The Fight Ahead: 13 Questions about the Origins, Objectives and War on BDS

Ramzy Baroud

BDS stands for ‘Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions’. The BDS Movement was the outcome of several events that shaped the Palestinian national struggle and international solidarity with the Palestinian people following the Second Uprising (Intifada) in 2000.

Building on a decades-long tradition of civil disobedience and popular resistance, and invigorated by growing international solidarity with the Palestinian struggle as exhibited in the World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa in 2001, Palestinians moved into action.

In 2004, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) called for the boycott of Israeli government and academic institutions for their direct contributions to the military occupation and subjugation of the Palestinian people. This was followed in 2005 by a sweeping call for boycott made by 170 Palestinian civil society organizations.

What is the academic boycott?

PACBI has served as a medium through which the Palestinian point of view is articulated and presented to international audiences through the use of media, academic and cultural platforms. Because of its continued efforts and mobilization since 2004, many universities, teachers’ unions, student groups and artists around the world have endorsed BDS and spoken out in support of the movement.

Why is BDS important?

In the absence of any international mechanism to end the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, and the lack of international law being enforced, as expressed in dozens of un-implemented United Nations resolutions, BDS has grown to become a major platform to facilitate solidarity with the Palestinian people, apply pressure on and demand accountability from Israel and those who are funding, or in any way enabling, Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

Is BDS a Palestinian or a global movement?

The call for BDS is made by Palestinian society. This is important, for no one has the right to represent the Palestinian struggle but Palestinians themselves.

However, the BDS movement itself – although centred on Palestinian priorities – is an inclusive global platform. Grounded in humanistic values, BDS aims to court world public opinion and appeals to international and humanitarian law to bring peace and justice in Palestine and Israel.

What are some of the historical precedents to BDS?

The boycott movement was at the heart of the South African struggle that ultimately defeated Apartheid in that country. Roots of that movement in South Africa go back to the 1950s and 60s, and even before. However, it was accelerated during the 1980s, which, ultimately, led to the collapse of the Apartheid regime in 1991.

There are many other precedents in history. Notable amongst them is the Boston Tea Party, protesting unfair taxation by the British Parliament; the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 (which ushered in the rise of the Civil Rights Movement led by Martin Luther King. Jr.) and the Salt March led by Mohandas Gandhi in 1930 (which initiated the civil disobedience campaign that was a major factor leading to India’s independence in 1947.)

All of these are stark examples of popular movements using economic pressure to end the subjugation of one group by another. BDS is no different.

What are BDS’ main demands?

The BDS movement has three main demands. They are:

– Ending Israel’s illegal occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Apartheid Wall.

– Recognizing the fundamental rights, including that of full equality, of Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel.

– Respecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194.

From where does BDS derive its support?

The BDS movement is the collective expression of the will and aspirations of the Palestinian people, who serve as the backbone of the popular, de-centralized movement.

Additionally, BDS is supported by conscientious people throughout the world, whether in their capacity as individuals, or as representatives of religious institutions, academic institutions, labour and professional unions, student groups and other organizations.

What is the main Israeli argument against BDS?

By equating any criticism of Israel and its right-wing government with anti-Semitism, Israeli supporters readily accuse BDS of being an anti-Semitic movement.

For example, the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League (ADL) bases such an accusation on the premise that “many individuals involved in BDS campaigns are driven by opposition to Israel’s very existence as a Jewish state.”

Why do Israel and its supporters mischaracterize the Movement and its goals?

The above is one of many such claims aimed at mispresenting the BDS Movement. These claims are also meant to confuse and distract from the discussion at hand. Instead of engaging with internationally-supported Palestinian demands for justice and freedom, the anti-BDS campaigners disengage from the conversation altogether by levying the accusation of anti-Semitism against their detractors.

But is BDS anti-Semitic?

Not in the least. In fact, quite the opposite. BDS opposes the supremacy of any racial group or the dominance of any religion over others. As such, BDS challenges the Israeli legal system that privileges Jewish citizens and discriminates against Palestinian Muslims and Christians.

Does BDS undermine the ‘peace process’?

The ‘peace process’, which operated largely outside the framework of international law has proven to be a splendid failure. Talks that began in Madrid in 1991, followed by the Oslo Peace Accords in 1993, the Paris Protocol in 1994, Hebron Protocol in 1997, Wye River 1998, Camp David 2002, and other agreements and understandings only led to the cementing of Israeli occupation, tripling the number of illegal Jewish settlers and vastly expanding the illegal Israeli settlement network in the Occupied Territories.

Since then, several wars have been waged against Palestinians, especially in Gaza, killing thousands and maiming thousands more. With no serious pressure on Israel, thanks to US backing of Israel at the UN, not a single Israeli was ever held accountable for what was repeatedly recognized by UN investigators as war crimes against Palestinians.

In the early months of his first term in office, former US President Barack Obama, attempted to breathe life in the defunct ‘peace process’, only to be met with Israeli refusal to freeze the construction of illegal settlements. Eventually, talks ended and they are yet to resume.

The suffering of Palestinians is now at its worst since the Israeli occupation in 1967. Gaza is under a decade-long, suffocating siege; occupied East Jerusalem is completely cut off from the rest of Palestinian towns and the West Bank is divided into various zones – Area A, B and C – all under various forms of control by the Israeli army.

What are the Israeli and pro-Israeli efforts to challenge BDS?

The Israeli government has sponsored several conferences aimed at developing a strategy to discredit BDS and to slow down its growth. It has also worked with its supporters across North America and Europe to lobby governments to condemn and to outlaw BDS activities and the boycott of Israel in general.

These efforts culminated on March 23, 2017 with Senate bill S720 which, if passed in its current form, will make the boycott of Israel an illegal act punishable by imprisonment and a heavy fine.

Meanwhile, Israel has already enacted laws that ban foreign BDS supporters from entering the country. This also applies to Jewish BDS supporters.

What has the BDS Movement achieved, so far?

Top Israeli government officials perceive BDS as their greatest threat. It is the first time in many years that this form of non-violent civil rights action has registered so profoundly on the agenda of Israel’s political elite.

The massive campaign underway to fight and discredit BDS is a testament to the power and resolve of the civil-society centred Movement. Palestinians are determined to, someday, achieve their own ‘South Africa moment’, when Apartheid was vanquished under the dual pressure of resistance at home and the global boycott campaign.

Moreover, BDS is successfully pushing the conversation on Palestine away from the margins to the centre. It seems that, the more Israel attempts to thwart boycott efforts, the more opportunities BDS supporters have to engage the media and general public. The accessibility of social media has proven fundamental to that strategy.

Why are so many joining BDS?

BDS is growing because it is both a moral and legal obligation to support oppressed people and pressure those who violate international law to end their unwarranted practices.

Writing from his cell in Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Guided by such moralistic principles, BDS offers a platform for anyone who wants to demonstrate solidarity with the Palestinian people in their 70-year-long struggle for freedom, justice and human rights.

How to Fund a Universal Basic Income Without Increasing Taxes or Inflation

Ellen Brown

In May 2017, a team of researchers at the University of Oxford published the results of a survey of the world’s best artificial intelligence experts, who predicted that there was a 50 percent chance of AI outperforming humans in all tasks within 45 years. All human jobs were expected to be automated in 120 years, with Asian respondents expecting these dates much sooner than North Americans. In theory, that means we could all retire and enjoy the promised age of universal leisure. But the immediate concern for most people is that they will be losing their jobs to machines.

That helps explain the recent interest in a universal basic income (UBI) – a sum of money distributed equally to everyone. A UBI has been proposed in Switzerland, trials are beginning in Finland, and there is a successful pilot ongoing in Brazil. The cities of Ontario in Canada, Oakland in California, and Utrecht in the Netherlands are planning trials; two local authorities in Scotland have announced such plans; and politicians across Europe, including UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, have spoken in favor of the concept. Advocates in the US range from Robert Reich to Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Luther King, Thomas Paine, Charles Murray, Elon Musk, Dan Savage, Keith Ellison and Paul Samuelson.  A new economic study found that a UBI of $1000/month to all adults would add $2.5 trillion to the US economy in eight years.

Welfare can encourage laziness, because benefits go down as earned income goes up. But studies have shown that a UBI distributed equally regardless of income does not have that result. In 1968, President Richard Nixon initiated a successful trial showing that the money had little impact on the recipients’ working hours. People who did reduce the time they worked engaged in other socially valuable pursuits, and young people who were not working spent more time getting an education. Analysis of a similar Canadian trial found that employment rates among young adults did not change, high-school completion rates increased, and hospitalization rates dropped by 8.5 percent. Larger experiments in India have reached similar results.

Studies have also shown that it would actually be cheaper to distribute funds to the entire population than to run the welfare services governments engage in now. It has been calculated that if the UK’s welfare budget were split among the country’s 50 million adults, each of them would get £5,160 a year.

But that is not enough to cover basic survival needs in a modern economy. Taxes would need to be raised, additional debt incurred, or other programs slashed; and these are solutions on which governments are generally unwilling to embark. The other option is “qualitative easing,” a form of central bank quantitative easing in which the money flows directly into the real economy rather than simply into banks. In Europe, politicians are taking another look at this once-derided “helicopter money.” A UBI is being proposed as monetary policy that would stimulate productivity without increasing taxes. As Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, former senior vice president of the World Bank, explains:

. . . [W]hen the government spends more and invests in the economy, that money circulates, and recirculates again and again. So not only does it create jobs once: the investment creates jobs multiple times.

The result of that is that the economy grows by a multiple of the initial spending, and public finances turn out to be stronger: as the economy grows, fiscal revenues increase, and demands for the government to pay unemployment benefits, or fund social programmes to help the poor and needy, go down. As tax revenues go up as a result of growth, and as these expenditures decrease, the government’s fiscal position strengthens.

Why “QE for the People” Need Not Be Inflationary

The objection  to any sort of quantitative easing in which new money gets into the real economy is that when the money supply grows too large and consumer prices shoot up, the process cannot be reversed. If the money is spent on a national dividend, infrastructure, or the government’s budget, it will be out circulating in the economy and will not be retrievable by the central bank.

But the government does not need to rely on the central bank to pull the money back when hyperinflation hits (assuming it ever does – it has not hit after nearly nine years and $3.7 trillion in quantitative easing). As Prof. Stiglitz observes, the money issued by the government will return to it simply through an increase in fiscal revenues generated by the UBI itself.

This is due to the “velocity of money” – the number of times a dollar is traded in a year, from farmer to grocer to landlord, etc. In a good economy, the velocity of the M1 money stock (coins, dollar bills, demand deposits and checkable deposits) is about seven; and each recipient will pay taxes on this same dollar as it changes hands. According to the Heritage Foundation, total tax revenue as a percentage of GDP is now 26 percent. Thus one dollar of new GDP results in about 26 cents of increased tax revenue. Assuming each of the seven trades is for taxable GDP, $1.00 changing hands seven times can increase tax revenue by $7.00 x 26 percent = $1.82. In theory, then, the government could get more back in taxes than it paid out.

In practice, there will be a fair amount of leakage in these returns due to loopholes and deductions for costs. But any shortfall can be made up in other ways, including closing tax loopholes, taxing the $21 trillion or more hidden in offshore tax havens, or setting up a system of public banks that would collect interest that came back to the government.

A working paper published by the San Francisco Federal Reserve in 2012 found that one dollar invested in infrastructure generates at least two dollars in “GSP” (GDP for states), and “roughly four times more than average” during economic downturns. Whether that means $4 or $8 is unclear, but assume it’s only $4. Multiplying $4 by $0.26 in taxes would return the entire dollar originally spent on infrastructure to the government, year after year. For precedent, consider the G.I. Bill, which is estimated to have cost $50 billion in today’s dollars and to have returned $350 billion to the economy, a nearly sevenfold return.

What of the inflation formula typically taught in economics class? In a May 2011 Forbes article titled “Money Growth Does Not Cause Inflation!”, Prof. John Harvey demonstrated that its assumptions are invalid. The formula is “MV = Py,” meaning that when the velocity of money (V) and the quantity of goods sold (y) are constant, adding money (M) must drive up prices (P). But as Harvey pointed out, V and y are not constant. As people have more money to spend (M), more money will change hands (V), and more goods and services will get sold (y). Demand and supply will rise together, keeping prices stable.

The reverse is also true. If demand (money) is not increased, supply or GDP will not go up. New demand needs to precede new supply. The money must be out there searching for goods and services before employers will add the workers needed to create more supply. Only when demand is saturated and productivity is at full capacity will consumer prices be driven up; and they are not near those limits yet, despite some misleading official figures that omit people who have quit looking for work or are working only part-time. As of January 2017, an estimated 9.4 percent of the US population remained unemployed or underemployed. Beyond that, there is the vast expanding potential of robots, computers and innovations such as 3D printers, which can work 24 hours a day without overtime pay or medical insurance.

The specter invariably raised to block legislators and voters from injecting new money into the system is the fear of repeating the notorious hyperinflations of history – those in Weimer Germany, Zimbabwe and elsewhere. But according to Professor Michael Hudson, who has studied the question extensively, those disasters were not due to government money-printing to stimulate the economy. He writes:

Every hyperinflation in history has been caused by foreign debt service collapsing the exchange rate. The problem almost always has resulted from wartime foreign currency strains, not domestic spending. The dynamics of hyperinflation traced in such classics as Salomon Flink’s The Reichsbank and Economic Germany (1931) have been confirmed by studies of the Chilean and other Third World inflations. First the exchange rate plunges as economies pay for foreign military spending during the war, and then – in Germany’s case – reparations after the war ends. These payments led the exchange rate to fall, increasing the price in domestic currency of buying imports priced in hard currencies. This price rise for imported goods creates a price umbrella for domestic prices to follow suit. More domestic money is needed to finance economic activity at the higher price level. This German experience provides the classic example.

In a stagnant economy, a UBI can create the demand needed to clear the shelves of unsold products and drive new productivity.  Robots do not buy food, clothing, or electronic gadgets. Demand must come from consumers, and for that they need money to spend. As robots increasingly take over human jobs, the choices will be a UBI or to let half the population starve. A UBI is not “welfare” but is simply a dividend paid for living in the 21^st century, when automation has freed us to enjoy some leisure and engage in more meaningful pursuits.

Mass Shootings: the Military-Entertainment Complex’s Culture of Violence Turns Deadly

John W. Whitehead

“Mass shootings have become routine in the United States and speak to a society that relies on violence to feed the coffers of the merchants of death. Given the profits made by arms manufacturers, the defense industry, gun dealers and the lobbyists who represent them in Congress, it comes as no surprise that the culture of violence cannot be abstracted from either the culture of business or the corruption of politics. Violence runs through US society like an electric current offering instant pleasure from all cultural sources, whether it be the nightly news or a television series that glorifies serial killers.”

—Professor Henry A. Giroux

This latest mass shooting in Las Vegas that left more than 50 people dead and more than 500 injured is as obscure as they come: a 64-year-old retiree with no apparent criminal history, no military training, and no obvious axe to grind opens fire on a country music concert crowd from a hotel room 32 floors up using a semi-automatic gun that may have been rigged to fire up to 700 rounds a minute, then kills himself.

We’re left with more questions than answers, none of them a flattering reflection of the nation’s values, political priorities, or the manner in which the military-industrial complex continues to dominate, dictate and shape almost every aspect of our lives.

For starters, why do these mass shootings keep happening? Mass shootings have taken place at churches, in nightclubs, on college campuses, on military bases, in elementary schools, in government offices, and at concerts. This shooting is the deadliest to date.

What is it about America that makes violence our nation’s calling card?

Is it because America is a gun culture (what professor Henry Giroux describes as “a culture soaked in blood – a culture that threatens everyone and extends from accidental deaths, suicides and domestic violence to mass shootings“)?

Is it because guns are so readily available? After all, the U.S. is home to more firearms than adults. As The Atlantic reports, gun fetishism has become mainstream in recent decades due in large part to “gun porn in music, movies, and TV, [and] the combination of weapons marketing and violent videogames.” (Curiously enough, the majority of gun-related deaths in the U.S. are suicides, not homicides.)

Is it because entertainment violence is the hottest selling ticket at the box office? As Giroux points out, “Popular culture not only trades in violence as entertainment, but also it delivers violence to a society addicted to a pleasure principle steeped in graphic and extreme images of human suffering, mayhem and torture.”

Is it because the government continues to whet the nation’s appetite for violence and war through paid propaganda programs (seeded throughout sports entertainment, Hollywood blockbusters and video games)—what professor Roger Stahl refers to as “militainment“—that glorify the military and serve as recruiting tools for America’s expanding military empire?

Is it because Americans from a very young age are being groomed to enlist as foot soldiers—even virtual ones—in America’s Army (coincidentally, that’s also the name of a first person shooter video game produced by the military)? Explorer scouts are one of the most popular recruiting tools for the military and its civilian counterparts (law enforcement, Border Patrol, and the FBI).

Writing for The Atlantic, a former Explorer scout described the highlight of the program: monthly weekend maneuvers with the National Guard where scouts “got to fire live rounds from M16s, M60 machine guns, and M203 grenade launchers… we would have urban firefights (shooting blanks, of course) in Combat Town, a warren of concrete buildings designed for just that purpose. The exercise always devolved into a free-for-all, with all of us weekend warriors emptying clip after clip of blanks until we couldn’t see past the end of our rifles for all the smoke in the air.”

Is it because the United States is the number one consumer, exporter and perpetrator of violence and violent weapons in the world? Seriously, America spends more money on war than the combined military budgets of China, Russia, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Saudi Arabia, India, Germany, Italy and Brazil. America polices the globe, with 800 military bases and troops stationed in 160 countries. Moreover, the war hawks have turned the American homeland into a quasi-battlefield with military gear, weapons and tactics. In turn, domestic police forces have become roving extensions of the military—a standing army.

Or is the Second Amendment to blame, as many continue to suggest? Would there be fewer mass shootings if tighter gun control laws were enacted? Or would the violence simply take a different form: homemade bombs, cars driven into crowds, and knives (remember the knife assailant in Japan who stabbed 19 people to death at a care home for the disabled)?

Then again, could it be, as some have speculated, that these shootings are all part of an elaborate plan to incite fear and chaos, heighten national tensions and shift us that much closer to a complete lockdown? After all, the military and our militarized police forces have been predicting and preparing for exactly this kind of scenario for years now.

So who’s to blame for the violence?

This time, in Las Vegas, it was a seemingly nondescript American citizen pulling the trigger.

At other times, it’s organized crime syndicates or petty criminals or so-called terrorists/extremists.

Still other times, it’s the police with their shoot first, ask questions later mindset (more than 900,000 law enforcement officers are armed).

In certain parts of the Middle East, it’s the U.S. government and the military carrying out drone strikes and bombing campaigns that leave innocent civilians dead and their communities torn apart.

Are you starting to get the picture yet?

We’re caught in a vicious cycle with no end in sight.

Perhaps there’s no single one factor to blame for this gun violence. However, there is a common denominator, and that is a war-drenched, violence-imbued, profit-driven military industrial complex that has invaded almost every aspect of our lives.

Ask yourself: Who are these shooters modelling themselves after? Where are they finding the inspiration for their weaponry and tactics? Whose stance and techniques are they mirroring?

In almost every instance, you can connect the dots back to the military.

We are a military culture.

We have been a nation at war for most of our existence.

We are a nation that makes a living from killing through defense contracts, weapons manufacturing and endless wars.

In order to sustain the nation’s appetite for war over the long haul in spite of the costs of war in lives lost and dollars spent—and little else to show for it—the military has had to work overtime to churn out pro-war, pro-military propaganda. It’s exactly what President Eisenhower warned against (“the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex”) in his 1961 farewell address.

We didn’t listen then and we’re still not listening now.

All the while, the government’s war propaganda machine has grown more sophisticated and entrenched in American culture.

Back when I was a boy growing up in the 1950s, almost every classic sci fi movie ended with the heroic American military saving the day, whether it was battle tanks in Invaders from Mars (1953) or military roadblocks in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). What I didn’t know then as a schoolboy was the extent to which the Pentagon was paying to be cast as America’s savior.

By the time my own kids were growing up, it was Jerry Bruckheimer’s blockbuster film Top Gun—created with Pentagon assistance and equipment—that boosted civic pride in the military.

Now it’s my grandkids’ turn to be awed and overwhelmed by child-focused military propaganda in the X-Men movies. Same goes for The Avengers and Superman and the Transformers. (Don’t even get me started on the war propaganda churned out by the toymakers.)

All of the military equipment featured in blockbuster movies is provided—at taxpayer expense—in exchange for carefully placed promotional spots aimed at indoctrinating the American populace into believing that patriotism means throwing their support behind the military wholeheartedly and unquestioningly.

Even reality TV shows have gotten in on the gig, with the Pentagon’s entertainment office influencing “American Idol,” “The X-Factor,” “Masterchef,” “Cupcake Wars,” numerous Oprah Winfrey shows, “Ice Road Truckers,” “Battlefield Priests,” “America’s Got Talent,” “Hawaii Five-O,” lots of BBC, History Channel and National Geographic documentaries, “War Dogs,” and “Big Kitchens.” And that’s just a sampling.

It’s estimated that U.S. military intelligence agencies (including the NSA) have influenced over 1,800 movies and TV shows.

And then there are the growing number of video games, a number of which are engineered by or created for the military, which have accustomed players to interactive war play through military simulations and first-person shooter scenarios.

This is how you acclimate a population to war.

This is how you cultivate loyalty to a war machine.

This is how, to borrow from the subtitle to the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, you teach a nation to “stop worrying and love the bomb.”

As journalist David Sirota writes for Salon,

“[C]ollusion between the military and Hollywood – including allowing Pentagon officials to line edit scripts – is once again on the rise, with new television programs and movies slated to celebrate the Navy SEALs….major Hollywood directors remain more than happy to ideologically slant their films in precisely the pro-war, pro-militarist direction that the Pentagon demands in exchange for taxpayer-subsidized access to military hardware.”

Why is the Pentagon (and the CIA and the government at large) so focused on using Hollywood as a propaganda machine?

To those who profit from war, it is—as Sirota recognizes—”a ‘product’ to be sold via pop culture products that sanitize war and, in the process, boost recruitment numbers….At a time when more and more Americans are questioning the fundamental tenets of militarism (i.e., budget-busting defense expenditures, never-ending wars/occupations, etc.), military officials are desperate to turn the public opinion tide back in a pro-militarist direction — and they know pop culture is the most effective tool to achieve that goal.”

The media, eager to score higher ratings, has been equally complicit in making (real) war more palatable to the public by packaging it as TV friendly.

This is what Dr. Stahl refers to as the representation of a “clean war“: a war “without victims, without bodies, and without suffering”:

‘Dehumanize destruction’ by extracting all human imagery from target areas … The language used to describe the clean war is as antiseptic as the pictures. Bombings are ‘air strikes.’ A future bombsite is a ‘target of opportunity.’ Unarmed areas are ‘soft targets.’ Civilians are ‘collateral damage.’ Destruction is always ‘surgical.’ By and large, the clean war wiped the humanity of civilians from the screen … Create conditions by which war appears short, abstract, sanitized and even aesthetically beautiful. Minimize any sense of death: of soldiers or civilians.”

This is how you sell war to a populace that may have grown weary of endless wars: sanitize the war coverage of anything graphic or discomfiting (present a clean war), gloss over the actual numbers of soldiers and civilians killed (human cost), cast the business of killing humans in a more abstract, palatable fashion (such as a hunt), demonize one’s opponents, and make the weapons of war a source of wonder and delight.

“This obsession with weapons of war has a name: technofetishism,” explains Stahl. “Weapons appear to take on a magical aura. They become centerpieces in a cult of worship.”

“Apart from gazing at the majesty of these bombs, we were also invited to step inside these high-tech machines and take them for a spin,” said Stahl. “Or if we have the means, we can purchase one of the military vehicles on the consumer market. Not only are we invited to fantasize about being in the driver’s seat, we are routinely invited to peer through the crosshairs too. These repeated modes of imaging war cultivate new modes of perception, new relationships to the tools of state violence. In other words, we become accustomed to ‘seeing’ through the machines of war.”

In order to sell war, you have to feed the public’s appetite for entertainment.

Not satisfied with peddling its war propaganda through Hollywood, reality TV shows and embedded journalists whose reports came across as glorified promotional ads for the military, the Pentagon turned to sports to further advance its agenda, “tying the symbols of sports with the symbols of war.”

The military has been firmly entrenched in the nation’s sports spectacles ever since, having co-opted football, basketball, even NASCAR.

Remember, just before this Vegas shooting gave the media, the politicians and the easily distracted public something new to obsess over, the headlines were dominated by President Trump’s feud with the NFL over players kneeling during the national anthem.

That, too, was yet another example of how much the military entertainment complex—which paid $53 million of taxpayer money between 2012 and 2015 to pro sports teams for military tributes (on-field events recognizing military service members, including ceremonial first pitches, honor guards and Jumbotron tributes)—has infiltrated American culture.

This Trump-NFL feud is also a classic example of how to squash dissent—whether it’s dissent over police brutality or America’s killing fields abroad. As Stahl explains, “Supporting the troops is made synonymous with supporting the war. Those who disagree with the decision to send soldiers to war are thus identified with the enemy. This is done through a variety of associations… Dissent becomes synonymous with criminal activity.”

When you talk about the Las Vegas mass shooting, you’re not dealing with a single shooter scenario. Rather, you’re dealing with a sophisticated, far-reaching war machine that has woven itself into the very fabric of this nation.

As Stahl concludes, “War has come to look very much like a video game. As viewers of the TV war, we are treated to endless flyovers. We are immersed in a general spirit of play. We are shown countless computer animations that contribute a sense of virtuality. We play alongside news anchors who watch on their monitors. We sit in front of the crosshairs directing missiles with a sense of interactivity. The destruction, if shown at all, seems unreal, distant. These repeated images foster habitual fantasies of crossing over.”

You want to stop the gun violence?

Stop the worship of violence that permeates our culture.

Stop glorifying the military industrial complex with flyovers and salutes during sports spectacles.

Stop acting as if there is anything patriotic about military exercises and occupations that bomb hospitals and schools.

Stop treating guns and war as entertainment fodder in movies, music, video games, toys, amusement parks, reality TV and more.

Stop distribution weapons of war to the local police and turning them into extensions of the military—weapons that have no business being anywhere but on a battlefield.

Most of all, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, stop falling for the military industrial complex’s psychological war games.

Of Spiritual Smugglers and Stone Capitalists

V Geetha

Keeping tabs on those murdered for their rational, questioning world views, you realise that the dead are reminders of civilizational values that have been handed down by the great dissenting traditions of thought in this sub-continent. Whether rational, agnostic, atheist, or shramanic in origin, these traditions have sustained their vigour through time, though they appear to be eclipsed by more rhapsodic or coercive forms of spiritual authority as the case may be. Yet they remain, and today, they offend than ever before, because they are everywhere, in colleges, on the streets, speaking English and in the vernacular, they write, are present in public life, they challenge verities of every kind, including those that are deemed ‘progressive’ but in all instances, they remain committed to an open, democratic society and a social order that hinges on equality and fraternity, on compassion and comradeship. The dissenting tradition has found its bahujan votaries, and this is clearly not a good thing for those who dislike dissent as well as the bahujan.

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is an eloquent representatives of critical bahujan thought, and an original exponent of its various aspects. Anyone who’s spent time with him knows what a valuable and rich experience that usually is: you are made to reflect, are startled out of your habitual ways of knowing and importantly, Ilaiah is civility itself, ready to argue, debate, and follow you around into the kitchen if you are a woman friend, offering to assist with this or that domestic task of the day.

This way of being, critical, rational, standing up to the coercive power of Brahminical Hinduism, speaking truth to those who don’t want to hear it– this is clearly a problem not only for the ideologues and soldiers of the Hindu right, but also for all those who hold onto their caste identities and refuse to brook any critique of the latter. Ilaiah has earned the ire of sections of the Arya Vaisya caste, because he described their economic role as an instance of ‘spiritual smuggling’ – a brilliant use of language, reminiscent of what another rationalist and iconoclast said many decades ago, when he described the deities in Brahminical Hindu temples as ‘stone capitalists’ (this was Kuthoosi Guruswamy of the Self-respect movement, arguing with his communist peers in the pages of his magazine and theirs in the 1940s).

By targeting the great unproductive social existence of the upper castes, who live off the productive labour of others, Ilaiah has consistently called attention to the makers of social and economic wealth, those who ‘till the field and turn the pot’. In the post-Mandal period, when upper caste students flaunted their so-called merit to call attention to their being kept out (sic) of the citadels of learning and government, Ilaiah turned the very notion of merit on its head and developed a new measure for judging skill, intelligence, discretion and wisdom – based on what the working (caste) communities do of a day. He thus went on to develop a ‘labour theory of value’, adequate to a complex social reality, where labouris both exploited as well as degraded and viewed as polluting, and the spiritual surplus extracted from it, deemed pure, divine and necessary to shore up birth-determined cultural capital. His extolling of the worth and science behind different forms of labour, albeit caste labour, and his suggestive sense of what the productive bahujan are all about, and how may they be destigmatized are very important points for us to ponder.

Sadly, those who appear to have pondered long and hard over these matters are those who are dismayed, angered by his views. They may not be of the vintage Hindutva variety, but they are far more durable and locally visible and powerful – for caste hierarchy is sustained not on account of a proclaimed religious ideology alone, but by the exercise of petty power and banal attempts to belittle some folks and worship others, in short by a descending scale of contempt and an ascending scale of reverence. This caste way of being, a primal expression of a partial, alienated selfhood, is what fascism feeds on, pandering to its fears and anxieties on the one hand, and drawing from its impulse to denigrate, on the other. So, when so-called sentiments are hurt, we realise that it is democracy that is being called out, critical rationality that is being censored, and in all this the dissenter is viewed as expendable. The crude violence of Hindutva is recognizable and identifiable, but the sustained, whining violence of thwarted caste folks is less so, being localized and easily marked as an ‘atrocity’ rather than the norm that it is.

Ilaiah has dared show up this norm, for the unlovely thing that it is – the product of an exploitative, dissembling and parasitic social order. And he is thus to be censored, attacked. In this context, it is important to read him, debate his views, affirm his politics of dignified labour and skill and stand with him.

Toyota ends car production in Australia

Will Marshall

On Tuesday, Toyota wound up production at its plant in Altona, a working-class suburb in southwest Melbourne. The closure marks the end of the company’s 54-year Australian manufacturing operation. The shutdown left 2,700 workers unemployed, and threatens tens of thousands more jobs in the car components industry.

The Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU), which covers car workers, previously oversaw the shutdown of Ford’s production in Melbourne and Geelong in October last year, eliminating the 600 remaining jobs. Once Holden closes its operation in South Australia, in less than three weeks, a further 944 workers will be left unemployed, and car production will cease in Australia.

A University of Adelaide study in 2014 predicted this would result in the destruction of some 200,000 jobs across the country.

The string of shutdowns is an indictment of successive Labor governments, at the state and federal level, and the trade unions. Having imposed round after round of sackings, speed-ups and cuts to conditions, the unions, functioning as an industrial police force of the car corporations, have done everything they can to ensure “orderly closures.”

The Toyota plant in Altona

On Tuesday, Toyota held a private “event” for its sacked employees. Speaking via video link, the company’s global manager Akio Toyoda expressed his “sincere appreciation again to you, our dedicated employees.” Different Toyota models were driven around the plant. As always, a large private security force was on hand to keep workers in check.

These cynical exercises, promoted by the unions, have become the norm for the car giants. Ford raffled off several cars as part of its final “celebration.” Holden is planning a “street party.”

The reality is that after extracting vast profits from their employees, Ford, Toyota and Holden, have decided their Australian operations are not providing a sufficient return for their ultra-wealthy shareholders. They have thus ended manufacturing, wreaking social havoc on devastated working-class communities.

This is part of a global restructuring by the major car producers, aimed at taking advantage of poverty-level wages and economies of scale in Asian manufacturing hubs. Workers in every part of the world, from Asia and the US and Europe, are paying the price.

Toyota has been engaged in a continuous overhaul of its operations over the past decade, which has included plant closures in the United States and elsewhere, and the stepped-up exploitation of its Japanese workforce. As a result, the second largest car company in the world registered a 2016-2017 operational profit of $US16.28 billion.

The unions, taking their nationalist and pro-capitalist program to its logical conclusion, support this global race to the bottom, helping companies pit workers against each other along national lines. The AMWU, working with Toyota and the major companies, drove down wages and conditions over the past 20 years, seeking to ensure Australian car manufacturing was “internationally competitive.”

At the Altona Toyota plant, the union enforced enterprise agreements in 2008 and 2011 that included real wage cuts and shorter working hours. In 2011, the union enforced 350 sackings and collaborated in the expansion of casualised and temporary labour. The union supported a series of massive subsidies to the car companies, by the former federal Labor government, which came with the proviso of a stepped-up assault on jobs, wages and conditions.

In 2014, the union insisted workers had to accept Toyota’s closure announcement, and suppressed any resistance. Since then, the AMWU has assisted Toyota with a highly planned transition of its Australian operations away from manufacturing to sales and distribution.

At the same time, the union helped the company squeeze as much profit as possible out of its workforce. Until Tuesday, Toyota continued day and night shifts, making certain the production goal of 61,000 vehicles for the year was attained.

AMWU National Vehicle Division secretary Dave Smith bragged of the union’s role on Monday, declaring: “This is the best performing Toyota plant in the world, for efficiency, for quality, right to the end.”

Toyota, with the backing of the AMWU, established a paltry $32 million fund to provide “re-training programs” for workers. The federal Liberal-National government and the Labor Party opposition issued statements promoting such programs.

Similar hollow declarations were made after Ford closed. Both the company and the government asserted they had spent millions on retraining workers. But only around half of those workers have found new jobs over the past year. Many are working casually on far lower conditions and pay.

Research conducted in 2008, after the closure of Mitsubishi in Adelaide, showed that just one-third of workers gained permanent work six months after the closure. The rest were either unemployed, under-employed or forced into retirement.

This is part of a broader corporate offensive against jobs, wages and conditions, following the collapse of the mining boom, amid a deepening crisis of Australian capitalism. Massive job cuts have been imposed in the energy sector, telecommunications, and virtually every other industry.

A Roy Morgan survey in August found that more than 10 percent of the national workforce, more than 1.2 million people, were out of work. In the working-class suburb of Elizabeth, in Adelaide, where Holden is closing its plant, unemployment has been estimated at 33 percent.

In other words, car workers are being thrown onto the scrapheap, deepening an unprecedented social crisis.

Ronnie

Ronnie, a 60-year-old worker with 23 years’ experience at the Altona plant, spoke to WSWS reporters on the day of the closure. “I am really worried about the young ones at the factory,” he said. “They all have mortgages that they have to pay. I’m not sure how they are going to do it. Toyota aren’t happy with the amount of their profits they are making so they are closing, even though there has been cost cutting, which has made things harder and harder for us.”

Ronnie commented: “The union always works with the company. When I first started working, I paid $8 dues to the union. Now we pay double that.” Pointing to the corporatised character of the unions, he noted: “They will be unhappy when GM closes in South Australia, because they will receive less union dues.”

The role of the unions underscores that jobs and conditions can be defended only through a rebellion against these pro-business organisations.

The closure of the car industry demonstrates that workers in every sector of the economy must develop independent organisations of struggle, including rank-and-file committees, to prosecute a struggle against the corporate elite’s offensive. These would be tasked with breaking the isolation imposed by the unions, unifying workers across the country and internationally, and developing coordinated industrial and political action.

Above all, what is required is a socialist perspective, aimed at establishing a workers’ government, which would place the banks and major corporations under public ownership and democratic control. This is the only means of opposing the continuous destruction of jobs, and the reduction of workers to conditions not seen since the 1930s.

Australian Greens demand disqualification of all “foreign” MPs

Mike Head

The Australian Greens last week reinforced their position as the most nationalist advocates of expelling from parliament anyone—including their own representatives—accused of the slightest appearance of divided loyalty to the Australian nation state.

In a submission to the High Court, which is due to hear challenges to the eligibility of seven MPs next week, the Greens call for the removal of any parliamentarian who, even unwittingly, is eligible for citizenship of another country.

The High Court, the country’s supreme court, will sit from October 10 to 12 in an unprecedented session that could disqualify all seven, including Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce, producing a crisis for the unstable Liberal-National Coalition government. Up to another 20 MPs are believed to face potential disqualification if the High Court rules against the seven.

The Greens’ submission goes far further than those of the government or the other politicians who have been referred to the High Court for potential disqualification under section 44(i) of the 1901 colonial-era Australian Constitution.

The submissions of the other five parliamentarians facing removal all argue, in various ways, that the court should not punish those who were ignorant of their dual citizenship or their eligibility for foreign citizenship.

The Greens, however, insist that the ban on MPs should be applied to the fullest extent, even if, for example, parliamentarians unknowingly acquired foreign citizenship entitlements from their parents or grandparents.

The Greens also demand this prohibition even though it disqualifies an estimated half of the population of Australia, which has always been an immigrant nation. The Greens’ submission defends this anti-democratic constitutional provision, arguing that it should be strictly applied despite its “blunt and limiting effect on democratic participation.”

The submission was made by two ex-Greens senators, Scott Ludlam and Larissa Waters, who dutifully resigned from the Senate, and apologised profusely, as soon as the reactionary witch hunt against alleged “foreign” MPs was first launched in mid-July. Ludlam and Waters quit their seats simply because they were born in New Zealand and Canada respectively, even though both have lived in Australia since they were infants.

Their submission reiterates that they “properly complied with the duty imposed by S 44 not to sit when disqualified by reason of being a citizen of a foreign power.”

Section 44(i) is far-reaching. It states that any person who “is under any acknowledgment of allegiance, obedience, or adherence to a foreign power, or is a subject or a citizen or entitled to the rights or privileges of a subject or a citizen of a foreign power” is “incapable” of being elected to parliament.

None of the other MPs referred to the High Court has stood aside. They are three National Party MPs—Joyce, Regional Development Minister Fiona Nash and ex-resources minister Matt Canavan—Senator Malcolm Roberts from the anti-immigrant Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and Nick Xenophon, who represents his own four-member Nick Xenophon Team.

In the government’s own submission to the High Court, Attorney-General George Brandis argues only Ludlam and Roberts were wrongfully elected because they allegedly should have known of their supposed foreign entitlements. Brandis contends that the other five MPs were all completely ignorant of their dual citizenships and should be allowed to stay.

The Greens’ submission is in line with the demand issued from the outset of the furore by party leader Senator Richard Di Natale for an “audit” of all 226 current federal MPs to determine their eligibility. This call, later taken up by the xenophobic One Nation, would trigger a McCarthyite inquisition into the loyalty of politicians.

What explains this extraordinary stance? First, the Ludlam-Waters submission objects that the government’s proposition would undermine the “integrity” of parliament and public confidence in the institution.

“Section 44 has a special status because it is protective of matters that are fundamental to the Constitution, being representative and responsible government in a democracy,” the submission states. “The integrity of that system requires the government to be conducted by officers who enjoy the confidence of the people.”

Thus, the Greens emphasise their devotion to the parliamentary set-up, which is already discredited in the eyes of millions of people because of the responsibility of successive governments for declining social conditions and worsening inequality.

Above all, the Greens invoke the importance of unquestioned patriotism, especially amid mounting war tensions. Referring to section 44, the submission insists: “The provision prevents persons with foreign loyalties and obligations from serving in the Australian Parliament. This is one aspect of the purpose of safeguarding the integrity of parliament and Australian sovereignty, because the potential for the foreign power to call upon a citizen’s duty, even if it had never done so in the past and even if the person concerned was hitherto unaware of the citizenship, remains a real possibility.”

A submission footnote links to evidence submitted by former independent MP Tony Windsor, who lost his rural-based seat to Joyce in 2013 and is petitioning the High Court for a by-election in the electorate on the grounds that Joyce’s father was born in New Zealand.

Windsor’s submission directly ties the disqualification demand to preparations for war, including military service obligations. It harks back to the lead-up to World War I, when young Australian men of dual nationality faced conflicting requirements to serve in rival armed forces. Windsor argues that similar conflicts arise today, with some countries, such as Greece, imposing compulsory military service on its citizens.

Extending the wartime scenario, Windsor invokes the possibility of dual citizens being charged with treason by a foreign government for acts committed in support of Australia. He also cites an ancient British court ruling, in Calvin’s Case of 1609, that “[e]very subject is by his natural ligeance bound to obey and serve his sovereign” and therefore “to go with the King, &c. in his wars, as well within the realm as without.”

Such precedents are being dredged up because of the rising dangers of war internationally. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s government, backed by the Labor Party, has already committed Australia to join any US-led war against North Korea, the central purpose of which would be to confront China, which is regarded by Washington as the primary threat to American global hegemony.

Alongside the parliamentary witch hunt, the corporate media has mounted one propaganda campaign after another against “Chinese influence.” Over the past year, media-driven “investigations” have increasingly vilified political and business figures, Chinese-born Australians and Chinese students studying in the country as a potential fifth column of the Chinese “communist” regime.

The promotion of nationalism is also a reactionary domestic diversion. It is occurring under conditions of growing social inequality and deepening class antagonisms, generated by the destruction of full-time jobs and deteriorating health, education and social services. There have been ever-deepening attacks on basic legal and democratic rights under the cover of the endless “war on terrorism.”

The Greens once appealed to young people by posturing as opponents of war and supporters of environmental protection. Increasingly, these pretences have been abandoned. Between 2010 and 2013, the Greens supported the minority Labor Party government of Julia Gillard, which unconditionally committed itself to the Obama administration’s “pivot” to the Indo-Pacific and the underlying US war plans against China.

Like their counterparts internationally, the Greens represent an upper middle-class layer, which is ever-more integrated into the capitalist state as growing international and social tensions threaten their social and economic status.

Whichever the way the High Court rules after next week’s hearings, the verdicts will be designed to shore up the political establishment and the entire capitalist state apparatus, of which the court is a key part.

The inquisition against “foreign” loyalties will not stop with MPs. The Greens’ submission underscores the warning issued by the Socialist Equality Party in a statement on September 6:

“The demand for unquestioned ‘allegiance’ on the part of the parliamentary servants of the capitalist state is intended as a benchmark for implementation throughout society. Anyone who opposes the policies of the government will be labelled ‘un-Australian,’ a servant of foreign interests, or, under conditions of war, downright treasonous.”