The World Bank’s Poverty Illusion

Mel Gurtov

What would you estimate is the minimum amount of money you need to get by every day? $100? $50? The figure, of course, depends very much on where you live and what you’re used to spending. Now shift and imagine you’re in a so-called developing country, say in sub-Saharan Africa or Southeast Asia. You might estimate you can get by on $10 if you’re in, say, Kenya as opposed to $20 in Thailand. But how about trying to live on $1.90 a day? According to the World Bank, that would put you in “extreme poverty.” Yet the Bank uses that figure as the “International Poverty Line (IPL),” and by that measure, global poverty has been reduced significantly. Which also means that if you’re making two or three times that amount per day, you’re supposed to be overcoming poverty.

From a critical and human-interest perspective, the IPL is nonsense. Anyone living on $1.90 a day—the World Bank for many years used $1 a day to define extreme poverty—cannot possibly live a meaningful life no matter how defined. In fact, the IPL is a political measure, set deliberately low to show how well the World Bank, other international funding agencies, and governments are doing at overcoming poverty. Governments like the low figure because they can pretend that citizens making the next highest levels of daily income, $3.20 and $5.50, are far more numerous than their poorest cousins. In short, the figure is a great way to evade responsibility.

Fortunately, we have an impeccable source for calling out the World Bank’s claim: Philip Alston, who has just left his post as the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. In his final report to the UN in early July, Alston said:

Even before COVID-19, we squandered a decade in the fight against poverty, with misplaced triumphalism blocking the very reforms that could have prevented the worst impacts of the pandemic. COVID-19 is projected to push hundreds of millions into unemployment and poverty, while increasing the number at risk of acute hunger by more than 250 million. But the international community’s abysmal record on tackling poverty, inequality and disregard for human life far precede this pandemic. Over the past decade, the UN, world leaders and pundits have promoted a self-congratulatory message of impending victory over poverty, but almost all of these accounts rely on the World Bank’s international poverty line, which is utterly unfit for the purpose of tracking such progress.

Alston called the Bank’s $1.90 poverty line, by which it could claim that over 1.1 million people were lifted out of extreme poverty between 1990 and 2015, “scandalously unambitious.” “The best evidence shows it doesn’t even cover the cost of food or housing in many countries,” he said. “The poverty decline it purports to show is due largely to rising incomes in a single country, China. And it obscures poverty among women and those often excluded from official surveys, such as migrant workers and refugees.” In all, a devastating critique.

The reality about global poverty, which the World Bank would prefer that we forget, is that extreme poverty has hardly improved at all in recent decades. “Even before the pandemic,” Alston says, “3.4 billion people, nearly half the world, lived on less than $5.50 a day. That number has barely declined since 1990.” And with COVID-19, which the World Bank does take into account, “poverty rates will go up as the global economy falls into recession and there is a sharp drop in GDP per capita. The ongoing crisis will erase almost all the progress made in the last five years.” That conclusion seems all but certain since, as two analysts say in an upcoming issue of Foreign Affairs, it will probably take several years for the global economy as a whole to recover from the contraction brought on by the pandemic. They cite a massive decline in exports (2020 will be “the worst year for globalization since the early 1930s”), very high unemployment, and an especially harmful impact on low-income people, who lack the education, job security, and health to survive without government support that will not be available in struggling economies.

The result? The World Bank estimates that 40 million to 60 million people will fall into extreme poverty (under $1.90/day) in 2020, compared to 2019. But again, the Bank uses the same flawed measurement, which means we have to add in (by the Bank’s account) anywhere from 70 to 180 million more people in the $5.50 a day category.

A major omission from the World Bank’s assessment is who benefits from poverty. The Bank says nothing about the world’s richest one percent, whose fortunes never fall, or the tax havens that enable multinational corporations to hide a large percentage of their profits. Again, Philip Alston, in his final report: “Instead multinational companies and investors draw guaranteed profits from public coffers [such as through tax havens], while poor communities are neglected and underserved. It’s time for a new approach to poverty eradication that tackles inequality, embraces redistribution, and takes tax justice seriously. Poverty is a political choice and it will be with us until its elimination is reconceived as a matter of social justice.”

Poverty is indeed a political choice, as we in the US know very well. Philip Alston told us that in 2017 when he visited several deep pockets of poverty, from Los Angeles to West Virginia and Detroit to Puerto Rico, at the end of 2017. His report (UN General Assembly Doc. A/HRC/38/33/Add.1, May 4, 2018) is a devastating indictment of the government that underscores the large and growing contradictions between the American Dream and reality. Alston told The Guardian that Trump’s policies amount to “ a systematic attack on America’s welfare program that is undermining the social safety net for those who can’t cope on their own. Once you start removing any sense of government commitment, you quickly move into cruelty.

In support of Alston, Robert Reich, the former labor secretary who often writes on inequality in America, says:

Over the last four decades, the median wage has barely budged. But the incomes of the richest 0.1% have soared by more than 300% and the incomes of the top 0.001% (the 2,300 richest Americans), by more than 600%. The net worth of the wealthiest 0.1% of Americans almost equals that of the bottom 90% combined. This grotesque imbalance is undermining American democracy.

The story of the “grotesque imbalance” between rich and poor is a global story that has been told often—and just as often ignored by those who enjoy keeping things as they are. Creating an economy based on social justice cannot be accomplished with quick fixes or “reforms.” It really is a revolutionary enterprise.

Online Education and the Struggle over Disposable Time

Pritha Chandra

During Covid-19 times, the ‘social distancing’ catchphrase has invaded every aspect of our lives. Public space has been fragmented into individualized, quarantined units, transforming social relations into aggregates of their interactions. Unlike other pandemics of yesteryears, Covid-19 has given a tremendous push to technology to secure social distancing. In the field of education, the phenomenon of online education was already slowly gaining space especially as complementary to traditional classroom education and as a mechanism of distance learning. Today, the ideology of social distancing has brought online education in the centre of educational systems. It has acquired legitimacy and the capacity to take over the whole system of education. In countries such as India, where Covid-19 has been used by the state as an opportunity to revamp various sectors, including health and medicine, a reconception of education is underway. Online education serves as the organizing force in this regard. 

Education as Commodity and the Question of its Production 

Popular debates on technology and online education generally revolve around the idea of education as a commodity to be put to consumption in the classical sense of the word. It is, of course, a commodity with a use-value, much in parlance with material commodities like food items, daily wear etc. Such commodified education naturally must meet the parameters of consumer satisfaction. Therefore, much discussion on the recent Covid 19-triggered tech-intensive online teaching harps on students’ differential access to internet connectivity and bandwidth, the problems of long-distance assessments without the characteristic ‘fairness’ metrics associated with offline exams etc. — in short, anything connected to the students’ overall satisfaction with their purchase of this immaterial commodity. 

What these debates however miss are the fundamental processes that go into the production of education, and the complex dynamics of the teacher-student relationship underpinning such production. By neglecting its sphere of production, we miss out on a very important aspect of this commodity — one that would help us understand online education, and the role of technology better, and also identify spaces of critique of education, as understood in the current socio-economic system. 

Notwithstanding the similarities, education is unlike any other commodity, not just in the material or physical sense, but mainly in the organization of its consumption and production. Material objects such as pens, cars etc. have an immediate use-value for buyers, consumed beyond the sphere of production. Education on the other hand, produces students as workers for their future entry into the labour market; its consumption or use-value lies in generating new, educated and skilled labour power for further use in the processes of production. Through a network of local and international educational institutions placed at different orders of hierarchy and status, education reinforces and reproduces the existing and (unequal) social relations by producing a heterogeneous group of future workers with differential skills, and by extension, differential wages. Hence, from the students’ perspective, education is consumptive production.  

Education as knowledge production is unique in placing this consumer — the student — in the production sphere itself. In other words, education as a commodity is a co-production of teachers and students, and is generated through continuous dialogue and interaction between them. It is not a fixed commodity, but one that is processual, and evolves within the dialectic of the educated-educator relationship. This dialectic constitutes a predicament for education in the current system. On one hand, there is the tendency to establish standardized syllabi and programs in response to the needs of a globalized labour market, making the practice of teaching and learning very mechanical; on the other, there is an equally strong opposition from the co-producers against attempts to kill their cooperative agency and creativity.  

Classroom settings and face to face instruction allow the dialectic of education to be productive in their dialogicity, with teachers innovating ideas and methods in dynamic and synchronous concord with students. With both instructors and learners present in the same physical space, learning — despite constraints of fixed syllabi and evaluation metrics — evolves through collective thinking and with a view to the intellectual needs and abilities of the participants. There are challenges thrown in with big class sizes and formal disciplinary settings leading to alienation typical of a hierarchized industrial scenario — an intensified lack of interest and commitment from both learners and teachers. However, since education in such settings is still based on direct relationships between students and teachers, there is always a possibility to overcome the alienating institutional mediation. There is a relative autonomy operating in this dialogic relationship, which allows innovation in ideas and knowledge production. 

Technology and the Informatization of Education 

Online education, on the other hand, despite and because of deploying the best of technologies, fails to simulate the same environment. Educational production is now distributed over multiple zones, with producers confined to their virtual cubicles. Without a shared space, education is reduced to instruction and information, discretized and reintegrated by the mediating pre-programmed machines. The dialogical relationship is now between the machine and the producers, not between the co-producers. The teacher is deprived of her role of the facilitator in this dialogue. She is just an instructor in this new environment. Her instructions are received by the machine, which mediatizes them and delivers them to students in a manner that it is programmed to deliver. This overhauls the whole dialectic of education, which is now hierarchized. Alienation in this process is quite stark, since the relations of production of education are completely transformed, which cannot be overcome by the deployment of any kind of technology.  

Technology, in fact, plays a big role in this alienation of labour that happens through the informatization of education. In the effort to replicate the classroom experience sans the direct relationship of affectivity between teachers and students, there is an over-accumulation of technologies and educational products, bringing in the surveillance techniques for remote disciplining of students and teachers. 

One only needs to look at the number of new gadgets and software for online education to understand the extent to which technology tries to overcome its artificiality. The market is flooded with AI-driven ‘smart content’ materials, customized lessons, digitized textbooks, easy to navigate chapter summaries, flashcards, automatically-graded exams, cameras for remote surveillance etc. The process of alienation is evermore intensified, since human living labour of both teachers and students are objectified in the development of these technologies. Their vivacity is reduced to an appendage to the artificiality of the machine. 

What is interesting is that while technology deskills the producers by taking over their powers of imagination and judgement, it also forces them to reskill themselves. With evermore new technologies hitting the online teaching platforms every day, both students and teachers are forced to continuously update themselves in their technical know-how to assist these machines. This has led to generational and occupational redundancies in education too by promoting lean production methods and Taylorising techniques in education. 

The Struggle over Disposable Time 

What happens to education as a commodity in this alienated and Taylorized production process? Education internalizes the segmented social relations that characterize capitalism. This introduces dualism in its institutionalization, which gets further systematized and globalized in the wake of the ongoing technicization of education. On the one hand, we have mass production of education as a set of discrete information and instruction to train the majority of the working population in the drudgery of assisting the machines. This is facilitated by online education technologies. On the other hand, we have elite institutions monopolizing the rights to innovate and research (secured by various legal and institutional mechanisms like patenting, funding etc.), for which the more intensive conventional teaching methods must continue. This duality of education enhanced by online educational technologies has been developing for the last few decades to keep pace with the human resource requirements of other industrial and service sectors. Hence, online education itself has emerged as a fast-growing industry. The Covid-19 pandemic has given its production and dissemination a new intensity, urgency and definite possibility. 

With the growing dominance of online education, and discretized learning/teaching methods, there is also a proportionate increase in disposable time for both teachers and students. In the absence of direct and personalized contact during lectures, instruction intensifies; knowledge in the form of discretized information is produced in less time than in traditional classroom set-ups due to the absence of students’ queries and interventions. But what will be the utility of this disposable time? The system controls this disposable time by retrenchment, and by increasing workload and diversifying work profiles for the existing educational or knowledge workers.

However, from the workers’ perspective, the disposable time has a different meaning, one that allows the co-producers to overcome drudgery and alienation by reclaiming the time-space for innovation and creativity. It is in this time-space that workers recognize knowledge as a result of their co-production, and re-appropriate it, going beyond being passive feeders-receivers of information assisting the machine. Dialogues between the students and the teachers are reestablished through more interpersonal interactions. This leads to a process of conscientization, in which the co-producers move beyond the classroom norms and fixed syllabi, and collectively build an understanding of phenomena and concepts, drawing on their own realities and experience. The disposable time enables workers to reclaim their common space and self-organize knowledge production, while reducing technology to mere means in this process, not as a mediator, organizer and controller of production and producers. It is only through such collaborative activities in these fractured times, that teachers and students together can assert their autonomy as knowledge producers and consumers.

Business as Usual Equals Many Extra Deaths from Global Warming

Pete Dolack

Is it already too late to stop global warming? That question is not asked with thoughts of throwing up hands in despair and giving up. Rather, that question must be asked in the context of mitigating future damage to whatever degree might yet be possible.

The context here is that the carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases thrown into the atmosphere don’t magically disappear but will have effects that will persist for centuries. A ton saved today is a ton saved tomorrow.

There are the mass disruptions that humanity will almost certainly see from dramatic rises in sea levels and the disruptions to agricultural patterns and sea life. Then there is the human health impact. In what its authors say is the most detailed attempt yet undertaken to quantify what the future cost of global warming will be in terms of mortality, a new scientific paper predicts the future will see significant increases in deaths.

Sixteen researchers, collaborating on a National Bureau of Economic Research paper titled “Valuing the Global Mortality Consequences of Climate Change Accounting for Adaptation Costs and Benefits,” estimate that under “business as usual” — that is, Earth’s current trend of steadily increasing greenhouse gas emissions continues — there would be 85 extra deaths per 100,000 people annually by the end of the 21st century. To put that statistic in perspective, all the world’s cancers currently are responsible for 125 deaths per 100,000 people, according to World Health Organization data. Or to be put it another way, the 85 extra deaths represent a toll comparable to the global total of deaths from infectious diseases in 2018.

As would be expected, the increased deaths will be disproportionally suffered in the Global South. Although the financial cost of mitigation is predicted to be higher in the advanced capitalist countries than elsewhere, the easing of cold weather in winter months might actually cause death rates to decline in high-latitude, high-income locations. The authors put that possibility in stark terms with this comparison:

“The costs of climate change induced mortality risks are distributed unevenly around the world. Despite the gains from adaptation … there are large increases in mortality risk in the global south. For example, in Accra, Ghana, climate change is predicted to cause damages equivalent to approximately 160 additional deaths per 100,000 annually under [the business as usual scenario] in 2100. In contrast, there are gains in many impact regions in the global north, including in Oslo, Norway, where we predict that the equivalent of approximately 230 lives per 100,000 are saved annually. These changes are equal to an 18% increase in Accra’s annual mortality rate and a 28% decline in Oslo’s.”

And thus their conclusion that “Today’s poor bear a disproportionately high share of the global mortality risks of climate change, as current incomes (as well as current average temperatures) are strongly correlated with future climate change impacts.” In other words, those least responsible for global warming will pay the highest price for it.

To make these predictions, the authors gathered mortality statistics from 41 countries accounting for 55 percent of the world’s population, which they say enables them to have put together a more comprehensive analysis than previously attempted by earlier studies.

It won’t be pretty for our descendants

In a different scenario, under which greenhouse gases are stabilized in coming years, the expected number of excess deaths would be less, although still concentrated in the Global South. Under this scenario, the amount of carbon dioxide equivalent is presumed to stabilize at above 500 parts per million (ppm), and although that is far less than the “business as usual” scenario, it should be remembered that today’s carbon dioxide equivalent content is 407 ppm. And that is with the recent downward blip thanks to the pandemic. To use non-scientific terminology for what would happen in a 500 ppm world, our descendants will be screwed.

To have a hope of keeping the eventual total of global warming from the start of the Industrial Revolution to under 2 degrees Celsius, considered the outside limit before uncontrollable, catastrophic environmental disruptions are triggered, atmospheric greenhouse gases will have to be held to not much more than present-day levels and then brought down.

Without a drastic change, soon, in global output of greenhouse gases — and no such change is anywhere in sight — even the scenario of stabilizing greenhouse gases at 500 ppm seems out of reach. But even if we could suddenly convert to a carbon-neutral economy and cease adding net gains to atmospheric greenhouse gases, it may already be too late. More worrisome still, the effects of global warming are occurring faster than expected.

The Arctic is warming two to three times faster than Earth is overall. The resulting faster than expected loss of land ice contributes to a faster sea level rise and the loss of sea ice adds to global warming in a feedback loop. That’s because a dark ocean surface absorbs solar radiation up to 10 times more readily than the brighter sea ice surface. In a 2019 paper, “Radiative Heating of an Ice-Free Arctic Ocean,” published in Geophysical Research Letters, three oceanographers and atmospheric researchers calculate that if the Arctic Ocean becomes ice-free, the loss of the ice’s reflective power radiating solar energy back into space would be the equivalent to adding one trillion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. That would be roughly equal to adding 25 years of additional global CO₂ emissions.

Although an ice-free Arctic Ocean is still generally predicted to be well into the future, that future might arrive much sooner than expected. Scientists at the British Antarctic Survey, publishing this week in the journal Nature Climate Change, believe it is possible for the Arctic to be ice-free as soon as 2035, a possibility based on study of Arctic sea ice during the last interglacial period, when Arctic land summer temperatures were 4 to 5 degrees C. higher than the pre-industrial baseline. By one measure, current temperatures above 60 degrees north latitude have already risen about 3 degrees C. since 1900.

There’s plenty of bad news to go around

As it is, predictions of what the world will look like are increasingly dire. For example, a 2015 paper by nine scientists led by geologist Andrea Dutton at the University of Florida published in the journal Science found that when global temperatures in the past were between 1 and 2 degrees C. above the pre-industrial base temperature, sea levels rose six to nine meters. What that finding means is that humanity may have already committed itself to an eventual sea level rise of that magnitude.

Need more? A 2016 paper published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, authored by 19 climate scientists from the United States, France, Germany and China and led by James Hansen, predicts that the melted freshwater from melting glaciers will add to the other scenarios to create a feedback loop that could culminate in a sea level rise of “several meters” in 50 to 150 years.

Still another paper, “Explaining Ocean Warming: Causes, Effects and Consequences,” concludes that the mean global ocean temperature will increase by as much as 4 degrees C. by 2100. This 2016 paper states that Earth has tipped into a heat imbalance since 1970, and this excess heating has thus far been greatly ameliorated because the world’s oceans have absorbed 93 percent of the enhanced heating since the 1970s. This accumulated heat is not permanently stored, but can be released back into the atmosphere, potentially providing significant feedback that would accelerate global warming. Dozens of climate scientists from around the world contributed peer-reviewed work to this report, research that in turn is based on more than 500 peer-reviews papers.

There is plenty more, but perhaps the foregoing is sufficient. And so what is the world doing? Very little. The December 2019 meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 25) in Madrid concluded with the world’s governments saying the conference “Notes with concern the state of the global climate system” and “Decides to hold, at its twenty-sixth (2020) and twenty-seventh (2021) sessions, round tables among Parties and non-Party stakeholders on pre-2020 implementation and ambition.” The time for “noting” there may be a problem would seem to be well past. A year earlier, at COP24 in Katowice, Poland, the world’s governments agreed to a rulebook with no real enforcement mechanism. And at COP23 in Bonn, participants congratulated themselves for their willingness to talk and agreed they would talk some more.

And so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut liked to say. We are fortunate that hot air from political leaders doesn’t add to global warming, however weighed down they are by the piles of corporate money that keep “solutions” at the level of talking rather than action. Our descendants are not likely to be amused.

Covid-19: past, present and future

Ron Forthofer

The current pandemic continues to have a large negative impact on most aspects of our lives. Over 20.6 million have been infected and almost 750,000 have died worldwide (about 5.3 million infections and over 168,000 deaths in the US) due to this pandemic. Besides these horrific impacts, this pandemic has also made clearer the failure of the bipartisan neoliberal economic approach that puts profit before people and planet.

Pre-pandemic

Before the pandemic, the world was already nearing a climate catastrophe and ecological collapse. In addition, under its neoliberal approach, the US already had a shamefully large number of homeless, tens of millions underinsured or without health insurance, millions experiencing hunger, millions without jobs, millions more facing huge debts, and an appalling wealth and income inequality. Politicians, operating in a system of legalized bribery, continued to fund the military wildly beyond its needs. This wasteful spending clearly didn’t make us secure and took money from the far more needed and productive domestic spending. In addition, systemic racism, especially in the US ‘injustice’ system, greatly harmed minorities. This was hardly an ideal world.

During the pandemic

Due to the Trump administration’s scandalous lack of preparedness and its failure to promptly implement public health measures, many municipalities instituted total lockdowns in an attempt to slow the spread of Covid-19. These lockdowns led to the closing of many businesses (especially small businesses) and tens of millions filed for unemployment. These job losses resulted in millions more: 1) losing their health insurance; 2) facing the loss of their housing; and 3) experiencing severe hunger. In addition, due to systemic racism, minorities were disproportionately more susceptible to the disease than whites.

So far, the Trump administration and Congress have enacted relief packages that primarily benefited the already obscenely wealthy while providing only minimal short-term aid to the rest of us. In contrast, several other nations demonstrated real concern about their people and their businesses by funding 70% or more of the business payrolls. As a result, they didn’t experience large job losses or bankruptcies.

My hopes

My hopes are that the politicians would finally live up to the ideas in: 1) the Second Bill of Rights (an economic bill of rights) that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposed in 1944; and 2) the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), including the rights of women, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948.

Roosevelt said: In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all —regardless of station, race, or creed.

Among these are:

• The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
• The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
• The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
• The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
• The right of every family to a decent home;
• The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
• The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
• The right to a good education.

Unfortunately, the US doesn’t recognize these rights and some others in the UDHR that are accepted by many other wealthy nations. As a result, tens of millions of our population unnecessarily suffer tremendous harm.

In addition, my hopes include a major overhaul in our imperialistic foreign policy. We must rejoin the family of nations and rely on diplomacy instead of military power and economic coercion. The global threats of nuclear war and the looming climate catastrophe require nations to work together.

Some vital changes

Unless the Trump administration and Congress quickly enact bills that:

1) fill shortfalls in the budgets of the Post Office and state and local governments;

2) provide aid to true small businesses;

3) provide long-term funding directly to the population;

4) declare a jubilee on debts owed to predatory lenders;

5) support a green new deal;

6) provide healthcare for all;

7) drastically reduce the military budget; and especially

8) fully protect the rights of minorities,

I fear the US is likely to fall into a long-lasting depression and risk societal collapse.

Update

President Trump and the Republican-led Senate dithered around for two months after the House proposed its major relief bill instead of getting a new relief bill enacted. This ineptitude and callous attitude towards the desperation and suffering of many Americans is incredible. Making matters maddeningly worse, the US is still ill prepared to deal with this crisis, a crisis that is likely to worsen upon the return of inadequately protected teachers and students to school.

Unfortunately, these updates reinforce my fears about the future.

Avoiding World War III in the Caucasus

David Boyajian

“The Caucasus is Ground Zero in the New Cold War between the U.S. and Russia.”

I wrote that several years ago, and it’s still true, particularly after Christian Armenia decisively repulsed a mid-July attack by Muslim Azerbaijan.

Perhaps dozens of Azeris died in the battles, including a major-general, colonel, and two majors.  Armenia reported far fewer deaths and captured a new defensive position, even though Azerbaijan possesses a bigger arsenal, quadruple the GDP, and more than triple Armenia’s population.

Azerbaijan attacked Armenia’s northeastern border and has done so before.  Typically, though, Azerbaijan attacks Artsakh (Karabagh), the de facto-independent Armenian-majority region that voted some thirty years ago for freedom from Azerbaijan, which rejects that vote.

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin deceitfully annexed Artsakh and the ancient Armenian region of Nakhichevan to Azerbaijan in the 1920s.  Far from being ancient itself, Azerbaijan was invented only in 1918.

Why should any of this matter to the rest of the world?

Why It Matters

• Major gas and oil pipelines originate in Azerbaijan. They cross Georgia and NATO member Turkey with fuel bound for Europe and elsewhere.  Georgia and Azerbaijan are thereby linked to the West.  These pipelines are at risk as they pass only about 12 to 30 miles from the July fighting and from Artsakh.
• The Caucasus is the US/NATO/EU’s doorway (via Turkey) into the energy-rich Caspian Sea Basin and then into Russia’s vulnerable Turkic-Muslim underbelly in Central Asia. Russia regards this as an existential threat.
• Armenia enjoys excellent relations with the US/NATO/EU. But for security reasons it aligns itself with the nearest major Christian power: Russia.  In sympathy with its Turkic Azerbaijani ally, Turkey has closed its border with Armenia since 1994.  Armenia, therefore, has become the geopolitical pivot point for whoever wishes to dominate the Caucasus.
• Turkey has long threatened Armenia, and has placed itself squarely on Azerbaijan’s side in the recent conflict. That may produce a Turkish confrontation with Russia, in addition to those in Syria and Libya.
• Azerbaijan is threatening to bomb Armenia’s Metsamor nuclear power plant. This would spread deadly radiation to Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iran, Turkey, and elsewhere.

Armenian-Western relations go back thousands of years.  The US/NATO/EU (we’ll term it the “Western Bloc”) has been very friendly to Armenia and Artsakh and aided them economically for decades.

Landlocked Armenia, however, depends on Russia for most of its gas and weapons.  Moscow also controls much of Armenia’s energy network.

Armenia (pop. 3 million), nevertheless, remains under threat from Azerbaijan (pop. 10 million) and Turkey (pop. 82 million) since the USSR’s dissolution in 1991.

Armenia under Siege 

Turkey committed genocide against Armenians in 1915-23.  The Armenian Highlands and everything else Armenian, particularly in what are now eastern and southern Turkey, were destroyed or confiscated.  Azeris joined in that genocide in the Caucasus.

The Armenian Genocide isn’t mere history.  The threat of Genocide 2.0 always looms.

Turkey and Azerbaijan (motto: “two countries, one nation”) won’t come to terms with Armenia’s existence.  Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev says all of Armenia should be part of Azerbaijan — without Armenians, of course.

The July 19 cover of the Turkish newspaper Diriliş Postası (Resurrection Post), headlined “Karabagh or Death,” portrays Azerbaijan as encompassing Artsakh and southern Armenia.

Turkey is still enamored with pan-Turkism, just as during WWI and the Armenian Genocide. Turkey envisions leading a federation that includes Azerbaijan and the Turkic-Muslim countries of Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) — all the way to China’s Xinjiang Province.

Soldiers in Turkish-Azerbaijani military drills last year wore arm patches depicting such a pan-Turkic entity.

Participants in recent worldwide anti-Armenian demonstrations flashed the Grey Wolves (Bozkurtlar) hand signal.  Grey Wolves is a neo-fascist, pan-Turkist organization responsible for hundreds of assassinations and murders.

While the European Allies (and, implicitly, America) militarily opposed Ottoman Turkey’s pan-Turkism in WWI, the Western Bloc implicitly supports pan-Turkism today.

Armenia is a geopolitical impediment to pan-Turkism.  That’s a key reason Russia needs Armenia.  Russians are too proud to admit it though.

However, Russia has increasingly been cozying up to Azerbaijan and Turkey.  Therefore, despite the Armenian-Russian mutual defense treaty and a Russian base in Armenia near the Turkish border, Armenia isn’t always certain of Russian support, particularly against Azerbaijan.

Azerbaijani Threats

Azerbaijan has violated the ceasefire agreement between it and Armenia/Artsakh thousands of times since 1994.  Armenian forces are in defensive mode. They have little reason to violate the ceasefire.  Azerbaijan rejects proposals for installing autonomous gunfire-detection equipment on the line of contact.

President Aliyev refuses even to negotiate with Artsakh, a stable democracy.  That’s hardly a recipe for peace.

Armenia is democratic and reformist.  Azerbaijan is autocratic.  It imprisons journalists and human rights activists at an astonishing rate.  Europe’s Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) named Aliyev its 2012 “Organized Crime and Corruption Person of the Year.”  U.S. diplomatic cables described him as a mafia-like figure.

Aliyev‘s “Azerbaijani Laundromat” bribed European officials and laundered billions.

In 2004, Azeri serviceman Ramil Safarov axed to death an Armenian lieutenant in his sleep at a NATO exercise in Hungary.  He was sentenced to life and imprisoned.  Hungary eventually released him to Azerbaijan which welcomed him as a national hero.  Armenian civilians have been tortured and beheaded by invading Azeri soldiers.

To ‘prove’ Armenians never lived in Nakhichevan, in 2005 the Azerbaijani military used pickaxes and dump trucks to destroy thousands of iconic headstones in a ninth century Armenian cemetery.  It was caught on video.

During the twentieth century, Azerbaijan emptied Nakhichevan of its Armenians and was doing similarly in Artsakh before Armenians put a stop to it.

No wonder Artsakh says it will never again submit to Azeri rule.

Turkish threats

Turkey was set to invade Armenia in 1993 during a coup against Russian President Boris Yeltsin led by Ruslan Khasbulatov, the pro-Turkish Chechen and Supreme Soviet speaker.  Fortunately, the coup failed.

In 1993, Turkish President Turgut Ozal threatened Armenia “in case they had not learned their lesson in 1915.”

Turkish President Erdogan recently menaced Armenia using a backhanded reference to the 1915 Genocide: “We will continue to fulfill this mission, which our grandfathers have carried out for centuries, in the Caucasus again.”

Turkey is supplying Azerbaijan with Bayraktar drones (based on Israeli designs), T-129 ATAK helicopters, and TRG-300 Tiger rocket systems.  Turkey has sent F-16 jets to Azerbaijan for joint military exercises.

Yet the Western Bloc has said and done nothing to restrain Turkey.

Turkey denies reports it will send jihadists to fight for Azerbaijan.  In the past, however, Turkey has sent its Grey Wolves, and Azerbaijan has recruited Afghan/Pakistani/Chechen mujahedin, to battle Armenians.

The Azerbaijani-Israeli-Jewish Axis

President Aliyev once compared Azerbaijan–Israeli relations to an iceberg: “Nine-tenths of it is below the surface.”

Israel sells Azerbaijan billions in advanced weapons (many used against Armenia and Artsakh) while Israel gets 40% of its oil from Azerbaijan and facilities to spy on and counter Iran.

Azerbaijan’s “lobby in the U.S.,” revealed Aliyev, “is the Jewish community.”

The American Jewish Committee’s Executive Director David Harris (aka Jews’ “foreign minister”), for instance, received Aliyev’s “Order of Friendship” award.

Numerous principled Jewish/Israeli writers are friendly to Armenians.  Still, the Israeli- Azerbaijani alliance has induced many Jewish/Israeli writers to gleefully malign Armenia.  Examples include Brenda Shaffer and Nurit Greenger.

It’s reminiscent of how Jewish American organizations — ADL, AIPAC, AJC, and others — have colluded with Turkey and Israel (in friendlier days) to hypocritically deny/diminish the Armenian Genocide and defeat Armenian Genocide resolutions in Congress.

Thus, the Azerbaijani-Israeli-Jewish axis is a clone of the disreputable Turkish-Israeli-Jewish one.

What’s Needed

Under relentless pressure and against all odds, Armenia and Artsakh continue to hold out against foreign actors who wish to deny them their very existence.

Regardless, from a practical, if not moral, standpoint, the Western Bloc and Russia should rein in Azeri and Turkish aggression unless they wish to see the region explode.

Former Malaysian prime minister’s conviction deepens political crisis

John Roberts

Former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak’s conviction last month on corruption charges follows a decades-long period of conflict within the ruling elites and is inflaming the current political crises and instability. He was the leader of the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) that ruled Malaysia for more than sixty years to 2018.

Najib was sentenced on July 28 in Kuala Lumpur by High Court Judge Mohd Nazlan Mohd Ghazli, to 12 years imprisonment and fined $US49million. Najib was convicted on all seven counts relating to the moving of $9.87 million into his personal accounts from SRC International, a unit of 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), a state investment fund.

Najib, out on bail pending an appeal to the Federal Court, faces two more trials over the billions of dollars that he and other UMNO figures and their business cronies in Malaysia and internationally allegedly looted from the 1MDB.

The second case involves charges over laundering $550 million taken from 1MDB. The third case concerns the abuse of power and cover up of a 1MDB audit report.

The scale of looting and laundering of state funds was staggering. Prosecutors in the US Justice Department claim $4.5 billion in 1MDB funds vanished during Najib’s term as prime minister from 2009 to 2018. In 2016, the Wall Street Journal estimated $6 billion was “siphoned” out of 1MDB.

The money laundering operation sparked official investigations, not only in the US, but Singapore, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates. The US investigation alone uncovered hundreds of millions of dollars spent on art works, casinos, and buying hotels and luxury real estate in the US and UK. It financed the production of The Wolf of Wall Street motion picture.

Notwithstanding the magnitude of the fraud, the conviction of a former prime minister and UMNO chief is unprecedented. Najib, like his UMNO predecessors, ruled the country through coalition governments since formal independence from Britain in 1957. They relied on an electoral gerrymander, anti-democratic laws and a politically controlled police and judiciary.

The UMNO regime was based on Malay chauvinism at the expense of the ethnic Chinese and Indian minorities that constitute about 30 percent of the population. The UMNO monolith claimed to present the welfare of all ethnic Malays but the chief beneficiaries of its race-based politics were the well healed UMNO cronies and connected business empires.

Najib had no fear of ever been held to account until the shock election defeat of his government at the May 2018 national elections.

Najib’s government was ousted by the Pakatan Harapan alliance (PH), composed of the ethnic Chinese based Democratic Action Party (DAP), the People’s Justice Party (PKR) of Anwar Ibrahim and the Malaysian United Indigenous Party (Bersatu) of Mahathir Mohamad, who was UMNO prime minister from 1981 to 2003.

While the PH presented itself as a reforming multiracial coalition that would end the race-based policies and corruption of UMNO and the BN, it was inherently unstable. It brought together heterogeneous sections of the ruling elite whose only real agreement was to get rid of Najib.

Anwar had been Mahathir’s deputy prime minister and finance minister in 1998. He responded to the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis by supporting the International Monetary Fund’s demands to open up the economy, and that threatened UMNO’s business cronies. Mahathir sacked Anwar and had him arrested and beaten up then framed and jailed on charges of corruption and sodomy. Najib repeated the frameup sending Anwar to jail a second time.

Mahathir only broke with Najib and UMNO because his government signed up to the Obama administration’s Trans-Pacific Partnership in 2016 threatening protected Malay businesses. On the same basis, he also opposed Najib’s signing $22 billion worth of infrastructure deals with Chinese corporations as part of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, which gave large-scale access to the Malaysian economy.

Despite the glaring differences on economic and social policy, Anwar, from his jail cell, insisted on bringing Mahathir and the Bersatu party into the electoral coalition, overcoming strong opposition in his own PKR. As part of the coalition deal that made Mahathir prime minister for the first half of the parliamentary term, Mahathir agreed to obtain a pardon for Anwar, allowing him to enter parliament and take over for a second term.

Mahathir, however, continually delayed setting a time for Anwar to become prime minister. Instead he stacked the cabinet with Bersatu, ex-UMNO, ministers out of proportion to the number of its parliamentary seats and openly defended the Malay chauvinism he had always espoused, creating the conditions for a break-up of the PH coalition.

Mahathir as prime minister began the prosecution of Najib, but by February of this year the new government was tearing itself apart.

This allowed a section of the ruling class, determined to maintain the dominance of the Malay elites, to plot and carry out a coup. The majority of Bersatu, minus Mahathir, his son Mukhriz, and four other Bersatu MPs, left the ruling coalition, along with a faction inside the PKR. Aided by intervention of the head of state, a sultan serving as king, the breakaways joined with UMNO and the Islamist Parti Islam se-Malaysia (PAS) to form a government. Bersatu leader Muhyiddin Yassin became prime minister.

The new government appeared to be signalling to the judiciary to acquit Najib. Four days before the verdict, it agreed to a $3.9 billion settlement with US investment firm Goldman Sachs, one of the many financial institutions involved in Najib’s 1MDB operation. This amount was only a small proportion of the amount sought by the Mahathir government when it filed charges in 2018. The firm received $600 million for raising $6.5 billion on bonds, but then turned a blind eye to the corrupt use of the funds.

The out-of-court settlement meant that the firm would abandon its defence that senior members of the BN government lied to the firm, thus potentially letting Najib and other UMNO figures off the hook. Malaysian prosecutors also dropped, without giving reasons, 1MDB charges, against Najib ally, Musa Aman, in June and Najib’s stepson, Riza Aziz, in May.

The High Court verdict shows that divisions in ruling circles run deep.

While no section of the ruling elite has any genuine commitment to popular democratic rights, the authoritarian UMNO structure has been weakened by developments in the world economy that have cut the ground from under cronyism and related policies of national economic regulation.

As in other South East Asian countries, the coronavirus pandemic in Malaysia has accentuated unresolved economic and political conflicts with the ruling elites. Amid the fierce internal conflicts, the ruling class has been unable to agree on an economic course to deal with the impact of the global slowdown and financial turmoil.

Washington’s anti-China campaign, begun under the Obama administration and intensified under Trump, has destabilised the whole region. Like other countries, Malaysia is trying to precariously balance between its economic dependence on China—its largest trading partner—and strategic relations with the US and its allies. At the same time, stirring up anti-Chinese chauvinism has been stock-in-trade for UMNO politicians.

The economy is slowing sharply. In June the IMF revised its GDP growth figure for Malaysia from negative 1.7 to negative 3.8 percent, compared with positive growth of 4.3 percent a year before. When strict pandemic restrictions were relaxed in June, the official unemployment rate fell slightly from a record 5.0 percent in May to 4.9 percent.

However, the real figure is likely to be much higher as seen by the savage reaction of the government to discontent among the millions of undocumented and other immigrant workers. Hundreds have been rounded up and arrested under the pretext of violating pandemic restrictions. When Al Jazeera exposed this mistreatment of immigrant workers, its Malaysian office was raided and its journalists threatened with sedition charges.

Muhyiddin and his UMNO dominated government have gone on the offensive, apparently in preparation for an election. This month corruption charges were laid against prominent DAP figure Lim Guan Eng over construction contracts in Penang state where he was finance minister and chief minister.

Under these pressures political alliances are falling apart.

Two days after the Najib verdict, UMNO president Zahid Hamidi, who himself faces possible 1MDB charges, announced that UMNO would not formally join the ruling coalition, undermining Muhyiddin’s efforts to stabilise the government. Instead UMNO will join PAS and other UMNO allies in a coalition alliance based on Malay-Muslim chauvinism in the expectation of an early election.

Mahathir and his five ex-Bersatu MPs refused to re-join Anwar’s PH coalition on the basis that rural Malays will work with Anwar but will not accept him as prime minister. Anwar and the PKR are refusing to have Mahathir as a prime ministerial candidate. DAP leaders are urging compromise fearing the turmoil will lead to losses in a snap election.

The Najib conviction is a clear sign that the entire edifice centred on UMNO on which the ruling class has relied for decades is falling apart, opening up the prospect of further political upheavals.

Sri Lankan prime minister admits US is behind Colombo Port deal with India

Vijith Samarasinghe

Sri Lanka’s government was pushed into crisis by a series of protests by Colombo Port workers last month against plans to privatise the port’s Eastern Container Terminal and hand it over to an Indian company. During the workers’ actions, Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse admitted that the US and India want to transfer the terminal to India’s Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone Limited.

Speaking at a port workers’ protest on July 24, Udeni Kaluthantri, the secretary of Jathika Sevaka Sangamaya, which is affiliated to the right-wing United National Party (UNP), revealed that when the union leaders met with Prime Minister Rajapakse at his ancestral home, he told them: “[W]e can allow you to unload the gantry cranes, but can’t let the operations start [at the terminal]. I had to go home once, because I got hammered by the US and India. I won’t make the same mistake again.”

Rajapakse was referring to a demand by the unions to fit two gantry cranes at the terminal and start operating it under the government’s Ports Authority, without privatisation.

Workers protest against privatisation of Colombo port terminal

Kaluthantri added: “During the last regime, the then Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe told me, that you have a right to protest, but don’t protest against [the terminal] privatisation. That will offend India. We cannot protect our government if India is offended.”

Rajapakse’s reference to being “hammered” pointed to the Washington-orchestrated regime-change operation in 2015, which ousted him as president and brought Maithripala Sirisena to power. New Delhi supported the political operation.

Washington backed Rajapakse’s brutal war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and his anti-democratic rule, but was hostile to his growing relations with Beijing. The US wanted to integrate Sri Lanka into its military encirclement of China and make India a frontline state in its confrontation with Beijing.

After taking power, Sirisena appointed Wickremesinghe as prime minister. They initially halted all Chinese projects and began integrating the military, particularly the navy, with the US Indo-Pacific Command. They conducted joint exercises and sought to develop the island into a logistics hub. India also enhanced its military and political relations with Sri Lanka.

The cash-strapped Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government later turned to Beijing for loans and allowed the resumption of Chinese projects, but continued the military integration with the US and India. That explains Wickremesinghe’s statement to the UNP union leader about not being able to offend India.

The comments of both Rajapakse and Wickremesinghe demonstrate the subservience of Sri Lanka’s capitalist establishment to the interests of US imperialism, with which Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is aligned.

On July 24, the union leaders met with a representative of President Gotabhaya Rajapakse requesting his assurance that the terminal would not be privatised. He refused to issue any such guarantee.

Terrified that workers’ anger over the privatisation would spiral out of their control, the union bureaucrats initiated an impotent “Sathyagraha” (sit-down protest) from July 29, again demanding a “written promise” from the president that “[the terminal] will not be privatised.” Some of the unions also tried to divert workers’ opposition into a nationalist anti-Indian campaign.

Anti-privatisation protest in Colombo

However, 10,000 workers began a strike on July 31, blocking all roads into and inside the port, completely paralysing it.

President Rajapakse not only refused to talk to the unions but attacked the workers’ struggle as an “extremist act of sabotage,” declaring: “I cannot be intimidated [by such actions].”

Facing this threat, the union leaders met with the prime minister at his residence again to obtain another empty pledge not to proceed with the agreement with India. Mahinda Rajapakse gave a “promise,” but only to prevent the strike continuing, just five days before the August 5 national election. The union leaders immediately called off the stoppage.

The government, as well as the unions, feared the strike would attract the support of other sections of workers also angered by decades of attacks on social and democratic rights.

Behind President Rajapakse’s threat and the manoeuvres by his brother the prime minister lies the pressure of India and the US, which want to gain control over the strategic Colombo port. The president and prime minister, well aware they are treading on a geostrategic minefield, do not want to annoy Washington and New Delhi.

Mahinda Rajapakse’s previous regime allowed China Merchant Port Holdings (CMPH) to build and operate the Colombo South harbour in 2012. The Chinese company also constructed the Hambantota harbour and, a few kilometres away, the Mattala airport. In 2016, the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government leased the entire Hambantota port to CMPH. The US and India expressed their concerns and accused China of creating a “debt trap” to secure the port.

The Indian company’s bid for the terminal is not merely to extract profit from it. It is a move to strengthen India’s grip over the key port—another step in Washington’s economic and military offensive against China, which began under the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia.”

Amid the world capitalist crisis escalated by the COVID-19 pandemic, US President Donald Trump has intensified the provocations against China. The US has formed the Asia-Pacific quadrilateral (Quad) alliance with Japan, India and Australia, against China. It also backed India in the deadly border clashes that flared in the Himalayan region between China and India in July.

The Colombo Port workers’ struggle has demonstrated that the US and India want Sri Lanka tied to their strategic and military moves against nuclear-armed China, raising the danger of a catastrophic war in which the island would become embroiled.