The British Government Colludes with Monsanto

Colin Todhunter

“The British Government has colluded with Monsanto and should be held accountable in the International Criminal Court in The Hague for crimes against humanity and ecocide.”- Dr Rosemary Mason.

The British public and the environment are being poisoned with a deadly cocktail of 320 pesticides. Moreover, Wales has become a storage dump for Monsanto’s most toxic chemicals. These are the messages conveyed by Dr Rosemary Mason in her recent open letter to Councillor Rob Stewart, the leader of Swansea City and County Council.

Dr Mason adds that Swansea has over the years been a testing ground for glyphosate with the outcome being a huge spike in illness and disease among the local population as well as ongoing environmental devastation. There has been a long-term reckless use of a glyphosate-based weedkiller in Swansea, regardless of EU recommendations.

Dr Henk Tennekes, an independent toxicologist from the Netherlands, and Dr Pierre Mineau, an expert on ecotoxicology from Canada, both prophesied environmental catastrophe from the self-regulated and unsustainable use of pesticides by the agrochemical industry.

In Tennekes’ book, ‘The Systemic Insecticides: a disaster in the making’, he showed that these chemicals act on the brains of insects (and humans). He showed that collapse of bee colonies, the loss of other invertebrates and bird declines in Europe are associated with chronic low levels of these chemicals. Dr Pierre Mineau wrote a Report for the American Bird Conservancy ‘Neonicotinoids and Birds’ in which he accused the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of collusion with the agrochemical industry and negligence.

Mason has written to the relevant UK authorities about these issues and the situation in Wales, but the UK Environment Agency has refused to act.

Monsanto using Wales as a toxic dump

Monsanto established a factory in Newport in 1949, and Mason notes that the company paid a contractor to illegally dump chemical waste in Brofiscin Quarry, Grosfaen. These included polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), the defoliant Agent Orange and dioxins used in the Vietnam War. When PCBs were banned in the US, the UK government agreed to ramp up production in a Monsanto-owned factory in Wales in 1971. They were manufactured until 1977. Toxic dumps were established at seven quarries around Wales.

Brofiscin Quarry in Grosfaen, near Cardiff, is one of the most contaminated places in Britain. In 2003, the lining of the quarry burst and the orange contents drained into west Cardiff. According to engineering company WS Atkins, the site contains at least 67 toxic chemicals. The Environment Agency claimed: “they offered no identifiable harm or immediate danger to human health.”

Citing a study by WWF-UK in 2003, Mason shows that residues of PCBs and other organochlorines were found in 75 adipose tissue samples taken from human cadavers throughout 1990 and early 1991 from Welsh populations. The researchers found: “little changes in the concentrations of these compounds in the Welsh population over the last decade, despite reduction in their use that came into force in the 1970s.”

Mason states that children in Wales have low scores in the PISA tests, a measure of reading, maths and science ability in 15 year olds, and low educational achievement in primary schools.

She also notes that organophosphate pesticides have supposedly been banned but are now used on salmon lice in fish farms: from 2006-2016 the salmon produced by fish farms has increased by 35%, but the use of OPs increased by 932%.

Theresa May promoting the great agrochemicals-pharmaceuticals scam

Glyphosate contamination of food is associated with an epidemic of diseases: in 2012, the area treated by glyphosate in the UK was 1,750,000 ha and by 2014 it had increased to 2,250,000 ha. Glyphosate (captures) and washes out the following minerals: boron, calcium, cobalt, copper, iron, potassium, magnesium, manganese, nickel and zinc.

Hypercholesterolaemia caused by glyphosate is now treated by statins.

The enzyme aromatase is activated by glyphosate and atrazine. Aromatase inhibitors are used to treat breast cancer and prostate cancer.

Mason says that the UK prides itself in being ‘in the forefront of new technologies’ that its companies can sell privately to the rich or to other countries: many are drugs to treat the toxic effects of pesticides. These include treatment for infertility, gene therapy, new treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s and diabetes and drugs to boost immunity.

Theresa May was very upbeat about Brexit: she said Britain had many things to sell to the world including chemicals, pharmaceuticals and medical expertise.

Cover-ups, deceptions and the dodging regulation  

The industry has worked overtime to cover-up its crimes, to try and discredit those who challenge its products and practices and to put a positive spin on what it does. Mason discusses the Seralini affair and how a massive PR campaign sprang into operation to try to discredit the study and pressurize the editor of the journal that published it to retract it. The UK-based Science Media Centre (SMC) was in the forefront of the attacks. The SMC defends and promotes GM technology and is 70% funded by corporations, including Monsanto and other big GMO developer firms.

The SMC’s director was subsequently reported as saying that she took pride in the fact that the SMC’s “emphatic thumbs down” on the study “had largely been acknowledged throughout UK newsrooms.” Bruce M. Chassy, professor emeritus of food science at the University of Illinois provided scathing quotes about the study.

Yes, that Bruse Chassey: the one later exposed as having received a grant from Monsanto of more than $57,000 in less than two years.

Mason says that in Wales there are cancer/disease hotspots in the surrounding villages where Roundup has been sprayed: for example, brain tumours (mostly glioblastomas), cancers of the breast, ovary, prostate, lung (more than half of which were in non-smokers), oesophagus, colon, pancreas, rectum, and kidney as well as non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), uterine carcinoma, leiomyosarcoma of the uterus, multiple myeloma, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, motor-neurone disease and Alzheimer’s/Dementia.  Many of the cancers are aggressive and unusual; they resemble the cancers that were seen in factory workers in the pesticides industry in the 1960s.

And yet a global biocide industry has emerged to advise on dodging regulations. It is controlled by the pesticides industry and is based in the UK making lots of money for Britain.

Mason cites the example of Exponent Inc., which describes itself as “a research and scientific consultant firm with clients from industry (including crop protection) and government.” Exponent was employed by Bayer to criticise EFSA’s work on neonicotinoids and bees in 2013. It also contributed to a review by a Dow employee that concluded that “exposure to specific pesticides during critical periods of brain development and neurobehavioral outcomes is not compelling.” This review was supported by the various UK government agencies.

Glyphosate and the destruction of biodiversity

In her letter, Mason describes how Japanese knotweed Reynoutrie japonica was introduced to Europe in the mid-16 Century. For 500 years, it caused no problems. Glyphosate was introduced in 1974 and by 1981 both plants were classified in the Wildlife and Countryside Act as invasive species. Mason argues that Swansea has been a test-bed for Roundup and is known as the Japanese knotweed capital of Europe because recurrent spraying makes the plants grow bigger and stronger. It grows in in old mine workings where the soil is loose. So, the people most affected by Roundup are the poor.

She then highlights that in the US the first confirmed glyphosate-resistant weed, rigid ryegrass, was reported in 1998 within two years of Roundup Ready crops being grown. Super-weeds in the US in GM cropping systems are now a massive problem. Between 1996 and 2011, as a result of GM technology, 22 glyphosate-resistant super-weeds had developed.

In 2016, Charles Benbrook said:

“Since 1974 in the U.S., over 1.6 billion kilograms of glyphosate active ingredient have been applied, or 19 % of estimated global use of glyphosate (8.6 billion kilograms). Globally, glyphosate use has risen almost 15-fold since so-called “Roundup Ready,” genetically engineered glyphosate-tolerant crops were introduced in 1996. Two-thirds of the total volume of glyphosate applied in the U.S. from 1974 to 2014 has been sprayed in just the last 10 years.”

The 2016 UK State of Nature Report highlights the devastating loss of biodiversity in the UK.

What we are seeing a war on any plant (or creature) that is not part of the moncultured (increasingly genetically engineered) system of agriculture favoured by the agrichemicals/agritech cartel.

What can be done?

At the end of her letter, Rosemary Mason states:

“The people of Wales are sick and NHS Wales is in crisis. Human health depends on biodiversity and Wales has an environmental catastrophe caused by pesticides.”

The UK government is engaged in criminality by colluding with agrochemicals manufacturers that are knowingly poisoning people and the environment in the name of profit and greed. As Mason points out, communities, countries, ecosystems and species have become disposable inconveniences.

Corporate totalitarian tries to hide beneath an increasingly fragile facade of democracy.

The agrochemicals industry lobbies hard to have its products put on the market and ensures that they remain there. It uses PR firms and front groups to discredit individuals and studies which show the massive health and environmental devastation caused and gets its co-opted figures to sit on bodies to guarantee policies favourable to its interest are put in place. Mason has documented all of this in her numerous fully-referenced documents and has identified and named the culprits.

We have enough information to know that agrochemicals are killing us and exactly who (corporations, public bodies and individuals) is culpable.

Readers can consult all of Mason’s fully-referenced documents here.

The regulatory system surrounding agrochemicals is not broken and in need of a bit of tinkering to put things right. From bought-and-paid-for science and public relations that masquerades as journalism to policy implementation and the lack of regulation, the argohemicals industry wallows in a highly profitable cesspool of corruption. Money wields power and political influence.

We must restore the link between farmer and consumer and challenge the corporate hijack of the food system. As a global movement, Nyeleni has a radical agenda that is committed to challenging some of the issues that fuel the problems we are facing, including:

“Imperialism, neo-liberalism, neo-colonialism and patriarchy, and all systems that impoverish life, resources and eco-systems, and the agents that promote the above such as international financial institutions, the World Trade Organisation, free trade agreements, transnational corporations, and governments that are antagonistic to their peoples.”

The Nyeleni Europe website contains some valuable information.

The agrochemicals industry continues to get away with crimes against humanity and the environment. Not everyone can grow their own or afford to eat healthily all the time and no one can escape the pollution and destruction of the environment and the impacts. The aim must be to educate, organise, agitate and inform the wider public who are gradually waking up to the reality of a corrupt food system.

“The model of production dominating European food systems is controlled by corporate interests and is based on concentrated power, monocultures, patenting seeds and livestock breeds, imposing pesticides and fertilisers…. it is a system perpetuated by ineffective regulation and unjust laws. Across Europe we are developing and supporting local food systems, swapping local seeds, realising peasants’ rights, building the fertility of our soils, and strengthening and increasing the resilience of local production and food webs. We need to strengthen local food cultures and public policies that support links between producers and consumers… .” – Nyeleni Europe

The Paris Peace Conference: Signaling an End to a Western-dominated Era?

Ramzy Baroud

No, it was not just ‘another Middle East peace conference,’ as a columnist in Israeli ‘Jerusalem Post’ attempted to depict the Paris Peace Conference held on January 15, with top official representations from 70 countries attending. If it was, indeed, just ‘another peace conference’, representatives from the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority (PA) would have attended as well.

Instead, it was a defining moment that we are likely to remember: as the one that has officially ended the peace process charade after 25 years.

In fact, if the Madrid Conference of October 1991 was the vibrant official start of peace talks between Israel and its Arab – including Palestinian – neighbors, the Paris talks of January 2016 was the sad termination of it.

As soon as the Madrid talks began, the positive energy and expectations that accompanied them began to fade. Even before the talks began, Israel had set political traps and erected obstacles. For example, refusing to deal directly with the Palestinian negotiations team led by the late Haidar Abdul-Shafi (since, as far as Israel was concerned, Palestinians did not exist), and even protested that negotiator, Saeb Erekat, was wearing the traditional Palestinian headscarf (kufiyah).

It has been 25 years since that initial meeting. Since then, several of the original Palestinian delegation members have passed away; others have aged while talking about peace, but with no peace in sight. The then young Erekat became the ‘chief negotiator’ of the PA, again, yet with nothing to talk about.

What is really left to be negotiated, when Israel has doubled its illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem? When the number of Jewish settlers have grown from a negligible 250,000 (in 1993) to over 600,000; when the rate of Palestinian loss of land has accelerated like never before, since the war and occupation of 1967; when Gaza has been under lock and key for over 10 years, suffering from war, polluted water and malnourishment?

Yet, the Americans have persisted. They needed the peace process. It is an American investment, first and foremost, because American reputation and leadership depended on it.

“We are joined at the hip with Israel,” said Professor John Mearsheimer, co-author of the ‘Israeli Lobby’ in a recent interview. “What Israel does and how Israel evolves matters greatly for America’s reputation.”

“This is why President Obama – and President George W. Bush before him, and President Clinton before him – went to great lengths to get a two-state solution.”

Precisely. They persisted and failed, and they failed again and again, until the two-state solution (which was never a serious endeavor, to begin with) became a distant and, eventually, an impossible quest.

As Israel’s political center moved sharply to the right under the leadership of Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, the US maintained its position, as if oblivious to the fact that ‘facts on the ground’ have altered the political landscape beyond recognition.

Former President Barack Obama began his career in what some saw as an earnest push for renewed talks, which were halted or stalled during the administration of George W. Bush. He dispatched Senator George Mitchell, whose negotiations skills in 2010 to 2011 could not move Israel from its obstinate position on settlement expansion and, again, dispatched his Secretary of State, John Kerry, who tried unsuccessfully to revitalize talks between 2013 and 2014.

Obama must have, at one point, realized that the efforts were futile. For a start, Netanyahu seemed to have greater influence on the US Congress than the President himself. This is not an exaggeration. When Netanyahu clashed with Obama over the Iran nuclear deal, he snubbed the US President and gave a talk to a joint Congress in March 2015, in which he chastised Obama and the ‘bad deal’ with Iran. Obama appeared forlorn and irrelevant, as the representatives of the American people gave numerous standing ovations to a foreign leader, who boasted, yelled, assigned blame and praise.

Kerry’s nostalgic last speech in late December was an indication of that epic failure, the gist of his plea being that it was all over. However, both Kerry and Obama have no one to blame but themselves. Their administration had the political clout and the popular mandate to push Israel, and exact concessions that could have served as the basis of something substantial. They chose not to.

And now, an opportunistic real-estate mogul, Donald Trump, is the President of the United States. He comes with an eerie agenda that looks identical to that of the current Israeli government of right-wingers and ultra-nationalists.

“We have now reached the point where envoys from one country to the other could almost switch places,” wrote Palestinian Professor, Rashid Khalidi, in the ‘New Yorker’:

“The Israeli Ambassador in Washington, Ron Dermer, who grew up in Florida, could just as easily be the US Ambassador to Israel, while Donald Trump’s Ambassador-designate to Israel, David Friedman, who has intimate ties to the Israeli settler movement, would make a fine Ambassador in Washington for the pro-settler government of Benjamin Netanyahu.”

So that’s it folks, the show is over. The era of the peace process is behind us, and early signs indicate that Palestinians, themselves, are now realizing it as they are clearly seeking alternatives to the various overbearing US administrations.

Indeed, several administrations under George Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama have all contributed to the idea that peace was at hand, that Israel was willing to compromise, that pressure has to be applied (mostly on Palestinians) to end the seemingly equal ‘conflict’, that the US was a neutral party, even-handed ‘honest broker’, even.

The Israelis did not mind playing along as long as the game did not jeopardize their colonialization scheme in the Occupied Territories; the (largely unelected) Palestinian leadership joined in, seeking funds and meaningless political recognition; and the rest of the world, including the United Nations, watched from afar or played their assigned, marginal role.

But, now, Israel does not need to accommodate the rules of the game anymore, simply because the American ‘broker’, himself, has lost interest. Trump understands that his country can no longer maintain policing a unipolar world and has no interest in picking fights with regionally powerful Israel.

Although Trump began his presidential campaign promising to keep an equal distance from Palestinians and Israelis, only to then head in an extremely alarming direction – with the promise to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem thus, possibly, igniting another Palestinian uprising.

Knowing that the US is no longer an ally, so-called ‘Palestinian moderates’ are now seeking alternatives. On the day of Trump’s inauguration in an unprecedented lavish party seen as the most expensive in history, Palestinian factions were meeting, not in Washington, London or Paris, but in Moscow.

The news of an agreement that will see the admission of both Hamas and Islamic Jihad into the Palestine Liberation Origination (PLO) received little media coverage, but it was consequential, nonetheless. The timing (Trump’s inauguration) and the place (Moscow) were very telling of a changing political reality in the Middle East.

But what are we to make of the Paris Conference? It was a sad display of a final French-European-American attempt at showing relevance in a region that has vastly changed, in a ‘process’ that existed on paper only, in a political landscape that has become too complicated and diverse for the likes of Francois Hollande (an ardent supporter of Israel, to begin with) to matter in the least.

No, it was not just ‘another Middle East peace conference’, but an end of an era. The American era in the Middle East.

What Happens to Afghanistan Now?

Brian Cloughley

Afghanistan is America’s longest war, and it seems it could go on indefinitely, if only because, in shades of the Vietnam catastrophe, there is no face-saving way out, and national pride is very much at stake.

President Trump says he will “pursue a new foreign policy that finally learns from the mistakes of the past” but has inherited a blunder he is going to find very difficult to resolve.  The situation in Afghanistan is dire to the point of calamity, and while Mr Trump has not yet made his intentions clear it is difficult to imagine him approving negotiations with the Taliban, and equally hard to see him in the position of an “America First” Commander-in-Chief who ordered his forces to retreat.

Perhaps money might affect his final decision.

The US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) Mr John Sopko, recently reported that “Afghanistan needs a stable security environment to prevent it from again becoming a safe haven for al-Qaeda or other terrorists. More than half of US reconstruction dollars since 2002 have gone toward building, equipping, training, and sustaining the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF).  However, the ANDSF have not yet been capable of securing all of Afghanistan and have lost territory to the insurgency.”

The ‘reconstruction dollars’ noted by Mr Sopko total a mind-boggling $115 billion, a figure most of us are incapable of comprehending.  One way of understanding how much this is, in a historical context, might be to consider that the entire 1948-1952 Marshall Plan, the US initiative for reconstruction of the whole of Western Europe following the devastation of World War Two, cost $103 billion in current dollars.  The tiny country of Afghanistan has swallowed up even more but remains a disaster area.  Of major relevance is Transparency International’s report released on January 25 which places Afghanistan 169 of 176 in its Corruption Index and notes that “there is no comprehensive legal framework for preventing, detecting and prosecuting corruption.”

In Mr Sopko’s words, “the United States contributed significantly to the problems in Afghanistan by dumping too much money, too quickly, into too small an economy, with too little oversight. Poor understanding of Afghan political and social realities led to unrealistic timelines and false assumptions about what was possible.”

The SIGAR’s summation is too kind.  It has to be faced that after the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 it engaged in a full-out war, thereby alienating millions of Afghans because the Pentagon had no understanding whatever of the country’s ‘political and social realities.’  (Some of the troops on the ground tried hard to become involved in local realities but got nowhere because their tours of duty were far too short, and their generals wanted victory in terms of conquered territory and dead bodies, not social understanding.)

The US-NATO military alliance directed the war from 2003 to 2014 when it was announced that its combat operations would cease and the US would leave a residual force until the end of 2016 (now extended).  Some thousands of US soldiers, mainly Special Forces, under the ‘Freedom’s Sentinel’ Mission, continue combat operations but other foreign contingents are confined to training and advising the Afghan army, air force and police.

In an election speech in 2008 Mr Obama declared he would ‘make the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban the top priority that it should be. This is a war that we have to win.’ But the war had already been lost.   Then in 2013 he said that withdrawal of US forces was possible because ‘we achieved our central goal, or have come very close, which is to de-capacitate al-Qaeda, to dismantle them, to make sure that they can’t attack us again.’

This was willfully ignoring reality, because the country was already lurching towards civil war, with disparate bands of insurrectionists creating mayhem at the same time as countless numbers of people within and connected to the Kabul government played politics, acquired vast sums of money, and bought expensive mansions in Dubai.  It was hoped, against all evidence, that the Afghan army would be able to defeat the Taliban and other insurgents, but this has not happened, and US special forces have now ramped up their operations.

The sad fact is that foreign meddling in Afghanistan has been catastrophic and the place is verging on anarchy, while masses of money continue to be poured into the place, especially by the United States.  This doesn’t make sense, and President Trump has said he wants to end wasteful expenditure.  This is the man, after all, who made a campaign speech declaring that ‘the people opposing us [the Democrats] are the same people — and think of this — who’ve wasted $6 trillion on wars in the Middle East — we could have rebuilt our country twice — that have produced only more terrorism, more death, and more suffering – imagine if that money had been spent at home.’

Trump is right about waste (although the figure of $6 trillion is suspect), and if he really thinks that building at home is better than battling abroad,  then he would immediately shut off Washington’s Afghanistan money tap which is scheduled to pour out another 4.6 billion dollars in 2017.

So will the President adhere to his publicly announced principle and abandon Afghanistan for the sake of America First?

The research agency Stratfor noted that before his bid for the presidency, “Trump released a video arguing that the United States’ decision to invade Afghanistan was a mistake and that its troops should withdraw. He stuck to a modified version of this view throughout the campaign season, presenting himself as a can-do technocrat with zero tolerance for waste.”

If the Taliban take over Afghanistan it is most unlikely there would be any direct threat to the United States.  Life would be hell for ordinary citizens, but since when has Washington worried about such things?  None of the insurgencies and coups in Libya, Syria and Ukraine, has resulted in a better life for the unfortunate people who have been the supposedly intended beneficiaries of Washington’s meddling.

President Trump declared that “From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first. America first . . .  we’ve defended other nation’s borders while refusing to defend our own; and spent trillions of dollars overseas while America’s infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay.”  But will he really “learn from the mistakes of the past”?

His promise appears indicative of intention to avoid further expensive catastrophes such as have been visited on Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya — although he did take time, during an Inauguration ball in Washington, to speak by video link to US troops in Afghanistan and tell them that ‘I’m with you all the way . . . we’re going to do it together.’ This was certainly a thoughtful public relations gesture — but was far from being assurance that the Trumpian United States would remain committed to Afghanistan’s future.

His final decision may well rest on discussions with the trio of generals he has appointed to high positions.  Generals Mattis, the Secretary of Defense;  Kelly, the Secretary of Homeland Security; and Flynn, National Security Adviser, are not people who are disinclined to present their views forthrightly.  Nor are they reluctant to wage war. It’s what they’ve been doing all their lives, after all.  The fact that their wars ended in dispossession, displacement and death of millions of people is neither here nor there.

The war in Afghanistan is an economic, social, moral and military fiasco, but we can expect it to go on for a long time. The Kabul government will stagger from indecision to dire decision and corruption will prosper while the Afghan people suffer unimaginable hardships and the barbaric loonies of extremist Islam have a wonderful time killing for the enjoyment of killing.  Just like the intellectual General Mattis, now Pentagon Supremo, who declared that “You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them.”

The hope that President Trump’s foreign policy will learn “from the mistakes of the past” is sadly optimistic.  Carry on shooting.

Liberalism as Class Warfare

Rob Urie

With apologies in advance for forcing unpleasant thoughts this early in an essay; reflexively, what economic class do the national Democrats’ ‘deplorables’ inhabit? With the persistence of institutional racism (graph below) across both Democrat and Republican administrations, why wouldn’t the answer be the rich who own the corporations that employ people and the professional class that does the hiring? If racism doesn’t motivate institutional racism, what does?

The question is loaded for a reason— the corporate titans and capitalist class that fund the major political Parties have uniformly rejected explicit race and gender bias in hiring through the institutions they own and / or control. As a point of social logic, if economic outcomes differ by race and gender but the entities doing the hiring aren’t racist or sexist, the fault must lie with jobseekers. Enter the bourgeois storyline of racism and sexism as misplaced blame from ‘losers’ for their own failures.

An obvious problem with this explanation is the systemic nature of institutional racism and sexism. The White / Black employment rate (below) is one of many measures that demonstrate systematic differences in economic outcomes by race across time. Unless one wants to posit bottom-up causality, that corporate hiring, compensation and wealth distribution are decided along racial lines by working class ‘deplorables,’ blame belongs with those who control the institutions that produce it.

Graph: Institutional racism has persisted across Democrat and Republican administrations since the onset of neoliberalism despite claims by Democrats and their supporters that they are the Party of racial reconciliation. Economic cycles explain the periodic convergence and divergence of the ratio of White to Black employment. Dean Baker explains the appearance of convergence in 2016 here. Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve.

The practice of blaming down in an increasingly hierarchical and anti-democratic society produces an obvious benefit for the economic powers-that-be and their servants in the political class. It blames the powerless for social dysfunction over which they have little to no control. And the self-serving tautology at work, that social power is distributed through a natural distribution of virtues— qualifications in the language of corporate apologists, provides faux meritocratic cover for the social violence of economic exclusion.

The issue here is not racism per se, but rather the division of the working class along racial and gender lines for the benefit of plutocrats and their servants. In what configuration of the world does it make sense that a working class that has been systematically disempowered for the last half-century is responsible for the social disintegration currently unfolding across the West?

In the case of institutional racism, the savage histories of slavery and genocide are used in the present to misrepresent the current distribution of social power as their artifact to the exclusion of class explanations. To the extent that working class racism does exist, it doesn’t explain the differences in institutional outcomes that have resulted in increasingly widespread economic exclusion. Again, assertion that the poor and working class determine institutional prerogatives is not supported by the evidence.

Put differently, the aspect of existing social divisions that has been carried forward from the pre-modern past is class relations. America was founded as a ‘new world’ plutocracy— there never existed a past where the poor and working classes determined the social policies that explain institutional racism. The idea that the laboring classes and petite bourgeois would create a slave class to lower wages and undercut their capacity for social negotiation is a non-sequitur created by plutocrats as cover for their own crimes.

As slight evidence— readers are invited to read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States for detailed background, the U.S. Constitution counted slaves as 3/5ths a person to accrue political power to the owners of ‘capital,’ not to the laboring classes. And today capital and its servants in the professional class determine who is employed and who isn’t and at what wages. Deference to labor ‘markets’ is misdirection, else systematic race and gender bias wouldn’t exist. (Ask an economist to explain why race and gender bias shouldn’t exist in a market economy).

Where economic power translates to political power, economic power frames the discourse. As the facts have it, this intersection finds the non-racist owners and senior managers of America’s dominant institutions being the major campaign contributors to both political Parties and thereby setting both the political and economic agendas of the nation. From this perspective racism is difficult to resolve because it requires the redistribution of social power. And it is this mal-distribution of social power that is the effective residual of the pre-modern past.

The class dynamic of the national Democrats’ ’deplorables’ comment has been lost on the liberal class for a reason. The corporatist frame that allows institutional rules to obviate factual outcomes under the manufactured logic of individual capacities only makes sense from inside a closed logic. It allows professional-class liberals to congratulate themselves on their social virtue without requiring the distribution / redistribution of social power that would affect the actual outcomes upon which this virtue is claimed.

In a material sense, enlightened liberal Barack Obama oversaw the near total destruction of Black wealth, a foreclosure crisis that continues to eviscerate communities of color and the elevation of the most predatory of capitalist institutions— Wall Street. The liberal chide that Mr. Obama’s (and Hillary Clinton’s) critics are racists posits an ethereal realm where intentions matter and factual outcomes don’t. Self-righteous liberals claim moral superiority based on their outcome-free intentions with social disintegration as their product.

Put differently, the two-Party back-and-forth between explicit and implicit racism since the rise of neoliberalism has had little to no impact on institutional racism. The evidence of difference that has been offered is economic cycles through which both institutional racism and the immiseration / evisceration of the laboring classes have persisted. Donald Trump is the ‘explicit’ variant who used the outcomes of bi-partisan policies as misdirection to win political support. He no more caused institutional race and gender bias than Democrats have resolved it.

The broader social product is a hermetically-sealed (through tautology) apologia for the existing order. It is hardly an accident that the deep-state, the self-perpetuating bureaucracy that supports the financialized death-state (militarism and environmental catastrophe), prefers the predictable ‘liberal’ hard-right to its loose-cannon brethren. The explicit racism and classism of the belligerent hard-right risks exposing the state-of-affairs ‘managed’ into existence by plutocrats and their political servants charged with overseeing the metaphorical plantation.

Graph: ‘Resistance’ to racism and sexism posed in terms of competition between the major political Parties confuses bi-partisan class warfare with product branding. Self-righteous posturing by liberals regarding racism and sexism serves as cover for the institutional perpetuation of both. Divide and conquer to protect ruling class gains is the intended outcome. Source: Cosmopolitan / U.S. Election Project.

Plutocrats and their servants have organized social resources so that ‘qualifications’ fall into their laps through the normal course of existing. This insight was behind the New Deal build-out of public education and Great Society programs of economic inclusion— without public provision of these ‘qualifications’ serve mainly to perpetuate the existing order. And even with these, a parallel private system that provides class distinction serves to undermine the leveling effect of public institutions.

The national Democrats’ con that they oppose racism while they support the institutions that perpetuate it links dog-whistle racial politics like the Clinton’s 1994 crime bill to the national Democrats ‘positive’ support for the capitalist institutions that perpetuate economic exclusion. The Clintons (and Barack Obama) aren’t racists— how could they be?—even though they supported mass incarceration, mass deportation and predatory lending by Wall Street that devastated communities of color.

Graph: Economic inequality is posed as a fact of nature as cover for political capture of the professional class for the benefit of the ruling plutocracy. In this context the liberal charge that social disintegration is being led by working class racists requires near-total ignorance of the mechanisms of economic distribution combined with class-based contempt for the working class and poor. Source: CBO.

The fear-mongering storyline of White backlash used to explain Donald Trump’s election perpetuates the myth of democratic rule in a plutocracy. It assumes that the political class is led from below when all evidence has it that wealth = political power. The political class does the bidding of the rich and the institutions they control. Race and gender bias are evidence of the mal-distribution of social resources, not the cause.

What anti-establishment voters, and those who consciously withheld their votes, got right in the recent election is that the illusion of choice provided by the major Parties is anti-politics. Liberals, as guardians of the status quo, are class warriors on the side of economic mal-distribution and the immiseration of the laboring classes and poor for the benefit of the rich. The ease with which the misdirection of ‘deplorables’ was sold illustrates the conundrum confronting any actual Left political movement.

Unclear Nuclear Pathways for 2017

Manpreet Sethi



The inauguration of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the US has just taken place. A lot of what happens in the nuclear domain in the coming 12 months will be dependent on the direction that is adopted by the new president as he settles in. Every fresh incoming administration normally brings in its own policies, and hence changes in economic, political, foreign policy and nuclear issues are always expected. But, the uncertainties being felt this time are more than usual. The statements and tweets made by Donald Trump as a presidential candidate and later as president-elect indicate a reversal of many of the previous administration's nuclear-related policies and actions. For the moment then, Trump looks like the proverbial bull in the nuclear china shop, and all are closely watching to see what all breaks, or not, under his nuclear watch. A few of the issues that will vie for his attention fairly quickly can be highlighted amid an as yet unclear nuclear path for 2017.

The first of the issues that can be expected to be handled by President Trump is the resetting of US relations with Russia. There is no doubt that this particular relationship has been left in a sorry state by the outgoing administration. Trump will most likely act quickly to arrest the trend and mend the situation. Will he do this by making compromises on sanctions, as he has indicated earlier? Will he link these actions to Russian concessions on nuclear arms control? Does the US itself have an inclination to undertake arms control given that it is looking to upgrade its own nuclear arsenal? After having been in a nuclear weapons reduction mode for some time, the US now appears to have moved in favour of modernisation. Before demitting office, Barack Obama approved a budget of US$ 1 trillion to be spent over three decades for this purpose. President Donald Trump has indicated the intention to stay the course and even tweeted that the US would not shy away from an arms race if his rivals so desired. While neither Russia nor China may rise to the bait, both are nevertheless engaged in modernising or building their own nuclear capabilities as per their visions of credible deterrence. 

As the US, Russia, and China proceed with their nuclear weapons programmes with an eye on one another, their behaviour and actions will have an impact on the global nuclear picture with ripples being felt in India and Pakistan too. Better US-Russia relations can be expected to have a positive fallout on the overall atmospherics. They may even help revive some of the bilateral US-Russia arms control agreements that have recently fallen by the wayside owing to lack of communication from both sides. But unless they specifically target arms control, a mere thawing of relations is unlikely to arrest the ongoing nuclear modernisation currently underway across all nuclear-armed states. 

A second issue sure to grab Trump’s attention is the nuclear agreement with Iran. In January 2017, international diplomacy should have been celebrating the first anniversary of the Implementation Day of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that brought a negotiated halt to the suspected military oriented activities of Iran’s nuclear programme. 2016 saw Iran living up to its promises under the agreement. It dismantled centrifuges that could have led it to enrich uranium, shipped out of the country enriched uranium in excess of what the JCPOA allows it to keep, removed the core from the Arak reactor that could have helped it build plutonium, and met the necessary requirements of IAEA inspections. In return, the country gained from a lifting of a majority of the sanctions imposed upon it. There was an upsurge in its oil production and exports, and many international leaders made a beeline to Tehran to establish new political and economic relations. 

However, instead of celebrating the successful conclusion of the first year of the JCPOA, the past few months have been spent in trying to read the tea leaves on how President Trump (and the Republicans now dominating Congress) would treat the Iran deal on assuming office. Trump has been vocal about his dissatisfaction with the JCPOA, and even let it be known that he intended to “rip open the deal” once elected. Now that he is the elected president, will he go through with the threat? Would he find it in US interest to do so, thereby destroying years of negotiations? Iranian leaders have signalled that any such act would mean the end of the agreement for Iran. They have been reminding the international community that the JCPOA involved multiple parties and that it cannot be for the US to kill it unilaterally. The other major powers - Russia, China and the European Union - too have invested heavily in the deal. The Iranian appeal, therefore, is to the rest of the actors to use their good offices to make good sense prevail on the new US administration. 

A third thorny nuclear issue that will seek Trump’s attention pertains to North Korea's provocative nuclear actions and behaviour. It may be recalled that in 2016, the country not only conducted two nuclear tests – in January and May – but also announced that it had miniaturised its nuclear weapons enough to be able to deliver them atop a ballistic missile. These actions and announcements were attention-seeking gestures, hoping to get the US to agree to conduct some kind of direct negotiation with Kim Jong-un, along the lines of those with Iran. However, the US was hesitant to be seen as negotiating with Pyongyang with the latter apparently holding a gun to it.  President Obama appeared content to leave the issue to be resolved by China, which nevertheless had little initiative to do so since it kept the US unsettled. China also claimed that its leverage upon North Korea was diminishing. With the change in administration, there is once again a window of opportunity for the US to take a serious relook at the issue. President Trump’s long experience as a successful businessman and his behaviour now as a politician show him to be a risk-taker. North Korea is obviously keen to engage directly with the US and there may be a deal here to look out for.

The North Korean issue also has special significance since it is tied up with relations between the US and its allies in Northeast Asia. Given that Donald Trump, during his campaign speeches, had mentioned that Japan and South Korea must bear a greater burden of the nuclear umbrella extended to them, including the BMD deployments, the two countries are anxious about how the North Korean imbroglio would be resolved.

As President Trump grants some clarity on his nuclear policies towards Russia, Iran, North Korea, and by extension, towards Japan and South Korea, he will be shaping the nuclear discourse that will dominate this year and beyond. Interestingly, amid this flux, a conference to negotiate a nuclear ban treaty is planned for 2017. The UN First Committee Resolution passed in October 2016 that calls for negotiations on a legally binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons, leading to their total elimination, has not yet caught the attention of President Trump. Of course, it may be recalled that the Obama administration had not succumbed to its charms either. But as the momentum for the conference builds up, it could catch Trump's fancy. After all, former President Reagan immortalised himself through the sanity he brought to the nuclear arms race when he and Soviet Premier Gorbachev pronounced in 1988 at Reykjavik that a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought. Who knows if Trump might grow to like the idea of disarmament and does something about it - after all, he is a risk-taker.

Meanwhile, it can only be hoped that President Trump understands the significance of the Nuclear Security Summits (NSS) that concluded last year. While the usual politics can be expected to get in the way of a Republican president acknowledging merit in a former Democrat president's initiative, there is no doubt that the NSS process achieved success in raising awareness and political action on nuclear security at the highest level in countries across the globe. The consensus so built and momentum acquired in setting international benchmarks for national efforts must not be lost. While Trump has not paid much attention to this issue, nuclear terrorism remains a palpable threat and the world cannot afford to lose out on efforts towards securing nuclear material and technologies from non-state actors. 

The nuclear pathways that the US adopts will become clear in the coming months. Undoubtedly, their impact will be felt worldwide as the fashion on the nuclear ramp is set by Washington. President Trump may believe in “America First” for many of his policy decisions, but on the nuclear front, one hopes he realises that he carries the burden of international security, too.

Central Bank governor says Sri Lankan economy “hospitalised”

Saman Gunadasa

Early this month, Sri Lanka’s Central Bank Governor Indrajit Coomaraswamy presented the financial institution’s “Road Map for 2017 and Beyond.”

Last June, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) approved a $US1.5 billion loan to the Sri Lankan government in order to avert a balance of payment crisis. The Central Bank is working closely with the IMF to ensure that the international bank’s loan conditions are fulfilled.

Coomaraswamy said Sri Lanka was the only country in the Asia-Pacific region, apart from Afghanistan, under IMF conditions. “Having an IMF program is the economic equivalent to being in hospital,” he said. “We are not in the ICU [intensive care unit] but clearly in hospital.”

Coomaraswamy’s remarks, which underscored the depth of the county’s economic crisis, were underpinned by his insistence that the government had to keep implementing the IMF’s austerity measures.

The three-year IMF loan was provided under the bank’s Extended Fund Facility, on condition that Colombo imposes economic measures similar to those inflicted on the Greek working class in 2014–2015. These include a 50 percent reduction in the fiscal deficit to 3.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2020, lifting the value added tax (VAT), other increases in government revenue and the privatisation of state-owned enterprises.

Last November, the government announced its 2017 budget, raising the VAT by 4 to 15 percent on all goods and services including essential items and cutting the fertiliser subsidy to farmers. It reduced expenditure on primary and secondary education by 50 percent, and by 30 percent for higher education. Health spending was also wound back by almost 7 percent and cuts imposed on public sector employees’ pensions.

In addition, since 2015, the Central Bank has allowed the rupee exchange rate to be decided by market forces, resulting in a devaluation of the currency by more than 10 percent, which has pushed up the prices of all imported goods.

These attacks come on top of IMF-dictated policies introduced by the previous government of President Mahinda Rajapakse in exchange for a $2.6 billion loan in 2009. That loan also sought to avert a balance of payment crisis, aggravated by Colombo’s massive expenditure on the communal war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and the impact of the 2008–09 global financial crisis.

The Rajapakse government maintained a wage freeze on public sector employees between 2006 and 2015, imposed various taxes on essentials, cut the fertiliser subsidy to farmers and intensified the privatisation of education.

Brutal state attacks were launched against workers and the poor opposing these measures. Police killed one worker when Katunayake free trade zone employees took strike action to defend their pensions. Another person was killed by police when fishermen protested against government cuts to kerosene subsidies.

The key purpose of the Central Bank’s “Road Map” is to insist that the current Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government enforces and extends the IMF’s austerity demands. The IMF measures were the only “medicine” available, Coomaraswamy declared.

To emphasise the point, Coomaraswamy stressed the underlying weakness of the economy. “Being a twin [fiscal and trade] deficit country increases vulnerability in an uncertain and volatile global economic environment,” he said.

According to the Central Bank’s figures, exports declined by 2.6 percent in the first 10 months of 2016, contributing to an increase in the trade deficit by 3.7 percent to $US7.2 billion. The IMF previously predicted a 5 percent annual growth of Sri Lanka’s GDP. This has now been downgraded to 4.5 percent.

Coomaraswamy warned that “unsustainable budget deficits boosted excess and untenable demand in the economy,” resulting in inflationary pressures and high interest rates. A higher deficit, he said, would further affect the balance of payments and the exchange rate.

The Central Bank governor declared that “consensus must be built among politicians, policy makers and the general public on the need for cohesive reforms.” In other words, the government must make the necessary political preparations to force the working class and oppressed masses to submit to the IMF’s demands.

Coomaraswamy’s remarks express the nervousness in ruling circles about growing social tensions as key sections of the working class, students and farmers have come forward to protest the government’s attacks on living standards.

In September-October last year, hundreds of thousands of plantation workers held strikes, demonstrations and pickets demanding higher wages. In December, tens of thousands of postal employees took part in two-day strikes demanding pay increases. University students continue to demonstrate against the privatisation of education.

Coomaraswamy insisted that the austerity measures would “strengthen the medium term stability of the economy.” In the context of increasingly volatile global conditions, these claims are a mirage.

In December, the IMF itself warned that the Central Bank “should be ready to tighten policy if global vulnerabilities grow. We emphasise this readiness.”

“Readiness” is a codeword for even more brutal social attacks on the living conditions of workers and the poor.

Any economic growth that has occurred has benefited a small wealthy elite and international investors. According to a recent Oxfam report, “the richest 10 percent of the population in countries like Sri Lanka, China, India, Indonesia, Laos and Bangladesh have seen their share of income increase by more than 15 percent,” matched by a 15 percent fall in the income share of the bottom 10 percent of the population.

The Central Bank governor’s program is for the further enrichment of international financiers and Sri Lanka’s wealthiest layers. The Ceylon Chamber of Commerce, the country’s peak business organisation, issued a statement after Coomaraswamy’s speech, describing it as “an encouraging outlook for the Sri Lankan business community.”