Why Politicians Are to Blame for Most Terrorist Attacks

Patrick Cockburn

European political leaders are making the same mistake in reacting to the massacre at the Christmas fair in Berlin, in which 12 died, as they did during previous terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels. There is an over-concentration on the failings of the security services in not identifying and neutralising the Tunisian petty criminal, Anis Amri, as the threat he turned out to be. There is too little focus on bringing to an end the wars in Syria and Iraq which make this type of atrocity unstoppable.

In the aftermath of the killings the visibility of Amri, who was shot dead in Milan this morning, as a potential threat looks misleadingly obvious, and the culpability of those who did not see this appears more glaring than it really was. The number of possible suspects – suspected before they have done anything – is too great to police them effectively.

No politician or security official wishing to retain their job can tell a frightened and enraged public that it is impossible to defend them. Those in charge become an easy target for critics who opportunistically exploit terrorism to blame government incompetence or demand communal punishment of asylum seekers, immigrants or Muslims. At such times, the media is at its self-righteous worst, whipping up hysteria and portraying horrifying but small-scale incidents as if they were existential threats. This has always been true, but 24/7 news coverage makes it worse as reporters run out of things to say and lose all sense of proportion. As the old American newspaper nostrum has it: “if it bleeds, it leads.”

But in over-reacting, governments and media play into the hands of the terrorists who want to create fear and demonstrate their strength, but whose greatest gains come when they provoke an exaggerated self-destructive response. 9/11 was the most successful terrorist attack in history, not just because it destroyed the Twin Towers but because it lured the Bush administration into invading Afghanistan and Iraq. Subsequently, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, rendition, torture and “targeted killings” (otherwise known as assassination campaigns), all justified by 9/11, have acted as recruiting sergeants for al-Qaeda type organisations.

The war on terror has failed more demonstrably than most wars: al-Qaeda numbered in the hundreds in 2001, but today – along with Isis – it has tens of thousands of fighters and supporters spread across dozens of countries.

Political leaders are not blameless, but they tend to be blamed for the wrong thing. Contrary to talk about “lone wolf” terrorism, most people like Amri turn out to have had sympathetic or supportive connections. In his case, US officials say he had communicated with Isis and was in contact with a Salafi preacher. He would have needed little more than inspiration and encouragement, since driving a truck into a crowd of people celebrating Christmas requires no special expertise.

Isis remains crucial to the present wave of terrorist attacks in Europe because it provides ideological motivation and justification and can, as in Paris and Brussels, control and sustain a terrorist cell. So long as there is a well-organised de facto Isis capable of providing these things, terrorism cannot be defeated; there will always be a “breakdown in security” to be exploited.

The continuing existence of such a state is proof of the failure of US and European leadership. It is they who created the original conditions for the rise of Isis by invading Iraq in 2003. They allowed Syria to be torn apart by civil war after 2011 and believed the consequent anarchy could be confined to Iraq and Syria. It was only in 2014 and 2015 – after the creation of Isis, the flood of migrants fleeing to central Europe and the terrorist attacks in France and Belgium – that politicians and officials really took on board the potential danger.

Yet two-and-a-half years after it was first declared, Isis is still in business. Some 2,885 Iraqis were killed in November alone, most of them as a result of fighting between Isis and the Iraqi security forces. Over the last month international focus has been on the fall of east Aleppo and too little attention is given to the fact that Isis has been holding its own in Mosul and has recaptured Palmyra in Syria.

There is a dangerous disconnect in the minds of governments and news organisations between what happens in the war in Iraq and Syria and the long-term consequences this has on the streets of Europe. When the Iraqi armed forces and their Kurdish allies began on 17 October their advance on Mosul, by far the largest urban centre held by any of the Salafi-jihadi groups, it was widely believed that Isis was about to be defeated in its last lair.

It has not happened. The elite units of the Iraqi armed forces, notably the 10,000 strong “Golden Division”, have suffered as much as 50 per cent casualties. They are being ground down by skilful tactics in east Mosul whereby mobile Isis units rapidly shift their positions in built-up areas using holes cut in the walls of houses and a network of tunnels. They avoid permanent fixed positions where they can be located and targeted by artillery and the US-led air coalition. They ambush the Iraqi military forces in their vehicles as they move through narrow streets. The UN says that almost 2,000 members of the Iraqi security forces, including paramilitary Shia units and Kurdish Peshmerga units, were killed in November alone.

The offensive is largely stalled and still has not reached the main part of Mosul city on the west bank of the Tigris River. Districts in east Mosul captured weeks ago have to be captured again. The main thrust of Iraqi government forces attack on Mosul was meant to come from the south, but this front has not moved for six weeks. Isis is even reported to have sent 500 fighters from Mosul across the desert to retake Palmyra, in the first important territorial gain by Isis for 18 months.

This is not an organisation that is going out of business fast, or even at all. The failure of Jabhat al-Nusra, Ahrar al-Sham and other insurgent groups to defend east Aleppo more resolutely and successfully will probably lead to a haemorrhage of the most experienced and toughest fighters to Isis. It will have the advantage of being less dependent than the other rebel groups on outside support from Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar who are close to accepting defeat in Syria. This may not save Isis in the long term because of the sheer number of its enemies, but it has shown once again that it is more resilient than the Pentagon had supposed.

There are serious consequences here for Europe: Isis can keep going for years with the low-level terrorist attacks like that which just happened in Berlin. It does not have to do much by way of exhortation or material aid to achieve this. When a terrorist incident does take place it is capable of shifting the political agenda in a country as large as Germany. Isis knows this and while it exists the terrorism will not stop.

Why Are India’s Development Programmes Not Delivering?

Moin Qazi

In India, most development programmes for   poor have been designed on the assumption that the poor need charities and they cannot afford to pay for the services .This is   erroneous   and we have witnessed how dollops of free money have stifled their initiatives .Several studies have revealed that the  poor are keen to have access to proper healthcare  , education, sanitation and housing .They are willing to pay for the services if they are genuinely useful and are available through hassle free systems. Today the poor are investing their precious savings in private hospitals and private schools. They are also borrowing at heavy rates of interest from private microfinanciers because bank loans, despite being cheaper, are mired in red tapism. The poor are fed up with the bureaucratic procedures that consume their mandays and may not yield any benefits in the end. In fact they are now wise enough t understand that loss of several mandays in chasing government departments for official largesse   neutralizes the net benefits.

What the poor insist is that the development programs must deliver what they actually need. This ethos underpins the new development paradigm. The mantra is: “Tell us what the poor want, don’t tell us what you think is good for them.” There’s arrogance to the attitude that we’re going to come in and fix something for them, and they should remain beholden to us. The only way for these programmes to really build trust is by starting from what people really feel what change their ivies for the better.

Tackling poverty requires a fundamentally different approach: one that starts with people themselves and encourages the initiative, creativity and drive from below .This principle  must be at the core of any programme aiming at transformation of their lives it is only then that if it can be lasting and meaningful.. If people can be given the support they need to make important decisions in their own communities, to build their own democracies in their own ways, they can do the rest themselves. In doing so, they will not only move their own communities out of poverty, they will take the world with them. Change must come from within: communities must make their own decisions regarding their future .

Development interventions are most successful if decisions are made close to the people. This requires effective national and local government working in partnership with the people.

It requires a new kind of leadership: not top-down, authority-based leadership, but leadership that awakens people to their own power — leadership “with” people rather than leadership “over” people.

There are too many impediments to real development: corruption, political influence in the allocation of land and/or credit, diffused focus and priorities, poor execution, social inequality and a shortage of rural infrastructure, among other factors.

Economic development and social change cannot be imposed from without. It must begin from within even though the initial nudges may have to come from outside. Lasting change comes about so slowly that you may not notice it until people resist being taken care of—they need to be given a chance to fulfill their own potential. When we design solutions that recognize the poor as clients or customers and not as passive recipients of charity, we have a real chance to end poverty. Importing unworkable ideas, equipment and consultants destroys the capacity of communities to help themselves.

The “bottom up” approach, which is being repeatedly emphasized in the development discourse, is about living and working with the poor, listening to them with humility to gain their confidence and trust. It cannot be bought and manipulated with money, or by grafting urban assumptions of development which in fact may destroy existing workable low cost structures. It is about respecting and implementing the ideas of the poor, encouraging them to use their skills and knowledge for their own development. It is about taking a back seat and providing the space for them to develop themselves .Approaches to rural development that respect the inherent capabilities, intelligence and responsibility of rural people and systematically build on their experience have a reasonable chance of making significant advances in improving those people’s lives.

The most powerful weapons for reducing poverty are policy instruments that benefit poverty reduction without in any way harming the dominant coalition of political power   . If a set of instruments harms the interests of the dominant coalition, it will not be implemented, even if it is known to reduce poverty. Advocacy for poverty reduction must mean not only advocacy for instruments that we know will lead to this outcome, but also for a realignment of the dominant coalition in a way that will orient it to the interests of the poor. We should alternately advocate for empowerment of the poor so that they can indeed challenge the dominant interests, and reengineer alliances in a way that will make possible policies and interventions for poverty reduction.

During the last several decades, Third World governments, backed by international aid organizations, have poured billions of dollars into cheap-credit programmes for the poor, particularly in the wake of the World Bank’s 1990 initiative to put poverty reduction at the head of its development priorities. And yet those responsible for such transfers had, and in many cases continue to have, only the haziest of ideas of what they achieved, and how their intervention could be redesigned to improve matters.

Although imported programmes have the benefit of supplying ‘pre-tested’ models, they are inherently risky because they may not take root in the local culture when transplanted. Home-grown models have greater chances of success. The hundreds of millions of households who constitute the rural poor are a potential source of great   creativity who, under present institutional, cultural and policy conditions, must seek first and foremost their own survival. Their poverty deprives not only them but also the rest of us of the greater value they could produce if only they were empowered and equipped with the right tools.

The people who pioneered the world’s most successful development programmes recognized this potential and always sought to evoke it. They are the ones who enabled the poor to take the right step on the right ladder at the right time. The results have been miraculous.

If we see and analyze societies which have grown and prospered we will observe that several development successes have occurred in less than optimal settings. A lot of good programs got their start when one individual looked at a familiar landscape in a fresh way .In each case, creative individuals saw possibilities where others saw only hopelessness, and imagined a way forward that took into account local realities and built on local strengths. . We increasingly have the tools. But we lack the necessary political will .If we have the courage to use them, the course of history will be truly different.

Panchayat Raj is just one of the ways of involving and empowering the grassroots to participate in the development agenda .The poor don’t want handout ,they want hand up.

It is time we heed the wisdom of the great philosopher Lao Tzu:

“Go to the people. Live with them.
Learn from them. Love them.
Start with what they know. Build with what they have.
But with the best leaders, when the work is done,

The task accomplished, the people will say
“We have done this ourselves”.

More layoffs at Bombardier in Germany

Dietmar Henning

Federal Economics Minister and Social Democratic Party (SPD) chairman Sigmar Gabriel has become involved in the dispute about the announced mass redundancies at train manufacturer Bombardier Transportation.

Gabriel wanted to meet with the management of the Canadian company, a spokeswoman for the minister said on Tuesday. The meeting, also to be attended by state ministers, trade union and works council representatives, is scheduled for January 9, 2017. A Bombardier spokesman said, “It is important for us that we coordinate closely with politicians and social partners on the future of the plants.”

In February and March 2016, Bombardier announced it would cut around 7,000 jobs worldwide over the next two years, or about 10 percent of the international workforce. Of these, 3,200 jobs were to be eliminated in rolling stock manufacture, which currently comprises nearly 40,000 jobs. In Germany, 1,430 of around 10,000 jobs have already been cut, almost exclusively in the three east German works at Hennigsdorf, Gorlitz and Bautzen. In October, the company announced it would cut an additional 7,500 jobs worldwide by the end of 2018, two thirds of them in its rail division.

In early December, citing industry sources, business daily Handelsblatt reported Bombardier was cutting 2,500 jobs in its German plants alone. According to Handelsblatt, the plants affected are in Saxony, where 1,900 are currently employed, in Görlitz, Bautzen (1,100 current jobs) and at the Brandenburg plant in Hennigsdorf, which has 2,500 employees. In Hennigsdorf alone, 500 jobs will be eliminated by halting production of rail vehicles.

Echoing management, which said it would not confirm any figures, union and works council representatives claimed they had no further information. That is absurd. The union and works council have been negotiating with top management about the job cuts since March. Moreover, they are in close contact with management through their seats on the supervisory board. For example, the works council chair, Michael Wobst, reported in March that he “feared” that production in Hennigsdorf would be halted. Now this has happened. So from where did these fears arise? What did Wobst know, and what did he conceal? And what is he silent about now?

Meanwhile, the establishment parties are getting involved at Bombardier. On Thursday, the current Christian Democrat-Social Democrat state government in Saxony offered the company tax cuts and other subsidies for the plants in Görlitz and Bautzen. Saxony’s state premier Stanislaw Tillich (CDU, Christian Democratic Union) told the press after the meeting: “We want to preserve Saxony’s traditional rail expertise.” Tillich held out the prospect of unspecified tax breaks to the head of the Railway Technology division, Laurent Troger, and the president and CEO in Germany, Michael Fohrer, for “technological development”. Tillich’s deputy, State Economics Minister Martin Dulig (SPD), also took part in the meeting.

On Wednesday, further talks were held in Berlin between Bombardier managers Troger and Fohrer with the SPD-Left Party state government in Brandenburg. “The state government clearly supports ensuring that Hennigsdorf is maintained as a location for the development and production of rail vehicles”, State Premier Dietmar Woidke (SPD) said.

Besides Woidke, State Economics Minister Albrecht Gerber (SPD) also took part. He had already promised to help Bombardier when visiting Eisenhüttenstadt. The state would use all the means at its disposal to preserve the company’s operations in Brandenburg, he said. Gerber spoke of “research funding”. Unlike his colleague in Saxony, he put a figure on this: 3.3 million.

Ministers’ involvement is increasing in proportion to the anger of the Bombardier workers over the ever-increasing numbers of job losses. The announcement, just before Christmas, of 2,500 job cuts in Germany alone, sparked horror and anger in the workforce. Following a factory meeting last week, René Straube, the incoming works council leader at the Görlitz factory, told the newspaper Neues Deutschland, “The number of colleagues who ask me when we are finally shutting up shop is increasing.” By “shutting up shop” he clearly meant strike action, which the works council and unions fear could escalate into a direct conflict with the corporation and its political backers.

In order to maintain control over the workforce and divert attention away from its complicity with management in the implementation of job losses, the IG Metall union and works council representatives have started talking about protests and strikes.

According to Straube, workers at the Bombardier factory in Görlitz will decide about strike action on January 17. He told Neues Deutschland, the cuts package has only one obvious purpose: “To satisfy shareholders and creditors”.

The main problem for the workers, however, is that neither the works council nor the union has any intention or ability to oppose these attacks. Allied with the big business politicians and tied to capitalism and the national market, the unions are opposed to the mobilisation of workers throughout the company and a common, cross-border struggle to defend all jobs, wages and benefits.

To do this would mean putting the social rights of workers before the profit interests of the big shareholders and creditors and developing a powerful political movement of the working class based on an international socialist perspective. IG Metall opposes such a battle like the plague.

Instead, the union and its works council representatives are colluding with top management to restructure the company at the expense of the workforce. To this end, they submitted their own strategy paper, titled, “Bombardier future (rail) timetable”, to top management in April. In the paper, the IG Metall and Bombardier main works council say the company “had manoeuvred into an adverse economic situation in recent years”, and they proposed various measures as to how the German plants can be made “competitive” again.

All IG Metall and its works council representatives want is that they participate in the process of restructuring and cutting jobs. They see themselves as co-managers, not only in the task of making Bombardier profitable, but in the destruction of jobs. They have not publicly opposed job cuts, only compulsory redundancies.

At the beginning of December, the IG Metall district head for Berlin-Brandenburg-Saxony, Olivier Höbel, said, “All plans that start from a scenario of compulsory redundancies and mass sackings will encounter resolute opposition from the IG Metall.”

IG Metall functionary Höbel, who represents the union on Bombardier’s supervisory board, chose his words very carefully: “Resolute opposition” in case of “compulsory redundancies” and “mass sackings”. In other words, what he is seeking is restructuring without any compulsory redundancies through the renewal of temporary contracts, the withdrawal of temporary workers, “voluntary” redundancy payments and early retirement.

This is the most common method used by the unions to cut jobs and impose plant closures. Its aim is to divide the workforce, spread insecurity and fear, and prevent a common struggle. Not infrequently, this sellout is initiated by holding a limited protest strike during which the professional trade union functionaries make radical-sounding speeches.

Russian oil giant Rosneft sells large stake to Western companies

Ivan Geliopolskiy

On December 7, it was announced that Russian oil giant Rosneft had closed a deal for the sale of 19.5 percent of its shares to the Swiss trading company Glencore and the Qatar state fund known as the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA). Each of these entities will obtain a 50 percent stake in a consortium that is acquiring the shares. The cost of the deal is about $11 billion.

In December of 2014, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev signed a resolution releasing Rosneft shares for privatization. However, over the ensuing two years, leading Kremlin bureaucrats were unable to reach agreement among themselves on the transaction.

The bulk of the oil company Bashneft, recently purchased by Rosneft, had been included in the package to be privatized. The deal for the purchase of the Bashneft shares by Rosneft led to the arrest of Russian Economic Development Minister Aleksey Ulyukayev, who has been accused of extorting a $2 million bribe.

Before the deal, slightly less than 70 percent of Rosneft shares had belonged to the state corporation Rosneftegaz. BP Russian Investments Limited, which was created in 1990 to participate in the fire sale purchase of Soviet industrial state assets and is connected to the UK company British Petroleum, owns nearly 20 percent of the company’s shares. The other 10 percent of shares are in free circulation. Nevertheless, the Kremlin will continue to hold a controlling interest in Rosneft after the recent share deal.

Rosneft was formed in 1991 as a state enterprise on the basis of the USSR Ministry of Oil and Gas, which had been dissolved. The expectation had been that it would be privatized gradually.

Rosneft’s weight grew significantly in the 2000s after the company acquired the Yukos oil company of oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who had been sent to prison for 10 years as a result of a political conflict with Russian President Vladimir Putin. At present, Rosneft’s share in Russian oil production amounts to over 40 percent, which makes the company the largest oil-producing firm in the country. Some 250,000 people work for Rosneft.

Rosneft’s CEO is Igor Sechin, a very close associate of President Putin. Sechin’s income in 2015 was estimated by Forbes magazine at $17.5 million. He is considered to be one of the most influential people in the country, after Putin. This influence is seen in his ability to orchestrate the judicial prosecution of media networks that oppose him.

In August, Sechin sued the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, which is associated with pro-Western liberal forces. On July 31, it published an article in which investigations editor Roman Anin claimed that Sechin owned a giant yacht worth at least $100 million.

He also launched a lawsuit against the newspaper Vedomosti, run by Russian-Israeli liberal writer Demian Kudryavtsev, over its publication of an article on Sechin’s construction of a “palace” in the Moscow suburb of Barvikha.

He won both cases. The court ordered the newspapers to remove the articles from their web sites and publish a refutation of them.

Leading Western print media have highly rated the deal to sell the Rosneft shares, with the British Financial Times calling it a “triumph for President Vladimir Putin.” The Guardian noted that the news of the deal was a “surprise to markets.”

Forbes wrote: “Sechin had said earlier in the day that Chinese and Kazakhstan bidders were the most likely to gain shares of the company, but Glencore and Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund came out of nowhere to outbid them.”

According to the Daily Telegraph, Glencore and the Qatar sovereign wealth fund became “the first international investors to take a stake in Russia’s largest crude company since the country’s economy was pummelled by international sanctions over the annexation of Crimea.”

Glencore is known for collaborating with countries that have fallen into disfavour with the West. Besides Russia, this has included Iran, Libya, Cuba and others. In recent years, Glencore sealed a number of deals with Russian companies for the production of crude oil. It also obtained stakes in aluminium producer Rusal (8.75 percent) and subsidiary subdivisions of the oil company Russneft.

In its turn, in August, the Qatar fund QIA secured an agreement for the acquisition of 25 percent of Pulkovo Airport in St. Petersburg. Qatar, which maintains close relations with the United States, and QIA, in particular, have on multiple occasions been accused of financing the Islamic State.

The Russian government is justifying the partial privatization of Rosneft’s state assets as a necessary measure to replenish the state budget. However, the oil company itself faces an acute problem in repaying its debts. The news agency RIA Novosti reported on June 8 that Rosneft had a net debt of $23.9 billion. The company’s enormous debt is bound up with its purchase of the Russian oil corporation TNK-BP in March of 2013.

In connection with this debt, Sechin petitioned the government for assistance in 2014, complaining of the company’s losses from sanctions imposed by the West against it. That year, the decision was made to prepare part of Rosneft for privatization.

On December 9, the State Duma approved Russia’s budget for 2017-2019. A 17 percent budget deficit, in the amount of $44 billion, is expected in 2017.

Deutsche Welle reported: “The plan is to finance this debt with funds from the Reserve Fund, which is expected to be depleted next year, as well as from the National Wealth Fund, which will have 4.2 trillion rubles [$68 billion] by the end of 2017.” Under the adopted budget, spending on health in 2017 will be reduced by nearly one quarter. The budget was calculated with the assumption that oil will cost $40 per barrel and inflation will not exceed 4 percent for the three years.

The proportion of income from raw materials in the Russian federal budget is very high. According to the first deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee on Economic Policy, Vladimir Gutenyov, “oil prices, as previously, comprise nearly 40 percent of the budget” of the country. Low oil prices on world markets are one of the most important factors in the downturn of the Russian economy.

Meanwhile, deindustrialization in Russia continues. According to a recent report of the Higher School of Economics, during the world economic crisis that first broke out in 2008, Russian manufacturing production has fallen by 7.2 percent.

“The physical resources of the Russian economy—infrastructure, technologies and equipment—have become obsolete. Major funds have deteriorated by over 50 percent, and there is no money in the budget for sufficient modernization,” Tatiana Golikova, head of the Accounts Chamber of Russia, announced in November.

Under conditions of Russia’s further descent into economic crisis, the Kremlin is compelled to sell off state property partially to Western investors as it attempts to defend the interests of the Russian oligarchy, which enriched itself from the restoration of capitalism by the Stalinist bureaucracy in the 1990s. This is an expression of the fact that, despite the Kremlin’s sabre-rattling and appeals to national chauvinism, the Russian elite is a weak and subordinate class, completely dependent on the world economy and the production of raw materials.

It is also possible that following Donald Trump’s victory in the United States presidential election, Putin, by selling the Rosneft shares, decided to make a sort of advance payment to the West in the hope of attaining some kind of compromise with the leading imperialist powers, primarily the US itself.

Nevertheless, the US and the European Union continue to exert tremendous economic, military and political pressure on Russia with the aim of establishing in the country a pro-Western, semi-colonial regime. Russia’s ruling circles are at an impasse in the face of this imperialist pressure, the intensifying socioeconomic crisis, and acute internal conflict.

Brexit seized on by Scottish government to mount new power grab

Steve James

The options facing the British government in its efforts to leave the European Union (EU) were recently summed by Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times (“The chaotic route to train-crash Brexit,” December 19).

Speaking for sections of the financial elite, he complained that beyond a “soft” Brexit where Britain retains access to the European Single Market (ESM) and a “hard” Brexit” where it does not, the most likely outcome was a “train crash Brexit” where “Britain simply crashes out of the EU—with chaotic consequences for trade and diplomatic relations.”

Rachman warned of the combined impact of a short timetable within which to unravel over 40 years of trade, legal and social entanglements, deepening impatience within the EU, costs estimated to be around €50 billion [$US 52 billion] owed to the EU, along with the inevitable frenzied response in the British press. Taken together these threatened that “Brexit would happen after two years in the most abrupt and damaging fashion possible: with Britain’s membership of the EU simply lapsing.”

Confronted with this great unraveling, the Scottish government of First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s Scottish National Party (SNP) has backed a 62-page paper outlining its preferred options.

From the standpoint of the dominant sections of business, financial and academic interests north of the border, the prospect of Brexit is a disaster, imperiling up to 80,000 jobs, and costing the economy up to £11 billion annually.

The document outlines proposals whereby Scotland, which voted 62 to 38 percent to remain within the EU, can retain some form of access to the ESM. Failing that, the SNP pitches in for powers repatriated from the EU to be immediately handed over to Edinburgh.

“Scotland’s Place in Europe” upholds that EU membership, “for all its imperfections,” provides “the best possible future for the UK and would best protect Scotland’s interests.”

Acknowledging that this is beyond its writ, the SNP encourages the UK as a whole to remain both in the ESM—with its 31 member countries and 500 million consumers—through membership of the European Economic Area (EEA) and within the European Customs Union.

The paper’s authors, the Standing Council on Europe, set up by the Scottish government in the aftermath of the June 23 vote to leave the EU, argue that the referendum result does not “require any part of the UK to exit the European market.”

The UK could seek comparable arrangements to those currently agreed between the EU and Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein, which have single-market access, but are not covered by the Common Agricultural Policy or the Common Fisheries Policy. The paper notes the ESM is much more than a free-trade area since it involves the “elimination of non-tariff or technical barriers to trade... that result from the vast array of national regulations and laws that govern the production, distribution, marketing and sale of goods.”

Loss of access to the ESM could, according to a National Institute of Economic and Social Research paper cited by the Scottish government, cost UK-based service industries up to 60 percent of their trade with EEA countries or 24 percent of their global total. Some 42 percent of Scottish international exports are currently directed towards the EU, while as many as 80 percent of Foreign Direct Investment schemes in Scotland cited access to the ESM as a factor in their investment decisions.

The large university sector would also be particularly impacted. One quarter of all research staff at Scottish universities are from the EU. Professional services are “dependent on the ability of services providers—such as architects, lawyers, accountants, artists and academics—to move within the European Single Market and provide their service free from any discrimination on the basis of nationality.”

Domestic industry and services will also be hit. The paper noted that 32.8 percent of workers in distribution, hotels and restaurants were non-UK EU nationals. Some 19.6 percent of staff in public administration, education and health, 18.4 percent in banking and 15.7 percent in manufacturing were also non-UK EU nationals.

The paper admits, however, that “we are not confident” the UK government will seek to retain ESM membership because of its deepening hostility to “external arbitration” and the “free movement of people.”

In the event of the British Conservative government of Theresa May not retaining EEA or ESM membership, the paper proposes a number of “differentiated” options. The authors warn, “the UK has created an unprecedented situation” and “there are no set rules for what happens now” and notes that Northern Ireland, the City of London and Gibraltar are all seeking special arrangements, while unknown assurances have been handed over to car producer Nissan to retain its operations in Sunderland.

The Standing Council offers a “Norway” option as one solution, the thrust of which is to retain as much of ESM membership as possible without jeopardising Scotland’s relations with the rest of the UK. Currently, by far the greatest volume of Scottish trade in all sectors is with England. By encouraging the UK or Scotland to join the European Free Trade Area (EFTA) and at some later stage becoming party to the EEA Agreement, some measure of ESM access could be retained.

The authors note, however, that were Scotland to join EFTA while the rest of the UK stayed outside, it would raise “practical questions relating to free trade and movement within the UK,” i.e., some form or border controls. Additionally, were Scotland to have a significantly different arrangement with regard to the freedom of movement of “goods, services, capital and persons” to be more in line with the EEA, an entire Scottish-based apparatus of compliance and a regional visa system would have to be constructed.

Faced with the possibility of all these options being ignored by the British government, the SNP sets out what are effectively its terms for avoiding another referendum on Scottish independence. The SNP brought forward draft legislation for a new independence poll earlier in the year, but is nervous of actually calling another vote when polls suggest it would again lose, as in 2014 when 55 percent voted against independence.

Instead, the nationalists are hoping to directly benefit from the Brexit debacle by laying claim to additional powers for the Scottish parliament. These fall within three areas.

· Areas currently subject to EU law that otherwise would be covered by the devolved government. These include agriculture, fisheries, education, health, justice and environmental protection.

· Control over repatriated EU laws on areas that are not currently its responsibility, such as employment law, health and safety legislation.

· New powers to “secure any differentiated relationship with Europe,” including “arrangements to enable Scottish law and regulatory regimes to be consistent with the requirements of the European Single Market.” This includes import and export control, immigration, competition law, company law, social security, energy regulation, financial regulation, transport along with the “ability to speak in international forums and to secure agreements with other countries.”

The Scottish proposals for ESM membership were immediately rejected by the British and Spanish governments, the latter dealing with the closely parallel Catalonian secession crisis. However, commentators noted that the timing of the papers’ release—the week before the Christmas break—suggested that the paper was, at this point, directed primarily towards building common ground with the SNP’s domestic rivals in the Scottish parliament, particularly the Labour Party and the Greens, in pursuit of policies that, even in their most muted form, sharply intensify an already unprecedented constitutional crisis.

Rural America registers spike in babies born with opioid withdrawal

Naomi Spencer

The number of babies born with opioid withdrawal has risen dramatically in the last decade across the United States, with rural areas disproportionally affected. A research letter published online December 12 in the Journal of the American Medical Association publication JAMA Pediatrics reported that rural hospitals have dealt with a sharp increase in the number of infants exhibiting neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS). The increase coincides with the deepening of poverty and explosion of painkiller and heroin use in the United States.

“Compared with their urban peers, rural infants and mothers with opioid-related diagnoses were more likely to be from lower-income families, have public insurance, and be transferred to another hospital following delivery,” wrote Nicole L.G. Villapiano, MD, the lead author of the research team from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor (UM).

NAS is a diagnosis that encompasses complications and withdrawal symptoms suffered by newborns exposed to opioids in the mother’s womb. Between 2000 and 2012, the US has seen a nearly fivefold increase in the number of NAS cases.

UM researchers analyzed hospital data of neonatal births and obstetric deliveries to correlate rates of NAS and maternal opioid use among rural patients and their urban counterparts from 2004 to 2013. Over this timeframe, they found the percentage of infants with NAS who were from rural counties had spiked from 12.9 percent to 21.2 percent of the total.

The incidence of NAS among rural-born babies rose disproportionately compared with urban births. The incidence of NAS increased from 1.2 cases per 1,000 hospital births to 7.5 cases per 1,000 in rural areas. This represents a growth rate nearly 80 percent higher than that seen by urban hospitals, where the rate rose from 1.4 per 1,000 to 4.8 per 1,000.

Research also revealed an increase in deliveries complicated by maternal opioid use, from 1.3 per 1,000 to 8.1 per 1,000 in rural hospitals. Urban deliveries saw a rise of maternal opioid use of 1.6 per 1,000 to 4.8 per 1,000.

Researchers said the results pointed to the need for increased funding for programs and clinics in rural areas to help with treatment for both mothers and their babies. “Maternal opioid use requires special attention given the poor outcomes and high costs,” Dr. Villapiano said in a statement to the press. “If we can provide resources to the areas that need them the most, we can do more on the front lines to address the opioid crisis for our most vulnerable patients.”

Over the past two decades, opioid addiction has skyrocketed in the United States. Highly addictive prescription painkillers like Oxycontin and Vicodin flooded into the market, with pharmaceutical companies like Purdue Pharma and Cardinal Health deliberately targeting rural and poor sections of the population. One 2014 study found that low-income mothers on Medicaid were prescribed opioids—most frequently codeine and hydrocodone—at high rates for pregnancy-related pain like backaches and joint pain. A staggering 42 percent of pregnant Medicaid-recipients in Utah and 35 percent of those in Idaho were prescribed opioids.

As the price of prescription pills rose, many patients who had developed addictions to these powerful painkillers turned to street drugs like heroin, leading to a public health epidemic that now claims more lives in many places than automobile accidents and gun violence each year. According to data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 47,055 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2014, nearly two-thirds of them from opioid use.

The illegality of the drugs compound the social stigma of addiction for pregnant women, who may be afraid to seek basic prenatal health care for fear of being punished. Around the country, legislatures have pushed to criminalize the drug problems of mothers whose addictions may harm fetal development, while simultaneously restricting access to drug treatment and reproductive care. Many drug-addicted women are compelled to struggle with both addiction and pregnancy on their own.

Babies who are born with signs of opioid withdrawal require special care and extended hospital stays in neonatal care units. Often they have low birth weights and are at a higher risk for birth defects like spina bifida or gastroschisis, where internal organs are formed partially outside of a baby’s body. They suffer agonizing pain and often cry inconsolably and have seizures. Symptoms of NAS frequently include irritability, high heart rates, diarrhea, breathing problems, and difficulty latching onto the nipple of a bottle or breast.

The cost of caring for these babies is considerable, with hospital NAS treatment expenses rising from $732 million in 2007 to $1.5 billion in 2013, according to a study in the Journal of Perinatology. Small, rural hospitals are often understaffed and lack proper facilities to treat the rising numbers of NAS-afflicted infants.

“Typically, rural hospitals that deliver babies have traditionally focused on the lower-risk population in areas they serve,” Dr. Alison V. Holmes of the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth told the New York Times. “But when you’re getting to a point of having a substantial proportion of mothers taking opioids and babies at risk for opioid withdrawal, it becomes a strain on the regional system.” The New England Journal of Medicine published a study last year revealing that some neonatal units had to spend upwards of 20 percent of their staff hours caring for babies suffering from NAS.

Obama White House spurns appeal to shield “DREAMers” and green-card holders

Zaida Green 

Christmas Day passed with President Obama ignoring appeals by more than 100 advocacy organizations that co-signed a letter urging him to shield up to 200,000 lawful permanent residents from deportation by the incoming Trump administration.

Administration spokesmen have indicated that there is no change in the position adopted last month, when the White House refused an earlier appeal from three members of the House of Representatives, all Democrats, that Obama issue a pardon for 750,000 young people who have received temporary deferrals of deportation under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), an Obama executive order.

The last official pronouncement from the White House came at a December 2 press briefing by deputy Obama spokesman Eric Schultz, who was pressed by reporters on the prospect that youth who registered under DACA could find the information they submitted being used by the Trump administration to deport them.

Schultz said, “Again, you’ll have to speak to the next administration about how they want to do this. I know that some of their representatives in interviews have been answering—offering questions. I don’t think they’ve made any decisions yet based on public reports.”

In reference to the pardons, he continued, “This is a process that starts at the Department of Justice. We have a well-established process for this, so I don’t have any new ones to announce for you at this time.”

The letter from the immigrants’ rights groups urges Obama to use his pardon power to exempt from deportation proceedings the 200,000 green-card holders, or permanent residents, who have old or minor criminal convictions, such as drug possession and subway fare evasion. Last month, President-elect Trump publicly declared his intent to deport all immigrants with criminal records—which would include legal as well as undocumented immigrants—in an interview on CBS News’s “60 Minutes.”

Obama cannot issue pardons of the minor criminal convictions themselves, because these are offenses against state rather than federal law. But he could remove the prospect of the state convictions becoming the pretext for legal jeopardy under federal immigration policies, although he has shown no interest in doing so.

The Obama administration has rejected previous appeals from advocacy groups and congressional Democrats to use the pardon power to grant protection from deportation to undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as children.

Since 2012, more than 750,000 young people have voluntarily paid fees and submitted fingerprints, addresses, background checks, and other personally identifiable information to the federal government in order to receive a reprieve from deportation for two years on a renewable basis, under DACA, a program established by executive order. These youth are also known as DREAMers from the DREAM act, which would have given them legal status but failed to pass Congress.

The families of DACA recipients and their advocates fear that the information submitted by the youths will be used by the incoming Trump administration to fast-track their deportation. Trump has vowed to rescind “every single Obama executive order” on his first day in office, which would include DACA.

“The Department of Homeland Security now has fingerprints, home addresses, and other information to identify these DREAMers,” wrote three Democratic representatives in a letter sent to the Obama Administration on November 17. “DREAMers face uncertainty, fear and stress, leading to psychological issues including depression, anxiety and an increased risk of suicide. Indeed, we have received reports of DREAMers who have taken their own lives as they are now facing the threat posed by the incoming President.”

Nancy Kelly, co-managing director of the Harvard Immigrant and Refugee Clinical Program (HIRC), told the Washington Post that the HIRC is recommending that DACA recipients who have already registered should renew their reprieves before Trump takes office, but that “for those who have never applied, we’re advising that the risk is probably too high for them to do so now.” The oldest DACA recipients are now in their late twenties, and few have any memory of the countries they fear they will be deported to.

The White House released a statement in response to the California Democrats’ letter just hours after it was published, avoiding the issue of a blanket pardon and hiding behind a legalistic formulation that applies to individual pardon requests: “As a general matter, we do not comment on the likelihood of whether a specific pardon may be granted, should one be requested.” The statement continued, in a further disavowal, “only Congress can create legal status for undocumented individuals.”

Cecilia Muñoz, director of the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, in an interview with the Center for Migration Studies, alleged that the pardon authority of the president was meant for criminal violations, not civil violations like those concerning immigration law. The California Democrats’ letter cited a 1920 Supreme Court ruling affirming that the President had authority to pardon all offenses, not only criminal offenses.

There is ample precedent for a blanket pardon for a large group of people in legal jeopardy. President Jimmy Carter issued such a pardon on his first day in office, January 21, 1977, for all those involved in offenses against draft registration laws during the Vietnam War.

It is a measure of how far to the right the Democratic Party has moved over the past four decades that the current Democratic president is so brazenly indifferent to the fate of nearly 1 million people.

A second open letter was sent to the Obama Administration on December 7 and endorsed by 64 House Democrats. It reiterated the fact that the Constitution does not limit presidential pardons to criminal offenses, and warned that a pardon would be “critical” and that the promotion of social stability was “a shared goal, especially at a time when fear and uncertainty in our communities is at an all-time high.”

A separate open letter written by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and co-signed by the mayors of 14 other cities was sent to Donald Trump, urging the president-elect to continue DACA and arguing that ending the program would “disrupt the American economy, as well as our national security and public safety.”

Democratic Senator Richard Durbin and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham have announced plans to introduce the BRIDGE Act, a bill that would protect DACA recipients from deportation for three years. The senators will introduce the bill early next year, after lawmakers return from the holidays.

The concern of the mayors, congressmen and senators, including some Republicans as well as Democrats, is that a program of mass deportations on the scale threatened by Trump could produce mass resistance and direct clashes between local residents and federal immigration agents, backed by local and state police forces.

DACA was established as part of a policy memorandum written by the previous secretary of homeland security, Janet Napolitano. Consequently, it can be terminated by anyone who assumes the secretary’s office, without even the need for an executive order from the president. Trump’s pick for secretary of homeland security is retired Marine Corps general John Kelly, the former head of the US Southern Command, which oversees US military operations in Central and South America. As commander of the US Southern Command, Kelly defended the use of torture at the Guantánamo Bay prison camp, and collaborated with Mexico and other Central American countries to clamp down on migration of asylum seekers.

Trump’s pick for attorney general, Jeff B. Sessions, is a self-confessed “nativist” and a former federal prosecutor, and has consistently backed the dismemberment of democratic rights, calling for the repeal of any restrictions on mass surveillance on a global scale and opposing the release of any prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. As attorney general, Sessions would have complete control over immigration courts, with the ability to set the standards for the hiring of immigration judges, revise the training and guidelines judges receive on how to interpret the law, and cut law enforcement funds to localities that go against the grain of his hard-line stance on immigration.

An estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants live in the US. At least 9 million people live in “mixed-status” families, which have members that are undocumented or whose visas have expired. According to the Department of Homeland Security, there are 1.9 million immigrants, both documented and undocumented, who have committed crimes that render them deportable under current law. The Migration Policy Institute, a think tank in Washington, concluded that 820,000 of those convicted are undocumented.

Manila to investigate claims of a US plot to oust Philippine president

Joseph Santolan

Heightened tensions between Washington and Manila escalated further on Tuesday, as Philippine Speaker of the House Pantaleon Alvarez announced that the legislature would be opening a public investigation of a blueprint allegedly drawn up by the US embassy for the overthrow of the Duterte government. The plot, which was reported in a front-page exclusive by the ManilaTimes on Monday, is a response not to Duterte’s “war on drugs” but to his increasing geopolitical ties with Beijing.

Manila Times editor-in-chief Dante Ang cited a document, which he claimed had been supplied by an anonymous “highly placed source,” and had been written by former US ambassador to the Philippines, Philip Goldberg. While rumors of military coups are a dime a dozen in the Philippines, the scenario and details documented by the Times are not only plausible, but quite likely accurate.

Since he took office at the end of June, Duterte has in a rapid and volatile fashion sought to restore economic and diplomatic ties with Beijing. Relations had been badly damaged by the tensions created by his predecessor Benigno Aquino, who functioned as a leading proxy of the Obama administration’s pivot to Asia.

At the same time, Duterte has been taking steps toward military dictatorship under the guise of his “war on drugs,” which has seen the murder of over 6,000 impoverished Filipinos, labeled by the police, military and vigilantes as “suspects.”

Washington initially funded and supported this murderous campaign, but as Duterte increasingly failed to toe Washington’s line in confronting China in the South China Sea, the White House began to invoke concern over “human rights” to pressure his government back into line. Duterte responded to each of these threats in a vulgar and unhinged manner, denouncing the United States and threatening to sever ties. His cabinet has always sought to soften or gainsay his words, but at every turn relations between Manila and Washington have soured.

Duterte has expressed open enthusiasm for President-elect Donald Trump, who in a seven-minute phone call at the beginning of December endorsed Duterte’s bloody suppression of the population. Trump’s support for Duterte’s campaign of mass murder does not, however, resolve the underlying geopolitical tensions, and, in the wake of the phone call, relations have continued to worsen.

Duterte boasted in several speeches in mid-December that he had personally killed several drug suspects, shooting some and throwing others out of helicopters. UN Human Rights High Commissioner Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein announced on December 19 that these admissions “clearly constitute murder” and that the UN would be launching “investigative and judicial proceedings” against Duterte. Duterte staged a press conference the next day in which he directly addressed al-Hussein, “You do not talk to me like that, you son of a bitch. You go and file a complaint in the United Nations. I will burn down the United Nations if you want. I will burn it down if I go to America.”

At the same time, the US government aid agency, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, deferred its vote until May 2017 on a renewal of the $433 million aid package for the Philippines “subject to a further review of concerns around rule of law and civil liberties.”

Duterte responded on December 17 that Washington should “prepare for the abrogation of the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA).” The VFA provides the legal framework for the basing of US forces in the country under the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), and its abrogation is a red line whose violation Washington will not tolerate.

On December 19, Chinese Ambassador Zhao Jianhua made an unannounced visit to the presidential palace of Malacañang during which he extended an offer to Duterte of a soft-loan of $500 million in addition to $14 million worth of military equipment. Duterte declared that he would set aside the ruling against China's territorial claims in the South China Sea handed down by the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in The Hague earlier this year, and was interested in pursuing joint oil exploration with China in the South China Sea.

That afternoon, Duterte delivered a speech attended by the newly appointed US ambassador to Manila Sung Kim, responding to the US deferment of aid payment. He told the ambassador to “shut up, shut up. I do not need your assistance … China is going to release to me 50 billion, go home, I do not need your aid.”

It is in this heated context that the Manila Times revealed that Ambassador Goldberg had drawn up a blueprint for the ouster of Duterte. According to the report, Goldberg “outlined a list of strategies” to remove Duterte from office within “a timetable of one-and-a-half years.” He called for Washington to launch a series of “socio-economic-political-diplomatic moves against Duterte to bring him to his knees and eventually remove him from office,” while supporting and promoting the political opposition behind Vice President Leni Robredo, of the opposition Liberal Party of Aquino.

The blueprint made no mention of concern over Duterte’s war on drugs, but stated that “Duterte’s political allies are privately concerned over his shift in foreign policy.” Central among these allies is former President Fidel Ramos, who was crucial to Duterte’s election victory, but has distanced himself from Duterte in the wake of tensions with Washington.

Both the US Embassy in Manila and US Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Russel issued statements denying the Manila Times report. Russel declared that “These allegations of a blueprint are false. No such blueprint exists.”

The Manila Times account, however, is quite credible. Washington does not tolerate violations of its geopolitical interests, but draws up plans for coups, ousters and assassinations, and this is in fact Goldberg’s specialty. He was kicked out of Bolivia in 2008 for plotting the ouster of President Evo Morales while serving as US ambassador to the country. In 2010 he became assistant secretary of state for Intelligence, responsible for the State Department’s interface with the CIA, NSA and other US intelligence agencies.

Foreign Affairs Secretary Perfecto Yasay held a radio interview on December 28 in which he declared that “I would not put such activity past Goldberg … I do not take this threat lightly. [This is] a serious matter we have to dig deeper into.”

Speaker of the House Alvarez announced that he would launch a public investigation of the alleged US ouster plot with the opening of the new session of the legislature on January 16. “It is going to be a public hearing, and all sectors, personalities concerned and mentioned in the report will be invited,” Alvarez said.

Vice President Robredo, who resigned from the Duterte cabinet in protest against his policies, is emerging as the central opposition figure. She is currently on a “vacation” of unspecified duration in the United States. A significant portion of the funding for the political opposition comes from Filipino American billionaire Loida Nicolas Lewis, who for the past six years bankrolled the anti-China organizations and protests in the Philippines.

According to the Manila Times, the Goldberg document recognized that the two pillars of support for the Duterte presidency were “law and order elements”—the military and police, on the one hand, and the Maoist Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) on the other. Goldberg called for undermining this base of support by exacerbating tensions between the two groups.

The loyalty of the top military brass in the Philippines is to the Pentagon, far more than it is to the Malacañang—the presidential palace. The ties of the generals and colonels in the Philippine military to Washington date back to the days of US colonial rule in the country, and have been fostered through each successive new cohort with training and funding. Duterte has sought to secure the loyalty of the military by giving them carte blanche powers through the “war on drugs,” and by doubling the salaries of rank-and-file soldiers.

He has at the same time received the support of the Maoist CPP and its front organizations. When questioned about the threat of being ousted from office, Duterte declared that he was secure because “the CPP will die for me.”

The Communist Party of the Philippines has been intimately involved with Duterte for decades, and supported him during his years in office as mayor of Davao City in the southern Philippines. Members and ex-members of their armed wing, the New People’s Army (NPA), served as gunmen in his death squads. With his election to the presidency, he invited them to appoint several of their members to serve in his cabinet. The CPP installed his secretaries of Social Welfare, Agrarian Reform, Anti-Poverty Commission and assistant secretary of Labor.

On December 26, the CPP celebrated its 48th anniversary, and leading representatives of the Duterte administration attended and addressed the proceedings, including Secretary of the Interior, Mike Sueno. Luis Jalandoni, a long-time head of the party declared that while the CPP would “only die for the people,” they were a “strong ally of the administration” and would “protect it from coup plots.” The next round of peace talks between the Duterte administration and the CPP will be held in Rome on January 18.

Israel presses settlement expansion, defies UN resolution

Patrick Martin

Flatly defying last week’s United Nations Security Council resolution, the Israeli government has announced that it will move ahead with thousands of new homes in East Jerusalem and elsewhere in the occupied West Bank territories seized by force nearly 50 years ago in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

Jerusalem’s municipal government was expected to approve more than 600 housing units in East Jerusalem at a meeting today, in what the city’s deputy mayor, who is in charge of the zoning authority, called a first installment on 5,600 new homes.

“We remain unfazed by the UN vote, or by any other entity that tries to dictate what we do in Jerusalem,” Meir Turgeman told the Israel Hayom newspaper. “I hope the Israeli government and the new US administration will support us so we can make up for the lack [of construction] during the eight years of the Obama administration.”

Despite this disparaging reference to Obama, the Zionist program of expansion in Palestinian territories moved ahead by leaps and bounds during his presidency. The Jewish population of East Jerusalem rose from 194,000 when Obama took office in 2009 to 208,000 by the end of 2014, an increase that is small only by comparison with the expansion of settlements in the West Bank proper, whose settler population skyrocketed from 297,000 to 386,000. The combined increase in the two areas is more than 100,000, nearly 21 percent.

The conflict between the Obama administration and the Netanyahu government has intensified throughout this period, with Washington clearly regarding its client state as engaging in unwarranted meddling in broader Middle East policy, particularly Netanyahu’s vehement opposition to the nuclear agreement with Iran. The Israeli leader took the unprecedented step of going to Washington without a White House invitation and addressing a joint session of Congress to declare his hostility to the deal.

Last week, the US ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, abstained rather than vetoing a Security Council resolution criticizing Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as obstacles to a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. It was the first time since 1979 that the UN Security Council adopted a resolution critical of Israeli settlement policy. Every attempt since then has been blocked by a US veto.

Despite the subsequent furor, Resolution 2334 is completely toothless, lacking any enforcement mechanism. If Clinton rather than Trump were preparing to assume the presidency, there is little doubt that the White House would have instructed Power to veto the resolution. The abstention is a cynical effort to posture as evenhanded under conditions where Washington remains the principal financial, military and diplomatic sponsor of Israeli aggression and oppression of the Palestinians.

The Netanyahu government responded to the passage of the resolution, by a 14-0 vote with only the US abstaining, by immediately downgrading diplomatic relations with 12 of the countries voting for it. Two more, Venezuela and Malaysia, have no diplomatic ties with Israel.

Israeli officials summoned the ambassadors of the 12 countries for a tongue-lashing by Netanyahu, including the representatives of such powers as Russia, China, Britain, France, Japan and Spain. Netanyahu also cancelled a scheduled visit by the prime minister of Ukraine and summoned home Israeli ambassadors to Senegal and New Zealand, two of the resolution’s cosponsors.

Netanyahu and his ambassador to Washington, former Republican Party operative Ron Dermer, went further in assailing the Obama administration, declaring that the US State Department had actually engineered the resolution and insured its passage, and claiming that they had “nonpublic information” to prove the charge. Dermer said he would share this evidence with the new US administration after Donald Trump becomes president on January 20.

In his formal statement, Netanyahu declared, “The Obama administration not only failed to protect Israel against this gang-up at the UN, it colluded with it behind the scenes,” adding, “Israel looks forward to working with President-elect Trump and with all our friends in Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, to negate the harmful effects of this absurd resolution.”

The extraordinary and unprecedented vitriol of Netanyahu’s attacks on Obama, despite the token character of the UN resolution, can only mean that he knows he has the support of the incoming administration for a major shift in policy toward the Palestinians living in the occupied territories. Netanyahu has been under increasing pressure from ultranationalist elements among the settlers, spearheaded by his coalition partner Naftali Bennett of the Jewish Home party, who are demanding the outright annexation of large portions of the West Bank, scrapping the pretense of a “two-state solution” in which the Palestinian Authority would become the internationally recognized government of a West Bank puppet state.

In the American media, this new direction was indicated in an op-ed column in the Wall Street Journal by John Bolton, the UN Ambassador during the George W. Bush administration who is a foreign policy adviser to Trump and may obtain a top position in the new administration. He claimed that the “two-state solution” was dead as of January 20 and should be replaced by what he called a “three-state solution,” in which Gaza was turned over to the Egyptian military dictatorship, parts of the West Bank were turned over to Jordan, and the rest annexed to Israel. Bolton did not spell out the fate of the Palestinians in the annexed territory, but Israeli extremists have called for their outright expulsion to Jordan or other Arab countries.

Trump has selected as the next US ambassador to Israel an individual very much in sympathy with such plans for a form of “ethnic cleansing” on the West Bank. David Friedman is the real estate billionaire’s personal bankruptcy lawyer. He has no diplomatic experience, but a long record as a fundraiser for West Bank settlements. Friedman has repeatedly denounced the “two-state” solution and advocated moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, something Trump has pledged to do as president.

Such a shift in policy would find widespread support in the US political establishment among Democrats as well as Republicans. Fully one-third of the Democratic caucus in the Senate—15 out of 45—have already sided with Netanyahu and Trump against the refusal of the Obama administration to veto the UN resolution.

Topping the list was the incoming minority leader, Charles Schumer, joined by Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Corey Booker of New Jersey, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Mark Warner of Virginia and nine others. Only two Democratic senators issued statements supporting the administration.

Trump spelled out his opposition to Obama’s refusal to veto the UN resolution in a Twitter statement warning that US policy would change after January 20. This follows a pattern since the election, in which Trump has broken radically with the tradition that the President-elect avoids public clashes with the White House, particularly on foreign policy, based on the maxim that the United States has “one president at a time.”

Besides repudiating Obama’s actions on Israeli settlements, Trump has repudiated a 40-year-old policy on Taiwan, the “One China” policy that concedes Beijing’s sovereignty over the island, and he has effectively repudiated a decades-old US policy of reducing nuclear weapons stockpiles, indicating his desire to engage in a new arms race.

As with his pronouncements on China policy and nuclear weapons, Trump’s intervention into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has the most incendiary implications. The “two-state solution” was the preferred policy of American imperialism for many decades, not because it offered a viable alternative to the Palestinians, but because it was a necessary political cover for the reactionary Arab monarchies and military dictatorships allied with the United States.

The essence of the foreign policy of the billionaire Trump, the personification of the American financial oligarchy, is to dispense with such diplomatic maneuvers and formulations in favor of unbridled bullying and military violence carried out unilaterally by the United States against all of its foreign rivals. It is a formula that leads directly to regional wars—in the Middle East, in Africa, in the Far East—and ultimately to World War III.