Happy New Year, Riyadh!

Charles Pierson

This's the season for giving. Accordingly, the US has given the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia a gift in the form of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which President Donald Trump signed into law on December 21.

The NDAA is not only a gift to the Saudis. The $738 billion in new defense spending the NDAA authorizes means a very Merry Christmas for the Pentagon and for Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and the like. The NDAA’s creation of a sixth branch of the armed forces, the Space Force, also guarantees a huge market for military contractors’ high-tech toys.

President Trump had Merry Christmas, too. Trump tweeted: “Wow! All of our priorities have made it into the final NDAA.” Trump couldn’t be happier if he found a pony—or a porn star—under his tree.

Progressives got coal in their stockings. Several urgently needed antiwar amendments which the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives had inserted in its version of the NDAA were thrown out during the reconciliation process. The House amendments would have ended US assistance to the Saudi-UAE coalition attacking Yemen; ended arms sales to the Saudis; required Congress’ assent to a US attack on Iran; and would have revoked the by now long in the tooth 2001 and 2002 Authorizations for the Use of Military Force which the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations have stretched far beyond their original purposes to make war anywhere they choose.

Tossing out the amendments means Congress and the President have given the Saudis gifts of incalculable value. The US will continue to provide arms to the Saudis and assist Saudi aggression in Yemen. And Trump can start a war with the Saudis’ hated rival Iran at any time without having to bother with Congress.

Denouncing the NDAA’s “astonishing moral cowardice,” Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA) urged “every member of Congress” to vote against the NDAA. Fat chance. Only 48 members of the House and 8 senators voted against the NDAA. Adam Smith, Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and a co-author of the axed Khanna-Smith-Schiff-Jayapal amendment which would have terminated US involvement in Yemen, went off his head entirely and praised the NDAA as “the most progressive defense bill in the history of the country.”

Trump’s Gifts to the Saudis

Under Trump, what Riyadh wants, Riyadh gets. The president remains slavishly loyal to the Saudis and, in particular, to the kingdom’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman. Trump’s man crush on bin Salman continued unabated even after the October 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the dissident Washington Post columnist who the Saudis murdered and then carved up with a bone saw in their consulate in Istanbul.

President Trump did grudgingly issue economic sanctions against 17 Saudis alleged to have been involved in the murder. Not against the kingdom itself, you understand, and certainly not against Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman.

Measures with real bite, such as an arms embargo on the Saudis, were rejected. So was the so-called No Nuclear Weapons for Saudi Arabia Act of 2018. The Trump Administration has been trying to negotiate a sale of two nuclear reactors to the Saudis, because apparently just giving the Saudis a nuclear bomb might raise eyebrows. The Act would not have barred the prospective sale, but would have hemmed it in with safeguards which the Saudis have been resisting. The Act expired without being voted on and has not been reintroduced.

Hail, Caesar!

The slap on Bin Salman’s wrist contrasts jarringly with US treatment of another international outlaw: Syria. The Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act became law on December 21 as part of the NDAA. Named after a pseudonymous Syrian military photographer who defected to the West, bringing with him 55,000 photographs of Syrians tortured and murdered by the criminal regime of President Bashar al-Assad, the Act ramps up economic sanctions on Syria, Iran, and Russia, each of which has contributed to the 110,000 to 220,000 civilian deaths during the Syrian Civil War.

Economic sanctions are problematic for the left. Too often, sanctions inflict suffering on ordinary citizens rather than their leaders. They are a weapon used by large, powerful states like the US against smaller, weaker states. Sanctions may not even work. Despite being buried under US sanctions, Iran has not abandoned its nuclear weapons program, probably because Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program. Sanctions are often promoted as an alternative to war, but in the case of Iran the purpose of US sanctions seems to be to soften up Iran for the kill.

Still, if anyone deserves sanctions—and I emphasize if—Assad, Iran, and Russia do. But what about the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia? Does anyone else sniff a little bit of hypocrisy here? Saudi Arabia is one of the worst violators of human rights in the world. The US overlooks Saudi crimes because of oil and US arms sales. But even if morality weren’t a concern (as, in statecraft, it almost never is), there is less reason than formerly to coddle the Saudis. The US imports less and less Saudi oil each year as US production of shale oil climbs. The US is on track to become a net exporter of oil. The Devil’s bargain the US struck in the 1945 Quincy Agreement, in which the US would provide Saudi Arabia with protection in exchange for Saudi oil, may been justifiable in the past. It isn’t anymore. The US no longer needs the Saudis. It’s time for the US to back away from one of the most hateful nations on the planet.

The Key to the Environmental Crisis is Beneath Our Feet

Ellen Brown

The Green New Deal resolution that was introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives in February hit a wall in the Senate, where it was called unrealistic and unaffordable. In a Washington Post article titled “The Green New Deal Sets Us Up for Failure. We Need a Better Approach,” former Colorado governor and Democratic presidential candidate John Hickenlooper framed the problem like this:

The resolution sets unachievable goals. We do not yet have the technology needed to reach “net-zero greenhouse gas emissions” in 10 years. That’s why many wind and solar companies don’t support it. There is no clean substitute for jet fuel. Electric vehicles are growing quickly, yet are still in their infancy. Manufacturing industries such as steel and chemicals, which account for almost as much carbon emissions as transportation, are even harder to decarbonize.

Amid this technological innovation, we need to ensure that energy is not only clean but also affordable. Millionas of Americans struggle with “energy poverty.” Too often, low-income Americans must choose between paying for medicine and having their heat shut off. …

If climate change policy becomes synonymous in the U.S. psyche with higher utility bills, rising taxes and lost jobs, we will have missed our shot.

The problem may be that a transition to 100% renewables is the wrong target. Reversing climate change need not mean emptying our pockets and tightening our belts. It is possible to sequester carbon and restore our collapsing ecosystem using the financial resources we already have, and it can be done while at the same time improving the quality of our food, water, air and general health.

The Larger Problem – and the Solution – Is in the Soil

Contrary to popular belief, the biggest environmental polluters are not big fossil fuel companies. They are big agribusiness and factory farming, with six powerful food industry giants – Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, Dean Foods, Dow AgroSciences, Tyson and Monsanto (now merged with Bayer) – playing a major role. Oil-dependent farming, industrial livestock operations, the clearing of carbon-storing fields and forests, the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and the combustion of fuel to process and distribute food are estimated to be responsible for as much as one-half of human-caused pollution. Climate change, while partly a consequence of the excessive relocation of carbon and other elements from the earth into the atmosphere, is more fundamentally just one symptom of overall ecosystem distress from centuries of over-tilling, over-grazing, over-burning, over-hunting, over-fishing and deforestation.

Big Ag’s toxin-laden, nutrient-poor food is also a major contributor to the U.S. obesity epidemic and many other diseases. Yet these are the industries getting the largest subsidies from U.S. taxpayers, to the tune of more than $20 billion annually. We don’t hear about this for the same reason that they get the subsidies – they have massively funded lobbies capable of bribing their way into special treatment.

The story we do hear, as Judith Schwartz observes in The Guardian, is, “Climate change is global warming caused by too much CO₂ in the atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels. We stop climate change by making the transition to renewable energy.” Schwartz does not discount this part of the story but points to several problems with it:

One is the uncomfortable fact that even if, by some miracle, we could immediately cut emissions to zero, due to inertia in the system it would take more than a century for CO₂ levels to drop to 350 parts per million, which is considered the safe threshold. Plus, here’s what we don’t talk about when we talk about climate: we can all go solar and drive electric cars and still have the problems – the unprecedented heat waves, the wacky weather – that we now associate with CO₂-driven climate change.

But that hasn’t stopped investors, who see the climate crisis as simply another profit opportunity. According to a study by Morgan Stanley analysts reported in Forbes in October, halting global warming and reducing net carbon emissions to zero would take an investment of $50 trillion over the next three decades, including $14 trillion for renewables; $11 trillion to build the factories, batteries and infrastructure necessary for a widespread switch to electric vehicles; $2.5 trillion for carbon capture and storage; $20 trillion to provide clean hydrogen fuel for power, cars and other industries, and $2.7 trillion for biofuels. The article goes on to highlight the investment opportunities presented by these challenges by recommending various big companies expected to lead the transition, including  Exxon, Chevron, BP, General Electric, Shell and similar corporate giants – many of them the very companies blamed by Green New Deal advocates for the crisis.

A Truly Green New Deal

There is a much cheaper and faster way to sequester carbon from the atmosphere that doesn’t rely on these corporate giants to transition us to 100% renewables. Additionally, it can be done while at the same time reducing the chronic diseases that impose an even heavier cost on citizens and governments. Our most powerful partner is nature itself, which over hundreds of millions of years has evolved the most efficient carbon sequestration system on the planet. As David Perry writes on the World Economic Forum website:

This solution leverages a natural process that every plant undergoes, powered by a source that is always available, costs little to nothing to run and does not cause further pollution. This power source is the sun, and the process is photosynthesis.

A plant takes carbon dioxide out of the air and, with the help of sunlight and water, converts it to sugars. Every bit of that plant – stems, leaves, roots – is made from carbon that was once in our atmosphere. Some of this carbon goes into the soil as roots. The roots, then, release sugars to feed soil microbes. These microbes perform their own chemical processes to convert carbon into even more stable forms.

Perry observes that before farmland was cultivated, it had soil carbon levels of from 3% to 7%. Today, those levels are roughly 1% carbon. If every acre of farmland globally were returned to a soil carbon level of just 3%, 1 trillion tons of carbon dioxide would be removed from the atmosphere and stored in the soil – equal to the amount of carbon that has been drawn into the atmosphere since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago. The size of the potential solution matches the size of the problem.

So how can we increase the carbon content of soil? Through “regenerative” farming practices, says Perry, including planting cover crops, no-till farming, rotating crops, reducing chemicals and fertilizers, and managed grazing (combining trees, forage plants and livestock together as an integrated system, a technique called “silvopasture”). These practices have been demonstrated to drive carbon into the soil and keep it there, resulting in carbon-enriched soils that are healthier and more resilient to extreme weather conditions and show improved water permeability, preventing the rainwater runoff that contributes to rising sea levels and rising temperatures. Evaporation from degraded, exposed soil has been shown to cause 1,600% more heat annually than all the world’s powerhouses combined. Regenerative farming methods also produce increased microbial diversity, higher yields, reduced input requirements, more nutritious harvests and increased farm profits.

These highly favorable results were confirmed by Paul Hawken and his team in the project that was the subject of his best-selling 2016 book, “Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming.” The project involved evaluating the 100 most promising solutions to the environmental crisis for cost and effectiveness. The results surprised the researchers themselves. The best-performing sector was not “Transport” or “Materials” or “Buildings and Cities” or even “Electricity Generation.” It was the sector called “Food,” including how we grow our food, market it and use it. Of the top 30 solutions, 12 were various forms of regenerative agriculture, including silvopasture, tropical staple trees, conservation agriculture, tree intercropping, managed grazing, farmland restoration and multistrata agroforestry.

How to Fund It All

If regenerative farming increases farmers’ bottom lines, why aren’t they already doing it? For one thing, the benefits of the approach are not well known. But even if they were, farmers would have a hard time making the switch. As noted in a Rolling Stone article titled “How Big Agriculture Is Preventing Farmers From Combating the Climate Crisis”:

[I]implementing these practices requires an economic flexibility most farmers don’t have, and which is almost impossible to achieve within a government-backed system designed to preserve a large-scale, corporate-farming monoculture based around commodity crops like corn and soybeans, which often cost smaller farmers more money to grow than they can make selling.

Farmers are locked into a system that is destroying their farmlands and the planet, because a handful of giant agribusinesses have captured Congress and the regulators. One proposed solution is to transfer the $20 billion in subsidies that now go mainly to Big Ag into a fund to compensate small farmers who transition to regenerative practices. We also need to enforce the antitrust laws and break up the biggest agribusinesses, something for which legislation is now pending in Congress.

At the grassroots level, we can vote with our pocketbooks by demanding truly nutritious foods. New technology is in development that can help with this grassroots approach by validating how nutrient-dense our foods really are. One such device, developed by Dan Kittredge and team, is a hand-held consumer spectrometer called a Bionutrient Meter, which tests nutrient density at point of purchase. The goal is to bring transparency to the marketplace, empowering consumers to choose their foods based on demonstrated nutrient quality, providing economic incentives to growers and grocers to drive regenerative practices across the system. Other new technology measures nutrient density in the soil, allowing farmers to be compensated in proportion to their verified success in carbon sequestration and soil regeneration.

Granted, $20 billion is unlikely to be enough to finance the critically needed transition from destructive to regenerative agriculture, but Congress can supplement this fund by tapping the deep pocket of the central bank. In the last decade, the Fed has demonstrated that its pool of financial liquidity is potentially limitless, but the chief beneficiaries of its largess have been big banks and their wealthy clients. We need a form of quantitative easing that actually serves the local productive economy. That might require modifying the Federal Reserve Act, but Congress has modified it before. The only real limit on new money creation is consumer price inflation, and there is room for a great deal more money to be pumped into the productive local economy before that ceiling is hit than is circulating in it now. For a detailed analysis of this issue, see my earlier articles here and here and latest book, “Banking on the People.”

The bottom line is that saving the planet from environmental destruction is not only achievable, but that by focusing on regenerative agriculture and tapping up the central bank for funding, the climate crisis can be addressed without raising taxes and while restoring our collective health.

As Honduras Collapses, Its People are Forced to Flee

Laura Carlsen

Honduras is collapsing. The thousands of migrants who flee every day are direct testimony to a political, economic and social crisis that the world ignores and the U. S. government seems bent on perpetuating. Instead of examining the crisis behind the exodus, the Trump administration has set an intercontinental human trapline that captures thousands of the world’s poorest and most persecuted men, women and children, and then converts their suffering into campaign fodder.

Until the Ukraine gamechanger came along, this seemed to be working as the central message of a candidacy that proclaimed white supremacy a valid political platform. Since the whistleblower exposé, the Trump re-election campaign has had to pivot to spewing lies about Joe Biden and fending off impeachment But unless he goes down, sooner or later he´ll return to slandering immigrants and issuing racist warnings of the “invasion” from the south.

Meanwhile, almost no-one is asking why so many people leave. Donald Trump portrays Honduran and other Central American migrants as global gold-diggers, looking for a way to scam an overly tolerant United States. Anyone with the slightest familiarity with what migrants go through, abandoning their homes and facing the physical and psychological dangers of the migrant trail, immediately and correctly dismisses this explanation.

The Mexican government has emphasized going to “the root causes” of migration, which it defines as underdevelopment, and a democratic congressional delegation led by Nancy Pelosi in August recently used the same language. But what are the ‘root causes’? What really motivates so many people to leave, when their chances of making it to relatives and new lives in the United States are so low? When the cost of the journey—in all senses—is so high?

The Real Roots of Migration

I went down to Honduras to ask grassroots leaders these questions. Also, to find out what’s behind the rise in the popular movement over the past year and, most of all, whether it can provide a way out of the downward spiral the country has been in since the coup of 2009. I found a country facing an acute crisis on all levels—a political crisis of legitimacy that has destroyed faith in the leaders and led to violent repression
of protest as the government implodes, an economic crisis with over 60% of the population living in poverty and extreme poverty, and a crisis in security as organized crime groups control urban territory, corporations take over resources, and corrupt security forces and paramilitaries routinely attack the citizenry with practically no legal consequences. There is also a deeper, more ineffable crisis: many Hondurans see no future in their own country.

Bartolo Fuentes is a migrant organizer who accompanied the first large caravan that left San Pedro Sula in October of 2018, picking up thousands of Hondurans and later Guatemalans before arriving at the Mexican southern border. He dismissed another common explanation for why people leave, one espoused by both Trump and the Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, that traffickers are responsible for convincing people to leave.

“That’s absurd, if they just ask the migrants in Tapachula (Mexico’s southern border) how they got there, what motivated them to leave, they’ll realize that here there’s terrible hunger, people don’t have a way to make a living, and worse, they don’t have any hope that things will get better,” Fuentes stated. “The people leave because in Honduras they can’t resolve the basic problem of survival. Other countries need to understand that it’s not outside agitators or instigators that are prodding the people to leave, it’s hunger, it’s despair, it’s the lack of opportunities. The way things are, Hondurans aren’t going to stop leaving any time soon.”

He and many others also cite as causes the everyday violence and death threats for the slightest of offenses—a young woman who rejects the advances of a local gang leader, a taxi driver who can no longer pay the weekly extortion fee, the mother who shields her young son from forced recruitment into gangs, and the child himself, growing up with too many images of loved ones murdered or filled with fear.  The list of what makes one a target in a land where the law has no inhibiting influence whatsoever goes on and on.

10 Years After the Coup

According to former president Manuel Zelaya, the current crisis has been a long time in the making—since 2009 when he was kidnapped and forcibly removed from office in a military coup. Despite widespread international condemnation of the coup, he was never restored to power in a return to the constitutional order. Instead, the illegal coup regime organized elections to whitewash its crime with the help of the U.S. government. Under successive illegitimate governments, democratic institutions became tools for private national and transnational interests.

“This has created more migrants, more poverty, greater corruption, more looting and an increase in drug trafficking because, put simply, there’s a popular phrase that says ‘when the river is muddied, it’s the fisherman’s gain’, Zelaya told me in his office in the opposition LIBRE Party headquarters.

“And we’re facing a reality—the global economic system of the transnationals generates privatizations, impositions of the International Monetary Fund and more poverty. With the lack of opportunities, the people flee, it’s not that they migrate– they flee –from the lack of opportunities and the misery in our country.”

Zelaya’s reflections on what happened after the coup lead straight into the protests happening today. After the coup, Honduras became the training ground for extreme forms of neoliberalism. It encouraged transnational investment in megaprojects that displace rural communities and cause entrenched conflicts. The foreign debt burgeoned from $3 billion to more than $9 billion in ten years. The rightwing president Juan Orlando Hernandez, has faced numerous corruption scandals and massive protests following the 2017 presidential election. In that election, JOH first stacked a court that then gave him a green light to go against the constitution and run for re-election, then he stole that election, shut down the vote count and declared himself the winner. Since then, the Honduran people have not stopped protesting. and the IMF signed a stand-by agreement with his administration for $311 million in May, signaling further privatization. The nation increasingly depends on remittances from the thousands who fled.

In early 2019, a law and then a series of presidential decrees opened up health and education services to private sector investment and management. The medical profession, unions and farmers, teachers and students hit the streets to protest the privatization measures and forced the government to roll back some, but not all, of the reforms. Under the leadership of the head of the Medical College, Dr. Suyapa Figueroa, the growing popular movement refused to back down. The Platform for the Defense of Health and Education was formed out of the people’s gut reaction to the wholesale delivery of the country to private interests and international capital. The privatization of health struck a nerve.

“The population was outraged because the situation that most harms them is the fact that the government had completely abandoned the issue of health. We always had shortages in hospitals, but never to the point where these shortages were constant, and we believe that these shortages were on purpose to cause the deterioration of the public health system to justify passing health services provision to the private sector,” Dr. Figueroa explained.

Today, the Platform for the Defense of Health and Education is the backbone of Honduras’ resistance movement. While strengthening its specific demands for accessible, free-of-charge public services, its main demand is the immediate resignation of President Juan Orlando Hernandez (JOH, by his initials).

A Narcostate?

That day might be closer than anyone expected. Hernandez was cited as a co-conspirator in the drug-trafficking trial of his brother, Tony. Tony Hernandez was extradited to the United States under terms his brother passed into law, in part to guarantee US support for his bid for power. The District court filing states that Juan Orlando used illegal drug money to finance his campaign and maintain his power.

On October 18, the court convicted Tony Hernandez on four counts of drug trafficking, illegal possession of weapons and making false statements to a US official. For the Honduran opposition, the trial meant that the accusation that Honduras is a “narcostate”, with the president at the head of it, was proven in a US court of law. It was huge news—not so much the revelation of the president’s involvement, but the fact that it became part of evidence in a US court that validated the information. Pressure to oust JOH increased and the grassroots movement gained momentum.

The mounting evidence of corruption and illegal activity against JOH should be ample reason for the US Congress to reconsider its strategy in Honduras. Trump announced plans to cut off aid to the country, and other Central American nations, for not doing enough to force their citizens to remain exposed to the violent situations the U.S. government helped create. His announcement caused a stir in Washington and the press, but the aid suspension never happened. Instead aid has continued, largely to repressive military and police and border programs that exacerbate rather than address the real problems.

Inexplicably, many progressive politicians and Washington NGOs protested the original announcement of suspension of aid to Honduras, with little explanation of how aid to an illegitimate and unpopular government in crisis would help the country. US aid historically– and especially under a Trump administration– has never been impartial or beneficent to the receiving Central American countries. All the Honduran grassroots leaders I talked to were very clear—U.S. aid props up the JOH government and works against us.

Trump later reversed himself and promised to restore aid, mostly for security measures to contain migration. And now the U.S. government has a new way to spend taxpayer money and ruin lives. On Sept. 25, Trump convinced a very vulnerable Juan Orlando Hernandez to sign a “Safe Third Country”agreement. This agreement  forces asylum seekers from other countries passing through Honduras to seek asylum there rather than continuing northward, despite the fact that Honduras is the nation that expels more people than any other country in the Hemisphere. As crazy as it sounds–and it is–the Honduran president quickly agreed, amid speculation that the negotiation included some sort of immunity or conditions of a cushy exile probably in Florida should that become necessary (potentially allowing him precisely what the U.S. government is so bent on denying ordinary Hondurans). JOH is teetering on the edge of a precipice, with the accusations of drug trafficking, abuse of power and corruption hanging over his head and a huge part of his own citizenry calling for his resignation on a daily basis.

Instead of turning a blind eye to the Honduran crisis, Congress should stop propping up a man his own people call a dictator. As the Honduran government continues to attack protestors and target activists, it should quickly approve the Bertha Cáceres Act, named for the feminist environmental activist murdered for defending a river slated to be dammed. The Act calls for the immediate suspension of security aid.

For those of us who have worked for decades on Central American solidarity, for the hundreds of thousands of Hondurans living in the United States and for new generations of activists involved in migrants’ rights, social justice and foreign policy, the plea is to stand up with and for the Honduran popular movement. Honduras has been the worst-case scenario of broken rights, outright U.S. intervention and ruinous capitalist economic policy. The Honduran people have had to fight so hard for so long. By joining grassroots and international pressure, the people could finally win their nation back from the corrupt oligarchy that has hijacked it.

How Nationalism is Transforming the Politics of the British Isles

Patrick Cockburn

Nationalism in different shapes and forms is powerfully transforming the politics of the British Isles, a development that gathered pace over the last five years and culminated in the general election this month.

National identities and the relationship between England, Scotland and Ireland are changing more radically than at any time over the last century. It is worth looking at the British archipelago as a whole on this issue because of the closely-meshed political relationship of its constituent nations.

Some of these developments are highly visible such as the rise of the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) to permanent political dominance in Scotland in the three general elections since the independence referendum in 2014.

Other changes are important but little commented on, such as the enhanced national independence and political influence of the Republic of Ireland over the British Isles as a continuing member of the EU as the UK leaves. Dublin’s greater leverage when backed by the other 26 EU states was repeatedly demonstrated, often to the surprise and dismay of London, in the course of the negotiations in Brussels over the terms of the British withdrawal.

Northern Ireland saw more nationalist than unionist MPs elected in the general election for the first time since 1921. This is important because it is a further sign of the political impact of demographic change whereby Catholics/nationalists become the new majority and the Protestants/unionists the minority. The contemptuous ease with which Boris Johnson abandoned his ultra-unionist pledges to the DUP and accepted a customs border in the Irish Sea separating Northern Ireland from the rest of Britain shows how little loyalty the Conservatives feel towards the northern unionists and their distinct and abrasive brand of British nationalism.

These developments affecting four of the main national communities inhabiting the British Isles – Irish, nationalists and unionists in Northern Ireland, Scots – are easy to track. Welsh nationalism is a lesser force. Much more difficult to trace and explain is the rise of English nationalism because it is much more inchoate than these other types of nationalism, has no programme, and is directly represented by no political party – though the Conservative Party has moved in that direction.

The driving force behind Brexit was always a certain type of English nationalism which did not lose its power to persuade despite being incoherent and little understood by its critics and supporters alike. In some respects, it deployed the rhetoric of any national community seeking self-determination. The famous Brexiteer slogan “take back control” is not that different in its implications from Sinn Fein  – “Ourselves Alone” – though neither movement would relish the analogy.

The great power of the pro-Brexit movement, never really taken on board by its opponents, was to blame the very real sense of disempowerment and social grievances felt by a large part of the English population on Brussels and the EU. This may have been scapegoating on a grandiose scale, but nationalist movements the world over have targeted some foreign body abroad or national minority at home as the source of their ills. I asked one former Leave councillor – one of the few people I met who changed their mind on the issue after the referendum in 2016 – why people living in her deprived ward held the EU responsible for their poverty. Her reply cut through many more sophisticated explanations: “I suppose that it is always easier to blame Johnny Foreigner.”

This crude summary of the motives of many Leave voters has truth in it, but it is a mistake to caricature English nationalism as simply a toxic blend of xenophobia, racism, imperial nostalgia and overheated war memories. In the three years since the referendum the very act of voting for Brexit became part of many people’s national identity, a desire to break free, kicking back against an over-mighty bureaucracy and repelling attempts by the beneficiaries of globalisation to reverse a democratic vote.

The political left in most countries is bad at dealing with nationalism and the pursuit of self-determination. It sees these as a diversion from identifying and attacking the real perpetrators of social and economic injustice. It views nationalists as mistakenly or malignly aiming at the wrong target – usually foreigners – and letting the domestic ones off the hook.

The desire by people to see themselves as a national community – even if many of the bonds binding them together are fictional – is one of the most powerful forces in the world. It can only be ignored at great political cost, as the Labour Party has just found out to its cost for the fifth time (two referendums and three elections). What Labour should have done was early on take over the slogan “take back control” and seek to show that they were better able to deliver this than the Conservatives or the Brexit Party. There is no compelling reason why achieving such national demands should be a monopoly of the right. But in 2016, 2017 and 2019 Labour made the same mistake of trying to wriggle around Brexit as the prime issue facing the English nation without taking a firm position, an evasion that discredited it with both Remainers and Leavers.

Curiously, the political establishment made much the same mistake as Labour in underestimating and misunderstanding the nature of English nationalism. Up to the financial crisis of 2008 globalisation had been sold as a beneficial and inevitable historic process. Nationalism was old hat and national loyalties were supposedly on the wane. To the British political class, the EU obviously enhanced the political and economic strength of its national members. As beneficiaries of the status quo, they were blind to the fact that much of the country had failed to gain from these good things and felt marginalised and forgotten.

The advocates of supra-national organisations since the mediaeval papacy have been making such arguments and have usually been perplexed why they fail to stick. They fail to understand the strength of nationalism or religion in providing a sense of communal solidarity, even if it is based on dreams and illusions, that provides a vehicle for deeply felt needs and grievances. Arguments based on simple profit and loss usually lose out against such rivals.

India’s Democracy is Facing an Existential Threat

Vijay Prashad


India’s Vice President M. Venkaiah Naidu made a curious comment on 28 December. ‘Express dissent in a democratic way,’ he said. Before he became the Vice President – a largely symbolic role – Naidu was the President of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the far-right political organization that now governs India. Naidu made his comment in the context of nation-wide protests against an exclusionary set of laws and policies pushed by his party. These laws and policies include the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), the National Population Register (NPR), and the National Register of Citizens (NRC). These laws and policies deeply discriminate against India’s 200 million Muslims.

Peaceful protests have been taking place across the country. Every public event seems to be transformed into a demonstration against not only these laws, but the government itself. In Kolkata – from where I write these words – the annual Rainbow Pride Walk combined Gay Pride with opposition to these laws. Signs at the march read, ‘No CAA’ and ‘No to Fascism.’ The Indian flag – not often seen at these events – was everywhere, a symbol of the fight over how ‘India’ should be understood.

Street signs indicate widespread opposition to these laws and policies from a range of political parties: everyone, except the BJP, seems to be against them. It has invigorated a serious debate about whether India’s State remains secular, and whether Indian society contains resources for secularism.

Secularism

Secularism in the Indian context means that the State should respect and tolerate all religions; Indian society should equally be tolerant of religious diversity.

What secularism has not meant is that the State should drive a policy for the secularization of society, which would include promotion of rationality over mysticism and the taxation of religious institutions.

Even the weak form of Indian secularism is in dispute now with the BJP pushing for the Indian State and Indian society to be dominated by their own rigid and narrow view of Hinduism. The BJP’s divisive politics threatens the secular compact with India’s large non-Hindu population, particularly the 200 million Muslims who live scattered across this vast country. The BJP’s political and cultural logic is against the respect and toleration of Islam and of Muslims. It is a politics of cultural suffocation, impracticable for India’s social and cultural diversity.

BJP leaders – including Prime Minister Narendra Modi – continue to use the language of secularism to justify their political agenda. Over the course of the past decade, the Indian State and the courts have formulated policies that accommodate the demands of minority groups, including on regressive grounds (such as laws of marriage and divorce).

In the name of secularism, the BJP has gone after these laws, using their existence to suggest that it is not the BJP but Muslims who are not secular; an illustration of this is the BJP’s attempt to undercut the Muslim Personal Law by a Uniform Civil Code. By this sleight of hand, the BJP masquerades as a defender of the Indian compact even as it undermines it. This confusion now seems to be over. The BJP’s strong anti-Muslim agenda over the definition of citizenship cannot be easily defended as the BJP’s commitment to secularism; it is seen for what it is – far-right bigotry.

Federalism.

One mechanism to preserve the diversity of India has been to emphasize the federal system over a central State. India is divided into twenty-eight regional states and nine union territories. One of these states – Jharkhand – had a provincial election as these protests cascaded. The ruling BJP state government was defeated, and a coalition of a regional party – the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha – and the Congress Party won the election. At the swearing in of the new chief minister – Hemant Soren – political leaders from a range of non-BJP parties came to make the ceremony into a political rally. These leaders – chief ministers of states and leaders of political parties, including the Communists – argued that this election was a mandate against the BJP.

By March 2018, the BJP (with its allies) ruled over 21 states, which account for 70% of India’s population. It appeared as if the BJP was unassailable. Then the BJP’s fortunes at the state level fell, with the BJP losing power in five important states – Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, and Jharkhand.

Many of the non-BJP ruled states have said that they will not honor the slate of discriminatory laws. This is a direct political challenge to the BJP. If the non-BJP opposition parties which gathered to celebrate Soren’s victory in Jharkhand are able to form a principled alliance, then it is likely that they will weaken the BJP’s political power.

Federalism is a defensive barrier against the authoritarianism of the BJP. So too is the attempt by opposition parties to isolate the BJP. A combination of the BJP’s arrogance and its failure to subordinate India’s diversity has shown that its authority is not derived from public acceptance of its agenda but from money and muscle power.

Muscle.

Unable to defend its discriminatory agenda, the BJP has taken recourse to raw police power. BJP leader Yogi Adityanath, who is the Chief Minister of India’s largest state – Uttar Pradesh (population: 200 million) – has shut off the internet in key areas and used the full force of the police to beat, arrest, and intimidate anyone who opposes the BJP policy. Of the twenty-seven people killed across India over these protests, nineteen were killed in Uttar Pradesh. A fact-finding team found that Yogi was running a “reign of terror” in the state against protestors.

When five women drew chalk drawings (kolam) with slogans against the discriminatory laws in Chennai (Tamil Nadu), they were arrested; when three lawyers went to the police on behalf of the women, the police arrested the lawyers. They join the thousands who have been arrested or held in preventative detention. Meanwhile, the internet has been cut off for large parts of the country. Two foreign nationals who had protested the laws – including a German student – have been deported. A fact-finding team found that the Delhi Police – which is controlled by the BJP government – was ‘unrelenting and cruel’ in its behavior at Delhi’s Jamia Milia Islamia University.

Vice President Naidu warned that dissent should be expressed in a democratic way. He was merely reflecting reality, since the protests have all been extraordinarily peaceful and respectful; the protestors have reclaimed the Indian flag and its Constitution and are holding fast to the view that they have the law and the public sentiment on their side.

It is the documented behavior of the BJP officials and of the police that needs to be chastised by the Indian Vice President. The violence that has taken place is the violence of the BJP’s hooligans and of the police, not the violence of the dissenters (as noted by many observers, including Human Rights Watch). It has become formulaic for the BJP to accuse its opponents of being “anti-national”; now public sentiment suggests that it is the BJP which is anti-national.

In January, the trade unions and the left parties have called for a week of protests from 1 January onwards, which will culminate in a general strike on 8 January. Last year’s trade union strike brought 180 million people onto the streets. If the momentum of these protests remains, then this strike on 8 January will be enormous; it could weaken the BJP’s political power fatally.

The 2019 Nobel Prize shows why we need to dump conventional economics

Ted Trainer

The prize has gone to three people studying how the poor can derive more benefit from existing “development” practices. It sees no reason to question the existing market and growth-driven economy and its derivative, development theory. It doesn’t threaten the massively unjust and environmentally destructive global systems that keep billions in poverty.

The 720,000 pound Prize has been awarded for studies carried out in “developing” countries over several decades, applying randomised trials to determine the effects of interventions like school meals, small monetary incentives for school attendance and work motivation. (Nobel Media, 2019.) Especially noteworthy are devices for reducing “…purchasing of temptation goods”, (…conceivably also of use in rich countries.) These are identified as ”nudges”, only likely to make small differences in the right direction but claimed to be capable of adding to significant effects in large populations. Much if not all of this work would seem to be unambiguously worthwhile, such as exploring how to improve vaccination rates. But there are disturbing criticisms which go far beyond these studies to indict the tunnel vision and ideological nature of conventional economic theory and practice.

The focus in these studies is on getting individuals to perform better within the system. The faulty individual is the problem; as Mader et al. (2019) say, “The idea is to ‘help’ poor people overcome supposedly irrational ‘risk aversion’ in order to be more entrepreneurial, or more ‘time-consistent’ and save for a rainy day.” Even leaving the issue of fault aside, this focus on individualism is the first problem; like “micro-finance” which helps the budding entrepreneur to invest and get ahead, it is about helping the most able and energetic to succeed, presumably on the assumption that if enough do so a good society will eventually result. This is to ignore the possibility that the problems are due to faulty social structures rather than faulty individuals, and the possibility that the best solutions would involve collective effort to establish radically alternative structures and systems.

Thus the second major problem is that the approach takes conventional development theory and practice for granted. It reveals a complete absence of interest in the possibility that these are technically and morally unacceptable and a legitimization of structures and practices which have condemned billions of people to suffer extreme poverty for decades, and which continue to do so. Mader et al. reject the “behaviourist” approach to the study of poverty and argue that the concern should be “… the political, social and cultural questions about what causes poverty and inequality.” Kvangraven (2019) recognizes that poverty alleviation is not development and that while “…small interventions might generate positive results at the micro-level, they do little to challenge the systems that produce the problems.”

In other words, this kind of focus has powerful ideological significance; it distracts attention from the way economic orthodoxy takes it for granted that there can be no conceivable alternative to the current approach to “development”. It is necessary here to briefly outline a critique of the dominant perspective.

Few if any areas of economics are as open to criticism as are conventional ”development” theory and practice. The source of the problem lies in the taken for granted conception of what constitutes “development”. There could be many perspectives on what the goals of development might be, and what the means to them might be. However almost all contemporary discussion centres only on one conception. Its essential assumptions and principles are;

The goal, or at least the one that enables the achievement of all others, is increasing the amount of producing and consuming going on, i.e., growing the GDP.

Poor countries must therefore plunge into the global market economy. They must find something to try to sell, if only cheap labour, competing against all other poor countries. Only if something can be sold can the money be earned to import what is needed.

It is not possible to develop without capital. People who have capital must be attracted to invest it in setting up farms, factories, fishing fleets and mines, to produce exports.

These ventures will produce whatever the investors think will maximize their profits within the global market economy. (Foreign investment never goes into producing to meet urgent local needs.)

Foreign investors will not come in unless there are ports, power stations, roads etc. So the government must go into debt to build these.

Before long the loan repayments will probably have become impossible, but the friendly people at the IMF and World Bank will come to the rescue with more loans…and Structural Adjustment Packages which will require the country to gear its development more closely to the interests of the foreign investors; i.e., de-regulate, devalue, sell off industries cheaply to foreign corporations, enable sale of land from peasants to corporations, cut subsidies and welfare so loan repayments can be made.

The result is that the country will develop a lot of factories and plantations, but none of them are likely to be producing anything the poor majority want or can afford. The country’s resources will mostly be flowing into the production of goods to sell in rich world supermarkets.

If the country does not have any logs left to export and can’t attract foreign corporations in, then unfortunately it can’t have any “development”.

It is imperative that market forces be allowed to determine the country’s fate. Business turnover and GCP will be maximised if there is minimal regulation, subsidies, protection or other interference with market forces. So, free corporations to invest in what makes most money for them. Ignore the fact that markets will always deliver scarce resources to the rich, because the rich can always pay more for them, and will always develop industries that produce what the rich want to buy.

All this is cast as not just legitimate, it is inevitable … it’s just the way the market system works. People with capital to invest are not going to come in and produce beans for hungry peasants making negligible profits when they can invest in soy exports and make good profits. You can’t expect high royalties on your copper exports when other countries are willing to accept lower royalties because they are desperate to pay off their debt.

The impoverished masses are told to accept these processes because they will benefit via “trickle down”. They are not told that in fact very little ever trickles down or that it is not the case that the mechanism is lifting large numbers out of poverty (except in China, which has taken the exporting capacities other countries once had and thus raised unemployment rates there; see Hickel, 2017.) Nor are they told that global resource limits rule out any possibility of trickle down ever raising billions of impoverished people to tolerable living standards, let alone to rich world levels.

After seventy years of this approach to development about four billion people are very poor, around 800 million are hungry and more lack clean water, thousands of children die avoidably every day …and half the world’s wealth has now been accumulated in the hands of less than 20 people. Leahy’s work (2009, 2019) is unusual in pointing out the futility of mainstream African development efforts to get impoverished farmers to succeed in the intensely competitive global “free market” food export arena. (Let’s not draw attention to the fact that US agribusiness is subsidized $20 billion every year.)

This conventional approach is a delight to the world’s rich; development cannot take place unless the owners of capital get opportunities to invest in profitable ventures, and Third World productive capacity goes into stocking rich world supermarkets and not into producing what the people urgently need. Even worse, it prevents them from using the resources around them, the soils, forests, rainfall and their own labour and traditional skills, to produce for themselves basic goods they need. “Development” theory rules this out; there is no alternative, indeed no alternative is conceivable. This is just as well; imagine how disruptive it would be if Third World people worked out how to develop satisfactorily without having anything to do with investors, banks, debt, export industries, or the IMF. But the risk is slight as all the experts and advisers have studied conventional economics.

The economics text books do not point out that conventional economics is only one of many possible kinds of economics, a kind narrowly focused not on increasing religious observance for instance, but simply on maximizing production for sale in markets. By contrast the development goal of Bhutan is to maximize the Gross National Happiness.

Thus conventional development economics is in fact only about capitalist development; it is an approach which allows development to be driven by the investment of capital to maximize profits. It produces a great deal of development, but it is almost entirely only development in the interests of the rich. It can, in other worlds, be seen as a thinly disguised form of plunder. Economics courses tend not to draw attention to this interpretation of how development works.

What then might be the goals of a more acceptable conception of “development”? One suggestion might be, enabling all to enjoy a high quality of life in ecologically sustainable ways. Consider the factors most likely to enable this. Would not these include, having good health, good food, sufficient shelter and clothing, having a good family and friends in a supportive community, satisfying and appreciated work, freedom from violence, insecurity, stress, anxiety and depression, knowing others care about you, knowing you will be secure in old age, a relaxed pace, a pleasant and sustainable environment, a sense of having collective control over one’s society, living in a society one can be proud of, one that all the world’s people could share? Except perhaps for the first of these factors, monetary wealth is irrelevant let alone a prerequisite. Some of the world’s poorest people, including those living in rich world Eco-villages, enjoy them all.

It is very easy to design settlements and economies which would guarantee these conditions. Here is a brief indication of The Simpler Way vision.

Assist people to build highly self-sufficient and cooperative local/village/regional/economies which devote local resources to meeting as many of their needs a possible.

In framing goals and policies totally ignore monetary values, volumes of investment, business turnover or GDP.

Aim at providing simple but sufficient, food, housing, clothing, etc., via community development committees organizing available land, labour and skills to meet as many urgent needs as possible. Focus first on intensive development of alternative/sustainable agriculture. This might involve many existing small private farms and firms but would prioritise building community collective capacities, through non-profit co-operatives, commons, community supported agriculture, working bees, edible landscapes, tree crops, free food sources etc. Only export surpluses.

Facilitate craft, garden, artisan, hand tool and traditional means of producing as these are typically quite adequate, but use modern technologies where sensible.

Eliminate unemployment. Organize for all to have a productive role; there are many things that need doing. This is best done by setting up village co-operatives to produce necessities, e.g., fish or poultry.

If necessary create village currencies to enable trade between people who have no national currency, simply by recording credits and debts created by mutually beneficial exchange.

Establish village self-government, via participatory town assemblies and committees. Avoid top-down authoritarian or expert led procedures. The empowerment and morale of all as equal citizens is crucial for effective village functioning.

Avoid or at least minimise involvement of official government agencies, except in so far as they are willing to support village-led development.

These activities can flourish without any need to first eliminate the normal market driven economy. They involve the establishment of a new Needs-Driven-Economy along side the old Profit-Driven-Economy. In time it is likely that the role for the latter will become less relevant.

The most important committees organize cultural affairs, education, monitoring (especially of community morale and perceived quality of life), festivals, celebrations and the provision of local leisure and holiday activities, all at negligible dollar or resource costs.

Recognise that the quality of life must be redefined in terms of enjoying, community, arts and crafts, a relaxed pace, leisure time, freedom from stress, depression, unemployment and insecurity, contributing to an admirable society … as distinct from accumulating individual or national monetary wealth. One’s wealth-of-life-experience would derive from how well one’s village was working.

These local economies will need some but very few basic inputs from the wider regional and national economies, such as chicken wire, plastic irrigation pipe, cement and hand tools. Providing these would require governments to allocate very few national resources. Governments would need to widely distribute the few mostly light industries producing these items so that each village could make a contribution the national supply of some of these, enabling it to pay for its imports of those it required.

The miniscule resources needed would leave national governments quite capable of funding the socially crucial systems villages need but can’t provide for themselves, such as medical services, especially when this alternative approach would enable them redirect the wealth flows presently going out to foreign investors and shoppers.

Most of these elements are characteristic of the 3,000 Eco-villages that now exist. The Remaking Settlements study (Trainer 2019) explains how an outer Sydney suburb redesigned along these lines might cut per capita dollar and resource costs by 90% while providing most of its food and other needs. Lockyer (2019) found that the Dancing Rabbit Eco-village in Missouri had per capita resource use rates around 5 to 10% of US national averages. Sustainability cannot be achieved unless reductions of this order are achieved, and they can only be achieved where settlement geographies and economies are small in scale, integrated and highly collectivist/cooperative (although there could also be many privately owned small farms, firms and co-ops.). For example these conditions enable kitchen scraps to go straight to the poultry and their manures to go straight to gardens, at no cost in energy, transport, bureaucracy etc. The study of egg supply by Trainer, Malik and Lenzen (2019) found that such a supply path would have dollar and energy costs around 0.5% – 2% of the typical supermarket path.

The Senegalese government is working to establish 1,400 Eco-villages. (St Onge, 2015.) Leahy (2009, 2019) documents the remarkable success of the kind of alternative village self sufficiency advocated above, concerned to enable African villagers to use the resources around them to cooperatively meet as many of their basic needs as possible.

Evidently no relevance or value is seen in any of this by the Nobel Prize winners, or the judges, or almost anybody else within the economics profession/industry. To them this would be obvious because this alternative fails to recognise that economics in general and “development” in particular can only be about earning more money, investing capital, increasing production for sale, and raising the GDP. Hence the remarkable power that the study of economics has on the mind. These people profess to want to remedy poverty but they can see no reason to study the glaringly obvious, glaringly unjust massive structures that determine and legitimize the flow of Third World wealth into the pockets of the rich while keeping billions impoverished. Most disturbing is not that three high prestige researchers think the best strategy is not to question that system while working out how to help/prod a few more people to get more of the scarce credentials and jobs it offers, it is the mentality of the economics establishment which has led it to regard this work as the most valuable contribution to poverty relief they could find.