Impeachment drive accelerates amid expanding political crisis in Brazil

Bill Van Auken

The leadership of the lower house of the Brazilian Congress has moved to accelerate the impeachment process against the country’s President Dilma Rousseff amid continuing street demonstrations both against and in favor of her ruling Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores—PT).

Friday saw demonstrations in every state of Brazil in defense of Dilma, as the president is universally known, and Lula, ex-president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the former metalworkers union leader who was a cofounder of the Workers Party over 35 years ago.

While the CUT trade union federation, one of the main organizers of the demonstration, claimed that 250,000 people rallied in downtown Sao Paulo, Brazil’s financial and industrial capital, and another 50,000 reportedly took to the streets in Recife to the north, the demonstrations, dominated by the PT officialdom, the CUT, government-affiliated “social movements” and student federations, were far smaller than the protests held across the country last Sunday demanding the ouster of Rousseff and the PT.

Those demonstrations, like similar ones held a year ago, were dominated by better-off sections of the middle class who have been mobilized on an extremely right-wing basis. Participants included those calling for a reprise of the 1964 military coup that led to over two decades of military dictatorship. The crowd also included an openly fascist youth group as well as people calling for the fascistic American billionaire businessman Donald Trump, the leading candidate in the current Republican presidential primary, to rescue Brazil.

While Brazilian workers are not participating in significant numbers in these right-wing rallies, they are likewise not joining in any major way in the demonstrations in support of the PT, whose pro-capitalist policies and corrupt politics they blame for the Brazilian economy’s slide into its worst economic crisis since the 1930s, with continuing waves of mass layoffs combined with escalating inflation that is decimating living standards.

There was a brief clash at the rally on São Paulo’s Avenida Paulista Friday when a small group of antigovernment protesters raised a banner demanding Rousseff’s impeachment, provoking a surge by the pro-Rousseff demonstrators, who were repulsed by Military Police using pepper spray.

In the early morning hours preceding the rally, police shock troops cleared the avenue, which had been blocked by protesters demanding the ouster of Rousseff. The cops employed tear gas, water cannon and stun grenades against the rather small band of demonstrators. Abandoning the street, they assembled in front of the Federation of Industries of São Paulo (FIESP), the country’s leading employers association, whose chief came out to greet them and subsequently provided them with lunch. FIESP gave its backing to last Sunday’s anti-Rousseff rallies.

Lula addressed the Sao Paulo rally Friday night, shouting repeatedly “There will be no coup!” and accusing Rousseff’s opposition of attempting to reverse the results of the 2014 election. He said he was rejoining the government to help Rousseff “reestablish peace.”

Anger on both sides of the impeachment debate was heightened—and the ranks of Friday’s rallies no doubt swelled—by the release on Wednesday of the contents of a conversation between Rousseff and Lula secretly recorded in a wiretap ordered by Sérgio Moro, the judge leading the Operation Carwash (Lava Jato) investigation into the ever-widening bribery and political kickback scandal surrounding the state-owned energy conglomerate Petrobras.

The wiretap recorded the Brazilian president telling her predecessor, Lula, that she would have a declaration of acceptance of his appointment as a government minister to be used in “cases of necessity.”

Moro and other investigators interpreted the statement as proof that Rousseff was prepared to make the appointment in order to block Lula’s prosecution in a criminal court and thereby forestall any conviction and possible jail time in connection with the corruption scandal. Ministers can be tried only by Brazil’s supreme court, which provides them with greater rights and proceeds much more slowly than a regular court.

Lula was briefly detained earlier this month for questioning in connection with the Petrobras scandal. He is accused by prosecutors of hiding his ownership of a seaside triplex apartment outside of São Paulo that was built by one of the construction firms accused of making political kickbacks in return for receiving lucrative contracts with the oil company.

Rousseff went ahead Thursday with the appointment of Lula as her chief of cabinet, denouncing Moro’s wiretap and the release of its content. She accused the judge of “dubious methods” and “deplorable practices” which she said violated the “principles and guarantees fostered in the constitution as well as the rights of our citizens. What’s more, it sets dangerous precedents. That’s how coup d’états begin.”

Making the release of the wiretap even more egregious was that the recording was made after the warrant authorizing it had expired.

Moro has defended the release of the wiretap evidence, comparing it to the US Supreme Court’s 1974 order that Richard Nixon turn over White House tapes to Congress.

Marco Aurélio Mello, a right-wing member of Brazil’s supreme court, described Moro’s leaking of the wiretap evidence to the media as “only a peccadillo” on his part that did not “invalidate the evidence.”

Meanwhile, an impeachment committee held its first meeting Friday as the lower house of Congress convened in a highly unusual Friday session. While Brazil’s deputies and senators habitually clear out of the inland capital of Brasilia on Fridays, not to return until Tuesday, the house speaker, Eduardo Cunha has vowed to convene sessions every weekday in order to more rapidly run out the clock on the 10 days that the constitution grants Rousseff to defend herself against impeachment charges.

The impeachment has been initiated on the basis of charges that Rousseff illegally manipulated the federal budget in order to maintain government spending in the run-up to the 2014 presidential election. Cunha, however, threw into the proceedings the charges made as part of a plea bargain by Delcídio do Amaral, the former PT leader in the Senate, that both Rousseff and Lula had actively participated in the Petrobras kickback operation.

The 65-member impeachment committee includes at least eight deputies who are themselves facing criminal charges before Brazil’s supreme court, while Cunha himself is a prominent suspect in the Petrobras scandal, accused of funneling tens of millions of dollars to his political allies and secretly depositing at least $5 million in Swiss bank accounts.

The deepening economic and political crisis has thoroughly discredited every major party and political institution in Brazil as the government veers ever closer to a full-blown constitutional crisis, with the executive, legislative and judicial branches each disputing each other’s powers.

In an ominous speech delivered to the Military Command of Amazonia in Manaus Friday, Gen. Eduardo Villas Bôas, commander of the Brazilian Army, said that he found it “regrettable that in a democratic country like Brazil, people find only in the Armed Forces a possibility of a solution to the crisis.”

European Union and Turkey reach deal to seal borders and expel refugees

Jordan Shilton

A summit between the 28 European Union (EU) heads of government and Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu produced an agreement yesterday in Brussels aimed at hermetically sealing off Europe’s borders to the millions of refugees fleeing war zones in the Middle East and North Africa.

Unveiling the deal after two days of talks, EU Council President Donald Tusk declared it would apply to refugees arriving in Greece after March 20. Refugees arriving on the Greek islands by crossing the Aegean Sea will be returned to Turkey, following the completion of a farcical asylum procedure in Greece. In exchange, the EU pledged to accept one Syrian refugee via legal means for every Syrian sent back to Turkey from Greece. This process will commence on April 4.

On top of the €3 billion offered to Turkey thus far, the EU has agreed to pay an additional €3 billion to Ankara by 2018. Turkey will also be offered the prospect of visa-free travel within the 28-state bloc for its citizens and the opening of a new chapter in negotiations over Turkish membership in the EU.

The claim that the deal is aimed at securing protection for refugees according to international law is a fraud. Turkey, a state gripped by a low-level civil war, where democratic rights are trampled under foot and political opponents of the regime suppressed, is to be declared a “safe country”, even though it has not fully implemented the UN Refugee Convention. This makes the asylum procedure formally offered in Greece practically irrelevant, since all refugees can be rejected on the grounds that they must first seek asylum in Turkey.

Moreover, Syrian refugees will only be accepted into the EU to the extent that others are prepared to risk their lives crossing the Aegean, which is patrolled by NATO warships and where well over 300 refugees have already drowned this year.

Expressing the indifference of the ruling elite to the plight of the millions fleeing war and poverty, German Chancellor Angela Merkel stated in a blunt message to the refugees, “Whoever sets out on the dangerous route is not only risking their life, they also have no prospect of success.”

The deal’s reactionary character was expressed in the fact that even the far-right Hungarian Prime Minister, Victor Orban, whose country has been sealed off by border fences since last year, praised it for placing no obligations on individual EU member states to accept refugees.

Turkish Prime Minister Davutoglu also hailed the agreement as “historic.”

Even reports in the mass media acknowledged that the deal effectively means the abandonment of any commitment to the right to asylum. An Associated Press story noted that the EU-Turkey deal meant the “outsourcing” of refugee protection to Turkey. Whereas an earlier draft instructed Turkey to treat refugees in accordance with international law, the final agreement merely contained the provision that Ankara adhere to those legal standards deemed “relevant.”

Refugees who do make it to Greece will be put to the back of the line when they return to Turkey, making it virtually impossible for them to make it to Europe legally.

In an indication of what is to come, reports emerged on Friday that Turkish coastguard boats and helicopters had detained 3,000 refugees on their way to the Greek island of Lesbos.

The deal agreed to unanimously by all EU governments is a blatant repudiation of the basic democratic right to asylum. In the wake of World War II and the horrific crimes of the Nazis, the capitalist powers felt compelled to establish the right to asylum as a fundamental tenet of international law. The UN Refugee Convention passed in 1951 guaranteed refugees not only the right to seek protection from war, discrimination and persecution in another country, but to be provided with access to jobs, education and social services.

The EU has committed to accept a mere 72,000 refugees, under conditions where close to 3 million Syrians alone are stranded in Turkey, and up to half of Syria’s population are either internally displaced or have fled to other countries. This is a return to the policies of the 1930s when the so-called democratic countries of Europe and North America accepted a token number of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution.

Greek Interior Minister Panagiotis Kouroumblis directly compared the Idomeni camp on the Macedonian border with a Nazi concentration camp. “This is a modern Dachau, the result of the logic of closed borders,” said the member of the Syriza-led government in Athens, which has deployed troops to detain refugees and is acting as Europe’s gatekeeper.

Significantly, the final agreement contained the provision that when the number of 72,000 refugees is reached, the “one in, one out” mechanism will be suspended and no more refugees will be admitted to the EU from Turkey.

In 2008, when the global financial system stood on the verge of collapse, no expense was spared to bail out the banks and investors whose actions brought the world economy to the brink of collapse. But when it comes to providing for the basic necessities of life for millions of desperate refugees, no resources are forthcoming.

The catastrophic conditions that have created the mass of refugees now blocked at Europe’s borders are themselves the product of the actions of the imperialist powers. The NATO bombardment of Yugoslavia in 1999, the invasion of Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11, the war of aggression against Iraq in 2003, the NATO-led air war to topple the Gaddafi regime in Libya in 2011, and the ongoing regime change operation to overthrow the Assad regime in Damascus—to mention only the most prominent examples—have resulted in the destruction of entire societies. Hundreds of thousands have been killed and millions have been forced to flee their homes.

The reliance on Turkey to block these refugees from reaching Europe will mean that they will be returned to the war zones they have sought so desperately to flee. Ankara is in the midst of a conflict with Kurdish separatists in the southeast of the country, where the Turkish army has launched a series of military operations resulting in hundreds of casualties. The Islamist government has also stepped up repression of journalists and the media, suppressing the Zaman newspaper, a publication critical of the government.

Notwithstanding the public pose of unanimity, the agreement on deterring the millions fleeing war cannot disguise the fact that deep differences remain within the EU itself. The closure of borders to keep out refugees, seen most recently with the decision by Austria and its Balkan neighbours to unilaterally impose border controls, threatened to tear the EU apart.

The deal was a “great success” for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, according to Die Welt. Merkel explicitly praised the deal because it embodied her demand for a “European solution” to the crisis. This call has nothing to do with any desire to assist refugees but is bound up with the interests of German big business to prevent the collapse of freedom of movement within the Schengen zone, from which it has been the main beneficiary over the past two decades.

For its part, France is less supportive of the concessions made to Turkey. French President Francois Hollande emphasised on Friday that Ankara would have to fulfill all 72 requirements before the removal of visa restrictions for Turkish citizens to travel within the EU would be implemented, according to Reuters.

Within the European working class, there is deep opposition to the sealing off of the EU’s borders and the patrolling of the surrounding waters by NATO warships. Significantly, in spite of the incessant right-wing propaganda by the media and established political parties, German daily Die Welt reported the results of a poll Friday that showed 51 percent of respondents in favour of opening the border at Idomeni.

There is no reflection in the political establishment of the widespread sympathy among working people for the refugees, however. The so-called “left” is fully on board with the anti-refugee policy. In Germany, the Left Party is backing Merkel’s policy, embodied in the deal with Turkey. In Greece, the Syriza government of Alexis Tsipras has joined hands with Davutoglu in upholding Fortress Europe.

Illegal Drugs, Race and the 2016 Elections

David Rosen

Illegal drug use in the U.S. is reaching epidemic levels.  In 2013, an estimated 25 million Americans were illicit drug users, about 9.4 percent of the population aged 12 or older; this is up from the 2002-09 rate of 7.9 percent.  The drugs used included marijuana/hashish, cocaine/crack, heroin, hallucinogens, inhalants and prescription-type psychotherapeutics.  Among whites, illicit drug use increased to 9.5 percent from 8.5 percent in less then a decade.

Illegal drug use has evolved from an inner city (i.e., black) crime to a suburban (i.e., white) disease.  A 2015 Gallup poll of the use of “mood altering drugs” found that seven of the top 10 states with the highest level of abuse – the percent of those using “almost every day” – were red states located in the South: West Virginia (28.1%), Kentucky (24.5%), Alabama (24.2%), Louisiana (22.9%), South Carolina (22.8%), Mississippi (22.3%) and Missouri (22.2%).

The change in the character of illegal drug use is no better expressed than in the personal tragedies experienced of two former Republican presidential candidates, Carly Fiorina and Jeb Bush.

“My husband, Frank, and I buried a child to drug addiction,” Fiorina said during the New Hampshire primary.  She was referring to her stepdaughter, Lori, who died in 2009 at the age of 35, having struggled for many years with marijuana, alcohol, prescription pills and bulimia.

Speaking to Bush, she noted, “The pot today is very different than pot Jeb just admitted to smoking 40 years ago.”  “So 40 years ago, I smoked marijuana and I admit it,” Bush said.  “I’m sure there are other people that might have done it.”  While Governor of Florida, Bush’s daughter, Noelle, suffered from drug addiction.  “She went through hell, so did her mom, and so did I.”

The National Institutes of Health found that from 2001 to 2014 the U. S. witnessed a threefold increase in deaths due to opioid pain relievers and a six-fold increase in heroin overdoses.  During the same period, overdose deaths from prescription drugs like Valium and Klonopin — sedatives called benzodiazepines — increased five fold.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) notes that overdoses (i.e., “drug poisoning”) are “the number one cause of injury-related death in the United States, with 43,982 deaths occurring in 2013.”  It found, based on data from 28 states, that the “death rate for heroin overdose doubled from 2010 through 2012.” Drilling down, it found there were 8,257 heroine deaths, most involving men aged 25–44 years.

In 2013, whites had the highest suicide rate in the country, at 14.2 per 100,000; American Indians and Alaska Natives were second with a rate of 11.7.  However, during 2005–2009, the highest suicide rates were among American Indian/Alaskan Native males with 27.6 suicides and non-Hispanic white males with 25.96 suicides.  Among women, non-Hispanic whites had the highest rate with 6.7 suicides.

Illegal drugs, the prison-industrial complex and the changing racial character of addiction – and suicide – surfaced a couple of times during the 2016 presidential race.  In New Hampshire and Colorado, Republican candidates, notably Fiorina and Bush, openly discussed it a personal experiences that would shape their practice.  However, illegal drugs and race remains little considered as a critical campaign issue.  The following summarizes the public position of the remaining candidates.

Republican candidates

A week or so after Nancy Reagan’s death, some of the Republican candidates have moved away her call to “Just Say No!”  The three candidates positions are as follows:

* Ted Cruz (Senator, TX) — he favors harsh mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug crimes.

“When it comes to a question of legalizing marijuana, I don’t support legalizing marijuana.  If it were on the ballot in the state of Texas, I would vote no. But I also believe that’s a legitimate question for the states to make a determination…I think it is appropriate for the federal government to recognize that the citizens of those states have made that decision, and one of the benefits of it, you know, using [Supreme Court Justice Louis] Brandeis’ terms of laboratories of democracy, is we can now watch and see what happens in Colorado and Washington State.”

* John Kasich (governor, OH) – he opposes the legalization of marijuana for medical and recreational purposes, but considers it a states’ rights issue.

“If I happened to be president, I would lead a significant campaign down at the grassroots level to stomp these drugs out of our country.”

* Donald Trump (tycoon, NY) – supports legalization of medical marijuana, but opposes legalization for recreational purposes.

“I say it’s bad.  … Medical marijuana is another thing, but I think [recreational marijuana] it’s bad. And I feel strongly about that.”  He also supports state’s rights to decide: “If they vote for it, they vote for it. But they’ve got a lot of problems going on right now, in Colorado. Some big problems.  But I think medical marijuana, 100 percent.”

Democratic candidates

The two Democratic candidates reflect a more nuanced stand on illegal drugs, each calling for a greater emphasis on prevention, treatment and recovery as well as revision of criminal prosecution.  The following quotes are from their respective websites.

* Hillary Clinton (former Sec. of State, NY) – has supported use of medical marijuana and for states to regulate recreational use.

“I do support the use of medical marijuana, and I think even there we need to do a lot more research so that we know exactly how we’re going to help people for whom medical marijuana provides relief.”

“I think that we have the opportunity through the states that are pursuing recreational marijuana to find out a lot more than we know today.”

* Bernie Sanders (Senator, VT) – has taken the most progressive stand on illegal drugs, calling for nonviolent drug offenders to receive treatment instead of incarceration.  He support medical use of marijuana and more study of Colorado’s recreational use of marijuana.  With regard to growing the heroin and opioid epidemic, he’s called for “preventative measures to increase education and rehabilitation in order to combat this epidemic.”

“Bernie supports the medical use of marijuana and the rights of states to determine its legality. He co-sponsored the States’ Rights to Medical Marijuana Act in 2001.”

“Vermont voted to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana and I support that.”

* * *

The notorious “war on drags” has dragged on for nearly 50 years and is increasingly recognized as a failure.  A 2015 Pew Research survey found that more than half (53%) of respondents favor the legal use of marijuana, while 44 percent are opposed.  It also reported that nearly a decade ago, in 2006, just one third (32%) supported marijuana legalization, while nearly twice as many (60%) were opposed.

The war on drugs failed on two fronts: (i) it failed to halt supply, close down the drug pipeline; and (ii) it failed to quell demand, the popular desire/need for “illegal” drugs.  It is a replay of Prohibition, but in slow motion.  Over this near half-century, both Republican and Democratic leaders backed the war on drug at an estimated federal, state and local price tag of $1 trillion.

More troubling, about 2.3 million Americans are imprisoned today, a significant proportion for drug offenses.  In 1980, about 40,000 people were in U.S. jails and prisons for drug crimes; today, it’s about a half-million people, a disproportionate number African-Americans and other people of color.  According to one study, from 1980 to 2007, African Americans were arrested for drug law violations at rates 2.8 to 5.5 times higher than white arrest rates.

The growing perception that the war on drugs is a failure is leading two fundamental changes regarding drug policy.  First, an increasing number of states are legalizing marijuana for both medical purposes and for recreational use.  Currently, 23 states and the District of Columbia have legalized to one degree or another medical marijuana and three states (i.e., Washington, Colorado, Oregon and Alaska) and Washington D.C. have approved adult use of recreational marijuana; a dozen or so states may have recreational marijuana ballot initiatives or referendums in the 2016 elections.

Second, states and cities across the country are revising their drug laws, with drug busts being reclassified from felony crimes to minor offenses, accompanied by a citation and modest fine — and no prison time. Among the state reclassifying drug offenses are Delaware, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi and Texas.

The prison-industrial complex has proven to be a failure to address either drug trafficking and drug use.  It’s also proven to be unaffordable public expense that accomplished very little – other than enriching a handful of state bureaucrats and private corporations.  One can only hope the American electorate will act accordingly in the November elections.

Competing With Russia and China: the Shares are Rising!

Brian Cloughley

Very few US official figures are known for their sense of irony, least of all the Defence Secretary Ashton Carter, and it is unfortunate that he and others lacking appreciation of unintentional absurdity would be unable to find dark amusement in the contrast between two recent parallel events.

On February 25 the Defence Secretary and his uniformed glove puppet, Air Force General Breedlove, appeared in front of the House Appropriations Committee to provide justification for spending as much on military affairs as the next eight nations in the world. It is likely he chose Breedlove to accompany him rather than the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest ranking Pentagon officer, because Breedlove is the Supreme Allied Commander Europe — the man responsible for carrying out the policy of confrontation with Russia.

Carter is the man who declared last year that “the US military has helped to maintain peace and stability in [Asia] for 70 years,” having had a slight lapse of memory about the US war in Vietnam from 1955 to 1973 in which 58,220 members of its military forces lost their lives while hundreds of thousands of innocent people in Vietnam and its unfortunate neighbours died in merciless US bombing onslaughts.  Countless thousands of children were sentenced to infirmity and grotesque deformity by Washington’s use of hideous poisons intended to destroy trees other vegetation.

As for the glove puppet, Germany’s Der Spiegel recorded a year ago that “General Philip Breedlove, the top NATO commander in Europe, stepped before the press in Washington [andsaid] that Putin had once again ‘upped the ante’ in eastern Ukraine — with ‘well over a thousand combat vehicles, Russian combat forces, some of their most sophisticated air defence, battalions of artillery’ having been sent to Donbass. ‘What is clear,’ Breedlove said, ‘is that right now, it is not getting better.  It is getting worse every day.’   German leaders in Berlin were stunned. They didn’t understand what Breedlove was talking about. And it wasn’t the first time. Once again, the German government, supported by intelligence gathered by the BND, Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, did not share the view of NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander . . .”

This was not surprising — because there was not a word of truth in any of his wild assertions.

At the very time Carter and Breedlove were speaking to the ever-receptive “support our troops” Congressional Committee (“under your leadership, the men and women who serve in the US military answer the call time and again to leave their loved ones, put themselves in harm’s way, and execute challenging missions abroad”)  the count-down to test-firing a US Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) was under way.

The defence secretary told the American public that “It’s a competitive world out there. We compete with China, we compete with Russia, we compete with terrorists. And we have to win.”

Minuteman missiles have nuclear warheads and are manufactured by the Boeing Company which is proud that “the Minuteman program established Boeing as a leader in large-scale system integration. Today, the combined heritage of the Minuteman programs of Boeing and Autonetics continues as Boeing Strategic Missile Systems (SMS), supporting the Air Force with system evaluation, testing, training and modernization.”

The US arsenal of deployed nuclear weapons includes 450 Boeing ICBMs, each having an explosive power of 475 kilotons (Kt).  The US bombs that totally destroyed the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were about 20 Kt.

On February 25 Boeing’s shares opened at 116.35 and went to a high of 117.60.  Next day they reached 119.45.  By March 17 they had increased to 129.23.  It seems they’ve taken off with comparable velocity to Minuteman missiles, boosted by statements on the part of the military and their legions of supportive politicians that China and Russia are threatening the United States. (We should remember that Eisenhower, in the first draft of his speech warning us all about the military-industrial complex, wrote “the military-industrial-Congressional complex.”)

Washington fails to realise — simply refuses to understand — that the only thing wanted by Russia and China is that the United States should mind its own business and stay out of other nations’ affairs that do not concern it.  Secretary Carter states that militarily “We compete with China, we compete with Russia”  — but Russia and China don’t want to compete with the United States.  They just want to progress and develop economically and socially and stay in their own backyards, with secure borders, while trading with as many countries as possible.

Neither Russia nor China has 700 military bases in over 40 countries round the world.  Neither Russia not China attempts to vastly expand  military alliances specifically designed to threaten the United States.  Neither Russia nor China possess nuclear-armed Carrier Strike Groups or Amphibious Ready Groups of the type and strength that the US deploys threateningly around the coasts of sovereign nations who prefer to mind their own business.

The latest US move to threaten China is deployment to the South China Sea of the nuclear-armed aircraft carrier USS John C Stennis along with the guided-missile cruiser USS Mobile Bay and the guided missile destroyers USS Stockdale and USS Chung-Hoon. They and their many escort vessels arrived off China on 4 March to join the guided missile cruiser USS Antietam and its fleet of ancillary ships.

In another wonderfully ironic episode, just as this mighty US attack fleet was arriving to menace China (and North Korea), Defence Secretary Carter announced to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco that “China must not pursue militarization in the South China Sea.”  Mystically, he observed that “Specific actions will have specific consequences” and when asked what these might be, he “told reporters the US military was already increasing deployments to the Asia-Pacific region and would spend $425 million through 2020 to pay for more exercises and training with countries in the region that were affected by China’s actions.”

With good historical justification, China maintains that most of the islet chains and groups in the South China Sea are its sovereign territory, although some areas are claimed by Brunei, Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines. The United States has got nothing to do with these disputes.  Washington has no treaties with any of these nations that would require military intervention in the event of one of them having a disagreement with another country.

There has not been an instance of Chinese interference in passage of a merchant ship in the South China Sea, and there never will be.

The United States has no territory of its own closer than the Pacific island of Guam, where, according to the US Congressional Research Service, “Since 2000, the US military has been building up forward-deployed forces . . .  to increase US operational presence, deterrence, and power projection.”  In other words, the US build-up is intended to confront China, which is now, understandably, being forced to increase its own military forces to be prepared for what might happen as a result of US “power projection.”

Complementing the US muscle-flexing in the South China Sea, the indefatigable Breedlove explained why Washington is indulging in similar antics in Europe.  Ignoring the fact that the insurgency against Syria’s government was energetically supported by the US, in training and equipping what it absurdly called “moderate rebel forces,” thus contributing to massive destruction and creating a dire refugee problem, Breedlove told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the refugee crisis in Europe is all the fault of Russia.  “Together,” he declared, “Russia and the Assad regime are deliberately weaponizing migration . . .  to break European resolve.”

In a fit of fantasy Breedlove announced that Russia has “chosen to be an adversary and poses a long-term existential threat” to the United States and its allies, and emphasised that the Supreme Allied Command Europe, “is deterring Russia now and preparing to fight and win if necessary.”

The US is deliberately and most aggressively threatening China and Russia.  Its military representatives are making belligerent statements that are intended to implant fear in Moscow and Beijing.

But the immature bluster and bravado of such as Breedlove and Carter do not create fear in those they seek to intimidate.  In their target countries they create resolve to stand up to the menace presented by belligerent rhetoric and incessant deployment of military force against them.

This is exactly what is happening at the moment, and the US may be in for some nasty surprises.

But in the meantime, no doubt shares in Boeing and the other parts of the military-industrial complex will continue to go ballistic.

Perilous Unknowns: the Mental Health of Presidential Candidates

Barry Lando

It’s become normal for Americans to demand—and receive-a professional assessment of the physical health of the candidates for president—just as they expect updates on the medical state of the president himself. After all, there have been many infamous cases of presidents, from Franklin Roosevelt to Jack Kennedy, who secretly endured serious debilitating illnesses.

Thus, the current crop of presidential hopefuls has provided medical information—though not necessarily from the most objective sources. Hillary Clinton’s doctor, for instance, declared her “fit to serve as president”. Donald Trump’s physician, opined that Trump’s blood pressure and lab results were “astonishingly excellent”, his “physical strength and stamina are extraordinary.” He concluded, “If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”

But what about Trump’s mental health?

Surely, we care if a candidate is mentally deranged. If we consider it reasonable that someone with severe psychiatric problems be prevented from purchasing a firearm, why go along with a system that might permit a similarly disturbed individual to gain control over the largest military arsenal the world has ever known?

Indeed, the power of an American president to declare war, to secretly dispatch special forces units to all corners of the globe, to okay the execution by drone or killer teams of anyone he deems a threat to the United States, that power has dangerously escalated over the past few years under Barrack Obama as Congress has refused to even debate Obama’s military actions abroad.

It’s O.K., we’re reassured: you can trust Obama. But what if he we were replaced by someone with a serious character disorder?

Such as, arguably, Donald Trump?

What character disorder? Recent articles from Vanity Fair to Time to Psychology today suggest that Trump is a textbook study of Narcissism. He’s a swaggering egotist; vain, self-centered, convinced of his own greatness, who (some theorize) unconsciously compensates for an underlying low self-esteem with bullying, blustering and braggadocchio.

“He’s so classic that I’m archiving video clips of him to use in workshops because there’s no better example of his characteristics,” clinical psychologist George Simon, who conducts lectures and seminars on manipulative behavior recently told Vanity Fair.“Otherwise, I would have had to hire actors and write vignettes. He’s like a dream come true.”

On the other hand, some of the world’s greatest political and business leaders have also been labeled narcissists, from Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle, to Bill Clinton, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, and George Soros. Though difficult to live and work with, they’ve proved extremely valuable and productive members of society. We wouldn’t want to be without them.

But, as the Harvard Business Review recently wrote, “The danger is that narcissism can turn unproductive when, lacking self-knowledge and restraining anchors, narcissists become unrealistic dreamers. They nurture grand schemes and harbor the illusion that only circumstances or enemies block their success…

Given the large number of narcissists at the helm of corporations today, the challenge facing organizations is to ensure that such leaders do not self-destruct or lead the company to disaster.”

“…the very adulation that the narcissist demands can have a corrosive effect. As he expands, he listens even less to words of caution and advice.…The result is sometimes flagrant risk taking that can lead to catastrophe.”

Dr. George Simon, an expert on personality disorders, explains, “Narcissism becomes particularly “malignant” (i.e. malevolent, dangerous, harmful, incurable) when it goes beyond mere vanity and excessive self-focus. Malignant narcissists not only see themselves as superior to others but believe in their superiority to the degree that they view others as relatively worthless, expendable, and justifiably exploitable.

“This type of narcissism is a defining characteristic of psychopathy/sociopathy and is rooted in an individual’s deficient capacity for empathy.  It’s almost impossible for a person with such shallow feelings and such haughtiness to really care about others or to form a conscience with any of the qualities we typically associate with a humane attitude, which is why most researchers and thinkers on the topic of psychopathy think of psychopaths as individuals without a conscience altogether.”

Extreme narcissists, we are told, lash out brutally at those who would dare question their talent or goals. They lie, cheat, change their story from one moment to the next; ignore anything that might challenge their view of the world or of themselves.

According to a recent cover story in Time about Donald Trump and Narcissism,  “Trump indeed appears to be emotionally incontinent, a man wholly without—you should pardon the expression—any psychic sphincter. The boundary most people draw between thought and speech, between emotion and action, does not appear to exist for Trump. He says what he wants to say, insults whom he wants to insult, and never, ever considers apology or retreat.”

“Make no mistake,” warns Dr. Simon, “no one is more dangerous than a person who sets him or herself above others to the point that he or she feels entitled to prey on those viewed as inferior

So, bottom line, in light of such warnings about how the dangers of malignant narcissists, after following the outrageous actions of Donald Trump on the campaign trail, why shouldn’t the American people demand assurances that Donald Trump–and all candidates for that matter—are mentally stable enough to become president of the United States.

More bluntly, why on earth should America’s leaders knowingly let a nut-case take over the White House?

At the very least, why not insist that that all the candidates undergo some kind of psychiatric examination?  That would of course include Trump’s main rival, Ted Cruz—seemingly another mentally–challenged figure.

The Devil and Hillary Clinton

Rob Urie

With all of the handwringing over neo-fascist buffoon and likely next President of the United States Donald Trump, very little of value is being written about the circumstances that are fueling his candidacy. America has long been the land of rich, white, racist, xenophobic cranks. They are even referred to on occasion as the Founding Fathers. In normal times, whatever that might mean, the constituency for explicit cranks like Mr. Trump is limited because people are busy with their lives. Following four decades of economic evisceration of the American middle and working classes through engineered competition with low-wage overseas labor, large numbers of likely voters don’t appear to have much of their former lives left to be busy with.

While it is wholly appropriate to call Mr. Trump and his minions out for their racism and xenophobia, the American political establishment has at least as much to answer for in this regard as Mr. Trump. A more nuanced explanation for ascendant xenophobia can be found in the economic competition that this establishment has inflicted from above. Sequential ‘free-trade’ agreements were intended to lower middle and working class wages. The predictable result is widespread economic disenfranchisement in former high wage countries. Mexican peasants displaced by NAFTA have been at least as victimized as displaced American workers, but this hardly finds the real malefactors in the American political establishment placing blame where it lies— with themselves.

Pitting the victims of imperial policies against one-another to preclude organized rebellion is as old as capitalism. It is important to note that Donald Trump isn’t talking about resurrecting a vibrant labor movement when he (correctly) argues that economic disenfranchisement explains much of the popular disillusion with the political establishment. His call for ‘better’ trade negotiators is to redirect exploitation, not to end it. Passage of NAFTA led to the hostile takeover of the indigenous Mexican economy by heavily subsidized U.S. based multi-nationals sending millions of economic refugees fleeing north— the entire program was cynical bullshit from the start. ‘Better’ cynical bullshit is the only thing that Donald Trump is offering.

Much has been made of the cover given the Clintons by the Black misleadership class for their punishingly racist and classist policies like ‘three strikes, you’re out,’ mandatory prison sentences for minor drug offenses, deregulating Wall Street to let it engage in predatory finance, welfare ‘reform’ and the wanton murder of hundreds of thousands of Brown children in Iraq through sanctions. Mr. Trump’s most potent xenophobic rhetoric comes via Hillary Clinton’s creation of around ten million refugees from Syria, Libya and Iraq— all wars directly or indirectly supported by Mrs. Clinton in her own right as a prominent American politician. Mrs. Clinton has hardly stepped forward to claim credit for this human destruction and misery. But the refugees exist to be demonized by Mr. Trump thanks to specific policies that are her handiwork.

One of the points made when Barack Obama refused to prosecute the (George W.) Bush administration’s war crimes was that ‘we,’ the humans that inhabit the planet, were only a few short years away from having someone else assume the role of President of the U.S. With Mr. Trump in ascendance, that particular chicken is coming home to roost. To be clear, Donald Trump needs a body count in the high hundreds of thousands to begin to compete with Mrs. Clinton in terms of creating human death and misery. Might it have been a good idea for Mr. Obama to have re-criminalized war crimes for humanity’s sake? And might it have been a good idea for him to have worried a bit more about the tens of millions of people being tossed onto the economic garbage heap and less about restoring the bankers who put them there?

The American politics of Immaculate Conception, of placing these carefully engineered economic and political outcomes in a distant past so that ideological differences can be put forward as substance, is central to the modern political process. The proverbial fly-in-the-ointment for this program is that now long displaced autoworkers in Detroit and furniture makers in North Carolina understood by the late 1980s that ‘free-trade’ was shorthand for policies to screw them to benefit their bosses and Wall Street. That it took mainstream economists (Krugman, Reich) until last week to understand what most moderately educated workers understood a quarter-of-a-century ago gets filed under the triumph of the obvious.

Related were the myriad ‘mortgage relief’ programs put forward by the Obama administration under the ‘you-people-are-too-stupid-to-know-that-you-are-being-screwed’ philosophy of public policy. “Foaming the runway” with twenty-seven million human lives (nine-million foreclosures X three family members affected by each) is good for engendering enthusiastic disillusion from those directly affected and their friends and extended families. While most foreclosures were resolved long ago in areas where housing has been successfully commodified, some of America’s less populated areas like Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta, Houston, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Birmingham, Jackson, Buffalo, Baltimore, Washington, Bridgeport, Hartford, Springfield, Cincinnati, Cleveland and a few hundred other small and medium sized cities are still working through foreclosure nightmares in their city ‘cores.’

Related also is the point made by pundit Tavis Smiley that Black and Brown citizens have seen their lots diminished in both relative and absolute terms under America’s first Black President. The ‘setup,’ the broad policies that led to dispossession, preceded Mr. Obama. The question then is whether Mr. Obama used the tools at his disposal to benefit the people who perceive their lots to be more than tangentially related to his political ascendance. Here the economic fraud that the Clinton’s perpetrated against their nominal constituents comes to bear— Black conservatives across the South raise the issue of the national debt to explain Mr. Obama’s reluctance to better the circumstance of the poorer half of the country when no such constraint exists. As was demonstrated when the Federal government committed tens of trillions of dollars to save Wall Street, the money is always there— for the rich and connected.

A question for the erstwhile feminists who support Hillary Clinton is: which slice of the social ontology is the relevant consideration: class, gender or race? Through her pre-campaign support for the TPP and her husband’s passage of NAFTA, Mrs. Clinton is a dedicated imperialist. From her willingness to destroy entire nations on a whim, Mrs. Clinton is a dedicated militarist. From her campaign funds and personal fortune Mrs. Clinton is a very good friend of Wall Street. From her carceral policies Mrs. Clinton is a racial opportunist who used the lives of millions of Black and Brown people as so much detritus—as a political stepping stone, to benefit her own ‘career.’ A quick guess is that around half of Mrs. Clinton’s victims have been women.

Donald Trump is as frightening as his opinions are poorly considered. His life has been lived around people whose livelihoods depend on not telling him to shut the fuck up. His nominal constituency by-and-large has no context for this— what to them appears as ‘speaking truth to power’ is in fact a privileged bully enamored with the sound of his own voice. Mr. Trump was born into the class that establishment Democrats and Republicans have spent the last four decades making so wealthy that it separates them from the consequences of their socially destructive actions. Donald Trump is an inheritance-baby insider who plays an outsider on television. It is hardly an accident then that Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton have been friends for over twenty years.

The Democratic establishment is in the process of shoving Bernie Sanders out of the way to put Hillary Clinton forward as the candidate to beat Donald Trump. The term too-clever-by-half comes to mind. The ‘missed opportunities’ of the last seven years are in the process of asserting themselves. Mrs. Clinton is a war-monger, free-trade-agreement loving friend of Wall Street at a time when a fair portion of the conscious public would just as soon burn the whole mess to the ground with Mr. Trump. The question for those who would vote for Mrs. Clinton to ‘stop’ Donald trump is: who are you going to vote for to stop Hillary Clinton? And to the bourgeois turd-ocracy channeling George H. W. Bush’s ‘why don’t the peasants go shopping;’ if things look alright where you are— if people have jobs, health care, enough food to eat and their teeth, you aren’t looking hard enough.

GMO And The Right To Know: But What's Hidden Beneath The Label?

Colin Todhunter

Rachel Parent’s campaign (Kids Right To Know) on GMO labelling has been the subject of a GM industry strategy aimed at countering her message. Despite this, in January 2016, Rachel Parent managed to get an invite to Monsanto’s annual shareholders’ meeting in St Louis (listen from 31:45). From the floor, she had the opportunity to address Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant directly and began by saying:

“One of your statements in your public report is that your success depends on public acceptance of your products. How do you expect the public to accept your GM crops if you make every effort to hide them?”

Parent offered the example of computer manufacturers providing the ‘intel inside’ label on their products because they are proud of their technology. She went on to state:

“If you truly believe that your technology is safe, if you truly believe that it has the potential to feed the world, then why are you treating it like a dirty little secret that can’t be shown on the label? Why, if it’s such a proven technology, are you fighting it [labelling] instead of promoting it? 64 countries around the world already require mandatory GMO labelling”

She gave the example of Campbell’s deciding to label GM ingredients on its product to promote transparency in response to consumer demand and continued:

“Even the New England Journal of Medicine in a recent post supported labelling and stated that it was essential for tracking novel food allergies and … [inaudible] effects of chemical herbicides applied to GM crops. Today, more than 70 bills have been introduced in over 30 states to require GMO labelling.”

Parent added that labelling bills were narrowly defeated in some other states as over $100 million was spent in misleading advertising campaigns, of which Monsanto was a major contributor:

“Fortunately, you weren’t able to mislead the people of Vermont, which now has a law that will go into effect July this year. So, instead, you tried to sue them. You spent millions every year lobbying politicians to prevent GMO labelling laws from coming into effect, including bills HR 1599, dubbed ‘the Dark Act’, aka ‘deny Americans the right to know’. You’ve spent millions on deceiving and misleading advertising, you’ve spent untold amounts paying so-called ‘independent scientists’, like Kevin Folta, to discredit people such as myself.”

Parent finished here three-minute slot by saying:

“The GMO labelling movement is growing and it’s not going to stop. Mr Grant, will you commit to stop wasting tens of their money - the shareholders’ money – on opposing consumers’ right to know? Will you commit to stop fighting transparency and freedom of choice? And will you commit to stop fighting democracy?”

In response, Hugh Grant argued that Monsanto has been in favour of voluntary labelling for many years and said Monsanto applauded Cheerio’s and Campbell’s for exerting their right to label GM (despite the industry spending millions to defeat such action). He continued by saying that Monsanto hoped some kind of federal voluntary labelling standard agreement could be reached that applies across the US (note the word ‘voluntary’).

According to Grant, Monsanto’s concern has been about the emergence of state by state labels which results in a patchwork approach, whereby it becomes difficult to know what is in food and moving food from state to state becomes complicated. Grant said he hoped and expected this would be taken up by the FDA.

That is very convenient seeing how the revolving door between Monsanto and the FDA operates. Monsanto can control the labelling issue better at federal state level. When individual states begin to pass regulations requiring labelling, or for that matter when anything has the potential to harm profits, the industry has access to considerable influence (see this, this and this) at the centre.

The anti-labelling stance is portrayed as being carried out with benign intent, of course: to prevent cross-state to state movement of food becoming difficult, or, as USDA Secretary and ardent Monsanto supporter Tom Vilsack implied, to prevent consumers from becoming confused (as labelling GM food would “send out the wrong impression.”

Time for a reality check. The CEO of a corporation has a legal obligation to maximise profit and market share. If the CEO doesn’t do it decides to do something that will benefit the population and not increase profit, he or she is not going to be CEO for long. They’ll be replaced by somebody who does do it. The bottom line is sales and profit maximisation. Profit trumps any notion of public good.

In 2014, Bloomberg ran a piece about Monsanto which stated that Hugh Grant is focused on selling more genetically modified seeds in Latin America to drive earnings growth outside the core US market. Sales of soybean seeds and genetic licenses climbed 16 percent, and revenue in the unit that makes glyphosate weed killer, sold as Roundup, rose 24 percent.

There is immense pressure to deliver profits regardless of the damage being done in Latin America and regardless of how much harm glyphosate is doing across the world or how carcinogenic it is and how much Monsanto knows it is.

Rachel Parent says Monsanto has spent millions on preventing GMO labelling and adds that this is a waste of shareholders’ money. However, given the commercial obligations of Hugh Grant as CEO, it must be assumed that this is not so much a ‘waste’ but an investment based on a careful calculation that more money would be lost to the company if labelling were to occur: consumers would then reject GM food in droves.

In response to Parent, Grant also stated that in 40 years’ time there would be two billion more people on the planet and it is going to be warmer, dustier and drier. He argued we would have to produce twice as much food and implied we should therefore not discount GM from having a role to play.

No doubt the implication is that we should let the bogus ‘free’ market decide on mix of options, despite GM itself being a flawed option. Given the financial and political clout transnational agribusiness companies wield, it would not be too long before GM became the overwhelming dominant option – regardless of what people actually desire: the industry has captured or at the very least seriously subverted or compromised governments and key policy and regulatory bodies in the US, Europe, India and, in fact, on a global level. Unfortunately, bribery, faking, smearing and the corruption of science have become commonplace.

At the same time, the industry employs self-serving rhetoric about ‘feeding the world’, while paying scant attention to the actual evidence pertaining the reasons why we have persistent poverty, food insecurity and hunger. And it offers its GMOs as a techno quick-fix solution to problems which it had a hand in making and benefits from.

Mandatory labelling would be a good idea. People should know what they are eating, But GMO has a serious credibility problem. No amount of labelling can hide that.