Best Way to Aid Africa

Cesar Chelala

Drought in Somalia threatens the lives of almost half the population, according to Somalia’s Prime Minister Hassan Ali Khaire. Over a two-day span, at least 110 people died of hunger in just a single region in the country. This highlights the tremendous needs Somalia and other African countries have for immediate help.

In the last few decades, enormous financial resources have been sent to the region. What has been accomplished, however, is subject to controversy since what has been achieved appears to have been counterproductive to Africa’s actual needs.

In spite of the considerable progress achieved in the fight against HIV/AIDS, other health problems remain. Although the Ebola epidemic has been largely controlled, the potential for a new epidemic still exists. Countries are now better prepared to deal with a new outbreak, but probably not to the extent that a serious new epidemic would demand.

Tuberculosis is still rampant in South Africa, which has the highest tuberculosis death rate per capita worldwide, followed by Zimbabwe and Mozambique. Worse yet, the high number of cases of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis in several countries make the disease much more difficult to treat.

Five children under age five die every minute in the African region, two thirds of them from preventable causes. Diarrheal and respiratory infections, malaria, measles and malnutrition represent big threats to children’s health. Pneumonia and malaria are the leading causes of death among children under five years of age. The interaction of under nourishment and infection can lead to a vicious cycle of worsening illness and deteriorating nutritional status.

Health problems in Africa cannot be considered in isolation from the countries’ sociopolitical and environmental realities, and require continued foreign technical and financial assistance. Increasing efforts are needed to be made to expand access to primary health care, especially in rural areas, accompanied by health promotion, disease prevention and improved health education activities. The relentless exodus of physicians and nurses to industrialized countries only compounds health problems.

Despite some progress in the social sphere, some important difficulties remain. One of them is significant unemployment, particularly among the young. Around 70 percent of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa is under the age of 30, and 60 percent of the unemployed are also young people. New policies are indispensable to incorporate them into the labor force.

A first step is to provide youth with basic skills so that they can achieve their earning potential. UNESCO and the International Labor Organization (ILO) have recommended that governments, international donors and the private sector develop integrated policies to create jobs for young people and ease the transition from school to work.

Poverty in the continent is widespread and affects most of the population. In 2010, more than 400 million people were living in extreme poverty across Sub-Saharan Africa. Currently, a notable proportion of women lack any significant income. The expansion of micro credit together with rural development projects mainly aimed at women could significantly improve the situation.

Education is another area of concern. Africa has the lowest rate of children in primary schools of any region. In addition to significant gender disparities, with girls far behind boys in educational attainment, geographical disparities between rural areas and urban areas, and economic disparities between low income and high income households are also significant.

Many experts on Africa don’t believe in the efficacy of aid. “Money from rich countries has trapped many African nations in a cycle of corruption, slower economic growth and poverty. Cutting off the flow would be far more beneficial,” wrote Dambisa Moyo, a Zambian-born international economist and author with extensive knowledge of Africa.

Aid, however, can become effective in improving people’s standard of living and education. It is critical to help African countries improve governance before providing financial assistance. In addition, effective aid must bypass corrupt governments and find ways of helping people in more direct ways, such as through community and religious organizations.

Although considerable amount of money has been sent to Africa through bilateral and international aid, there are still no effective mechanisms in place to monitor and make recipients accountable for spending. This is a vital, since corruption is like a weed that saps the countries’ social fabric and energy. In addition, there are not enough ways to evaluate the quality of projects funded mainly by international lending institutions and UN agencies.

Aid to Africa should be aimed at strengthening civil society and community-based organizations. African countries need better trade conditions for their products and technical assistance that is carefully and responsibly planned. Provided with a generous nature and energetic and hard working people, Africa is still a continent of hope.

Colonialist Assault on Puerto Rico and the Prospects for Independence

W.T. Whitney Jr.

“Porto Rico (sic) is not forgotten and we mean to have it.” Senator Henry Cabot Lodge was reassuring his friend Theodore Roosevelt. According to the New York Times, Puerto Ricans are an “uneducated, simple-minded and harmless people who are only interested in wine, women, music and dancing.”  The subject at hand for the Times, one year after the U. S. military invasion of 1898, was “Americanizing Puerto Rico.”

Upper –class haughtiness set the stage for victimization of the many by the wealthy few. Now the U. S. Congress is forcing Puerto Rico’s government to make payments on $72 billion in debt owed to U. S. banks and hedge funds.  People’s basic needs are being ignored.

The Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA), passed in June 2016, created a “financial control board” that has become “the de facto government, banker, judge, jury, and executioner of Puerto Rico,” according to critic Nelson Denis.

That board on March 8, 2017 called upon Puerto Rico’s government to take emergency steps to avoid running out of money. The next day it rejected Governor Ricardo Rossello’s plan offering annual interest payments of $1.2 billion, a far cry from the  almost $6 billion actually required. But on March 11 the board accepted a revised plan; interest payments would be $800 million a year. Government pensions would be reduced and employees furloughed.  Christmas bonuses are out.

The University of Puerto Rico faces a $300 million budgetary cut and 300 public schools will be closing. The board wants to shrink healthcare spending despite reductions from 12.3 percent of the GDP in 2010 to 10.5 percent in 2014. A 50- per cent minimum-wage cut for younger workers is possible.  The retirement age, gasoline and sales taxes, and electricity rates have inched up over five years. Pensions and benefits have diminished.

Most Puerto Ricans have been used to troubles since the U. S. take-over in 1898. Now, the overall poverty rate is 45 percent; 57 percent of children live in poverty. Unemployment officially is 12.6 percent of the workforce, but only 40 percent of adults belong to the workforce. Food prices are high partly because Puerto Rico produces only 10 percent if its food.

Emigration to the United States has been a hedge against misery; as of 2008, 400,000 more Puerto Ricans were living there than in Puerto Rico. Government authorities in both countries worried about a “surplus population,” says clinical psychologist Jorge A. Montijo.  By 1965, 35 percent of Puerto Rican women of childbearing age had been surgically sterilized.

The new rulers quickly changed Puerto Rico to their liking. By 1901 both U. S. exports to and imports from the island had quadrupled. U. S. owners controlled 70,060 acres in tobacco – up from 5529 acres – and 141,248 acres in sugar cane – up from 21,505 acres; 85 percent of the island’s manufacturing was in U. S. hands. As of 1928, four sugar syndicates owned over half of all arable land.

Legal arrangements facilitated U. S. control of the island’s economy and political life. An “Organic Charter” in April 1900 handed control of Puerto Rico to the U. S. Congress.  Another such law in 1917 gave Puerto Ricans U. S. citizenship (without representation in Congress) – just in time for them to be drafted as soldiers in World War I. Congress’ “Law 600” of 1950 allowed for a Puerto Rican Constitution and declared Puerto Rico to be a “Free Associated State,” a label used to persuade the United Nations General Assembly to remove Puerto Rico from its list of colonized territories.

Congress reserved the right to approve that Constitution before it took effect; its provisions would always give way to U. S. laws. It specified that “payment of interest and amortization of the debt [is] the first priority.”

Other legal straitjackets: Congress’ Merchant Marine Act (Jones Act) of 1920 required that cargoes going from one U.S. port to another – Puerto Rico included – be carried in a U. S. owned and operated ship, with a U. S. crew. Shipping costs went up as did prices for imported goods. And, rejecting a defendant’s claim of protection from double jeopardy, the Supreme Court ruled June 9, 2016 that Puerto Ricans bow to only one sovereign, the federal government.

Today, left-over effects of Section 936 of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code are ravaging the daily lives of most Puerto Ricans, or soon will be.  Regulations imposed in 1976 exempted U.S. companies operating in Puerto Rico from paying taxes on income or capital gains. U. S. investors would pay no taxes on dividends paid by those companies. And taxes weren’t due on U. S. investments deposited in Puerto Rican banks.

Section 936 was “nothing but a welfare program for the Fortune 500,” said a tax attorney. U. S. companies in Puerto Rico generated $14.3 billion in income in 1995 alone. The island’s economy grew. Meanwhile successive governments were relying on “multi-million” dollar loans to make up for sharply reduced tax collections. Federal monies flowed to the island and public -sector hiring increased. Government leaders and citizens fell into dependency.

Then, beginning in the 1990s and ending in 2006, authorities in Washington phased out Section 936. U. S. companies closed operations in Puerto Rico or cut back production. Industrial jobs fell by one third.  Between 2006 and 2014 Puerto Rico’s GDP contracted by 13 percent, thus “provoking a new wave of migration,” with heavy middle class representation. Soon “Puerto Rico [was] essentially running on bonds held by U.S.-based banks and corporations” – and hedge funds. The PROMESA law came to their rescue.

Puerto Ricans are resisting. Students at various branches of the University of Puerto Rico marched and demonstrated in late February against threats to schools and University programs. Teachers joined them, pointing to poorly-paid professors now being hired on short-term contracts. The Communist Party’s Abayarderojo newspaper labeled school closings and reorganization of educational districts into independent entities, which is contemplated, as “war on public education.”

The struggle to shed Puerto Rico’s colonial status is at low ebb.  The Independence Party has gained little support from voters in recent elections and in referenda on relations with the United States. Most Puerto Ricans have voted either for one party inclined toward statehood or another tending toward autonomy. Nowhere to be found is high – profile, anti-colonial agitation centering on exploitation of the working class.

It was different once. From the 1930s into the early 1950s, the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party propelled the independence movement. Pedro Albizu Campos, the Party’s president told members that, “We will immediately free the worker from labor leaders disoriented by the Yankees … who have him carrying the North American flag, whose dark shadow reigns over this colonial government that has converted us into slaves of North American corporations and businesses.”

The first item of the Party’s economic program spoke of “organization of workers so they can demand from foreign interests or invaders participation in gains to which they have a right.” Albizu maintained that workers are “the true power and true source of wealth belonging to the homeland.”  Striking sugar cane workers in 1934 called upon Albizu Campos to lead their strike.

The Nationalist Party faded after terrible repression including massacres and imprisonment of leaders. Albizu Campos served two long terms in prison, where he was tortured.  The story was otherwise in Cuba; there, revolutionaries brought two struggles together, one for national sovereignty, the other for social justice.

Alejandro Torres Rivera, leader of the National Hostos Independence Movement and a lawyer, provides commentary as relevant to Puerto Ricans’ resistance today as it was to the Nationalists he was writing about:

“[T]o have the national demand for independence be taken up by a social class like the working class made for a more persuasive questioning of the colonialist and imperialist project of the United States in Puerto Rico.   Imperialism was also aware of the danger to its interests from the political demand for liberty, sovereignty, and independence being merged in a common program with the social and economic claims of the working classes of Puerto Rico.”

WikiLeaks Vault 7 Reveals CIA Cyberwar and the Real Battleground of Democracy

Nozomi Hayase

WikiLeaks dropped a bombshell on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Code-named “Vault 7”, the whistleblowing site began releasing the largest publication of confidential documents, that have come from the top secret security network at the Cyber Intelligence Center. Long before the Edward Snowden revelations, Julian Assange noted how “The Internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen.” He decried the militarization of the Internet with the penetration by the intelligence agencies like NSA and GCHQ, which created “a military occupation of civilian space”. Now, WikiLeaks’ latest disclosures shed further light on this cyber-warfare, exposing the role of the CIA.

At a recent press conference from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, Assange explained how the CIA developed its own cyber-weapons arsenal and lost it after storing it all in one place. What is alarming is that the CIA became aware of this loss and didn’t warn the public about it. As a result, this pervasive technology that was designed to hide all traces, can now be used by cyber-mafias, foreign agents, hackers and by anyone for malicious purposes.

Part one of this WikiLeaks publication dubbed “Year Zero”, revealed the CIA’s global hacking force from 2013 to 2016. The thousands of documents released contain visceral revelations of the CIA’s own version of an NSA. With an ability to hack any Android or iPhone, as well as Samsung TVs and even cars, they spy on citizens, bypassing encrypted messaging apps like Signal and Telegram. The Vault 7 leaks that exposed the CIA’s excessive power is of great importance from a point of view of security for individual privacy. But it has larger significance tied to the mission of WikiLeaks.

Opening Government into the Deep State

Describing itself on its site as “a multi-national media organization and associated library”, WikiLeaks aims to open governments in order to bring justice. In the speech at the SWSX conference in Texas, delivered via Skype in 2014, Assange described the particular environment that spawned the culture of disclosure this organization helped to create. He noted how “we were living in some fictitious representation of what we thought was the world” and that the “true history of the world” is “all obscured by some kind of fog”. This founder and editor in chief of innovative journalism explained how disclosures made though their publications break this fog. The magnitude of this Vault 7 cache, which some say may be bigger than the Snowden revelations, perhaps lies in its effect of clearing the fog to let people around the world see the ground upon which the narratives of true history are written.

Since coming online in 2007, WikiLeaks has published more than 10 million documents. Each groundbreaking disclosure got us closer to where the real power of the world resides. In 2010, WikiLeaks rose to prominence with the publication of the Collateral Murder video. With the release of documents concerning U.S. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they hit on the nerves of the Pentagon —the central nervous system of the Military Industrial Complex. With the release of the U.S. Diplomatic Cables, they angered the State Department and came head to head with this global superpower.

Last year, this unprecedented publisher with its perfect record of document authentication, began to blow the cover off American democracy a step further to clear the fog. WikiLeaks played an important role in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. The DNC leaks disrupted the prescribed script of corporate sponsored lesser of two evils charade politics. The publication of the Podesta emails that revealed internal workings of the Clinton campaign, gave the American people an opportunity to learn in real time about the function of the electoral arena as a mechanism of control.

With the demise of the Democratic Party, led by its own internal corruption, the cracks in this façade widened, unveiling the existence of a government within a government. People are beginning to glimpse those who seek to control behind the scenes – anonymous unelected actors who exercise enduring power in Washington by manipulating public perception. This unraveling that has been slowly unfolding, appeared to have reached a peak last month when Trump’s former National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn resigned. He was forced to do this on the grounds that leaked classified information revealed he was lying about his phone conversation discussing sanctions with the Russian Ambassador.

WikiLeaks now entered its 10^th year. The momentum continues, bringing us to a new pinnacle of disclosure. At the end of last year, in anticipation of this new release, WikiLeaks tweeted, “If you thought 2016 was a big WikiLeaks year, 2017 will blow you away.” During the dramatic takedown of General Flynn, the media created a frenzy around unconfirmed claims that Russia was meddling with the U.S. election and Putin’s alleged ties with Trump, creating another fog of obfuscation. It was in this climate that WikiLeaks published documents showing CIA espionage in the last French presidential election.

History Awakening

The idea of a shadow government has been the focus of political activists, while it has also been a subject of ridicule as conspiracy theories. Now, WikiLeaks’ pristine documents provide irrefutable evidence about this hidden sector of society. The term ‘deep state’ that is referenced in the mainstream media, first hit the major airwaves in 2014, in Bill Moyers’ interview with Mike Lofgren. This former congressional staff member discussed his essay titled “Anatomy of the Deep State” and explained it as the congruence of power emerging as a “hybrid of corporate America and national security state”.

We are now watching a deep state sword-fight against the elected Caesar of American plutocracy in this gladiator ring, surrounded by the cheers of liberal intelligentsia, who are maddened with McCarthy era hysteria. As the Republic is falling with its crumbling infrastructure and anemic debt economy, far away from the coliseum, crazed with the out-of-tune national anthem, the silent pulse of hope begins to whisper. WikiLeaks unlocked the vaults that had swallowed the stolen past. As the doors open into this hidden America, history awakens with dripping blood that runs deep inside the castle. As part of the release of this encrypted treasure-trove of documents, WikiLeaks posted on Twitter the following passphrase; “SplinterItIntoAThousandPiecesAndScatterItIntoTheWinds.” These were actually words spoken by President John F. Kennedy, a month before his assassination. His exact words were “I will splinter the CIA into a thousands pieces and scatter it into the wind” – which shows his attitude toward the CIA as an arm of the deep state and what many believe to be the real reason for his assassination.

The secret stream of history continues, taking control over every aspect of civil life and infecting the heart of democracy. The U.S. has long since lost its way. We have been living in a fictitious representation of the flag and the White House. It is not judicial boundaries drawn by the Constitution or even the enlightenment ideals that once inspired the founders of this country that now guide the course of our lives. Tyranny of the old world casts its shadow, binding Congress, the Supreme Court and the President into a rule of oligarchy. CIA documents revealed that the U.S. Consulate in Frankfurt was used as a covert hacking base, while CIA officers work under the cover of the State Department to penetrate with these intelligence operations. The Wall Street Journal now reports that President Trump has given the CIA expanded authority to carry out drone attacks, which was power that prior to that had only been given to the Pentagon.

Decisions that radically alter the direction of our society are not made in a fair democratic election, a public hearing or the senate floor. They are made in the FISA Court and secret grand juries, bypassing judicial warrants and democratic accountability. This hidden network of power that exists above the law entangles legislators, judges and the press into a web of deception through dirty money and corrupt influence. It controls perception of the past, present and future.

The Internet Generation

As the deep state comes to the surface, we are able to see the real battle on the horizon. What is revealed here is a clash of values and two radically different visions of a future civilization. In his response to the Vault 7 publication, Michael Hayden, the former CIA director was quick to lay blame on the millennials. He said, “This group of millennials and related groups simply have different understandings of the words loyalty, secrecy and transparency than certainly my generation did”. To him, these young people are the problem, as if their different cultural approach and instincts must be tempered and indoctrinated into this hierarchical system, so they know who their masters are.

Who are these people that are treated as a plague on society? This is the Internet generation, immersed with the culture of the free-net, freedom of speech and association. They believe in privacy for individuals, while demanding transparency for those in power. Peter Ludlow, a philosopher who writes under the pseudonym Urizenus Sklar, shared his observation of a cultural shift that happened in 2011. He noted that WikiLeaks had become a catalyst for an underground subculture of hackers that burst into the mainstream as a vital political force. Assange recognized this development in recent years as a “politicization of the youth connected to Internet” and acknowledged it as “the most significant thing that happened in the world since the 1960s”.

This new generation ran into the deep state and those who confront it are met with intense hostility. Despite his promise of becoming the most transparent government, Obama engaged in unprecedented persecution of whistleblowers. Now this dark legacy seems to be continuing with the present administration. Vice president Mike Pence vowed to “use the full force of the law” to hunt down those who released the Intelligence Agency’s secret material.

As these conflicts heat up, resistance continues in the Internet that has now become a battleground. Despite crackdowns on truthtellers, these whistleblowers won’t go away. From Manning to Snowden, people inside institutions who have come to see subversion of government toward insidious control and want change, have shown extraordinary courage. According to a statement given to WikiLeaks, the source behind the CIA documents is following the steps of these predecessors. They want this information to be publicly debated and for people to understand the fact that the CIA created its own NSA without any oversight. The CIA claims its mission is to “aggressively collect foreign intelligence overseas to protect America from terrorists, hostile nation states and other adversaries”. With these documents that have now been brought back to the historical archive, the public can examine whether this agency has itself lost control and whose interests they truly serve.

The Future of Civilization

As the world’s first stateless 4^th estate, WikiLeaks has opened up new territory where people can touch the ground of uncensored reality and claim creative power to participate in the history that is happening. In a press conference on Periscope, Assange made reference to a statement by the President of Microsoft, who called for the creation of a digital Geneva Convention to provide protection against nation-states and cyber-attacks. He then affirmed WikiLeaks’s role as a neutral digital Switzerland for people all over the world.

WikiLeaks is taking the first step toward this vision. After they carefully redacted the actual codes of CIA hacking tools, anonymised names and email addresses that were targeted, they announced that they will work with tech companies by giving them some exclusive access to the material. Assange explained that this could help them understand vulnerabilities and produce security fixes, to create a possible antidote to the CIA’s breach of security and offer countermeasures. WikiLeaks tweeted notifying the public that they now have contacted Apple, Microsoft, Google, Mozilla and MicroTik to help protect users against CIA malware.

The Internet unleashed the beast that grows its force in the dark. Unaccounted power is dragging global society down into an Orwellian dystopia. Yet, from this same Internet, a new force is arising. Courage of the common people is breaking through the firewall of secrecy, creating a fortress that becomes ever more resilient, as the network of people around the world fighting for freedom expands. When democracy dies in darkness, it can be reborn in the light of transparency. The deep state stretches across borders, sucking people into an abyss of totalitarian control. At the same time, the epic publication of Vault 7 that has just begun, reminds us that the greatness in each of us can awaken to take back the power of emancipation and participate in this battle for democracy, the outcome of which could not only determine the future of the Internet, but of our civilization.

Manufactured Opioid Crisis: a Ploy to Salvage the War on Drugs

Sal Rodriguez

In case you haven’t heard, there’s an opioid crisis in America.

With majorities of Americans now clearly supportive of marijuana legalization, opioids, a class of drugs used for thousands of years to treat pain and other ailments, have become the latest target of drug warriors and do-gooders alike.

“Our nation is in the throes of a heroin and opioid epidemic,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Wednesday. “Overdose deaths more than tripled between 2010 and 2014.  According to the CDC, about 140 Americans on average now die from a drug overdose each day. That means every three weeks, we are losing as many American lives to drug overdoses as we lost in the 9/11 attacks.”

Indeed, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 33,000 Americans lost their lives in 2015 due to opioid-related overdoses, including 12,989 deaths associated specifically with heroin.

Candidate Donald Trump suggested, of course, a border wall would help solve the problem, while President Trump has complained America is a “drug-infested” country where “drugs are becoming cheaper than candy bars.”

On the other side of the aisle, Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia has gone so far as to call for a new war on drugs to combat apparent problem of opioid use, abuse and overdoses.

With so many Americans dying, it’s important to clarify a few things about opioids, the folly of knee-jerk government reaction and the need for harm reduction.

The exaggerated danger of opioids

Despite their reputation, opioids are neither especially addictive nor dangerous on their own.

Research has consistently shown that few individuals who are prescribed opioids ever actually develop a problem with them.  A 2016 study by Castlight Health, Inc. suggested only about 4.5 percent of individuals who receive opioid prescriptions are abusers. A 2010 Cochrane review of 26 studies found reports of opioid addiction in only 0.27 percent of patients.

Meanwhile, guidelines issued by the CDC in 2016 for prescribing opioids for chonic pain cited another study which followed chronic pain patients who received opioid prescriptions for 13 years. The study found that “one in 550 patients died from opioid-related overdose” over the 13 years, which upon reflection is a remarkably low rate considering the demographic involved.

As for the dangerousness of opioids, one variable often left out in discussions of opioid overdose is the fact that opioid overdoses tend to involve multiple drugs.

A 2014 report from the CDC based on nationwide emergency room data noted that alcohol was involved in 22.1 percent of deaths related to opioid pain relievers, but conceded the figure could be higher, given wide varieties in how states and localities collect and report toxicology data.

Other, more focused studies have found incredibly high rates of drug mixing at play in opioid overdoses. A 2015 paper looking into opioid overdoses in San Francisco from 2010-2012 found that 74.9 percent of opioid overdose deaths involved other drugs, including cocaine (35.3 percent), benzodiazepines (27.5 percent) and alcohol (19.6 percent). Likewise, data from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene noted that “nearly all (97 percent) overdose deaths involved more than one substance.”

With respect to heroin specifically, as a 2003 article published in the Journal of Urban Health explained, “The overwhelming majority of overdoses, both fatal and nonfatal, involved the concomitant consumption of heroin with other drugs. The extensiveness of polydrug use among ‘heroin’ over-doses suggests that ‘polydrug toxicity’ is a better description of the toxicology of overdose.”

Rarely do mainstream media reports of the opioid crisis mention the prevalence of polydrug toxicity – except for the occasional surge in excitement over fentanyl, a highly potent opioid which unscrupulous drug dealers sometimes put into heroin to strengthen its effects. (Naturally, the mixture of fentanyl with heroin is more an unintended consequence of prohibitionist drug policies and a resistance to harm reduction approaches than anything else.)

Of course, it is much more politically lucrative to exaggerate the risk and danger of opioids than to acknowledge the relatively low risk of addiction and the likelihood that harm reduction efforts (like warnings against mixing opioids with other drugs) might save lives.

Government policies turned people to heroin

As the prescription and use of opioids surged in the first decade of the 2000s, so too did the number of people seeking addiction treatment and experiencing overdoses. Rather than take a measured approach, government officials instead pursued policies aimed at restricting access to prescription painkillers, criminalizing and arresting doctors and patients in the process.

The continued rise in overdose deaths only indicates these approaches haven’t worked to curtail abuse or death from opioid use and misuse.

Instead, individuals who previously used pharmaceutical opioids have increasingly been pushed towards heroin use, with heroin use in the United States the highest its been in 20 years.  According to the Drug Policy Alliance, “Ninety-four percent of opioid-addicted individuals who switched from prescription opioids to heroin reported doing so because prescription opioids ‘were far more expensive and harder to obtain.’”

Of course, for people who have switched from pharmaceuticals to heroin due to lack of access to legal pain medication, or those who abuse either pharmaceuticals or heroin for whatever reason, government policy has only made them less safe.

And there’s plenty of reason to believe government policies have only made opioid and heroin use less safe than before. The increased number of deaths reported in 2016 happened despite decreases in the number of opioid prescriptions and the number of heroin users.

Harm reduction

Despite the well-documented role of polydrug use opioid overdoses, it’s unlikely we’ll see proclamations from Jeff Sessions or Trump or any other prominent politicians warning people to engage in harm reduction when using opioids by foregoing alcohol, benzodiazepines or any other contraindicated drug that could heighten the risk of harm or death from opioid use.

Other ideas include getting allowing individuals with chronic pain to access the medication they need without criminalizing their ailment or threatening their doctors with prosecution. Or allowing the operation of safe injection sites and expanding access to medication-assisted treatment and access to syringe exchange programs and naloxone, which can effectively reverse opioid overdoses.

Of course, a border wall won’t solve the problems associated with opioid use and abuse, nor will an expansion or perpetuation of prohibitionist policies. Yet, Trump’s budget proposal includes $175 million in increased expenditures for the Department of Justice “to target the worst of the worst criminal organizations and drug traffickers in order to address violent crime, gun-related deaths, and the opioid epidemic.” It also, of course, includes calls for billions of dollars for his beloved wall. Furthermore, Jeff Sessions’ public proclamations have overemphasized the role of enforcement and drug abuse prevention ideas from the ’80s and ’90s.

Alas, the nation’s massive anti-drug bureaucracies and agencies need some way to stay afloat, even though their entire mission is predicated on the fraudulent idea that drug prohibition and enforcement will keep Americans safe and drug-free. Anti-drug crusades predicated on saving people from themselves or sinister chemicals may be dressed up in good intentions, but as history has shown, they are little more than ruses to further expand government intervention in our lives and bloat the budgets of government agencies.

The Crimes of Apartheid

Vijay Prashad

Apartheid is a powerful word, with evocations of the South African experience and with implications of crimes against humanity. The United Nations does not use this word loosely. It rarely enters UN reports, and is not heard from the lips of UN officials. But now, in a report released on March 15 in Beirut, Lebanon, the UN has proclaimed that Israel ‘is guilty of the crime of apartheid’. This is a very significant judgment, one with important ramifications for the UN, for the International Court of Justice and for the international community.

In 2015, the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) was charged by its member-states – the eighteen Arab states in West Asia and North Africa – to study whether Israel has established an apartheid regime. ESCWA asked two American academics — Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley — to undertake the study. Falk had been the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories from 2008 through 2014. Tilley had served as a Chief Research Specialist in South Africa’s Human Sciences Research Council, which had produced a study in 2009 showing apartheid-like conditions in Israel and the Palestinian Occupied Territory. The report that they have now produced makes the ‘grave charge’ that Israel is guilty of apartheid not only in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem — the Occupied Territory — but also within its own boundaries and against the Palestinian refugees. This is a very sharp report, which will be hard for Israel to ignore.

End of two state consensus?

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in Washington DC recently to meet U.S. President Donald Trump. At that meeting, Mr. Trump seemed to disregard the international consensus towards the creation of two states. In fact, as this report and others show, the two-state solution has been long vitiated. The Israeli government’s illegal Jewish settlement project in the West Bank and its virtual annexation of East Jerusalem makes it impossible to imagine the establishment of Palestine in that region. What exists is a one-state, with Israel having exercised its dominion in the entire land west of the Jordan River, but a one-state with an apartheid system, with Israeli Jews in a dominant position over the Palestinians. The new UN report speaks to this disturbing apartheid situation not only in the Occupied Territory of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, but in all of Israel.

One reason why the Israeli government is unwilling to consider a one-state solution with equal rights for all Israelis and Palestinians is what they call a ‘demographic threat’. If the 12 million Palestinians — exiles and refugees included — would be citizens of this one-state, then they would dwarf the six million Jews in the country. The UN report argues that Israel is a ‘racial regime’ because its institutions are premised on maintaining a Jewish nation by techniques of suppression and expulsion.

Gross discrimination

Palestinians who have Israeli citizenship (ezrahut) do not have the right to nationality (le’um), which means that they can only access inferior social services, face restrictive zoning laws, and find themselves unable freely to buy land. Palestinians in East Jerusalem are reduced to the status of permanent residents, who have to constantly prove that they live in the city and that they do not have any political ambitions. Palestinians in the West Bank live ‘in ways consistent with apartheid’, write the authors of the UN report. And those who are exiled to the refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan have absolutely no rights to their homeland. All Palestinians – whether those who live in Haifa (Israel) or in Ain al-Hilweh (Lebanon) suffer the consequences of Israeli apartheid. This indignity is punctuated with laws that humiliate the Palestinians. The latest law — the Muezzin Bill — imposes limits on the Muslim call to prayer in Israel and East Jerusalem.

Matters would be less grave if the Israeli political system allowed Palestinians rights to make their case against apartheid-like conditions. Article 7(a) of the Basic Law prohibits any political party from considering a challenge to the State’s Jewish character. Since this description of the Israeli state renders Palestinians as second-class citizens, their voting rights are reduced to merely an affirmation of their subordination. As the UN report suggests, ‘An analogy would be a system in which slaves have the right to vote but not against slavery’. Palestinians inside Israel and in the Occupied Territories, as well as in enforced exile, are forbidden to fight to change the terms of politics in Israel. This roadblock is the reason why the UN report appeals to the international community to live up to its commitments.

Since most of the world’s states have signed the Convention Against Apartheid, they are now obliged to act to punish instances of apartheid. Two recommendations from the report stand out. First, the authors ask that the International Criminal Court (ICC) investigate the situation in Israel. The ICC’s Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda opened an investigation on Israel’s 2014 bombing of Gaza and on the illegal settlements in the West Bank. Ms. Bensouda has indicated that she is not averse to a full assessment of Israel’s actions. Whether she will now widen the scope of her investigation to the apartheid nature of the state is a separate matter. Second, the report asks that member states allow ‘criminal prosecutions of Israeli officials demonstrably connected with the practices of apartheid against the Palestinian people’. Earlier this year, former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni cancelled a trip to Brussels when she was alerted that the prosecutors there might arrest her using the principle of universal jurisdiction. Such actions raise the cost to Israel for its apartheid policies.

When the UN Security Council declared late last year that Israel’s settlements in the Occupied Territories were illegal, then there was worry in Israel that Ms. Bensouda would accelerate her work. Others in Israel said that there was nothing new in the resolution, which neither used the word ‘grave’ to describe the situation nor considered Israeli actions to be a war crime. But the new report does both. If it is acknowledged that Israel is an apartheid state, then this is tantamount to war crime (in the 1977 Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions) and to a crime against humanity (in the 1973 Apartheid Convention and the 1998 Rome Statute of the ICC).

India’s reaction

To prepare the ground for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s trip to Israel later this year, his Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar will soon go to Israel. Word comes from the Ministry of External Affairs that it is likely that Mr. Modi will not visit the Occupied Territories, which will be a snub to Palestine. India’s overall reaction to this report will define Mr. Modi’s attitude towards Israel. The appearance of this report – and its strong conclusions – should give Mr. Modi pause before he shreds decades of consensus for Palestine from India. Will India take leadership in upholding international law as it did in the fight against South African apartheid? Or will India back away from high principle and settle for arms deals and empty rhetoric?

The Hardening of Society and the Rise of Cultures of Cruelty in Neo-Fascist America

Henry A. Giroux

What does the culture of cruelty look like under a neo-fascist regime?

First, language is emptied of any sense of ethics and compassion.

Second, a survival of the fittest discourse provides a breeding ground for racial and social sorting.

Third, references to justice are viewed as treasonous or, as at the present moment, labelled dismissively as “fake news.”

Fourth, the discourse of disposability extends to an increasing number of groups.

Fifth, ignorance becomes militarized, enforced not through an appeal to reason but through the use of the language of humiliation and eventually through the machinery of force.

Sixth, any form of dependency is viewed as a form of weakness, and becomes a referent and eventually a basis for social cleansing. That is, any form of solidarity not based on  market-driven values is subject to derision and potential punishment.

Seventh, the language of borders and walls replaces the discourse of bridges and compassion.

Eighth, violence becomes the most important method for addressing social problems and mediating all relationships, hence, the increasing criminalization of a wide range of behaviours in the United States.

Ninth, the word democracy disappears from officially mandated state language.

Tenth, the critical media is gradually defamed and eventually outlawed.

Eleventh, all forms of critical education present in theory, method, and institutionally are destroyed.

Twelfth, shared fears replace shared responsibilities and everyone is reduced to the status of a potential terrorist, watched constantly and humiliated through body searches at border crossings.

Thirteenth, all vestiges of the welfare state disappear and millions are subject to fending for themselves.

Fourteenth, massive inequalities in power, wealth, and income will generate a host of Reality TV shows celebrating the financial elite.

Underlying this project is one of the most powerfully oppressive ideologies of neoliberal neo-fascism. That is, the only unit of agency and analysis that matters is the isolated individual. Shared trust and visions of economic equality and political justice give way to individual terrors and self-blame reinforced by the neoliberal notion that people are solely responsible for their political, economic, and social misfortunes. Consequently, a hardening of the culture is buttressed by the force of state sanctioned cultural apparatuses that enshrine privatization in the discourse of self-reliance, unchecked self-interest, untrammeled individualism, and deep distrust of anything remotely called the common good. Freedom of choice becomes code for defining responsibility solely as an individual task, reinforced by a shameful appeal to character.

Liberal critics argue that choice absent the notion of constraints feeds Ayn Rand’s culture of rabid individualism and unchecked greed. What they miss in this neo-fascist moment is that the systemic evil, cruelty, and moral irresponsibility at the heart of neoliberalism makes Ayn Rand’s lunacy look tame. Rand’s world has been surpassed by a ruling class of financial elites that embody not the old style greed of Gordon Gekko in the film Wall Street, but the psychopathic personality of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho.

The notion that saving money by reducing the taxes of the rich justifies eliminating health care for 24 million people is just one example of how this culture of cruelty and hardening of the culture will play out.

Dark Times are truly upon us. There will be an acceleration of acts of violence under the Trump administration and the conditions for eliminating this new stage of state violence will mean not only understanding the roots of neo-fascism in the United States, but also eliminating the economic, political, and cultural forces that produced it.

There is more at work here than getting rid of Trump, there is a need to eliminate a system in which democracy is equated with capitalism, a system driven almost exclusively by financial interests, and beholden to two political parties that are hard wired into neoliberal savagery.

Israel and the A-Word

John Reynolds

The word resonated loud and clear from South Africa. Hendrik Verwoerd, widely described as a key architect of apartheid, was the far-right National Party’s propagandist, political strategist and, ultimately, party leader. In 1961, as South African Prime Minister, he noted that Israel was built on land taken ‘from the Arabs after the Arabs lived there for a thousand years.’ The point was to express his approval and to highlight Zionism’s common cause with the Afrikaner pioneers: ‘In that, I agree with them. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.’

Verwoerd was able to make this diagnosis without needing to live to see the brutality of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza after 1967. Israel’s apartheid foundations were laid in its dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948. They were reinforced by the immediate erection of colonial constitutional structures that cemented the exclusion of the colonised.

Since then, Israeli law and policy has only deepened the state apparatus of separation and segregation, discrimination and domination. Over the years, countless activists, authors and artists, as well as leading anti-apartheid figures from South Africa, have referred to Israel’s particular brand of structural discrimination as akin to apartheid. In the last decade, international lawyers have also begun to do likewise, but with reference to the definition of apartheid under international law rather than by analogy to southern Africa.

This week, a report commissioned and published by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) has concluded that ‘Israel has established an apartheid regime that dominates the Palestinian people as a whole’. According to the report, the Israeli regime governing Palestinians is a racial regime of institutionalised domination – the essence of the international legal definition of apartheid. The maintenance of Israel’s exclusionary constitutional character as the state of the Jewish people has entailed a “strategic fragmentation of the Palestinian people”. It has involved expulsion of Palestinian refugees into exile, discrimination against Palestinians inside Israel as second-class citizens, oppression of Palestinians under occupation; all through a concerted array of law, policy and practice that forges ‘a comprehensive policy of apartheid’.

This finding breaks new ground in the context of UN analysis on Israel/Palestine. Specialised UN bodies – such as the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and the Human Rights Council’s Special Rapporteur on Palestine – have in recent years categorised Israeli law and policy in terms of racial segregation and apartheid. This framing has been geographically limited to the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, however – as distinct from inside Israel itself, or Israel’s relationship with the Palestinian people writ large.

This was a somewhat necessary distinction, given the UN practice of analysing the occupied Palestinian territory and Israel as two separate territories under international law. But it was also in certain respects an artificial distinction. Much of what renders the situation in the occupied territory as apartheid is the separate and preferential legal system applied to Israeli settlers – a hierarchical legalism which is central to the constitution of Israel itself. Laws on citizenship, residency and family unification, as well as land, planning and housing rights, apply inside Israel to benefit Jewish-Israeli citizens over Palestinians. Those laws are then channeled into the West Bank to further stratify the population there. Colonisers living in the settlements are endowed with legal status and privilege that is denied to the Palestinian population of the same territory.

There are of course differences in the modalities of Israel’s discrimination against Palestinians – depending on whether they are inside Israel, in occupied territory, or in exile. The crucial point that the UN report highlights, however, is that this is nonetheless best viewed as a single overarching institutional regime which discriminates against the Palestinian people as a whole.

For a UN Commission report to state this so clearly, and to theorise Israel as a “racial state”, is significant. A people’s tribunal, the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, did arrive at similar conclusions back in 2011. The momentum that this analysis has gathered in official UN settings since then shows the possibilities of an international law from below – one which is not afraid to confront the realities of a state in which increasingly discriminatory legislation has spewed thick and fast from an ascendant far-right.

While the report’s findings do hinge on the legal definition of apartheid, the Commission itself does not have the authority of an international tribunal. The International Court of Justice and the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination are among the relevant actors when it comes to determining Israel’s state responsibility for an unlawful apartheid regime. The International Criminal Court enters the fray for determining the criminal responsibility of individual Israeli officials for the perpetration of acts of apartheid, as crimes against humanity. Any adjudications from these and other legal institutions can feed into the UN political organs vested with the capacity to impose sanctions and arms embargoes, as was (eventually) done with apartheid South Africa. In this context, the report offers a potential platform for further developments in the political arena of the UN.

A UN spokesperson has said that ‘the report as it stands does not reflect the view of the Secretary-General’. The report made no claim to represent the views of the UN as a whole. It does, however, reflect the views of a regional UN commission, made up of eighteen member states of North Africa and West Asia. And here it is important to remember that the genesis of the UN sanctions and arms embargo against South Africa flowed up from below and inwards from the periphery, not down from on high or out from the core. The Third World states led the charge against apartheid for many years in the face of Western resistance and support for South Africa. It was 1952 when a group of thirteen Arab and Asian states first succeeded in adding ‘The Question of Race Conflict resulting from the policies of apartheid’ to the UN General Assembly’s agenda. It took another 25 years – after multiple abstentions and vetoes by Britain, France and the US, and a rising global social movement against apartheid – before the Security Council eventually imposed a mandatory arms embargo on South Africa.

In the current conjuncture, the significance of this week’s report extends beyond Israel/Palestine. Verwoerd’s National Party is not the only white supremacist political movement to have seen the attraction of Israel’s constitutional structures. The “alt-right” movement in the US is premised on a white nationalism that incorporates very real antisemitic discourse and intimidation among its multiplicity of racisms. At the same time, it admires Israel’s exclusionary policies. Richard Spencer describes the alt-right project as ‘a sort of white Zionism’ and argues, as Omri Boehm has noted, that Israel’s ethnic-based politics is the basis of a strong, cohesive identity which the alt-right is seeking to emulate in the US.

With the alt-right now maintaining a foothold in the White House, it is imperative to think seriously about the apartheid nature of Israel’s constitutional order and about how to deepen anti-racist alliances and solidarities across borders. The Trump/Bannon travel ban agenda of course finds some parallel in Israel’s own long-standing border policies, and comes at a time when Israel has adopted new legislation purporting to ban boycott adherents. In that context, the ESCWA report’s call for member states and civil society to support and ‘broaden support for boycott, divestment and sanctions initiatives’ is another significant political move.