrage. Children have refused to go to school on Fridays to protest the potential loss of their future. And if you need a measure of how long some of us have been at this, in December, the Conference of Parties to the UNFCCC will meet for the 25th time.
Scientists working on the issue have often told me that, once upon a time, they assumed, if they did their jobs, politicians would act upon the information. That, of course, hasn’t happened. Anything but, across much of the planet. Worse yet, science failed to have the necessary impact in significant part because of disinformation promoted by the major fossil-fuel companies, which have succeeded in diverting attention from climate change and successfully blocking meaningful action.
Making Climate Change Go Away
Much focus has been put on ExxonMobil’s history of disseminating disinformation, partly because of the documented discrepancies between what that company said in public about climate change and what its officials said (and funded) in private. Recently, a trial began in New York City accusing the company of misleading its investors, while Massachusetts is prosecuting ExxonMobil for misleading consumers as well.
If only it had just been that one company, but for more than 30 years, the fossil-fuel industry and its allies have denied the truth about anthropogenic global warming. They have systematically misled the American people and so purposely contributed to endless delays in dealing with the issue by, among other things, discounting and disparaging climate science, mispresenting scientific findings, and attempting to discredit climate scientists. These activities are documented in great detail in How Americans Were Deliberately Misled about Climate Change, a report I recently co-authored, as well as in my 2010 book and 2014 film, Merchants of Doubt.
A key aspect of the fossil-fuel industry’s disinformation campaign was the mobilization of “third-party allies”: organizations and groups with which it would collaborate and that, in some cases, it would be responsible for creating.
In the 1990s, these allied outfits included the Global Climate Coalition, the Cooler Heads Coalition, Informed Citizens for the Environment, and the Greening Earth Society. Like ExxonMobil, such groups endlessly promoted a public message of denial and doubt: that we weren’t really sure if climate change was happening; that the science wasn’t settled; that humanity could, in any case, readily adapt at a later date to any changes that did occur; and that addressing climate change directly would wreck the American economy. Two of these groups — Informed Citizens for the Environment and the Greening Earth Society — were, in fact, AstroTurf organizations, created and funded by a coal industry trade association but dressed up to look like grass-roots citizens’ action organizations.
Similar messaging was pursued by a network of think tanks promoting free market solutions to social problems, many with ties to the fossil-fuel industry. These included the George C. Marshall Institute, the Cato Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Heartland Institute. Often their politically motivated contrarian claims were presented in formats that make them look like the scientific reports whose findings they were contradicting.
In 2009, for instance, the Cato Institute issued a report that precisely mimicked the format, layout, and structure of the government’s U.S. National Climate Assessment. Of course, it made claims thoroughly at odds with the actual report’s science. The industry also promoted disinformation through its trade associations, including the American Legislative Exchange Council, the American Petroleum Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Black Chamber of Commerce, and the National Association of Manufacturers.
Both think tanks and trade organizations have been involved in personal attacks on the reputations of scientists. One of the earliest documented was on climate scientist Benjamin Santer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who showed that the observed increase in global temperatures could not be attributed to increased solar radiation. He served as the lead author of the Second Assessment Report of the U.N.’s prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, responsible for the 1995 conclusion that “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human impact on the climate system.” Santer became the target of a vicious, arguably defamatory attack by physicists from the George C. Marshall Institute and the Global Climate Coalition, who accused him of fraud. Other climate scientists, including Michael Mann, Jonathan Overpeck, Malcolm Hughes, Ray Bradley, Katharine Hayhoe, and, I should note, myself, have been subject to harassment, investigation, hacked emails, and politically motivated freedom-of-information attacks.
How to Play Climate Change for a Fool
When it came to industry disinformation, the role of third-party allies was on full display at the House Committee on Oversight hearings on climate change in late October. As their sole witness, the Republicans on that committee invited Mandy Gunasekera, the founder and president of Energy45, a group whose purpose, in its own words, is to “support the Trump energy agenda.”
Energy45 is part of a group known, bluntly enough, as the CO2 Coalition and is a perfect example of what I’ve long thought of as zombie denialism in which older players spouting industry arguments suddenly reappear in new forms. In this case, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the George C. Marshall Institute was a leader in climate-change disinformation. From 1974-1999, its director, William O’Keefe, had also been the executive vice president and later CEO of the American Petroleum Institute. The Marshall Institute itself closed in 2015, only to re-emerge a few years later as the CO2 Coalition.
The comments of Republican committee members offer a sense of just how deeply the climate-change disinformation campaign is now lodged in the heart of the Trump administration and congressional Republicans as 2019 draws to an end and the planet visibly heats. Consider just six of their “facts”:
1) The misleading claim that climate change will be “mild and manageable.” There is no scientific evidence to support this. On the contrary, literally hundreds of scientific reports over the past few decades, including those U.S. National Climate Assessments, have affirmed that any warming above 2 degrees Centigrade will lead to grave and perhaps catastrophic effects on “health, livelihoods, food security, water supply, human security, and economic growth.” The U.N.’s IPCC has recently noted that avoiding the worst impacts of global warming will “require rapid and far-reaching transitions in energy… infrastructure… and industrial systems.”
Recent events surrounding Hurricanes Sandy, Michael, Harvey, Maria, and Dorian, as well as the devastating wildfire at the ironically named town of Paradise, California, in 2018 and the fires across much of that state this fall, have shown that the impacts of climate change are already part of our lives and becoming unmanageable. Or if you want another sign of where this country is at this moment, consider a new report from the Army War College indicating that “the Department of Defense (DoD) is precariously unprepared for the national security implications of climate change-induced global security challenges.” And if the Pentagon isn’t prepared to manage climate change, it’s hard to imagine any part of the U.S. government that might be.
2) The misleading claim that global prosperity is actually being driven by fossil fuels. No one denies that fossil fuels drove the Industrial Revolution and, in doing so, contributed substantively to rising living standards for hundreds of millions of people in Europe, North America, and parts of Asia. But the claim that fossil fuels are the essence of global prosperity today is, at best, a half-truth because what is at stake here isn’t the past but the future. Disruptive climate change fueled by greenhouse gas emissions from the use of oil, coal, and natural gas now threatens both the prosperity that parts of this planet have already achieved and future economic growth of just about any sort. Nicholas Stern, the former chief economist of the World Bank and one of the foremost experts on the economics of climate change, has put our situation succinctly this way: “High carbon growth self-destructs.”
3) A misleading claim that fossil fuels represent “cheap energy.” Fossil fuels are not cheap. When their external costs are included — that is, not just the price of extracting, distributing, and profiting from them, but what it will cost in all our lives once you add in the fires, extreme storms, flooding, health effects, and everything else that their carbon emissions into the atmosphere will bring about — they couldn’t be more expensive. The International Monetary Fund estimates that the cost to consumers above and beyond what we pay at the pump or in our electricity bills already comes to more than $5 trillion dollars annually. That’s trillion, not billion. Put another way, we are all paying a massive, largely unnoticed subsidy to the oil, gas, and coal industry to destroy our civilization. Among other things, those subsidies already “damage the environment, caus[e]… premature deaths through local air pollution, [and] exacerbat[e] congestion and other adverse side effects of vehicle use.”
4) A misleading claim about poverty and fossil fuels. That fossil fuels are the solution to the energy needs of the world’s poor is a tale being heavily promoted by ExxonMobil, among others. The idea that ExxonMobil is suddenly concerned about the plight of the global poor is, of course, laughable or its executives wouldn’t be planning (as they are) for significant increases in fossil-fuel production between now and 2030, while downplaying the threat of climate change. As Pope Francis, global justice leader Mary Robinson, and former U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon — as well as countless scientists and advocates of poverty reduction and global justice — have repeatedly emphasized, climate change will, above all, hurt the poor. It is they who will first be uprooted from their homes (and homelands); it is they who will be migrating into an increasingly hostile and walled-in world; it is they who will truly feel the heat, literal and figurative, of it all. A fossil-fuel company that cared about the poor would obviously not be committed, above all else, to pursuing a business model based on oil and gas exploration and development. The cynicism of this argument is truly astonishing.
Moreover, while it’s true that the poor need affordable energy, it is not true that they need fossil fuels. More than a billion people worldwide lack access (or, at least, reliable access) to electricity, but many of them also lack access to an electricity grid, which means fossil fuels are of little use to them. For such communities, solar and wind power are the only reasonable ways to go, the only ones that could rapidly and affordably be put in place and made available.
5) Misleading assertions about the costs of renewable energy. The cheap fossil fuel narrative is regularly coupled with misleading assertions about the allegedly high costs of renewable energy. According to Bloomberg News, however, in two-thirds of the world, solar is already the cheapest form of newly installed electricity generation, cheaper than nuclear, natural gas, or coal. Improvements in energy storage are needed to maximize the penetration of renewables, particularly in developed countries, but such improvements are happening quickly. Between 2010 and 2017, the price of battery storage decreased a startling 79% and most experts believe that, in the near future, many of the storage problems can and will be solved.
6) The false claim that, under President Trump, the U.S. has actually cut greenhouse gas emissions. Republicans have claimed not only that such emissions have fallen but that the United States under President Trump has done more to reduce emissions than any other country on the planet. One environmental reporter, who has described herself as “accustomed to hearing a lot of misinformation” about climate change, characterized this statement as “brazenly false.” In fact, U.S. CO2 emissions spiked in 2018, increasing by 3.1% over 2017. Methane emissions are also on the rise and President Trump’s proposal to rollback methane standards will ensure that unhappy trend continues.
Science Isn’t Enough
And by the way, when it comes to the oil companies, that’s just to start down a far longer list of misinformation and false claims they’ve been peddling for years. In our 2010 book, Merchants of Doubt, Erik Conway and I showed that the strategies and tactics used by Big Energy to deny the harm of fossil-fuel use were, in many cases, remarkably similar to those long used by the tobacco industry to deny the harm of tobacco use — and this was no coincidence. Many of the same PR firms, advertising agencies, and institutions were involved in both cases.
The tobacco industry was finally prosecuted by the Department of Justice, in part because of the ways in which the individual companies coordinated with each other and with third-party allies to present false information to consumers. Through congressional hearings and legal discovery, the industry was pegged with a wide range of activities it funded to mislead the American people. Something similar has occurred with Big Energy and the harm fossil fuels are doing to our lives, our civilization, our planet.
Still, a crucial question about the fossil-fuel industry remains to be fully explored: Which of its companies have funded the activities of the trade organizations and other third-party allies who deny the facts about climate change? In some cases, we already know the answers. In 2006, for instance, the Royal Society of the United Kingdom documented ExxonMobil’s funding of 39 organizations that promoted “inaccurate and misleading” views of climate science. The Society was able to identify $2.9 million spent to that end by that company in the year 2005 alone. That, of course, was just one year and clearly anything but the whole story.
Nearly all of these third-party allies are incorporated as 501(c)(3) institutions, which means they must be non-profit and nonpartisan. Often they claim to be involved in education (though mis-education would be the more accurate term). But they are clearly also involved in supporting an industry — Big Energy — that couldn’t be more for-profit and they have done many things to support what could only be called a partisan political agenda as well. After all, by its own admission, Energy45, to take just one example, exists to support the “Trump Energy Agenda.”
I’m an educator, not a lawyer, but as one I can say with confidence that the activities of these organizations are the opposite of educational. Typically, the Heartland Institute, for instance, has explicitly targeted schoolteachers with disinformation. In 2017, the institute sent a booklet to more than 200,000 of them, repeating the oft-cited contrarian claims that climate science is still a highly unsettled subject and that, even if climate change were occurring, it “would probably not be harmful.” Of this booklet, the director of the National Center for Science Education said, “It’s not science, but it’s dressed up to look like science. It’s clearly intended to confuse teachers.” The National Science Teaching Association has called it “propaganda” and advised teachers to place their copies in the recycling bin.
Yet, as much as we know about the activities of Heartland and other third-party allies of the fossil-fuel industry, because of loopholes in our laws we still lack basic information about who has funded and sustained them. Much of the funding at the moment still qualifies as “dark money.” Isn’t it time for citizens to demand that Congress investigate this network, as it and the Department of Justice once investigated the tobacco industry and its networks?
ExxonMobil loves to accuse me of being “an activist.” I am, in fact, a teacher and a scholar. Most of the time, I’d rather be home working on my next book, but that increasingly seems like less of an option when Big Energy’s climate-change scam is ongoing and our civilization is, quite literally, at stake. When citizens are inactive, democracy fails — and this time, if democracy fails, as burning California shows, so much else could fail as well. Science isn’t enough. The rest of us are needed. And we are needed now.
Posted by at No comments:

What’s Ailing The Economy?

Mansoor Durrani

When the chief investment officer (CIO) at one of the world’s largest asset managers, PIMCO, publically admits what you have been saying and writing for the past 10 years then it is both a time of worry and hope.
Worry: because when the present economic system – built on greed, deception and speculation – will collapse then it will spread social and economic mayhem beyond our imagination.
And Hope: because a more balanced, equitable and just socio-economic order is long overdue. So whenever it is ushered in at a global scale, it is likely to bring much needed respite to those 99% who have been hammered to the bottom of the economic pyramid as a result of rampant globalization fueled by unlimited debt and heavy speculation.
PIMCO’s CIO Dan Ivascyn manages US$ 1.5 trillion in assets. At a Global Investment Summit in New York recently, he acknowledged “the impact of globalization, wealth inequality and climate change creating political uncertainty over the next five to 10 years.” I have been in the corporate banking business for well over two decades. Having built and managed a multi-billion dollar portfolio, I have seen from close quarters in the financial markets how “financial creativity” and “over leveraging” enhances economic risks which inevitably leads to social tension.
Every crisis has some early warning indicators. This is why we must not rush to the market to buy fire extinguishers after the fire sets in. More so when the price of that imminent crisis is expected to be global and catastrophic. And at the moment, we are seeing a much gloomier scenario than what the numbers looked like on the eve of 2008 global financial crisis. The US government debt has doubled since the 2008 financial crisis. While the global debt stands at US$ 188 trillion – the biggest debt bubble the world has ever seen. This numbers, which is equivalent to 230% of world output, has risen by US$ 24 trillion in just the last 3 years. On this amount, global financial elites are extracting US$ 500 billion annually in interest income alone. That is the singular reason why rich are getting richer (and poor, poorer) at an extremely alarming pace over the last 10 years.
Post 2008 crisis, I wrote in a piece “This is Not a Credit Crisis” in The Banker’s magazine that ‘a financial system based on justice and fairness will survive now and thrive in future’. And I highlighted the fact that ‘there is no “financial economy” in Islam, only real economy. Islam does not permit debt to be traded, discounted or securitized.’ Similarly, speculative trading is completely prohibited under the system which invariably results in high level of economic volatility. For instance, we often witness billions of dollars of investors wealth wiping out in a matter of hours in stock markets.
At a time, when civil unrest is gathering pace like a wildfire from Hong Kong and Beirut to Chile and beyond, another high profile player of the present financial system, Michael Novogratz, the hedge fund manager turned crypto-currency and blockchain investor expresses deep concerns about the future and admits “we’re waiting till the new narrative shows up.” Well the new (and more stable) narrative is already up and running. There are over 500 Islamic banks across five continents managing over two trillion dollars in Islamic financial assets – covering banking, capital markets, and Islamic insurance products. This industry is primarily catering to the faithful for the past four decades. The time is fast approaching when it will need to step up and serve the humanity, in general. The template is ready.
But idealism apart, the global elites who have been benefiting from the existing financial system will not allow “an orderly transition” at any cost. So practically speaking, the social unrest is likely to grow and envelope a much larger territory than what we see today. For weathering through such turmoil, it may be advisable to minimize personal investments in financial assets and maximize investments in hard assets – preferably small plots of agriculture lands that serve basic human needs like food and dairy products. Because survive we must, to experience better times!
Posted by at No comments:

Imperialist imprint in Bolivia coup

Farooque Chowdhury

Imperialist imprint in the just carried out Bolivia coup is visible. Donald Trump, the US President, has said in a statement: “The United States applauds the Bolivian people for demanding freedom and the Bolivian military for abiding by its oath to protect not just a single person, but Bolivia’s constitution.”
Who these “people” are? The fascists, the rich, the appropriators, and the lumpen elements money of the rich hired. They are not the poor, the dispossessed, the humble, the sections of the Bolivian society with whom Evo Morales was striving to organize a humane society.
And, the “military”? Leadership of which is mainly and broadly tied to imperialist masters although constitutionally bound to uphold and safeguard interests of the people of Bolivia, as it’s the people that pay salary to the armed body. The bayonets the armed body fixes on its rifles, the bullets the body uses to intimidate the people are purchased with the people’s money. The armed forces’ act of “protecting the constitution” was compelling a constitutionally elected leader with majority of the people’s verdict to renounce presidency.
What’s the character of “freedom” being secured through the coup? It’s freedom of capital, national and imperialist, to appropriate and loot the people and natural resources. And, it’s the freedom to tie the country into imperialist war-plan – strategic and tactical – against the peoples of Latin America.
The White House issued the US presidential statement that began with the following sentence: “The resignation yesterday of Bolivian President Evo Morales is a significant moment for democracy in the Western Hemisphere.”
The “democracy” that is cherished in the statement has been ensured through the forced exit of an elected president. The election sought people’s verdict. And, the majority of the people expressed their will – Evo – with a more than 10 percent majority. Now the imperialist power finds “democracy” in forced, and obviously, unconstitutional ouster of elected leader. The “democracy” the imperialism is marketing and imposing at opportune moments on countries convenient to it is the “democracy” of imperialism. Only fools, and lackey of imperialism run and beg to imperialism for this variety of “democracy”. The type of “democracy” imperialism loves is for the rich, for the exploiters, for the plunderers. And, these type of lackeys are not only in Bolivia and Venezuela. They reside and engage with politics in other countries also. And, they, with auxiliary role played by a certain type of NGOs, depend on imperialism for their type of “democracy”. In some countries, a group of “left” elements joins them.
The US Presidential statement issued on November 11, 2019: “Morales’s departure preserves democracy and paves the way for the Bolivian people to have their voices heard.”
Can anyone claim the forced – unconstitutional – ouster of an elected president preserves democracy? Can anyone cite a single example of trampling a people’s verdict lets people’s voices heard in any country, from any page of history-book, from real life experience? Shall any imperialist state accept such act within its political mechanism? No, and never.
What was the “people’s” voice heard in Bolivia on its streets, in front of and in elected official’s residences? For weeks, the streets were blocked. The streets saw vandalism with full force, mob violence to its extreme. Elected officials, at least one of them was women and from indigenous community, were threatened, howled at, beaten, assaulted, dragged out of office, humiliated. A part of media has carried those photos. At least one people’s representative, a woman, was confined in a town hall while the hall was set on fire. She was allowed to leave the alighted building after the fire raged around. Even, this “people” – a fascist gang – set the residence of Evo’s sister on fire. Even, Evo’s residence has been vandalized and looted.
Shall any elected or, imperialism-backed dictator, without people’s mandate, accept – allow the vandals – to carry out a small fragment of such acts in any part of their country, with any of their elected officials? Shall they allow this in any case of any sibling or offspring of any of their the elected officials? Shall any imperialist state allow burning of governors’ houses within their country or within their legal jurisdiction? Residences of two governors in Bolivia have been burnt by blood-hounding mob, fascist in character, hired with money. Imperialism doesn’t consider legal jurisdiction. Unilateral decision and declaration about deployment of US forces in and actions of the forces around the oil fields in the Kurdish region of Syria is the latest example of imperialist way of “respecting” or “abiding” by law – domestic and international. Has imperialism heard and accepted the voice raised on the floor of the UN General Assembly, only days ago, on the question of US imposed economic blockade against Cuba? It’s the longest ever economic blockade by the most powerful country against a geographically small island-country. The UNGA vote was overwhelmingly against the imperialist act. Only three member-states of the UN including the US voted against the resolution. Audience of global media knows the way Jane Fonda was arrested in Washington DC. She stood for climate – a climate within which people can breathe, can live, and shall not have to abandon their homes, hospitals, schools, agricultural lands and mangrove forests, and cases, cities. Was the voice been listened?
Now, imperialism is delivering sermon – hear “people’s” voice! Is this – the mobocracy and the imperialismocracy in Bolivia over the last few weeks – the way to let people’s voice heard?
The US President’s statement – “Statement from President Donald J. Trump Regarding the Resignation of Bolivian President Evo Morales” – signaled: “These events send a strong signal to the illegitimate regimes in Venezuela and Nicaragua that democracy and the will of the people will always prevail.”
The recent political developments in Bolivia are a strong signal, no doubt. It’s a strong signal to, as the statement identifies, “illegitimate regimes in Venezuela and Nicaragua”.
And, the US President said with a confident tone: “We are now one step closer to a completely democratic, prosperous, and free Western Hemisphere.”
Coup against Evo by imperialism pulls imperialism, a mighty machine, closer to democracy! It’s not paradox. It’s contradiction and contradictory in real sense. A mighty machine motivated to subjugate the world is against a man committed to organize a humane life for the exploited people in his country. The machine is so powerful that it was failing to proceed to its cherished “democracy” because of a man, a revolutionary. Does it show might of the machine? The machine knows its weakness.
That’s the reason the machine had to conspire with elites, the most minor part of the society, and a few armed officers commanding an armed force, but having no people’s mandate and depending on the people to pay for their salary, and for arms and ammunition with which these armed persons are trying to trample the people.
Thus, the imperialism imprints its intervention in Bolivia, in the life of the people of the commoners of the Andean country.
The Hill has said the truth with the following heading: “Trump celebrates resignation of Bolivia’s president” (by Brett Samuels, November 11, 2019). It’s celebration, to imperialism! What’s the cause of the celebration? Evo is absent. But, Evo’s absence is for today only. Tomorrow he will come back with his people.
The report said:
“President Trump on Monday hailed the ouster of Bolivian President Evo Morales as a ‘significant moment for democracy’ even as Morales’s supporters and some U.S. lawmakers likened it to a coup.
“Trump issued a statement approving of Morales’s resignation.”
A military act, an act-unconstitutional, is being hailed by a leader of a state, which claims to be a democracy! The bourgeois democracy – centuries-old, an advanced bourgeois democracy – has found one of its best contemporary theoreticians to uncover its character. Shall the bourgeois democracy accept such act in its case, within its state machine, or in case of its imperialist allies?
The Washington Post has said in its report on the coup in Bolivia: The heads of the armed forces and police withdrew their support for the government in recent days amid escalating protests.
Shall the WaPo accept such move by leaders of the armed forces in cases where its interests sleep?
What democracy they are dreaming?
It’s coup-plotters’ democracy. It’s planned to be a democracy of elites, the rich. So, the coup-project is being led by a businessman, Bolivia’s Guaido and Bolsonaro.
The coup-machine – has already started moving through the near-empty streets of La Paz and of other cities. Activists are being hauled, hands cuffed, blindfolded, kneeled, arrested. A Reuter’s photo captioned: “Members of the security forces patrol a street, at the Murillo square, in La Paz”. Enough to perceive the situation.
Before the coup formally unfolded, the coup plotters unleashed hoards of lumpen elements, and those petty-soldiers were kidnapping people, engaging with arsons, threatening political leaders, blocking roads. Shall the Empire allow this in its own territory? Never, never.
What’s in view now there in Bolivia? The Camacho and Mesa duo have spelled out nothing clearly. Their current agenda is repressing the Evo-supporters. They are still relying on violence with their armed goons, and the armed forces and police.
The ringleader in this coup is Bolivia’s Guaido-Bolsonaro – racist, misogynist Camacho – with heavy fortunes in his own pockets and in family coffer. His family is connected to secessionist and far-right anti-democratic activities and enterprises in Bolivia. Imperialism has correctly appointed its orderly in Bolivia – a rich appropriator.
There are the famous NED and IRI, the long arms for imposing Washington-designed “democracy”, activities in countries. US Dollars, millions as their reports show, have been channeled in Bolivia over the years to “seed” their “democracy”. Who knows about activities of their brother “Enterprise” and “Free Labor Unions” to organize their friendly businesspersons and a group of “labor” leaders, lumpen in character? All they do is: Promote rightist agenda.
There are reports of conversations between the Empire leaders and the coup soldiers.
One side, imperialism and its orderlies, thus, are there in Bolivia.
On the opposite, there is Evo. He said during resigning his post: “My sin is being a union leader, indigenous.” He led in imbibing the people with a sense of dignity. He led in the initiatives to lift up 3 million people out of the pit of poverty. The country was the region’s fastest growing economy. He nationalized sectors/enterprises lucrative to imperialism. And, he kicked out US military bases. He represented the commoners.
His is the class war camp of the exploited. Evo’s moves, political and economic, are enough to make imperialism his enemy. So, imperialism has intervened in Bolivia. It may turn more forceful. Nevertheless, the intervention will, hopefully, stumble; because of the state of politics the people there are pursuing since long.
Are other countries including a number of South Asian countries free from similar intervention-possibility? Not at all; not even in any dream. Rather, probably, in some rooms in the Empire’s palace, similar conspiracies for intervention are being hatched, and preparations are going on in full swing.
Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)