Amazon has Some Serious Antitrust Issues

Michael Sainato

Amazon has built an empire in the internet economy, dominating ecommerce sales and transactions, and rapidly expanding in tandem with the online shopping industry. It competes with Netflix and Hulu in providing films, television shows, and original programming, recently expanding Amazon Video globally. It provides authors with independent publishing services. An August 2016 article in Bloomberg noted Amazon is taking business away from UPS, FedEx, and other shipping services as it expands it delivery and logistics network. Amazon provides web services in the form of hosting servers, offering software, cloud space and financial services. Amazon offers credit and loans to its sellers and customers. The company’s infrastructure continues to infiltrate and dominate businesses and industries that continually increase their reliance on ecommerce.

A recent publication in Yale Law Journal by Law School student Lina M. Khan, Zephyr Teachout’s Policy Director for her 2014 Campaign for New York Governor against Andre Cuomo, outlines the anti-trust concerns in regards to Amazon’s aggressive expansion and the shortcomings under current law to meaningfully address anti-trust implications in the internet economy.

“The titan in e-commerce is Amazon—a company that has built its dominance through aggressively pursuing growth at the expense of profits and that has integrated across many related lines of business,” wrote Khan. “As a result, the company has positioned itself at the center of Internet commerce and serves as essential infrastructure for a host of other businesses that now depend on it. This Note argues that Amazon’s business strategies and current market dominance pose anticompetitive concerns that the consumer welfare framework in antitrust fails to recognize.”

Khan cited Amazon’s first few years of growth and development, during which the company managed to continue running despite suffering drastic losses. Founded in 1994, the company didn’t report its first quarterly profit until 2002. But even since then, the company has continued posting losses, yet has remained a Wall Street favorite. “The company barely ekes out a profit, spends a fortune on expansion and free shipping and is famously opaque about its business operations,” reported the IBTimes in 2013, citing Amazon’s increase in revenue is completely poured into lowering prices and offering services like free shipping to eliminate competition, or to expand into different industries. This monopolistic business model has come at the expense of its workers and small businesses.

For Amazon’s warehouse employees, Amazon and its managers use unattainable productivity goals to maximize employee output and exploit their job insecurity. The company often utilizes temporary workers from labor recruiters with offices in warehouses to replace employees as needed. The company has faced several employee lawsuits, including its unwillingness to pay employees for time spent in mandatory security lines exiting the warehouse, aimed at combatting employee theft. In January 2016, Amazon settled that lawsuit for $3.7 million. In October 2016, delivery drivers filed a lawsuit against Amazon for paying them as independent contractors, but stipulating they follow rules and company practices as employees. “The company’s winners dream up innovations that they roll out to a quarter-billion customers and accrue small fortunes in soaring stocks,” reported the New York Times in 2015 on the predatory business model Amazon uses to exploit low ranked employees. “Losers leave or are fired in annual cullings of the staff- ‘purposeful Darwinism,’ one former Amazon human resources director said. Some workers who suffered from cancer, miscarriages, and other personal crises said they had been evaluated unfairly or edged out rather than given time to recover.”

For small businesses and independent retailers, Amazon has eliminated its competition through price reductions close to cost meant to beat competition rather than make a profit, and a flood of investments that provide amenities like free shipping other businesses can’t compete with. Its power and resources have allowed Amazon to boost itself in different marketplaces, all behind the veil of the internet, shielding it from similar criticisms that Wal-Mart’s business practices have provoked, while avoiding have to charge sales tax in most states due to the transactions conducted on the internet.

For Amazon’s book marketplace, the “Gazelle Project” was set up from a quote by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos instructing his price negotiators to stalk publishers “the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle.” pushing them to reduce their book prices to acquire a listing on Amazon, undercutting all competition.

When rival competition emerges, Amazon has either bought them out or poured in funds to undersell the competing company until they cede to selling or go bankrupt, as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos did to Diapers.com, detailed in a 2013 book by Brad Stone. Amazon has reportedly offered customers a $5 rebate if they scan items in stores using their App and buy them on Amazon instead.

Amazon’s practices have incited anti-trust concerns, but as Yale Law School Student Lina M. Khan added, anti-trust laws aren’t updated to properly assess companies in the internet economy.  “Due to a change in legal thinking and practice in the 1970s and 1980s, antitrust law now assesses competition largely with an eye to the short-term interests of consumers, not producers or the health of the market as a whole; antitrust doctrine views low consumer prices, alone, to be evidence of sound competition,” Khan wrote. “It is as if Bezos charted the company’s growth by first drawing a map of antitrust laws, and then devising routes to smoothly bypass them. With its missionary zeal for consumers, Amazon has marched toward monopoly by singing the tune of contemporary antitrust.”

Khan argues that in regards to Amazon and the twenty-first century marketplace, the competitive process as a whole, including marketplace infrastructure and dynamics.

“Amazon controls key critical infrastructure for the Internet economy—in ways that are difficult for new entrants to replicate or compete against,” Khan explained. “By making itself indispensable to e-commerce, Amazon enjoys receiving business from its rivals, even as it competes with them. Moreover, Amazon gleans information from these competitors as a service provider that it may use to gain a further advantage over them as rivals—enabling it to further entrench its dominant position.”

Amazon has built, expanded and acquired the infrastructure their competition depends on, and it exploits this power to eliminate any neutrality in the competitive process. The company’s size and broad scope enables it to selectively choose who uses it services, how, and on what terms, while increasingly tipping the competitive balance in their favor. Khan concludes by outlining two avenues of possible solutions for Amazon’s monopoly; “restoring traditional antitrust principles to create a presumption of predation and to ban vertical integration by dominant platforms could help maintain competition in these markets,” or based on the presumption that dominant online platforms like Amazon are inherently monopolistic, then applying regulations similar to those enacted for public utilities to mitigate any abuse of power from the dominant platform. But both avenues demand analyzing current legal framework and amending it to address the internet economy and in that economy, what should the law identify as unhealthy threats to maintaining a free, competitive market.

The Nuclear Weapons Threat to Our Common Future

David Krieger

Nuclear weapons are an existential threat to humans and other forms of complex life.  The possibility of nuclear annihilation should concern us enough to take action to abolish these weapons.  The failure of large numbers of people to take such action raises vitally important questions.  Have we humans given up on our own future?  Are we willing to act on our own behalf and that of future generations?

Nine countries possess nuclear weapons, and the predominant orientation toward them is that they provide protection to their citizens.  They do not.  Nuclear weapons provide no physical protection.  While they may provide psychological “protection,” this is akin to erecting a Maginot Line in the mind – one that can be easily overcome under real world conditions, just as the French Maginot Line was circumvented in World War II, leading to the military defeat and occupation of France by German forces.

Following a recent test of a nuclear-capable Minuteman III missile from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, Colonel Craig Ramsey, the flight test squadron commander, commented that “efforts like these make nuclear deterrence effective.”  Perhaps they do so in Colonel Ramsey’s mind, but no one knows what effects such tests have on the minds of potential nuclear adversaries.  We can say with certainty that such tests would not deter terrorists in possession of nuclear weapons, since the terrorists would have no territory to retaliate against.  It should be noted as well that U.S. leaders are generally highly critical of similar missile tests by other nations, and do not view these tests as providing an effective deterrent force for them.

We know from the damage that was caused by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that these weapons kill indiscriminately and cause unnecessary suffering, both crimes under international humanitarian law. Any threat or use of these weapons would be immoral as well as illegal.  Nuclear weapons are also extremely costly and draw scientific and financial resources away from meeting human needs.  As long-distance killing devices, they are also cowardly in the extreme.

Are those of us living in the most powerful nuclear weapon state sleepwalking toward Armageddon?  Are we lemmings heading toward a cliff?  Are we unable to awaken from a nuclear nightmare?  We must wake up and demand the good faith negotiations for nuclear zero promised in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved 30 seconds ahead and now stands at 2.5 minutes to midnight.  We have been warned many times and in many ways.  Yet, we remain stuck at the brink of nuclear catastrophe.  The people need to step back from the brink and insist that their leaders follow them in moving away.

U.S. nuclear policy puts the future of humanity in the hands of a single leader with the codes to initiate a nuclear war.  Should that leader be unstable, unbalanced, erratic or insane, he or she could initiate a nuclear war that would leave the world in shambles, destroying everyone and everything that each of us loves and holds dear.

The stakes are very high and the challenge is one we ignore at our peril.  I encourage you to join us at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation in working to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons, a world we can be proud to pass on intact to our children, grandchildren and all children.

A Republican Carbon-Tax Proposal: Pros and Cons

Peter Belmont

The Feb. 8 New York Times op-ed ”A Conservative Case for Climate Action” has provided the sole even slightly hopeful piece of news I’ve seen this year from Republicans —here statesmen rather than politicians. This proposal is spelled out at greater length here.

This proposal is hopeful principally because it calls for some/any climate action—chiefly in the form of a carbon tax to replace environmental regulations—at a time when nearly 100% of President Trump’s cabinet, most of his advisors, and many Republicans in Congress appear to be ideological or corrupt climate deniers who will fight any action whatever to end emission of greenhouse gases. The proposal comes at a time when the Koch brothers and their ilk are indeed riding high.

Let us hope that this proposal from a council of Republican elder statesmen will turn enough of these Republican politicians around, convince them that action on climate change is necessary, that the problem is real and grave, and that they should buck the president and his entourage.

That said, the proposal is presented rather as though it were, in and of itself, a satisfactory recommendation about what the USA should do about climate. If this is what the authors actually had in mind, they are surely wrong. See section “Final Thoughts” below.

And, sadly, it is obvious that neither this proposal nor any other proposal to fight climate change has a snowball’s chance of being implemented or (as to Obama’s EPA regulations) retained, in the present political circumstances.

What one hopes for is a change of political circumstances. I suppose it could happen. One good sign, perhaps, the New York Times has been paying quite a bit of attention to this “carbon tax”: here 2/7, and here 2/13.

Pros: Getting The Voters On Board

This proposal imagines re-distributing carbon tax collections to all Americans evenly per capita—$500 in the first year!—rather than spending the tax collected on green-energy projects or re-distributing the collected taxes regressively via tax reductions. Since a large increase in gasoline tax will hit the poor especially hard, an equal (per-capita) carbon-tax rebate to every American with a social-security number will be most welcome. Perhaps the proposers of this plan had in mind voters with a financial stake in supporting the plan initially and later working to prevent its repeal?

(And, wild hope, once we have an arguably-socialistic per-capita carbon-tax rebate, even if proposed by Republicans, can single-payer all-citizens health care be far behind?)

One might ask, of course, whether $500 annually per child—in the first year, mind, and more later—might encourage unwise population growth.

Pros: Preventing Carbon Tax From Wrecking American Exports

The proposal has an interesting idea, namely, rebating this tax for exported manufactured goods whose manufacture incurred the tax, and charging the tax (as a tariff) on manufactured goods imported. This proposal would keep American manufactures competitive.

Whether such a rebate/tariff system comports with international trade law is another matter.

Of course, how any of this comports with the sovereignty-surrendering profit-guarantees of so-called “free-trade” (that is, foreign investment protection) treaties such as NAFTA is beyond my competence.

But Will This Carbon Tax, Alone, Defeat Emissions?

Whether the proposed annually increasing “carbon taxes”—however implemented, the devil being in the details—will accomplish a sufficient reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is a question that Americans must study and debate.

And to this end we should be aware that the very modest (read: insufficient) GHG reductions aimed at by the Obama-era regulations were modest because of Republican opposition, not because they were sufficient to combat climate change in a timely manner. Very much greater GHG reduction was and remains needed.

We must be mindful that what is needed is something like 100% fossil-free electric generation by 2025 and 100% fossil-free transportation (ground, air, sea), building heating, and industrial heating by 2045. If any tax scheme is to be useful, it must be robust enough to bring this about. Merely saying the words “carbon tax” is not sufficient! After all, there is the question of methane produced by animal farming; and unwise cutting of forests, neither of which is primarily related to “carbon” (i.e., fossil fuel burning).

Cons: Problems

Anyone who thinks this Republican proposal might become law should think about the likely consequences.

The proposal embodies a defect present in existing policies for funding highway and road repair from (current) gasoline taxes: as cars and trucks become more efficient—or more electric—they will use less gasoline and thus reduce gasoline tax collections, making the funding of road repair problematic.

If this increasing carbon tax (with its implied annual gasoline tax increases) causes cars and trucks to use less gasoline, and causes buildings to use less oil and gas and coal for building heating, etc., etc., then the collected tax—and thus the per-capita redistributed tax—will decrease, reducing the public’s political happiness with the taxation program.

Something else to consider: if gasoline tax rates rise not merely annually, as this proposal suggests, but also steeply, and new cars and trucks consequently come to use less gasoline overall, owners of (remaining) gas guzzlers will have difficulty selling them, creating an unrecoverable capital cost situation for such consumers.

Similarly, as fossil fuel taxes rise, owners of fossil-fueled electric generating facilities (unless by political gimcrackery they force consumers to foot the tax bills while refusing to permit replacement by “green” energy sources) will find themselves facing stranded assets—unsellable and unpaid-for fossil-fuel burning plants being replaced by “green” or nuclear or hydro power generation.

But these will not only be economic facts: they will create political facts as well. Just as gun-owners love their guns and want to keep them, owners of gas-guzzlers and fossil-fueled electric generation plants will want to keep them and to keep using them and will oppose the carbon tax rate hikes.

And, of course, as the recent election rhetoric suggests, not only may regulations made by one administration be un-made by another, but the same may happen to programs of taxation, especially those that come to be felt as onerous. A tax on “carbon” begun today must last about 40 years. That’s a long time for a scheme of taxation to go unchallenged in American politics.

Cons: Other Considerations

Many things—plastics, chemicals—are manufactured from fossil feed-stocks. If these manufactures are biodegradable or degradable at all, and will one day release their carbon content to the atmosphere, these manufactured goods (and not only fuels) should fall within the ambit of the carbon tax.

Sad to think of excluding certain plastics from the carbon tax because they are a permanent non-biodegradable blight on the earth’s environment!

Cons: Will Carbon Tax Avoidance Planning Work?

A principal purpose of the proposed escalating carbon tax is to help businesses plan capital projects. And, one imagines, to help ordinary folks plan capital projects such as buying cars or installing electric or fossil-fired heating systems.

Capital planning works on two tracks. The easier track is planning new capital expenses. The harder track is planning to replace existing capital.

For example, if I am a solely-economically-motivated consumer and I definitely need a new car today, I may elect to buy an electric or hybrid car because I know how the gasoline tax will rise over time and because I believe that the gasoline tax will be prohibitive within 5 or 10 years. And I may elect to replace my present car now rather than later if it is a gasoline-burner since its resale value is bound to decrease over time as the carbon tax (and gasoline tax) increases.

But what if I recently bought, and cannot reasonably hope to recover the cost of, a new gasoline-fueled car? When if at all should I sell it (and stop using it)? If the cost of a new car is much greater than the aggregate gasoline tax (now and over the anticipated lifetime of my car), I may elect to keep the car—and thus to defeat the purpose of the carbon-tax.

Does this matter? How much of the USA’s GHG emissions comes from personal cars? Could a policy to defeat climate change ignore personal vehicles?

Well, “The largest sources of transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions include passenger cars and light-duty trucks, including sport utility vehicles, pickup trucks, and minivans. These sources account for over half of the emissions from the sector” (See: federal government source, still on-line 2-9-1017). And the transportation sector, also including freight trucks, commercial aircraft, ships, boats, and trains, produces 26% of total USA emissions. (Ibid.) So passenger cars and small trucks and SUVs produce more than 13% of total emissions.

Cons: Doing The Math

And what will the gasoline tax be, anyway? Well, consider that “[a]bout 19.64 pounds of carbon dioxide (CO2) are produced from burning a gallon of gasoline that does not contain ethanol” (federal government source, still on-line 2-9-1017). This means that a $40 tax on one ton (2000 lbs) of CO2 is equivalent to a gasoline tax of $0.40. I rather fear that most drivers will not find an additional 40-cent gasoline tax sufficient reason to abandon their cars.

Of course, the tax is proposed to “increase steadily” but how much per year is not stated. If the carbon tax grows, let us say, by $20/ton annually, thus to $240/ton in 10 years, and to $440/ton in 20 years, the tax would become more significant. The gasoline tax after 10 years would be $2.40, after 20 years would be $4.40. Note, however, that Europeans have been paying taxes at this level for many years and still drive fossil-fueled cars.

If I drive 10,000 miles annually and get 33 MPG, then I burn 303 gallons of gasoline annually, at initial carbon-tax ($0.40) cost of $121. If I figure that my car will be unusable after 10 years, I can figure on an average annual gasoline tax rate of $1.20, an annual gasoline tax of $363, and a 10-year gasoline tax of $3,630.

Over 20 years, on the numbers shown above, this would be $666 annually on average or $13,320 over a 20-year car lifetime (if it lasted that long).

If a new hybrid car costs $25,000, I might find it cheaper to keep my car than to replace it, whether over a 10-year or a 20-year estimated/planned lifetime.

In other words the proposed tax may be (far) too small to be effective in driving GHG emissions to zero within 20 years.

Special Considerations For Electric Utilities

Similarly, if a coal-fired electric generation plant is so expensive to replace (say with “green” electric sources) that it is cheaper over its anticipated lifetime to continue to burn coal than to abandon the plant and replace it, then the electric power company will persist with coal (and pass on the costs, including the annually increasing carbon taxes, to the consumers, who are often captives) than to switch to “green”. And this too will defeat the purpose of the carbon tax. For this reason, federal legislation allowing each consumer to purchase electric power from an independent supplier—and thus from a “green” and un-carbon taxed source—will likely be necessary.

All of which is merely to repeat that “the devil is in the details”. It seems likely that a climate-saving scheme based solely on the “market driven” mechanism of a carbon tax will require not merely an annually increasing tax but perhaps an escalating tax. And that implies a Congressional will not today in evidence.

But what are the alternatives?

Education And How To Get It

One thing that would help would be a lot—a real lot!—of education about climate change, its causes and its present and future effects, on the part of government and media. The New York Times of Feb. 8, 2017, is an example of a shot at this sort of education. I don’t recall seeing such a lot of “climate talk” in a single issue of NYT in years. Let us hope that NYT and all other American media begin to take climate as seriously as it deserves—as seriously as this proposal by Republican statesmen seems to suggest.

If media will not educate the American public about climate without political posturing (such as the roll-out of this proposal), let the political posturing continue, because to get to climate action we desperately need much more education on the part of all American media.

Final Thoughts

No mechanism for specifying the USA’s responsible action to remedy climate change can be “set in stone”, not a carbon tax, not any other.

The reason is that as time goes by (and much time has gone by since the broad theories of restricting GHG emission were announced), the science changes—scientists learn more; and the situation changes—the world emits ever more GHGs, bringing us that much closer to catastrophe and thereby making the required action at that time ever more demanding.

So if the USA creates a carbon tax, the tax rate and its application will have to be adjusted as we see experientially whether or not businesses and others adjust their cumulative behavior in a satisfactory manner.

And if the EPA makes rules about electric generation and transportation and so on, these rules will have to be adjusted for the same reasons: to see to it that the USA’s cumulative behavior in the context of the ever-changing global situation will prove satisfactory.

Most proposals seem to me to have an obvious flaw—they seem to desire to go slow, to take things easy, to make changes as slowly as possible. But nature is not taking things slow, and the industrialized world is not slowing its GHG emissions (yet) as if it wished to avoid catastrophe.

If it accomplishes nothing else, this “carbon tax” proposal has at least got a fairly large notice in the NYT. Anything that gets the usually silent American media to take favorable notice of a project to combat global warming/climate change is all to the good!

In any case, the USA is part of the global system, not apart from it, and must adjust its behavior to the global situation in which it finds itself.

And the politicians and media would do us all a favor to say so.

Pro-GMO Scientists Blinded by Technology and Wedded to Ideology

Colin Todhunter

The Oxford Martin School is based at Oxford University in the UK and has set up the ‘Oxford Martin Commission for Future Generations’ (OMC). Bringing together international leaders from government, business and civil society, the OMC aims to address the growing short-term preoccupations of modern politics and business and identify ways of overcoming today’s gridlock in key international negotiations.

The OMC’s website says that this diverse group of highly respected global leaders has called for a radical shake-up in politics and business to deliver progress on climate change, reduce economic inequality, improve corporate practices and address the chronic burden of disease.

Any institution committed to radically shaking up politics and business should be both willing and able to call to account powerful private interests and not be compromised by ideology or conflicts of interest. However, campaigner Dr Rosemary Mason wrote to the OMC last year to state that such things do appear to be undermining its stated aims. She expressed concern that OMC commissioners have allegiances with various global corporations that could undermine the neutrality and credibility of the commission. She went on to name certain individuals and noted their links to corporate power.

For example, there is Sir John Beddington, Professor of Natural Resources Management for the OMC, and his position on the debate about genetically modified (GM) food and crops. Beddington was made Chief Scientific Adviser to the British Government in 2007. In 2012, he declared his faith in GM technology. Mason quotes him as saying, “And among those scientific wonders, the use of genetically modified crops has a particularly rich potential… Just look at the problems that the world faces: water shortages and salination of existing water supplies, for example. GM crops should be able to deal with that.”

A recent report says that during his visit to Australia, Beddington told ABC Rural news that politicians around the globe are ignoring the science relating to GM for the sake of short-term political opportunism.

He is quoted as saying, “If a politician completely ignores scientific advice, then they’re in danger of making policy decisions which will prove to be unutterably wrong.”

Beddington went on to argue for more rapid and sensible responses from policies that engage science and stated, “There is a movement in Europe which is just against any genetically-modified plant used for food [and] that is so naïve. There’s no doubt in the developing world, plants can be modified to be resistant to drought or insect pests and that is going to be very, very important moving into the future.”

He also claimed that the aim of gene editing is to produce plants that are resistant to droughts, pests and diseases, while boosting yields, which would be needed to feed a growing world population.

Beddington told ABC Rural that there was approximately two billion people experiencing malnutrition and these people either lack sufficient levels of nutrients needed for proper development or are eating too much poor-quality food. With 25 per cent of children dying in the first few years of life, he said that children were being robbed of their social and economic potential. In an era of so-called ‘anti-science’, he argued it was more important than ever that scientist ensured their relevancy within society.

Beddington concluded by saying:

“What is sensible is to insist that this is the scientific evidence, you may not like it, but that is the evidence.”

Taken at face value, much of what Beddington says might seem quite reasonable: a growing global population requires food, GM based on scientific evidence can provide it and naïve resistance, which is not based on science, is holding back the technology’s potential.

It’s a line of thought that we have heard many times before from proponents of GM. The purpose here is not to go over old ground and repeat what I or others have written in recent articles that take issue with some of Beddington’s views, especially regarding the science of GM and his wholly erroneous claims about critics holding anti-scientific views.

The wider context: scientists and development   

However, the issue of ‘naivety’ is worth exploring. If there is any naivety around, it is not to be found within the ranks of those who question or oppose GM. In fact, the type of views Beddington expresses are driven by naivety or even worse: a failure to appreciate the reality of hunger, malnutrition, poverty and the nature of a global system of food and agriculture that is tied to corporate power.

Scientists are fond of telling everyone that GM technology can fix the world food problem. This assumes there is a ‘problem’ as they define it (food shortage); but any problem that does exist has less to do with the world’s inability to feed itself and more to do with political issues related to food distribution, access to land, inequality and so on as well as inappropriate models of economic and social development that have adversely impacted indigenous agriculture and regional food security.

As a technology, GM is but a tool. There may indeed be a need for it in certain situations, given proper testing and analyses of specific contexts and circumstances. However, you can roll out a technology and it can have disastrous consequences because of the context within which it operates. And you can roll out that technology knowing it will have many adverse effects but it will be highly beneficial to those who financially profit from that roll-out.

We just have to look at the outcome of GM technology since GM crops were commercialised over 20 years ago. Has it reduced pesticides use? No. Has it increased yields? No. Have companies who control the technology and its associated proprietary inputs (e.g. Roundup/glyphosate) made a financial killing? Certainly (see this and this).

Some 20 years of GM indicate that statements about the efficacy and benefits of GM are based more on wishful thinking than actual reality. GM has been dominated by giant transnational corporations who have used the technology to grow a select handful of crops, which by and large have been used to feed people in richer countries, not poorer regions where hunger and malnutrition persists. Moreover, GM has been integral to a system of food and agriculture in the US that fuels obesity, bad health and monolithic diets that are nutritionally poor. Also, in the US, farmers are squeezed and kept afloat by taxpayer subsidies so that Monsanto, Cargill and the likes of Wal-Mart can rake in massive profits.

People in the US now have a diet dominated by GM corn and soy. And where GM has been grown outside of the US, food security has been undermined, crops are grown for animal feed to be exported to rich countries and the planting of GM has led disease and illness places such as Argentina.

GM is being used by vested interests who seek to irreversibly alter the genetic core of the world’s food and rake in massive profits. This is why GM is not just about science – indeed, science might be a minor issue given the overall context – especially for poorer countries.

If we are to take India as an example, the Green Revolution was promoted by US corporations and interests that uprooted what was a highly productive system of agriculture. That system offered a diverse diet, and system was responsive to local climate and soil conditions. What we now have is drought, degraded soil, less diverse diets, nutritionally deficient crops and farmers placed at the mercy of rigged global trade rules as well as a whole range of other problems.

To say that GM will rectify problems related to drought, yields or climate change fails to acknowledge the damage already done and that GM – the way it is to be rolled out by foreign corporations – is only going to exacerbate things: a damaging corporate-controlled chemical treadmill followed by similar; this time a corporate-controlled biotech treadmill. The Green Revolution was never designed to ‘feed the world’. The same is true for GM. Such rhetoric is designed to mask the motives based on self-interest, geopolitics and profit.

In India, the World Bank and US companies are driving the development agenda. The push to drive at least 400 million from the land and into cities is already underway at the behest of the World Bank: a World Bank that India is seriously indebted to and a World Bank that is, under the guise of ‘enabling the business of agriculture’, committed to opening up economies to corporate seeds and agrochemicals and securing global supply chains.

The drive is to entrench industrial farming and displace the current productive system with one suited to the aims of foreign agribusiness and retail interests. This entails commercialising the countryside and replacing small-scale farming –  the backbone of food production in India (and globally), which is more productive than industrialised agriculture, more sustainable and capable of producing more diverse, nutrient-dense diets.

The ongoing issue to commercialise GM mustard in India is part of a push that seeks to restructure India to benefit foreign capital. By touting for GM, many scientists are (inadvertently) lobbying for a particular model of development. That development agenda regards the peasantry, small farms and India’s rural-based traditions, cultures and village-level systems of food production/processing as backward, as an impediment to ‘progress’. It regards alternative approaches to agriculture that have been advocated by numerous high-level reports as a hindrance: approaches that would in effect build on and develop the current rural infrastructure and not eradicate it.

Do people who promote GM without addressing the issues raised above really think that technology is a silver bullet? Do they think it is the key way to feeding the world – or to feeding an India that is already self-sufficient in key foodstuffs and could be more so if it were not for the effects of politically motivated WTO rules and World Bank directives?

By not addressing any of this, can scientists who tout for GM to the detriment of all else be regarded as ‘objective’? To dismiss all of the issues raised in this article and to ignore the model of corporate power that GM is wedded to demonstrates either gross naivety or an (unwitting) ideological allegiance to the political dogma of neoliberalism.

Rosemary Mason raised a valid point: allegiances to corporate power can and do undermine any chance of neutrality and credibility. Science certainly has a role to play in helping to deal with food and agriculture issues. But the problem is that some scientists feel a need to promote a technological innovation without looking at (or even wanting to look at) the wider context. By doing so, they fail to appreciate that the answer to poverty, hunger and malnutrition first and foremost lies in addressing the context and in not blindly promoting technology.

Gambia: a Very African Coup

Thomas C. Mountain 

Recently the Gambian President, as corrupt and brutal as any in Africa for over 20 years now, was overthrown by a foreign invasion and occupation following a tightly contested election.

To review, there was an election in Gambia which was very close, a difference of 20,000 or so and the “opposition”, a western favorite, declared victory. President Yahyah admitted it seemed he had lost but then announced that after further investigation there were serious irregularities that could have changed the outcome. He suspended the election process until he could figure out what took place, something his handpicked Constitutional Court upheld.

ECOWAS, a mini version of the African Union, flexed its military muscle and the Senegalese Army backed by the Nigerian Air Force, invaded Gambia and forced President Yahyah to flee the country, evidently with all the cash in the National Bank.

To this day the Senegalese Army continues to occupy Gambia, with Senegalese Commandos providing personal protection for the newly installed President, having been sworn in while residing in Senegal?

If the old President wasn’t such a S.O.B. (until recently “our SOB”) one could feel outraged about what can only be described as “a very African Coup”, for where else in the world could one country invade and occupy a neighbor, install the President they support and everyone cheers? Or at least the western media does, though I have yet to hear anyone remotely uncomfortable about such a major violation of international law and non intervention principals anywhere in the international arena.

Of course Ethiopia, ruled by a particularly brutal, genocidal even, western supported regime for longer than President Yahyah regularly steal elections, declare a state of emergency, and yet the African Union goes right on running their dog and pony show from the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa.

In neocolonial Africa it is not the “rule of law” rather the “law of the jungle” where only the strong survive, and what chance does a tiny country like Gambia have against military powers like Senegal and Nigeria. As a result we have Gambia and a very African Coup.

Australian government in disarray over vote-swapping deal with One Nation

Mike Head

A preferential vote deal struck by the Liberal Party with Pauline Hanson’s right-wing One Nation party for the March 11 Western Australian state election has sharpened the political crisis within the Liberal-National Coalition across the country.

Facing a landslide defeat, the state Liberal government has negotiated a pact with Hanson’s party, whose media polling in the state has soared to 13 percent since last July’s federal election. Premier Colin Barnett’s Liberal administration, in the former mining boom state, has slumped to just 30 percent in the polls, as part of a wider collapse in support for the Liberals nationally.

The Liberal Party will direct its second voting preferences in the upper house to One Nation, not to the rural-based National Party, which is part of the Coalition government of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull at the federal level. In exchange, One Nation has agreed to direct its preferences to the Liberals in 35 lower house seats. The Nationals have retaliated in response, directing preferences in some upper house electorates to the Greens, thus endangering Liberal Party seats.

This is not merely a Western Australian development. Senior ministers in Turnbull’s government were intimately involved in the horse-trading with One Nation, notably Finance Minister Mathias Cormann and Employment Minister Michaelia Cash—who took Hanson to dinner in Perth, the state capital, last December.

Turnbull and other cabinet members have strenuously defended the deal. While claiming to disagree with some of Hanson’s anti-immigrant and protectionist policies, Turnbull emphasised that his government was now collaborating with her. “I have to say we work very closely with the One Nation senators,” Turnbull stated.

A previous Coalition government, under former Prime Minister John Howard, vowed in 2001 that it would never swap preferences with One Nation and then railroaded her to jail after her party’s appeal to disaffected voters threatened to destabilise the two-party system.

Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce, the National Party leader, has bitterly denounced the deal, warning it would lead to a loss of government in Western Australia and, eventually, nationally. Tensions between the Liberals and the Nationals are deepening throughout Australia, due primarily to the crisis in rural and regional areas, where most of the National Party’s support base lives. This has been caused by a severe loss of jobs and basic services, from mining-related closures and government austerity cuts.

This political crisis not only raises the prospect of a split in the federal Coalition government. It underscores the level of political disaffection wracking the entire parliamentary establishment. Buoyed by the election of Donald Trump as US president, Hanson is seeking to emulate the American billionaire’s success in diverting the anger and alienation felt by millions of working class, small business and impoverished people into reactionary nationalist, xenophobic and protectionist directions.

After decades of declining living conditions and ever-more glaring social inequality imposed by Coalition and Greens-backed Labor governments alike, Hanson is cynically exploiting the seething hostility that has resulted. In this, she is walking in the footsteps of mining magnate Clive Palmer’s Palmer United Party, which made a similar pitch in the lead up to the 2013 federal election, but has since imploded.

In Hanson’s home state of Queensland, another ex-mining boom state, media polling currently puts One Nation’s support at 23 percent. This may be enough for her party to join a coalition government with either Labor or the Liberal National Party after the next state election, which could be held this year. The same poll reported that more than a third of respondents, while not necessarily agreeing with Hanson’s policies, thought it would be good for One Nation to hold the balance of power in the next state parliament.

Behind the support for Hanson lie dangerous illusions that she represents the interests of ordinary working people, or that One Nation will at least push governments into backing away from their pro-corporate offensive on jobs, working conditions and essential public services such as health, education and welfare.

In reality, as indicated by the comments of Turnbull and Hanson herself, she is actively seeking a prominent position within the parliamentary system, having already assisted the Coalition government to push through socially destructive spending cuts. Not only does Hanson scapegoat Muslims, asylum seekers and foreign workers, in an effort to divide and weaken the working class. She denounces welfare recipients, thus blaming unemployed youth and workers, as well, for the relentless destruction of jobs and conditions by Australian corporations.

The Labor Party, while hypocritically criticising the Liberals for courting One Nation, is also seeking an accommodation with Hanson. Her economic nationalist and protectionist views dovetail with the efforts of the Labor and trade union movement to divert workers’ discontent down divisive anti-Chinese and anti-foreign worker channels.

Report reveals widespread torture of minors in Mexican prisons

Alex Gonzalez

In Mexico, 57 percent of adolescents in prison are tortured, according to a report released by the National Center for Human Rights (CNDH) late last month.

The CNDH, an independent agency, details the background and experiences of youth aged 14-18 who have been accused of committing a violent crime. It is based on interviews and surveys with 730 adolescents in 17 representative states throughout the country.

According to the Mexican Commission of National Security, there are currently over 13,000 adolescents behind bars, of which over one-fifth have been convicted of a violent crime, such as murder, robbery using violence and kidnapping.

The nationwide report documents the systematic abuse of imprisoned adolescents by local and federal police, as well as by sections of the Mexican Army and the Marines. Over half (57 percent) of all interviewed teens reported being tortured—often over the course of several days—after their arrest. Interviewees frequently reported being subjected to electric shocks, stabbed, tasered, drowned, asphyxiated and struck by the police.

One youth told interviewers: “I was undressed and tied up. They put water on me, the put bags on my face, they left me undressed and wet for five hours. They hit me in the ribs and tasered me. When they tortured me, I had to say what they wanted to hear or they would hit me more.”

While Mexican law prohibits using torture to extract confessions, previous investigations by the CNDH have found multiple cases of falsification of medical records that would confirm detainees had been subjected to torture.

Violations by the justice system documented by the study spread beyond torture and abuse at detention centers, including systematic violations of due process. The majority of adolescents reported not being informed of the charges against them (59 percent), not being informed of their rights (69 percent) and not being told they had the right to an attorney (54 percent).

Overall, 16 percent of those interviewed reported being innocent, although this number was over twice as high in some regions (37 and 44 percent in Veracruz and Oaxaca, respectively). The report notes “a particularly high percentage [of alleged innocence] was found among those who, under conditions of poverty, marginalization and powerlessness, also suffered from discriminatory treatment by the justice system due to their ethnic or indigenous status.”

The report tells the story of Wilfrido, a 21-year-old indigenous youth who was charged with murder and was convicted because a seven-year-old relative of the victim cried in court at the sight of him. Despite Wilfrido’s explanation that the young boy had cried because he was frightened and did not speak Spanish, the existence of no other evidence against him and an alibi placing him elsewhere during the crime, the judge found this to be sufficient proof and he was sentenced to nine years in prison.

The study sheds light to the complicit role of the armed forces in the drug trade: about 20 percent of those interviewed said current or former members of the police or the army also took part in the criminal operations for which they were convicted.

Under conditions of violence and endemic poverty, vulnerable youth become entangled in the drug trade in an effort to provide for themselves and their families. The majority (64 percent) of those interviewed reported getting involved in crime to help their families financially. Prior to their arrest, adolescents reported working both in legal (e.g. farmer, daily worker, fisherman, dishwasher) and illegal (e.g. robbery, selling drugs, kidnapping) activities. However, those who worked in the illegal sector could earn up to 10 times as much.

Adolescents who are convicted of violent crimes are among the most vulnerable sections of the Mexican working class. Interviewed teens were three times as likely to live in conditions of extreme poverty than the general population, and 40 percent noted they had been physically abused frequently prior to being incarcerated. Highlighting the predatory role of the drug trade, the majority of those interviewed joined organized crime when they were between 12 and 14 years old.

The CNDH report is a damning indictment of the existing conditions in Mexico more than a decade after the US-backed “war on drugs,” which has claimed over 80,000 lives since 2006. With the military and economic aid of the Bush and Obama administrations, this bloody war has not only led to countless deaths, but has militarized society to the degree that, as the report states, torture “constitutes ‘normal’ behavior that is to be expected from police.”

About half of all murders between 2008 and 2015 can be attributed to the “war on drugs,” according to the Mexican Statistics and Geography Institute (INEGI). Of these murders, 84 percent have never gone to trial.

Despite spending billions of dollars on security forces and military equipment, the drug war has been an abject failure. The US continues to have the highest levels of illegal drug use in the world, and the supply of illegal drugs to the US remains virtually unchanged.

Trump has sought to scapegoat immigrants for both the failure of this policy and for the conditions of poverty in the US that lead many to become addicted to drugs. “We have to keep the drugs out of our country,” he has stated. “We are getting the drugs, they’re getting the cash. We need strong borders. We cannot give amnesty.”

Workers and youth in Mexico and the US must reject this nationalist poison and fight to end capitalism, the social system that breeds the desperation and hopelessness that creates both the demand for and supply of drugs in order to serve the profit interests of corporations, banks and cartels.

Brazilian army sent into streets of Rio amid mounting protests

Bill Van Auken 

Some 9,000 Brazilian troops began to deploy in the streets of Rio de Janeiro Tuesday in the face of mounting protests against austerity and privatizations and the threat of a work stoppage by the Military Police (PM), the force that patrols the country’s second-largest city and the state which bears the same name.

On the same day that Brazil’s right-wing President Michel Temer announced the deployment, calling the threat of a walkout by the PM an “insurrection against the constitution,” workers of Rio’s State Water and Sewage Company (CEDAE) staged another mass protest outside the state’s Legislative Assembly in opposition to a planned privatization of this essential social service.

Last Thursday, riot police violently repressed a similar demonstration, leaving a number of people severely injured.

The military deployment in Rio follows a similar dispatch of federal troops to its neighboring state to the north, Espiritu Santo, where blockades organized by wives, mothers and other relatives outside PM barracks, demanding higher pay and improved conditions, led to the PM staying off the streets and triggered a sharp rise in homicides and other crimes.

Schools, public transportation and businesses shut down in the course of the protests, particularly in Vitoria, the state’s capital. While some 3,000 troops, including armored units and paratroopers, were sent in to restore “law and order,” the return of the PM to the streets at the beginning of this week appeared to be the result of an agreement reached between their representatives and the state government.

The PM, an inheritance from the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil for two decades following a CIA-backed coup in 1964, is under military discipline and legally barred from striking. The force is responsible for killing thousands of Brazilians each year. In 2015, Brazil’s police killed at least 3,300 people, roughly three times the number killed by cops in the US.

Off-duty police have participated in protests against the austerity measures, in some cases calling for a return to military dictatorship and forcing workers to take down their banners. There have also been reports of off-duty cops pulling guns on riot police sent to quell their protests.

The deployment of federal troops to Rio was requested by Rio’s state governor, Luiz Fernando Pezão, who is a member of the PMDB (Brazilian Democratic Movement Party), the same party as President Temer. Under the federal intervention, known as a “guarantee of law and order,” the troops are to be deployed until February 22, when an evaluation will be made by the government over whether they will be kept occupying Rio for a longer period. The following week is that of Rio’s Carnival, which brings visitors from around the world.

The use of the army to carry out policing functions has become increasingly frequent as Brazil continues to face its worst economic crisis in a century, and with the Temer government’s approval ratings falling to the abysmal level reached by former Workers Party President Dilma Rousseff before her impeachment on trumped-up charges of budgetary manipulations last August. Some 47,000 troops were deployed in Rio during the summer Olympic Games, and more recently the government sent troops in to quell bloody prison revolts.

In announcing the deployment to Rio, Brazil’s Defense Minister Raul Jungmann insisted that, as opposed to the events in Espiritu Santo, there was no loss of “control” in Rio de Janeiro nor any “inability of Rio’s organs of state security to maintain law and order.” He claimed that 95 percent of Rio’s Military Police was operating as normal. Instead, he said, the deployment was of a “preventive” character, designed to “free members of the PM on account of demonstrations.”

Jungmann’s estimate of the percentage of Military Police going out on patrol is no doubt overly optimistic, even though the stoppage has reached nowhere near the level seen in Espiritu Santo. Still, wives and relatives of police have sought to block the entrances to nearly 30 of Rio’s 50 PM barracks, including that of the Shock Battalion used to repress demonstrations. In some cases, the police have resorted to changing shifts outside the barracks and even opening up new entrances to circumvent the pickets.

Police, like civilian public-sector workforce, have still received neither their January salary nor the so-called 13th salary, a legally mandated year-end bonus that should have been paid out at the end of last year.

The state and federal governments are particularly concerned about mobilizing sufficient repressive force to hold a vote February 20 on the privatization of CEDAE, the state-owned water company. Previous attempts to enact legislation on the sale of the public service have been blocked by protests. A vote had been scheduled for Tuesday, but was postponed for fear that the protests outside the PM barracks could deprive the Rio Legislative Assembly of an adequate security force.

The sale of the state water company is a key piece in the austerity program being championed by Governor Pezão in the face of Rio’s desperate fiscal crisis, which has been deepened by the fall in the price of oil, a commodity that had previously fueled the local economy. The privatization is supposed to secure a loan of 3.5 billion reais (approximately US$1.1 billion) from the federal government designed to prevent the state’s complete default on debt payments.

Even as the Temer government was deploying army troops to quell opposition to capitalist austerity and privatization, it also moved in a manner unprecedented since the days of military rule to impose censorship on Brazil’s two most prominent daily newspapers—both of which had supported the impeachment of Rousseff that brought Temer to power.

Temer sent a government lawyer to court to obtain an injunction ordering Folha de S.P. to withdraw an article it had posted on its website reporting on an attempted blackmail of the president’s wife, Marcela. The piece described some of the messages sent by the blackmailer, a hacker who had cloned the Brazilian first lady’s iPhone. This included a threat that unless she paid him 300,000 reais, he would make public information that would drag the president’s reputation “through the mud.”

The Rio-based O Globo announced Monday that it had been subjected to a similar censorship order secured by the Palácio do Planalto, Brazil’s White House.

This state censorship is particularly onerous in that it is preventing the dissemination of information that was revealed in the public trial of the hacker, who was prosecuted, convicted and sent to prison.

Temer’s actions reflect the extreme crisis of the government he heads and fear of any further public reference to scandals surrounding his administration The Petrobras bribes-for-contracts corruption scandal that engulfed the entire political establishment could still bring down his own presidency as well. Temer is reportedly still under investigation over testimony by a top executive at the Odebrecht construction conglomerate that he solicited nearly US$3 million in illegal campaign donations during the 2014 election.

Given the crisis and instability gripping the government, the increasing resort to calling out the army to deal with social unrest carries with it the real threat of laying the foundations for a return to military rule in Latin America’s largest country.