GMOs, “Biggest Fraud in the History of Science”

Colin Todhunter

The decision on whether to renew EU approval for the herbicide glyphosate is to go to an appeals panel on 23 June after a last ditch attempt to get a temporary re-authorisation failed on 6 June (for some background information, see this). It is unclear if the meeting will produce the majority vote needed to pass the authorisation. The current licence for glyphosate in the EU expires on 30 June.

In an ideal world, glyphosate would be taken off the commercial market due to its obvious adverse effects on human health and the environment. In such a world, the EU would at the same time be facilitating policies that would ensure a major shift towards more sustainable agricultural practices.

In the world that we exist in, however, commercial and geopolitical interests trump any notion of what is in the public interest, what is good for the environment and strategies that could result in localised food production systems to ensure food security, thriving communities, nutritious food, replenished soils and climate-friendly practices.

These interests have succeeded in rolling out a system of economic plunder and bad food and poor health across the planet. If the ordinary person were to engage in biopracy, ecocide, the devastation of livelihoods and to knowingly poison the environment and food, as these corporations have, they would face years of incarceration.

Instead, we find these corporations securing privileged access to or control over institutions and co-opting politicians, policy makers, scientists and regulators, who sit on powerful bodies masquerading as ‘public servants’ or mouth platitudes about serving humanity, while effectively serving the interests of their real constituents: the global agritech/agribusiness cartel.

Conflicts of interest: the EFSA and the Royal Society

In February 2016, campaigner Rosemary Mason wrote to Dr Bernhard Url, Executive Director of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), asking him some serious questions about the independence of EFSA committees. The letter comprised the fully-referenced document ‘Glyphosate causes cancer and birth defects. Humans are being poisoned by thousands of untested and unmeasured chemicals’.

Bernard Url failed to reply.

On 6 June, Mason wrote to the president of the influential UK’s Royal Society, Sir Venki Ramakrishnan, about conflicts of interest within the Society.

Venki Ramakrishnan failed to reply.

In late May, the Royal Society released the report ‘GM Plants: Questions and Answers’. The report reads less like an objective appraisal and more like a pro-GMO whitewash on GM crops.

The report conveniently fails to address the ongoing debate around glyphosate and, where it is briefly mentioned, it is in glowing terms. Given the prevalence of herbicide-tolerant GMO crops and its devastating health and ecological impacts, this is a serious omission. This should come as little surprise, however, as Professor Jonathan Jones who has links with Monsanto was one of the authors of the report and claims that glyphosate is not poisonous to mammals

Over the years, the Royal Society has consistently misrepresented the facts about glyphosate and GMOs, as highlighted by Steven Druker (discussed further on).

Mason has now penned another open letter (Open Letter to the President of the Royal Society and GMO Scientists (1)), to Ramakrishnan and GMO scientists who are members of the Royal Society.

If GMO scientists are pushing to get GMOs into the UK (and Europe), along with the associated chemical inputs, such as glyphosate, it seems reasonable to suppose that they would be both willing and able to respond to Mason’s points.

Mason would like these scientists to address the crisis of independence that the EFSA and the Royal Society seem to be experiencing. For example, Mason notes there is no CV available for the public to see for Prof Dr. Achim Gathmann, Vice-Chairman EFSA GMO Panel 2016-2018, and concludes it is because he works for the Federal Office of Consumer Protection and Food Safety (BVL), Berlin: the very office which controversially declared glyphosate not to be carcinogenic.

She also raises the issue of transparency regarding three unpublished studies that the EFSA used to help base its decision on that glyphosate is not carcinogenic to humans (contradicting the WHO evaluation that glyphosate is ‘probably carcinogenic’ to humans): the 2001 study owned by the Israeli pesticides company ADAMA Agan Ltd, the 2009 study owned by the Australian pesticides company Nufarm; and the 1997 study owned by the Japanese pesticides company Arysta Life Sciences.

The public must ask to view these documents by submitting their requests to the Health and Safety Executive’s Chemicals Regulation Directorate. They will be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Mason cites examples of the EFSA GMO Panel ‘adopting’ GM without properly considering environmental consequences, despite it admitting to GMOs leading to problems of reduction in farmland biodiversity, glyphosate-resistant weeds and the destruction of food webs and the ecological functions they provide. Papers (cited by Mason) show that super weeds are massively destructive to the environment in the US and that over a period of 30 years there has been uncontrolled spread and contamination globally by many GM plants that are now herbicide resistant.

Prof Joe Perry (Chairman of GMO Panel) retired as a Rothamsted (a UK research institute involved with GM crop research) employee in June 2006. Mason argues he effectively became ‘Rothamsted’s man in Europe.’ From July 2006 he was permanently employed on various GMO Committees, until he took over from Harry Kuiper in 2012 as Chairman of the GMO panel.

While the EFSA claims that the GMO Panel is a committee of experts on GM, Mason provides concrete evidence that they are often anything but. She cites in great detail many examples of the use of flawed science, the ignoring of numerous studies that contradict the assertions being made by panel members and bad advice being offered by prominent and influential figures to push a pro-GMO agenda. At the same time, the EFSA does its best to play down the conflicts of interest among members.

Mason asks why did the EFSA conceal its own paper that discovered a hidden viral gene in GMO crops. Again, Mason suspects deception is the order of the day. She cites evidence to show that US and EU GMO regulators have for many years been inadvertently approving transgenic events containing an unsuspected viral gene which has potential harmful consequences. This, along with other cases detailed by Mason, implicates regulators and the industry in a circle of mutual incompetence and complacency.

Rosemary Mason brings attention to numerous key studies that highlight the adverse health and environmental impacts of GMOs and pesticides which have been ignored by the EFSA, and various conflicts of interest are noted regarding the Royal Society’s ‘Questions and Answers’ recent report.

After having read the points raised by Mason (just a few have been outlined here – readers are urged to read her letter in full) along with the evidence she supplies, many might well assume that, at best, the EFSA is either complacent, or, at worst, incompetent or corrupt.

It would be interesting to know what the Royal Society has to say in response.

Mason then goes on to discuss Professor Gilles-Eric Séralini and his team’s study showing the toxic and carcinogenic properties of glyphosate-based Roundup. She highlights the industry-motivated attacks he faced, which again were based on flawed assertions wrapped up as scientific fact: ‘unscientific polemics’ masquerading as science.

And Royal Society members were prominent in these attacks.

Mason does not hold back in naming individual scientists, including members of the Royal Society, whose work she calls into question and whose reputations are at stake due to false, misleading or ignorant statements, academic fraud and corruption, gross scientific misconduct or unscientific papers that were subsequently retracted.

Supporting the biggest fraud in the history of science

The genetic engineering of the food supply is the biggest fraud in the history of science, according to Steven Druker, who provides firm evidence that governments and leading scientific institutions have systematically misrepresented the facts about GMOs.

Mason draws on Druker to make her case and concludes that if the US Food and Drug Administration had actually heeded its own experts’ advice, told the truth and obeyed the law, the GM food venture would have imploded and never gained traction anywhere, and – as GMOs drive the sale of glyphosate – we would not have witnessed the massive increase in the use of glyphosate which is causing devastation to people and environments across the globe.

In her letter, Mason makes clear to president of the Royal Society Sir Venki Ramakrishnan that Steven Druker has in fact already challenged the Royal Society over its pro-GMO bias. In his open letter to it, he challenged the Society to respond to the catalogue of questionable practices, the smearing of scientists who are critical of GMOs and false statements it or its individual members have been responsible for.

Although members of the Royal Society have been at the vanguard of the pro-GMO scientific movement in the UK, Druker has received no response. The Royal Society has not defended itself. It supports GM crops but refuses to have a rational debate about them.

Mason draws on numerous credible sources to show how modern agriculture and its practices and chemical inputs present a growing threat to humanity and the environment due to hormone-disrupting chemicals, loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services, crop monocultures, industrially produced fertilizers and pesticides, antibiotic feed supplements and degraded soil, etc.

She also provides quite a detailed summary of the deep politics of GMOs and the green revolution to place issues within a wider context.

Cesspool of corruption?

Recipients of Mason’s various painstakingly researched open letters usually fail to provide any response. They should understand, however, that her letters are ‘open’ for the public to read. She conveys deeply held concerns that millions of people have about glyphosate and GMOs and would like to be addressed.

She – and by implication, the public – faces the similar blank responses that Steven Druker faced with his two open letters to Monsanto and the Royal Society. The public would like answers. Are we to conclude that the whole affair concerning GMOs/glyphosate is mired in “a cesspool of corruption“?

The fact we do not receive answers, are informed that we can read certain important reports in a ‘reading room’, are offered a whitewash report on the GM issue by Britain’s preeminent scientific body or can merely make requests to read texts (with no guarantee we will be given access) plants in the public’s mind that something is being kept from it.

It also plants in the collective conscience that, while rich and powerful corporations and lobbyists secure privileged access to the corridors of power, the public is being treated with contempt and is being fed a constant dose of pro-GMO propaganda.

Rosemary Mason concludes her letter by stating:

“THE AGROCHEMICAL CORPORATIONS AND THEIR PAID LOBBYISTS ARE CONTROLLING PESTICIDES REGULATION. SCIENCE, AND IN PARTICULAR THE ROYAL SOCIETY, THINKS IT HAS ALL THE ANSWERS. MANY GMO SCIENTISTS HAVE CONFLICTS OF INTEREST.”

Fostering a Culture of Violence in America

Cesar Chelala

The recent shooting rampage that left 50 people dead in Orlando, Florida, is just the last, but by no means the only incident taking the lives of dozens of people. Florida, where the event occurred, has also the sad distinction of being the first state to issue one million permits to carry concealed guns.

Although violent incidents occur in other countries, they are not as frequent –or as lethal- as in the U.S., which has the highest homicide-by-firearms rate among the world’s most developed nations. Gun ownership is particularly relevant in the U.S., where civilians own an estimated 300 million guns, making Americans the most heavily armed people in the world on a per capita basis. In comparison, police in the U.S. has approximately one million guns.

A report by the Swiss-based Small Arms Survey states that with less than five percent of the world’s population, the U.S. has approximately 35 to 50 percent of civilian-owned guns, and it ranks No.1 in firearms per capita.

The question of gun ownership in the U.S. centers on the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Opponents of gun control stress the last part of the sentence: “the right of people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” They neglect to consider the first part, which describes a “well-regulated militia” as the holders of this entitlement.

The National Rifle Association (NRA) has become one of the country’s most powerful lobbies, and its influence continues to grow. According to the Washington Post, the NRA has helped elect four out of five candidates it has endorsed in a congressional election, and is continuously trying to overturn gun-control laws in the courts of justice.

At the same time, landmark Supreme Court rulings in 2008 and 2010 dramatically curtailed the authority of state and local governments to limit gun ownership. To make matters even worse for gun control advocates, approximately half of the 50 states in the U.S. have adopted laws that allow gun owners to carry their guns openly in most public places.

Although self-defense is often cited to justify the people’s right to bear arms, research has shown that a gun kept in a home is 43 times more likely to kill a member of the household or a friend than an intruder. In addition, using firearms to resist a violent assault increases the victim’s risk of injury and death. The number of teenagers who die from gunshot wounds in the U.S. is greater than for all other causes combined.

In a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Arthur Kellermann states that -excluding factors such as previous history of violence, class, race, to name the most important three- a gun-holding household is 2.7 times more likely to experience a murder than a household without one. His findings have been severely criticized by opponents of gun control legislation.

It is estimated that the gun market of $2 to $3 billion a year has experienced an extraordinary boom since President Barak Obama’s election in 2008, despite his emphatic position for stricter gun control laws. According to a Gallup survey, 47 percent of American adults keep guns, a figure that is the highest since 1993.

Peter Dreier, Distinguished Professor of Politics at Occidental College in Los Angeles, CA, states that among modern democracies the U.S. has the most guns per capita and the weakest gun control laws. President Obama has indicated that Congress has failed to pass “common sense gun safety reforms”.

From 2011 through the first three quarters of 2012, the NRA spent more than ten times as much as gun control interest groups in its lobbying efforts.

After the Orlando tragedy, two of the U.S. biggest gun companies, Sturm, Ruger & Co and Smith & Wesson, have substantially increased their share prices. We cannot decry the consequence of our actions if we foster a culture of violence in the country.

Canadian Companies Exploit African Resources

Yves Engler

What is wrong here? While Canadian companies exploit African resources for their own benefit this country’s charities call on us to join Africa “hope” walks.

Last week Toronto-based Lundin Mining hired the Bank of Montreal to help it decide what to do with its stake in the massive Tenke Fungurume copper-cobalt mine in Eastern Congo (Kinshasa). Unfortunately, it is not uncommon for Toronto firms to make economic decisions that affect hundreds of thousands of Africans and for Canadian companies to exchange African mineral assets among themselves.

A number of companies based and traded here have even taken African names. African Queen Mines, Tanzanian Royalty Exploration, Lake Victoria Mining Company, African Aura Resources, Katanga Mining, Société d’Exploitation Minière d’Afrique de l’Ouest (SEMAFO), Uganda Gold Mining, East Africa Metals, Timbuktu Gold, Sahelian Goldfields, African Gold Group and International African Mining Gold (IAMGOLD) are all Canadian. With a mere 0.5 percent of the world’s population, Canada is home to half of all internationally listed mining companies operating in Africa.

Active in 43 different African countries, Canadian mining firms have been responsible for dispossessing farmers, displacing communities, employing forced labour, devastating ecosystems and spurring human rights violations. And, as I detail in Canada in Africa: 300 Years of Aid and Exploitation, numerous Canadian mining companies have been accused of bribing officials and evading taxes. Last year TSX-listed MagIndustries was accused of paying $100,000 to tax officials in a bid to avoid paying taxes on its $1.5-billion potash mine and processing facility in Congo (Brazzaville). In April a Tanzanian tribunal ruled that Barrick Gold organized a “sophisticated scheme of tax evasion” in the East African country. As its Tanzanian operations delivered over US$400-million profit to shareholders between 2010 and 2013, the Toronto company failed to pay any corporate taxes, bilking the country out of $41.25 million.

While Canadian companies loot (legally and illegally) African resources, government-funded “charities” (aka NGOs) and the dominant media call on Canadians to walk for “hope” in Africa. Last weekend the Aga Khan Foundation Canada organized the World Partnership Walk in 10 cities across the country. In an article titled How the World Partnership Walk lets Canadians bring hope to African communities the organization’s International Development Champion, Attiya Hirj, writes about visiting Aga Khan Foundation and Global Affairs Canada sponsored projects in Tanzania and Mozambique. Hirj says her “trip really opened my eyes to what rural communities truly need, which is a sense of hope.” She suggests the situation can be remedied if enough Canadians come “together to fundraise and generate awareness through activities such as the World Partnership Walk.” There is no mention of the need for African resources to be controlled by and for Africans.

Hirj’s article reflects an extreme example of Canadian paternalism towards Africans. But it’s deeply rooted in our political culture.

Gripped by a desire to rid “darkest Africa” of “nakedness” and “heathenism”, Canadian missionaries helped the European colonial powers penetrate African society. In 1893 a couple of Torontonians founded what later became the largest interdenominational Protestant mission on the continent and by the end of the colonial period as many as 2,500 Canadians were proselytizing across Africa.

Today, all the media-anointed Africa “experts” promote a similarly paternalistic version of ‘aid’ and largely ignore Canadian companies’ role in pillaging the continent’s wealth. But, Canadians concerned about African impoverishment should point their fingers at the Canadian firms controlling the continent’s resources and offer solidarity to those sisters and brothers fighting for African resources to be controlled by and for Africans.

Rape Culture and “Twenty Minutes of Action”

Julian Vigo

Rape culture is a term coined by feminists in the 1970s which designates not only how females are vulnerable to sexual violence at the hands of males, but which speaks to the depth at which such violence is normalised. Quite often this term is met with ridicule in social media because for many, bitching about inequality is just part of the mantra of those women who refuse to be complicit, who refuse to STFU (shut the fuck up) and die in a fire as we are so often told to do on Twitter when we are not complicit subjects in the social use and production of our bodies and lives.

The actions of Brock Allen Turner epitomise the reality of assault by stranger which has recently been used to mock women online in social media and news comment section debates over the bathroom issue in the United States, as if the lower rate of stranger rape indicates that women should be unconcerned about the potential threat to their bodies at the hands of males. While sexual assault by stranger is the sort of scenario that most people still uniquely conceptualise as rape, this sort of assault is not uncommon accounting for 18% of all rapes. Still the problem of rape and how it is conceptualised, and more prevalently not conceptualised, within society as a major force of violence against women is rooted in its origins.

One of the best and first known rapes in Greek mythology is the rape of Chrysippus by Laius as he was first kidnapped and then sexually assaulted within that story. In fact, historically within Roman law, rape (raptus) was primarily conceptualised as kidnapping or abduction whereby the sexual violence was either secondary or presumed. Over time the notion of rape as an act in and of itself (stuprum) was legally distinguished in the late Roman Republic and then recorded into law (3 CE). This was the first shift from the implication of sequestering to the bodily and sexual violation of “boy, woman, or anyone.” However, rape at this stage was still conceived as a violation of the head of family, the paterfamilias, in that it was his consent that was needed, not that of the female who had little say in the possible arrangements of a forced marriage. Still, rape in this period was viewed as a crime against the citizen’s body and liberty. With the rise of Christianity, the framing of rape shifted from the larger political context of a crime against the individual, private body to a public offence. Together with Augustine’s interpretation of Lucretia’s suicide which is spins this as a sign that she might have encouraged her own rape, there was a violent shift in the discursive and legal constructions of rape from this time forward. Indeed, the rape of Lucretia was utilised as a political tool to foment male political power from Charlemagne to Louise XIV, with her inscription in the writings of Rousseau and Voltaire serving to bolster the French Republic. The notion that a female is in responsible for what happens to her body became a convenient political tool of empire where the actual violence of rape was paved over with other meta-discourses of male desire, male needs, male supremacy, and even the needs of the monarchy. The re-inscription of male subjectivity and power was as central to rape as the body of the female was incidental to this act of violence.

Turn to today, the reality is that Brock Turner is as much as residual of this historical legacy as is his victim. While his victim’s letter has received the attention of media, what is most confounding are the letters submitted to the court by various family members, friends, and coaches. Most shocking of all is the letter penned by his father, Dan A. Turner:

As it stands now, Brock’s life has been deeply altered forever by the events of Jan 17th and 18th. He will never be his happy go lucky self with that easy going personality and welcoming smile. His every waking minute is consumed with worry, anxiety, fear and depression. You can see this in his face, the way he walks, his weakened voice, his lack of appetite. Brock always enjoyed certain types of food and is a very good cook himself. I was always excited to buy him a big ribeye steak to grill or to get his favorite snack for him. I had to make sure to hide some of my favorite pretzels or chips because I knew they wouldn’t be around long after Brock walked in from a long swim practice. Now he barely consumes any food and eats only to exist. These verdicts have broken and shattered him and our family in so many ways. His life will never be the one he dreamed about and worked so hard to achieve. That is a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years of life.

Aside from the obvious reversal of guilt and innocence blatantly on display here, a tactic not new in rape trials, what Dan Turner misses about rape culture is constituent of the larger social misunderstanding of what it really is: rape culture not only implicates the millions of male rapists around the planet, rather it is the larger discursive framework which allows the individual rapist or rapist apologist, to take the sexual violation of a woman and parenthetically extricate these “twenty minutes of action” as somehow anathema to that male subject’s essentially good nature. You know, the other 23 hours and 40 minutes of that particular day. It is as if we must uniquely defer to what the male subject does when he is not “out of character” raping women to constitute his holistic “happy go lucky self” who can get back to his eating his ribeye steak.

And herein lies the punctum of rape culture: that the violation of women is conceived as the rupture in behaviour and “good boy” normalcy that constitutes the civil subject. Male as always good natured (except when he is not), male as in control (except when he is not), male as well meaning (except when he is not), and woman as collateral damage for the except when he is not for the “twenty minutes of action.” To anyone contemplating rape in terms of time management, one could vulgarly frame rape within a larger temporal structure to minimise these minutes such that one might rationalise the act of violation in this manner: “She needs to get over it. After all, it only lasted a few minutes.” Indeed, women are constantly reminded to move on and focus on those events that are really worthy of their attention, as if victims of violence evaluate must forgive the date rapist because she knew him and might have, like Lucretia, encouraged him. Women are told to put a line under what was only a few minutes of a long happy future (if only she could put it behind her).

Rape culture epitomises the presumption that women are perpetually willing victims in their own rape, not because in 2016 it is assumed that she wants to be raped, that she was in the wrong part of town, too drunk for her own good, or that she was wearing tight jeans, as the historical clichés go (clichés which are not at all fantastical, but very much based on historical and juridical fact). But because it is assumed that her body is still, in the eyes of the right a private possession, and of the left a public commodity. Because a woman’s cultural value is still pinned upon her ability to concede—to concede her vulnerability in the current bathroom wars, to concede the most minuscule doubt that perhaps she shouldn’t have taken that route home, and even concede that she should not have been drinking. She is even expected to consider the facts leading up to those “twenty minutes of action,” assumed to actively participate in the casting of doubt and aspersions on her possible willingness to have taken part in her own sexual assault. Dan Turner’s perverse reversal of victim and victimiser whereby his son is bizarrely cast as a victim, is all too common today and demands of the rape victim that she have sympathy with her victimiser, that she ally herself with her aggressor, because such is the task of the contemporary female to be perpetually linked to her symbolic paterfamilias as she strays from the perceived safety of the home. Nary a word about how many political actors of the left still regard rape as an unfortunate price to pay for freedom, rather than an extenuating symptom of male violence.

 The specific language of “twenty minutes of action,” is a sad indicator of the cultural temperature for reading violence against women today. When rape is regarded as an action, likened to swimming or any other sport or activity one is forced to extricate morality and violence from what is really just an activity like any other. That this action involved the penetration of an unconscious woman is incidental to Dan Turner and his son. In fact, such a letter indicates the familiar and social heritage of rape within the world. That indeed if it is possible for one person to commit this “action,” then it is even more probable that this actor is surrounded by other like-minded actors who have set the scenario, costumes, stage props, and lighting such that everyone but the victim is acclimatised to the leap of faith necessary to suspend disbelief in this his reality. Rape culture is a permanent state of this suspension of disbelief, from the perpetrator, to his father, and friends and anyone who prefers to view the staging of this tragedy as a romantic comedy, as rapist with a heart of gold, or as the potential professional swimmer who made bad judgment call. When it is time to invoke readings of male subjectivity, every effort is extended to the rapist and his clan to explain why he rapes and astonishingly, Dan Turner’s letter was only one of a pile of letters Judge Persky received.

Here is an excerpt of the letter from Turner’s childhood friend, Leslie Rasmussen:

I don’t think it’s fair to base the fate of the next ten + years of his life on the decision of a girl who doesn’t remember anything but the amount she drank to press charges against him. I am not blaming her directly for this, because that isn’t right. But where do we draw the line and stop worrying about being politically correct every second of the day and see that rape on campuses isn’t always because people are rapists.

Rasmussen, who is now bemoaning the fact that her band has recently had many gigs canceled from various events in New York is incredulous that people take issue with her having minimised a sexual assault because the victim lay unconscious while “not blaming her directly,” of course. But Rasmussen does ask a pertinent question that needs to be turned inside-out to speak to the inconsequence of rape culture in her world view since it is due to her support and the many other letters of support which enact the rationale of political correctness. Since political correctness today is commonly understood as the political discourse of policing language and policies so as not to offend or disadvantage a particular demographic, it is clear that every single letter handed to the judge in support of Brock Turner, to include that of Rasmussen, functions precisely to police the legal interpretation of what Turner committed: sexual assault. Or if we are to believe Rasmussen, “These are idiot boys and girls having too much to drink and not being aware of their surroundings and having clouded judgement.” When rape is tantamount to getting drunk and surroundings are a proxy for penises, fingers and vaginas, the stage setting of rape is really as good as the narrative spun by the accused and friends. That is, if they really believe it.

Justice for Brock Turner’s victim, however, is turning into the “gift” that keeps on giving as we now learn that Brock Turner’s sentence has already been reduced to three months due to good behaviour credits applied ahead of time because—sit down for this one—“it was assessed that he was unlikely to misbehave behind bars.” So not only are women like Turner’s victim up against Brock Turners of the present, but we have the luxury to fight against their future persona’s constructed by the generous court system which deems the sexual assailant as benevolent. Sexual offenders are de facto assumed to be “unlikely” to misbehave while paradoxically behind bars for a brief stint because they sort of have—emphasis on the “sort of.” Together with an entourage of people who explain “twenty minutes of action” as a result of “clouded judgment” due to alcohol consumption and who blame Turner’s assault on “sexual promiscuity,” we are being told, effectively, that rapists are just men who rape women. Unpacked, this means that rapists are men who by the sheer number of the world’s population have come into social contact with other humans and who, because of this fact (plus memories), are able to procure letters of support simply because they did not rape every other of these other humans in their inner circle. Unpacked once again: rapists are really not rapists because they did not rape me.

On “Islamic” and “Islamist Terrorism”

Gary Leupp

Donald Trump declares that the Orlando nightclub massacre shows that he “was right on Islamic terrorism” all along, once again chiding Obama for avoiding that label. Hillary Clinton for the first time uses a similar term in an interview with Savannah Guthrie on NBC New’s Today Show.

She says, “To me, radical jihadism, radical Islamism, I think they mean the same thing. I’d be happy to say either.” The news media has treated this as a major shift; and Trump was quick to take credit.

Actually, there is a subtle difference in terminology. “Islamic” used by Trump is a synonym for “Muslim” when used as an adjective; but it has a somewhat broader application. One is more likely to talk about Islamic rather than Muslim civilization, art, science, etc. But it mainly refers to traditional religion-based activity.

Clinton’s term Islamist, on the other hand, is generally understood to refer to views and activities of modern political movements to reorder society in accordance with some conception of Islamic law (the sharia).

Thus, calling someone an “Islamic terrorist” associates Islam in general (as a religion) with terror, while calling someone an “Islamist terrorist” associates the person with a political movement enjoying limited support in the Islamic world that consists of some 1.6 billion people.

But “Islamism” is a vague concept. There are Islamists who accept multiparty democracy and participate in elections, like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt that won seats in parliament in 2000, 2005 (during which it courted Coptic Christians’ support by pledging to work against restrictions on church construction) and 2011-12. (Recall that Brotherhood member Mohamed Morsi became president in 2011, only to be toppled by the U.S.-backed military within a year.)

Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), an ally of the Muslim Brotherhood, began as a self-defined Islamist party in 1983. It has since officially abandoned that term but it was never anything like the Islamist Taliban in Afghanistan.

The Palestinian Hamas (“Change and Reform”) party, which won the 2006 election and administers Gaza, is an Islamist and nationalist party committed in theory to Israel’s destruction while maintaining a de facto long term truce with Israel. Lebanon’s Hizbollah is another Islamist and nationalist party, rooted in the country’s large Shiite minority but enjoying significant support from Christians and others. It holds two cabinet positions. Both of these (quite different) organizations are of course regarded as “terrorists” by Israel and the U.S. because their militias have carried out “terrorist” attacks on the Jewish state.

The Taliban in Afghanistan is a Pashtun-based nationalist and Islamist organization that was praised in 1996 by Zalmay Khalilzad—future U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, then Iraq, then the U.N.—as a group that “do not practice the anti-U.S. style of fundamentalism practiced by Iran,” to which the U.S. should “be willing to offer recognition and humanitarian assistance…” Their rule was harsh, but the U.S. did not consider them “terrorists.”

But after 9/11 the Talibs were tarred with the same brush as al-Qaeda, another—much smaller and very different—Islamist organization consisting mostly of Arabs who had set up camp in Afghanistan before the Taliban came to power and were tolerated by a regime likely unaware of its global terror plots.

Some Arab states including Saudi Arabia are governed by Islamists, who strictly enforce Sharia law. Shiite-led Iran is also governed by a law code rooted in the Sharia. This commitment to some version of the Sharia is the key element of Islamism as a broad political phenomenon.

So Islamism is a pretty vague construct, even when used by journalists and academics. There are self-defined Islamists committed to peaceful change, based upon sincere religious faith; Islamists engaged in armed nationalist struggles; Islamists who pull off large and small terror attacks; Islamists (in Saudi Arabia) who receive billions in U.S. military aid every year.

To call the lone wolf mass-murderer Omar Mateen an “Islamist terrorist” as Clinton does implies that he did what he did in order to somehow contribute to a process of imposing Sharia law on the U.S.—which is doubtful. His connection to Islamism includes some statements over the years to others, claiming involvement with incompatible Islamist groups including Hizbollah, ISIL and al-Nusra, and some mention of ISIL in his 911 call.
(It will be interesting to hear the specific wording of that call.)

Mateen, it now turns out, was a heavy drinker who went to Orlando’s Pulse nightclub to pick up men. That is not the profile of an Islamist but of a self-hater torn between homophobic religious beliefs (which are not shared by all Muslims; there are lots of GLBT Muslims and, and homosexuality is legal in 20 Muslim-majority countries) and his own desires. He is a terrorist by definition. But an Islamist? Not your typical one, surely.

So how about Trump’s choice, “Islamic terrorist?” This too strikes me as even more analytically unhelpful, focusing not on his politics but on his religion itself.

There have been many terrorists who profess Christianity. It is at the heart of the Ku Klux Klan, symbolized by the burning cross. Roman Catholicism was a defining characteristic of the IRA during its “terror” period. The Norwegian mass-child-murderer Anders Breivik pronounced himself a “cultural Christian.” The Christian Phalange Party of Lebanon has committed numerous massacres of Palestinians. Guatemala’s President Efrain Rio Montt led a vicious war against his people in the 1980s and was eventually convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity. (He was among other things a minister in the evangelical California-based Church of the Word and friend of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.)

There’s great diversity here, are there is among terrorists professing Islam. But how often have such people been referred to, or even conceptualized, as “Christian terrorists” much less “Christian-ist terrorists”? What if some Klasmen led by a church pastor beat a black man to death and the media reported it as “an act of Christian terrorism”? People would protest: “Wait, that’s not fair. Just because they were Christians doesn’t make them Christian terrorists. It wasn’t like their religion made them do it. Maybe in their own minds they were inspired by some warped interpretation of the Bible, but you shouldn’t hurt the feelings of 2.2 billion people by throwing around that term. Anyway they’re not real Christians.”

Because many Muslims respond to terror events and their media coverage in the same way. “They committed a terrible crime!” they’ll say. “But anyway they weren’t real Muslims.”

It’s not for me (a non-Christian and non-Muslim) to determine who is or isn’t really one of either of those. I assume both religions claim the sincere allegiance of very good and very evil people alike, with most somewhere in between. But to identify an act of terrorism as “Islamic” or “Islamist” or “Muslim” (the masses probably don’t much distinguish between these terms and are unaware of their nuances) is to implicate the religion in a way that never applies to Christianity. It contributes to non-Muslims’ perception of the religion as somehow especially terror prone.

As for this Sharia business—and some Americans’ baseless fears that Muslims want to impose it on the U.S.—maybe we should think about it this way.

Islam preaches the existence of the One God who created the heavens and the earth, humankind and laws to govern humankind inscribed in a holy book. Does that sound threatening to you? Because that’s also basic Judaism. A large portion of what Jews call the Tanakh, and Christians call the Old Testament, consists of the so-called Laws of Moses received directly (according to Jewish and Christian belief) from God Himself.

They include, alongside the Ten Commandments, a massive number of laws governing diet, ritual purity, worship practices, etc. They require newborn boys to be circumcised. They specify death for adultery and homosexuality. Just as does the Qur’an, a book compiled in the seventh century inspired by Jewish scriptures undoubtedly known to the Prophet Muhammad.

That is to say, the Sharia is basically an emanation of the Laws of Moses in the Bible, part of what we can call the “Judeo-Christian-Islamic” tradition.

Few of today’s Jews follow all the laws found in the books of Exodus and Leviticus (or would approve the brutal punishments specified). Christians meanwhile generally see them as inapplicable to themselves, perhaps citing St. Paul’s epistles and his insistence that circumcision and observance of Jewish dietary laws etc. was unnecessary for them. Few Christians or Jews are asking for biblical law to become the law of the land.

Islamists on the other hand believe that the solution to today’s problems is to be found in the implementation of the Sharia. (Indeed in many Muslim-majority countries, including Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Sharia is at least referenced in the constitution as the basis of law.) I of course strongly disagree with this. But this Islamist advocacy of the Sharia alone motivates very few Muslims to try to impose it through terrorism.

In other words, neither Islam nor Islamism in themselves explain such phenomena as al-Qaeda and ISIL, and to refer to their terrorism as one or the other is misleading, prejudicial, inflammatory and unfair to 22% of the world’s population.

Negative Rates, Plunging Yields and a “Fix” for the Economy

Mike Whitney

On Tuesday, the 10-year German bund slipped into the bizarro-world of negative rates where lenders actually pay the government to borrow their money.  Aside from turning capitalism on its head, negative rates illustrate the muddled thinking of central bankers who continue to believe they can spur growth by reducing the cost of cash. Regrettably, the evidence suggests otherwise. At present, there is more than $10 trillion of government sovereign debt with negative rates,  but no sign of a credit expansion anywhere. Also, global GDP has slowed to a crawl indicating that negative rates are not having any meaningful impact on growth. So if negative rates are really as great as central bankers seem to think, it certainly doesn’t show up in the data.  Here’s how the editors of the Wall Street Journal summed it up:

“Negative interest rates reflect a lack of confidence in options for private investment. They also discourage savings that can be invested in profitable ventures. A negative 10-year bond is less a sign of monetary wizardry than of economic policy failure.” (“Money for Nothing“, Wall Street Journal)

Bingo. Negative rates merely underscore the fact that policymakers are clueless when it comes to fixing the economy. They’re a sign of desperation.

In the last two weeks, long-term bond yields have been falling at a record pace. The looming prospect of a “Brexit”  (that the UK will vote to leave the EU in an upcoming June 23 referendum) has investors piling into risk-free government debt like mad. The downward pressure on  yields has pushed the price of US Treasuries and German bund through the roof while signs of stress have lifted the “fear gauge” (VIX)  back into the red zone. Here’s brief recap from Bloomberg:

“Today’s bond market is defying just about every comparison known to man.

Never before have traders paid so much to own trillions of dollars in debt and gotten so little in return. Jack Malvey, one of the most-respected figures in the bond market, went back as far as 1871 and couldn’t find a time when global yields were even close to today’s lows. Bill Gross went even further, tweeting that they’re now the lowest in “500 years of recorded history.”

Lackluster global growth, negative interest rates and extraordinary buying from central banks have all kept government debt in demand, even as yields on more than $8 trillion of the bonds dip below zero.”….

The odds of the U.S. entering a recession over the next year is now the highest since the current expansion began seven years ago, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development also warned this month the global economy is slipping into a self-fulfilling “low-growth trap.” What’s more, Britain’s vote on whether to leave the European Union this month has been a major source of market jitters.” (“Most Expensive Bond Market in History Has Come Unhinged. Or Not", Bloomberg)

There are a number of factors effecting bond yields: Fear, that a Brexit could lead to more market turbulence and perhaps another financial crisis. Pessimism, that the outlook for growth will stay dim for the foreseeable future keeping the demand for credit weak.. And lack of confidence, that policymakers will be able to reach their target inflation rate of 2 percent as long as wages and personal consumption remain flat. All of these have fueled the flight to safety that has put pressure on yields. But the primary cause of the droopy yields is central bank meddling,  particularly QE, which has dramatically distorted prices by reducing the supply of USTs by more than $2.5 trillion in the US alone.    David Stockman gives a good rundown of what’s really going on in an incendiary post titled “Bubble News From The Nosebleed Section”.  Here’s a clip:

“…One of the enduring myths of Bubble Finance is that bond yields have plunged to the zero bound and below because of “lowflation” and  slumping global growth. Supposedly, the market is “pricing-in” the specter of deflation. No it isn’t. Their insuperable arrogance to the contrary notwithstanding, the central banks have not abolished the law of supply and demand.

What they have done, instead, is jam their big fat thumbs on the market’s pricing equation, thereby adding massive girth to the demand side of the ledger by sheer dint of running their printing pressers white hot. Indeed, what got “priced-in” to the great global bond bubble is $19 trillion worth of central bank bond purchases since the mid-1990s that were funded with cash conjured from thin air.”

(“Bubble News From The Nosebleed Section“, David Stockman’s Contra Corner)

Central banks have never intervened in the operation of the markets to the extent they have in the last seven years. The amount of liquidity they’ve poured into the system has so thoroughly distorted prices that its no longer possible to make reasonable judgments based on past performance or outdated models. It’s a brave new world and even the Fed is uncertain of how to proceed. Take, for example, the Fed’s stated goal of “normalizing” rates. Think about what that means. It is a  tacit admission that the that the Fed’s seven-year intervention has screwed things up so badly that it will take a monumental effort to restore the markets to their original condition. Needless to say, whenever Yellen mentions “normalization” stocks fall off a cliff as traders wisely figure the Fed is thinking about raising rates. Here’s Bloomberg again:

“Last year, inflation in developed economies slowed to 0.4 percent and is forecast to reach just 1 percent in 2016 — half the 2 percent rate most major central banks target, data compiled by Bloomberg show.”

So what Bloomberg and the other elitist media would like us to believe is that these highly-educated economists and financial gurus at the central banks still can’t figure out how to generate simple inflation. Is that what we’re supposed to believe?

Nonsense. If Obama rehired the 500,000 public sector employees who got their pink slips during the recession, then we’d have positive inflation in no-time-flat. But the bigwigs don’t want that. They don’t want  full employment or higher wages or workers to a bigger share in the gains in production. What they want, is a permanently-hobbled economy that barley grows at 2 percent so they can continue to borrow cheaply in the bond market and use the proceeds to buy back their own shares or issue dividends with the money they just stole from Mom and Pop investors. That’s what they really want.  And that’s why  Krugman and Summers and the other Ivy League toadies concocted their wacko  “secular stagnation” theory. Its an attempt to create an economic justification for continuing the same policies into perpetuity.

So what can be done? Is there a way to turn this train around and put the economy back on the road to recovery?

Sure. While the political issues are pretty thorny, the economic ones are fairly straightforward. What’s needed is more bigger deficits, more fiscal stimulus and more government spending. That’s the ticket. Here’s a clip from an article in VOX that sums it up perfectly:

“But if the exact cause of the bond boom is a little unclear, the right course of action is really pretty obvious: If the international financial community wants to lend money this cheaply, governments should borrow money and put it to good use. Ideally that would mean spending it on infrastructure projects that are large, expensive, and useful — the kind of thing that will pay dividends for decades to come but that under ordinary times you might shy away from taking on…..

The opportunity to borrow this cheaply (probably) won’t last forever, and countries that boost their deficits will (probably) have to reverse course, but while it lasts everyone could be enjoying a better life instead of pointless austerity.” (“Financial markets are begging the US, Europe, and Japan to run bigger deficits", VOX)

That’s great advice, and there’s no reason not to follow up on it. The author is right, these rates aren’t going to last forever. We might as well put them to good use by putting people back to work, raising wages,  shoring up the defunct welfare system, rebuilding dilapidated bridges and roads, expanding green energy programs, increasing funding for education,  health care, retirement etc. These are all programs that get money circulating through the system fast. They boost growth, raise living standards, and build a better society.

Fixing the economy is the easy part. It’s the politics that are tough.