The Silent Cry of Honduras

Patricio Zamorano

The crisis in Honduras is not just a matter of the serious misdeeds of the past weeks or even decade. The really dramatic problem of Honduras is the terrible communication void in which this nation has fallen for the rest of the planet. The country with the highest number of violent deaths per 100,000 in the world; a major hub of drug trafficking under the noses of one of the largest U.S. military bases in Central America; the only country in this new century that has suffered a coup in the traditional style of the 70s; and the nation that has been hit by systematic electoral fraud in the last two elections, seems to be drowning in the indifference of the entire international community.

It seems that Honduras is totally set adrift, without any concrete gesture of real, constructive, institutional reform by its imposed godfather, the United States.

The OAS admits the existence of electoral irregularities

Honduras has the word “scandal” in every corner of its battered institutions. In a chain of events that would take hundreds of pages, everything begins with the recent elections on November 26th, for which organizations such as the OAS have enumerated an enormous amount of irregularities in the electoral context.

First, the candidate of the progressive Opposition Alliance Against the Dictatorship (Alianza de Oposición Contra la Dictadura), Salvador Nasralla, was winning by 5 points, but later, after a suspicious “computer glitch” was restored, the electoral count showed the incumbent president Juan Orlando Hernández ahead by 40,000 votes. The case of Hernández borders on the comical: on the heels of the great scandal in which his presidency has now fallen, he appeared before the cameras announcing his triumph and emphasizing the “impeccable” nature of the process. In truth, it was indeed an impressive manipulation of the facts.

It is common to hear the usual Honduran political actors opine about how the results of the previous election were directly manipulated; assuming all of these denunciations were certain, the election was won by Xiomara Castro. They spoke this way, casually and openly, of course, without a concrete legal basis. These are, after all, rumors. But now in the recent election the so called rumors have returned with so much more force that they have become concrete facts that even the OAS cannot ignore. This time things proceeded by a similar modus operandi before the eyes and patience of the significant presence of election observers. The chronic delays in the count, the surprise outage of the computer system, the subsequent change in what the partial count had been showing. The same scenario obtains: thousands of suspicious votes cast, just as in 2013, and once again the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), declines to audit the ballot forms sent from thousands of polling stations. For example, more than 5,000 forms that the OAS reported were not transmitted by the TSE the night of the elections, a serious act that is impossible to conceal.

Last Sunday evening, December 17, the TSE moved hurriedly in a desperate move to ratify the corrupted results that give the electoral victory to Juan Orlando Hernández, despite an urgent tweet sent by OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro just minutes before TSE’s pronouncement. For sure, Almagro was aware of what Hernández had in mind. The Secretary General said: “A lack of certainty brings me to urge [you] not to make irresponsible pronouncements until definitive information of the OAS Observer Mission in Honduras [is made available].”

The government of Hernández ignored the pressure. Afterwards, with the fraud having been consolidated after the announcement of the TSE, Almagro asked with good reason for the elections to be repeated. Here is the relevant tweet: “General Secretariat of the @OEA_ official proposes new elections to guarantee peace and harmony in #Honduras in the face of the impossibility of determining the certainty of the results of the election.” It was also announced that the candidate Salvador Nasralla is traveling to Washington to meet with the OAS, the State Department, and human rights organizations, with solid evidence of electoral fraud.

Honduras and Venezuela: different criteria

The case of the OAS is sui generis. Notice the great personal energy of its Secretary General Luis Almagro when it comes to his special campaign against the government of Venezuela. Yet in the case of the clear cut scandal of Honduras, Almagro had remained silent until the 6^th of December, when in a communiqué he had to formally denounce the electoral fraud, a move which suggested the possibility of urging new elections. In the face of this absurd and evident electoral fraud, a historic deed, the Electoral Observer Mission (EOM) of the OAS had recognized days before that on account of the fraudulent vote it was unable to ratify winners. But the words of the Mission and the OAS had little echo in the news media throughout the region.

The OAS ought to exercise, by means of an extraordinary effort, every pressure that it can bring to bear and of which it has already given great demonstrations in the extremely personal campaign of Almagro against the government of Venezuela. But the fraud in Honduras is so scandalous, that Almagro would have absolutely no problem with regard to moral legitimacy should he exercise even a small iota of the energy in the case of Honduras as he has wasted against the democratically elected President of Venezuela.

The same argument applies to the agencies of international cooperation. It is their moral and professional obligation to exercise every pressure of which they are capable, considering all the money they have sent to Honduras, to see to it that the fraudulent election of November be annulled and that new elections be called. This time there ought to be an iron grip control over the process to avoid a new fraud. It does not matter who wins in Honduras, the candidate of the left or of the right. But the will of the electorate ought to be respected as sacred.

Face to face with corruption.

If one scratches the surface just a little bit one discovers, in the political and institutional classes in Honduras (over informal conversation at the table, a working dinner, or an academic interview), the immediate emanation of the acidic smell of corruption. One knows everything; everyone knows. The information is so concrete, so openly obvious, that the international observer feels a strange taste on the palate, thinking about the officers of the Embassy of the United States, the functionaries of the OAS, the experts of the agencies of international cooperation, privy, on a daily basis, to the same conversations, to the same scandalous revelations. Why the inaction?

Here are some clues. Months before, interviewing ex president Manuel Zelaya, I asked him: “We all analyze the causes of the coup against your government, but, what do you yourself think, President, led to your ouster?

Zelaya responded firmly, quickly. “It was on account of Cuba and Venezuela.” He was indicating that they did not oust him by force from elected office on account of the issue he advanced before the Constituent Assembly or the struggle to reform the Constitution so that the president could be re-elected. This is the official version of those who backed the coup. Zelaya hit the nail on the head when he indicated that the political and financial class of Honduras, its power intact after two centuries, would never allow a reformist government (either of the left or the right, but principally progressive, as we can glean from recent events) to survive in Honduras. Even less would these elites allow a government inspired by Chavista or Castrista Bolivarianism, which they identify as the enemy of the socio-economic and political model that guarantees their situation of privilege. The political structure of Honduras, entrenched in the corporate power of the country, is a rigid construct that has never been reformed by a popular revolution, civil war, or process of independence and colonial reform as has the rest of the Americas. In this sense, the social structure of Honduras is much like a neo-feudalism that denies the democratization of access to power and that remains rabidly opposed to the integration of new social and political groups.

 Irony: President Hernández was re-reelected without a coup

Zelaya has good reason to think this way. He comes from an area of large landowners of Honduras; he was a man of the traditional elite, to the great surprise of the sector to which he had belonged. Just a few years after having ousted him, the same right wing group around the National Party of Juan Orlando Hernández proceeded, once again in full view and scrutiny of the OAS, of the U.S. and of the international aid community, to authorize his own re-election by means of a Supreme Court selected by the President himself.

Without constitutional reform. Without a plebiscite. Without a coup. Without a world scandal. In truth: the silence of the international community is difficult to comprehend.

All of the national and international actors that condemned the consultative plebiscite of Zelaya to ask the Honduran people about reforming the Constitution to permit re-election in 2009 maintained an iron silence when president Hernández did the same thing in 2015.  There was no condemnation from the OAS. There were no threats of applying the Democratic Charter and no call for the suspension on Honduras from the Permanent Council. The U.S. did not punish the members of the golpista regime and their functionaries with economic sanctions nor suspend their travel visas. Not one notable effect.

One irregular act among many

This is not the first time the battered Constitution of Honduras has been tarnished by machinations perpetrated by the will of the elite who are in power. The country goes through an enormous institutional scandal each year, authorizing, for example, golpista Roberto Micheletti to be a potential candidate in the presidential election despite being clearly and literally disqualified (presidents of Congress are not able to be candidates for president). But the Constitutional Court of the Supreme Court in 2008 simply ignored the same Constitution and authorized Micheletti to be a potential candidate. Reform by decree.

There are deeds of the past decade that border on the absurd. The same Constitutional Court, in 2008, prevented then Vice President Elvin Santos from being a potential presidential candidate, because he had been an interim president when Manuel Zelaya left the country. In the primary campaign, Santos found an incredibly ridiculous solution. He named Mauricio Villeda as his candidate-representative, while disseminating in the media that by voting for Villeda, electors would actually be voting for him (Santos) under the banner of the Liberal Party. If Villeda won, Santos would be the candidate. Amazing.

U.S.: A billion dollars, into the void.

The subject of the U.S. is separate chapter. The country to the North has spent an impressive sum of $1.2 billion on Honduras between 2005 and 2016 (source: USAID). It is on Honduran territory that the United States has one of the largest military bases of Central America, Palmerola. This was the same base where the plane carrying Zelaya had stopped during the 2009 coup in route to expel him from the country. Generous amounts of security related funding flows from the U.S. to the Honduran armed forces and police. And despite this flow of international aid, Honduras is sunk (an irony of the meaning of its name in Spanish: “depths”) in a critical security situation that in some ways constitutes a humanitarian crisis. Thousands of Hondurans are assassinated every year (60 to 88 murders per 100 thousand inhabitants, according to sources, one of the highest rates on the planet). The drug mafia is mixed up with the State and its institutions in a form more profound than Mexico. The police are feared by the prosecutors and ministers, and the gangs terrorize the population in every corner of the country. I have witnessed how lawyers who work for the Judiciary, do not identify themselves to agents of security in the streets in order not to fall victim to possible ambushes perpetrated by the same police.

In an act that does not have an explanation, the injection of resources of the U.S. for the police and armed forces of Honduras, the same forces that ousted Zelaya, is not conditioned with regard to results. The same drug mafias, gangs and assassinations continue without respite notwithstanding the hundreds of millions of dollars spent to no effect. And with a U.S. military base a few kilometers from the capital of the country. Another scandal that does not seem to penetrate the corridors of Washington DC.

A painful poverty

The population of Honduras is so chronically poor, that the traveler can find adults in a grave state of malnutrition, as I saw personally in the Montaña de la Flor, where the vestiges of indigenous tribes survive. In this zone, even the police eat once a day, and the population sometimes goes more than a day without food. According to the World Bank, 66% of Hondurans live in poverty. A social stain on all of the Americas. A shame for the Honduran financial elite.

This entire spectrum of social realities is a product of a political reality that is harmful and toxic to the Honduran population, a reality that emanates from the very political class in power, supported, sometimes by mere inaction by the U.S., the OAS and the international cooperation community. It appears the experiment of the left represented by Zelaya has significantly radicalized these three establishments. These three actors had mostly decided simply to look the other way in the face of the recent electoral fraud, with the aim of maintaining the most conservative status quo. Already there are several former presidents of Central America subject to judicial processes for flagrant corruption fighting to escape jail. As the electoral irregularities denounced by a report of the Observer Mission of the OAS demonstrates, Hernández has won some years of protection in power, but if the rumors being discussed over the tables of Tegucigalpa or San Pedro Sula are certain, the days of impunity are numbered. Such is the case should an ethical and morally legitimate position somehow be taken by the international community.

Whitewashing: The Media’s Two Narratives on Terrorism

Ramzy Baroud

Within hours after Akayed Ullah, a Bangladeshi immigrant, allegedly detonated a pipe bomb in New York City on December 11, severely injuring himself and wounding four others, a most comprehensive official and media narrative emerged.

The formulation of the narrative concerning Ullah’s motives, radicalization and assumed hate for the US was so immaculate, one would have thought it took authorities months, not hours to compile such demanding evidence.

Strangely, Ullah’s own family was surprised by the accusation concerning their son.

However, the exact nature of what truly happened matters little. Not only was Ullah instantly found guilty by the media, all Muslims and immigrants, in fact, were.

Following each attack of this nature, Muslims in the US mobilize to fend off accusations concerning their faith, their values and their allegiance to the country in which they live.

But it is not an easy fight to win. When President Donald Trump is constantly tweeting anti-Muslim propaganda, while his administration exploits every opportunity to advance anti-immigrant initiatives, the beleaguered small community of Muslims in the US can do little to stop the rising tide of Islamophobia.

The media has played a major role in propagating the negative attitudes towards Muslims and Islam, which, in turn, provide the much-needed public support for the government to continue with its anti-Muslim measures.

Compare such attitudes with the way in which mass shootings carried out by white American men is communicated by the government and media alike.

Although mass killings by white males have proven to be the deadliest in the US, the discussion generated in the media and official discourses are centered mostly on mental illness of white attackers. In other words, there is consensus that violence perpetrated by members of the white community is not inherent to that community’s race, culture or religion.

Five years after Adam Lazna killed 20 first graders and six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, many are still at work trying to analyze Lanza’s supposed mental illness that drove him to commit such a reprehensible act.

The fact that Lanza was carrying more than 30 pounds of weapons seemed superfluous. Many pundits and politicians still refuse to engage in a discussion about guns.

The ‘mental health’ argument in also championed by Trump himself.

“Mental health is your problem here”, Trump said in a statement in response to a mass shooting by Devin Kelly, a white male who killed more than two dozen people in a Texas church last November.

Resorting to easy answers when white men kill is now the norm. Killers of other races, skin colors and nationalities, however, get entirely different treatment.

As soon as the news emerged of Ullah’s alleged bombing in New York, the Trump administration moved in full force to target immigrants. It called on Congress to end the diversity immigration lottery program, and to also shoot down chain migration – a government program that allows for easier immigration based on family connection.

The incessant media coverage and stubborn government targeting of Muslims have led to an unprecedented hysteria which, in turn, led to numerous incidents of Muslims being targeted because of their faith. Many accounts of Muslims being thrown out of airplanes, often kicking and screaming, is becoming a fact of life in the US.

When Khairuldeen Makhzoomi was kicked out of a Southwest Airlines flight last year for speaking Arabic on the phone, the agent who escorted him reprimanded him for using his mother tongue in public considering “today’s political climate.”

Anila Dualatzai was dragged down the aisle of a plane heading to Los Angeles. She was “profiled, abused, interrogated, detained, and subjected to false reporting and the trauma of racist, vitriolic public shaming precisely because she is a woman, a person of color, and a Muslim,” her attorney told the Washington Post.

While this hysteria plays well into the hands of opportunistic politicians like Trump, actual facts suggest that violence is hardly a Muslim phenomenon.

Newsweek reported on statistics showing that white men have committed most of the country’s mass killings. Since 1982, the “majority of mass shootings – 54 percent – were committed by white men,” numbers show.

Stephen Paddock, the 64-year-old white man who massacred 58 people and wounded hundreds more at the Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas last October, was only one of an ever-growing list.

Countless government officials and journalists have fanned out to find out why Paddock would carry out such a heinous act, as if a white man’s violence is a rare event in a country supposedly threatened by Blacks, Mexicans and Muslims.

Yet the truth is that the white man’s profile is the most violent in the US.

“White men commit mass shootings out of a sense of entitlement,” John Haltiwanger wrote in Newsweek.

Research conducted by Eric Madfis from the University of Washington argued in 2014 that, in the US, “middle-class Caucasian heterosexual males in their teenage years and in middle age commit mass murder … in numbers disproportionately high relative to their share of the population.”

He ascribed this finding to “white entitlement” and “heterosexual masculinity”, among other reasons.

Still, a whole race, gender and religion are not held suspect; a rule that applies to some and excludes others.

Certainly, anti-Arab and Muslim sentiment in the US has been around for generations, but it has risen sharply in the last two decades. Arabs and Muslims have become an easy scapegoat for all of America’s instabilities and failures.

But demonizing and humiliating brown-skinned men and women is certainly not the way out of the economic, political and foreign policy quagmires which American ruling elites have invited upon their country.

Such unlawful and undemocratic behavior may feed anti-Muslim hysteria a little longer, and give the likes of Trump more fodder for their useless efforts in targeting innocent men and women. But, in the long run, it will do the country much harm, damaging its democratic institutions and contributing to the culture of violence, founded on entitled white men touting guns and killing innocent people.

The Internet is Already Broken

NICK PEMBERTON

Near the end of 2014 Kim Kardashian set out to “break the internet.” She posed naked for pictures. This went great, getting 1% of entire internet activity on the day she did it. Now the worry is that such expressions of democracy will be gone when we lose net neutrality.

Net neutrality is a funny phrase. There certainly was net neutrality when leftist websites were blacklisted from Google. And when Amazon’s Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post. Not to mention that all the content we receive come from six large companies who own just about all the media we consume. It is odd to see people who solely consume corporate outlets such as MSNBC bemoaning the loss of net neutrality.

What may be more troubling than the loss of a supposedly free internet is that so many of us were fooled already. Even in a neutral setting so many of us preferred to consume the very same websites that will now be able to pay for advantages on the internet.

The term “fake news” has never quite told the whole story. The idea that there is some sort of liberal conspiracy being peddled by all mainstream news outlets is silly. These people are only liberal to hide their corporate agenda from liberals, and I suppose everyone who hates liberals. Once you count the liberals and the liberal haters you don’t have many people left. Moreover, the news isn’t necessarily purely fake that often. When ABC suspended Brian Ross it was essentially for spreading fake news. What is a more effective strategy than outward lying is telling part of the truth. Or just spinning speculation without ever presenting evidence, Russia interference in the US elections being the blueprint. All bets are off for imperialism though I think. The New York Times and the Iraq war come to mind.

The mass distractions we receive on the internet are not necessarily fake, they are just nonsense. Selfies posture as resistance. Memes function as political commentary. Angry trolling is a conversation.

The US has always been pretty good about free speech, we just are dumb enough to believe what we hear. It is rather ironic that it is now Trump who is banning words like “fetus” from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention when he himself was supposed to represent the censored silent majority, suffering under the reign of political correctness. Trump may be an authoritarian but Obama was surely one also. Look at his treatment of whistle blowers or his mass surveillance programs.

The main point here is that net neutrality has a limited value if we are echoing our corporate masters anyways. It surely is a right we deserve, and abandoning such a principle is another step towards authoritarianism. So to this extent the loss of net neutrality may be more problematic for its implications than its effect on an already docile population.

It’s not like the internet is the first thing to exit neutrality. For a country that is so outraged about private ownership of the internet where do we stand on private land? Our schools are being privatized. So are our parks. Our land, our water and our air. Is the water at Standing Rock neutral? How about air pollution? Who owns the air when certain people are profiting of of the pollution of it? Are people themselves even neutral? Look at worker relations or domestic violence. The elections are bought. Small businesses can’t compete against large ones. In a country where 1% of the population has more wealth than the bottom 99% we are worried about the neutrality of the internet.

The loss of net neutrality will effect all these things but maybe we can take this time as a chance to spend less time on the internet and more time with each other. That is not only loving each other but also learning from each other, as news sources. If one were to only read the “neutral” news you would think that mass shootings were more common than good deeds, that  everyone looked like Kim Kardashian, that Russians lurked behind every corner and that the rich only gave to charities. A world at least a degree removed from realness has always been represented on the internet.

The news on the internet is the story of six very rich people. The world is full of many more than that. The hope would be that the loss of net neutrality might open doors for us to rely on other ways to connect with people and understand our world. So far though the fear of losing net neutrality has been met with a response bred by the internet. One of instant outrage, lacking reflection. Click bait that does more to break the internet than defeat it. At this pace it’s loss will be forgotten by the next royal wedding, and we will go on consuming the truth about the world from the people who profit from its demise.

Australian government ends year with more austerity cuts

James Cogan

The economic update unveiled on Monday to the Australian government’s 2017–2018 budget contains sweeping new attacks on higher education, welfare entitlements and childcare outlays, while maintaining previously announced increases in military spending.

The original budget, brought down by the Liberal-National Coalition government of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in May, projected a deficit of $29.4 billion for 2017–2018. Successive Labor and Coalition governments have presided over significant deficits every year since the 2008 financial crisis, while promising the money markets to return the budget to surplus.

Turnbull’s first budget since the 2016 federal election was little different. Over the normal four-year projections used in treasury documents, it predicted a steady return to surplus by the 2020–2021 financial year. Like previous forecasts, it was based on what financial commentators labelled as “fanciful” expectations of global and Australian economic growth.

With this week’s Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO), Finance Minister Mathias Cormann painted an even rosier picture. It revised the deficit predication for 2017–2018 downward to $23.6 billion and increased the predicted budget surplus by 2020–2021 from $7.4 billion to $10.2 billion.

These purported improvements to the budget bottom line are the outcome of a range of contradictory factors.

A rise in commodity prices, particularly for iron ore—Australia’s largest export—has resulted in higher-than-expected company tax payments, estimated to bring in an additional $7.4 billion in revenue by 2020-2021. This was entirely cancelled out, however, by slower than expected wages growth, as millions of workers suffer stagnant or even falling real incomes.

Personal income tax is projected to be $8 billion less because wage growth is running at barely 1.9 percent, compared with a forecast of 2.5 percent. The budget nevertheless predicts that wage growth will soar to 2.75 percent in 2018-2019, and even higher in the following years. In reality, it is most likely to fall even further.

Even though the MYEFO acknowledges that overall economic growth is 2.5 percent rather than the predicted 2.75 percent, it still forecasts the figure leaping to 3 percent in 2018-2019. Despite warning signs in financial markets, MYEFO assumes that highly indebted households will continue to meet ever-rising expenses and that Australia’s overheated housing market will continue to expand.

The real “improvement” to the budget is coming from the ongoing assault on the living standards of the working class.

Draconian changes to welfare eligibility, introduced since 2013–2014 under both Labor and the Coalition, have already hit impoverished sections of the population. Now, over the four-year projections, the government expects to spend $1.5 billion less on disability support; $1.2 billion less on student allowances; and $755 million less on the aged pension. It is predicting that it will extract $405 million in “welfare debts” by direct deductions from Family Tax Benefits.

At the same time, the estimated funding for the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme—which subsidises medication—has had to be increased by $2.1 billion over four years due to higher demand. This vital area will no doubt be a future target for funding cuts, compounding the health crisis affecting growing numbers of people.

Cormann announced a new raft of austerity policies, to make up for the fact that some measures contained in the May budget were blocked by the opposition parties in the Senate, the upper house of parliament. While posturing as opponents of austerity, Labor, backed by the Greens, is responsible for making deep cuts to social services.

Among the most significant new measures is an administrative “freeze” of university funding at 2017-2018 levels for the next two financial years. This will lower spending on the sector by $2.1 billion. The Senate blocked planned outright cuts of over $2.8 billion.

Universities have already warned that the freeze will mean they will have to limit enrolments and impose cost-cutting—most likely deeper attacks on the wages and conditions of tertiary sector workers.

To gouge further “savings” from higher education, the government will attempt to place further burdens on students. From mid-2018, it will seek to lower the income threshold at which graduates must begin repaying their student debts from $52,000 to $45,000. It will also seek to impose a “cap” on student loans, preventing students borrowing more than $150,000 for medical–related degrees and $104,440 for all others.

In a particularly harsh policy, Cormann announced that the government will cut spending by $1.2 billion by forcing new migrants to Australia to wait three years before they can claim welfare, instead of the already punitive two-year waiting period. The social consequences of this measure will be severe.

The government will also seek to “save” another $1 billion through a “crackdown” on childcare providers who allegedly make excessive claims for state subsidies. This will most likely result in higher child-care costs for families.

While the MYEFO continues the process of slashing welfare programs and subsidies, it maintains unchanged the increases to military and national security spending. The defence budget will expand by over 6 percent per year to 2020–2021. Over the decade from 2017, close to $500 billion will be outlaid on the armed forces. The Federal Police and intelligence agencies are also receiving annual increases.

The aim of the austerity measures is to create sufficient “structural”—that is, permanent—reductions in budget spending to pave the way for cutting the corporate tax rate for all companies from 30 percent to 25 percent. The Coalition, with the backing of Labor opposition, is already progressively lowering the tax rate for businesses with revenue under $50 million.

Jennifer Westacott, the head of the Business Council of Australia, declared that “delivering the remainder of the government’s plan for a reduced company tax rate has to be the starting point” for policy next year.

In corporate circles, however, even the planned 25 percent rate is considered woefully inadequate to maintain “international competitiveness” for Australian-based banks and other financial operations. In the United States, the rate is being cut to 21 percent. In Singapore, it is already 17 percent and in Hong Kong, 16.5 percent.

Demands for even deeper austerity by big business and the corporate media are inevitable in 2018.

Disney to purchase 21st Century Fox for $66.1 billion, creating new mega-conglomerate

Gabriel Black 

Disney, the massive media conglomerate, announced last Thursday that it had reached a deal to purchase 21st Century Fox in a mega-merger worth $66.1 billion. The merger, if approved by the US Justice Department, will be the second largest entertainment production merger of all time, promoting an even higher degree of monopolization in the already highly consolidated entertainment and communications industry.

Disney is already the second largest media conglomerate in the world measured by revenue, taking in $52.5 billion in 2015. It follows Comcast, which owns NBC Universal and made $80.4 billion in 2016.

In addition to Disney’s signature movies and theme parks, the company owns ABC and all of its subsidiaries, Lucasfilm (Star Wars), Pixar Animation, Marvel, Touchstone Pictures, A&E Networks, Lifetime Entertainment, the History Channel and ESPN, to name just a few of its hundreds of assets. Disney also owns a 30 percent stake in Hulu, the major streaming rival to Netflix and Amazon, which, when combined with Fox’s 30 percent share, will make Disney the majority share-holder.

According to Rich Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG, a major international financial firm, the merger could lead to the elimination of up to 10,000 jobs. As part of the announcement, Disney told investors that the merger would bring $2 billion in “synergies.”

Greenfield wrote, “In order to reduce costs by upwards of $2 billion, we believe Disney will need to cut well over 5,000 jobs and the number could easily swell toward 10,000 given the high degree of overlap between the two companies around the world.”

In 2016, Disney employed roughly 195,000 people around the world. Fox employed 22,000.

According to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, Rupert Murdoch’s wealth has surged since speculation began in early November that Disney could buy out Fox. In early November, Murdoch’s wealth was valued just above $11 billion. Now it is estimated at around $13.75 billion. Bloomberg projects that Murdoch’s wealth will increase by another $2 billion between now and when the deal is completed.

This quick $4.5 billion, almost a fifty percent increase in his wealth, is a reward from Wall Street investors for the cost efficiencies—that is, job cuts and monopoly benefits—to be gained by the merger. Murdoch made $581 million in added wealth just this last Thursday, according to Bloomberg. On his shareholder call Thursday discussing the deal, he said, “The value we’re unlocking is plain to see.”

Reports indicate that Disney’s purchase of Fox is aimed partially at consolidating its position against Netflix and Amazon, as both companies challenge the business model of traditional entertainment companies by making their own shows and movies. Disney hopes to use Hulu as its rival platform to Netflix and Amazon.

According to YipitData, a combined Fox-Disney would own almost 20 percent of top Netflix TV shows. Before the merger, Disney announced that it would be taking its content off of Netflix. These shifts point to a market in which two or three vertically integrated media companies produce and distribute their content in segregated entertainment monopolies.

The further consolidation of film and television under two or three vertically integrated companies devoted to blockbuster profits does not bode well for more critical, thoughtful works.

The mega-merger between Disney and Fox is just one of a series of recent consolidations in the entertainment and communications industry, as well as the economy as a whole. In 2016, AT&T announced that it would buy Time Warner for $85 billion, creating a vertically integrated telecommunications-media giant. The deal is still under review by the Trump Administration, which is purportedly requiring Time Warner to sell off CNN separately, in a form of political retaliation against the network.

This huge merger agreement followed a deal fully completed in 2013, in which Comcast bought NBC Universal from General Electric, valuing NBC Universal at $30 billion.

These deals, however large, are only a reflection of the trend towards monopoly in the general economy. The past 10 years have seen record-breaking mergers and acquisitions, with 2015 being the largest year on record.

To name just a few of the major deals:

* In 2015, Dow Chemical bought DuPont for $131 billion, creating a chemical, agricultural powerhouse.

* Anheuser-Busch bought SAB Miller for $131 billion.

* Heinz bought Kraft for $101 billion.

* Charter bought Time Warner Cable for $78.7 billion.

* In 2016, Bayer bought Monsanto for $66 billion.

* ChemChina bought Syngenta for $43 billion.

* This year, CVS Health announced the purchase of health insurer Aetna for $70 billion.

* Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal reported that Ascension Health and Providence St. Joseph Health were in talks about a merger between that would create the largest hospital chain in the US.

Trump’s massive tax cuts for corporations and investors are expected to accelerate the wave of acquisitions and mergers. Such parasitic activities, along with stock buybacks and dividend increases, increase the wealth of the financial elite while diverting resources from productive investment. Far from creating new, decent-paying jobs, the result of the latest windfall for the rich will be intensified austerity, more job cuts and increased exploitation of the working class.

Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital deepens crisis of Arab leaders

Jean Shaoul 

On Friday, Israeli soldiers killed at least four Palestinians and injured hundreds more in clashes in East Jerusalem and the West Bank and Gaza Strip, including wheelchair-bound Ibrahim Abu Thurayeh, 29, who has no legs. It happened as thousands of Palestinians took to the streets after Friday prayers to protest the decision of US President Donald Trump to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

Israeli security forces, which fired tear-gas, stun grenades and rubber-coated steel bullets against the protestors, have killed 10 Palestinians, injured 1,933 and arrested at least 260 since Trump announced his decision on December 6.

The move, overturning decades of official US policy, marks an end to the charade of the so-called “two-state solution” inaugurated under the 1993 Oslo Accords. It has precipitated a political crisis for the Palestinian Authority and all of the Arab regimes, which utilised endless negotiations on realising a truncated state as a cover for their betrayal of the Palestinian people.

The Oslo Accords established the Palestinian bourgeoisie as masters of a semi-state apparatus and a police force to be used against workers and poor farmers. In contrast, the wealth of a tiny layer of Palestinian businessmen soared, in large part thanks to handouts from the imperialist and regional powers.

The promise of a Palestinian state—on non-contiguous pieces of land to be negotiated under the auspices of US imperialism—facilitated the reality of expanding Israeli settlements and the decimation of the Palestinians’ social, economic and political conditions.

Trump’s announcement has given the green light to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government to step up its suppression of the Palestinians and its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from East Jerusalem.

Neither Fatah, the dominant faction in the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) and the Palestinian Authority (PA), which has ruled the West Bank since 1994, nor its Islamist rival, Hamas, which has ruled the besieged Gaza Strip since 2006, commands significant popular support.

The 82-year-old Mahmoud Abbas assumed the presidency of the PA after Yasser Arafat’s death, under highly suspicious circumstances, in 2004. Abbas resurrected the peace talks that Arafat had rejected in 2000 as an abject surrender to Israel. However, there have been no genuine negotiations since then. Everyone now knows there never will be, thanks to Trump. A recent opinion poll found that 67 percent of Palestinians want Abbas to resign.

Saeb Erekat, a former Palestinian negotiator, squirmed in his efforts to cover the PA’s exposed rear. “Unfortunately, President Trump just destroyed any possibility of two states,” he complained. The only alternative, he said, was a one-state solution with equal democratic rights for all. This is a pipedream within the framework of the existing imperialist carve-up of the Middle East and the political domination of the Palestinian and Arab bourgeoisie. In practical terms, it expresses the striving of the Palestinian bourgeoisie for a deal with the Zionist regime in Israel and Washington within which it would be guaranteed a share of the economic and political spoils.

Hamas too has sought the support of various regional powers to push for the creation of a Palestinian mini-state, but its room for manoeuvre has been severely curtailed by the defeat suffered by its parent organisation, the Muslim Brotherhood, in Egypt, its growing alienation from Iran and Syria over its support for the US-backed Islamist insurgency against the Assad regime in Syria, and the siege led by Saudi Arabia and Egypt against Hamas’s patron, Qatar.

Hamas has been backed by Turkey, but it is being pushed ever more firmly into the same orbit as Fatah—around Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Trump’s announcement on Jerusalem follows on the heels of Hamas’s announced reconciliation with the PA and its offer to share the governance of Gaza.

Hamas thus plays the same essential role as its secular rival—as a mechanism through which the Palestinians are policed and their plight utilised by the Arab regimes as part of their bargaining with Washington and other imperialist powers.

Following Trump’s announcement on Jerusalem, Hamas made the pro-forma call for “days of rage” and a new intifada that would again pit an essentially defenceless people against the most powerful armed force in the region. But many within Palestine recognise the dead end into which they have been led after two failed intifadas and numerous military assaults that only increased their suffering.

The Arab regimes have issued the required statements opposing Trump’s decision, but their chief concern is that it “needlessly stirred more conflict in an already volatile region” and focused opposition to their own rule.

Egypt’s military junta, headed by Abdul Fattah el-Sisi, made sure the media and the clerical establishment downplayed Trump’s announcement so as not to further inflame tensions already running high due to soaring food prices, unemployment and poverty. El-Sisi has banned rallies, including one outside the Arab League headquarters in downtown Cairo on December 9, when an emergency meeting of foreign ministers met to coordinate the response to Washington.

El-Sisi withdrew his generals from the Gaza Strip, where they were trying to further the reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah, to make it clear that Cairo did not support Hamas’s response to the announcement.

No less compromised is Saudi Arabia. The feudal monarchy is seeking to build an alliance with Israel in line with US imperialism’s preparations for a regional war with Iran, their regional rival. Trump has spoken of the “really good feeling towards Israel” in Saudi Arabia following his visit to both countries in May. Crown Prince Muhammed Bin Salman told Trump that while Riyadh publicly objects to Washington’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and the US embassy’s relocation to Jerusalem, neither is a bar to Saudi engagement with Israel or detrimental to Israel’s moves in the Middle East.

Salman summoned Abbas to Riyadh last month, where he dictated the terms of a US-Israeli “peace” that would leave Jerusalem and virtually all of the West Bank settlements in Israeli hands and deny Palestinian refugees the right of return to a state whose borders would remain under Israeli control. It followed a secret visit by the Saudi crown prince to Israel in September for discussions with Netanyahu, unprecedented Saudi calls for normalisation with Israel and an informal economic rapprochement with visits by Saudi businessmen.

Last month, Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Gadi Eisenkot said that Israel was ready to share “intelligence information” with Saudi Arabia, as they both had a common interest in standing up to Iran. A few days later, Israeli Communications Minister Ayoub Kara issued an invitation to Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh to visit Israel.

Last week, Israel received a 25-strong delegation from the interfaith group “This is Bahrain,” which was on a five-day tour of religious sites in Israel. Its mission to convey a “message of peace” to Israel apparently had the support of King Hamid of Bahrain, whose fragile control of his throne is dependent on Saudi Arabia’s armed forces. A delegation of Israeli business leaders is to visit Bahrain in January. Israel has backed Riyadh’s blockade on Qatar.

Trump’s announcement on Jerusalem points to the growing danger not only of renewed and bloody conflict between Israel and Palestine, but of a regional war, in which Arab, Jewish, Iranian and other national and ethnic groups will be pitted against each other.

The only way forward is the adoption of a perspective for the unification of the working class and poor peasants across all national divisions against their common enemy—the imperialist powers and the corrupt bourgeois regimes through which they exercise ultimate control. The goal must be to bring an end to the division of the region into hostile nation states based on the brutal exploitation of its peoples and the forging of the United Socialist States of the Middle East.

Lafarge affair exposes French ruling elite’s funding of Islamic State terrorists

Francis Dubois & Alex Lantier 

The investigation into the financing of the Islamic State (IS) terrorist militia by construction firm Lafarge-Holcim exposes the fraud of the so-called “war on terror” waged by France and its NATO allies. In fact, over five years, a multi-billion-dollar firm that leads the CAC-40 French stock exchange deliberately funded a terrorist militia that carried out attacks across Europe and in France.

This directly raises the role of the state and the Socialist Party (PS) government of former President François Hollande. It reacted to the deadly terror attacks of January and November 2015 in France by imposing a state of emergency and promoting the neo-fascist National Front (FN), inviting its leader Marine Le Pen to the Elysée Palace. It also used the state of emergency as a pretext to brutally repress protests against its anti-worker labor law—claiming that protests undermined the police work of the “war on terror” and the unification of France in a struggle against Islamism.

At that time—according to investigations of six Lafarge executives in the last two weeks, including ex-CEO Bruno Lafont and general manager Eric Olsen—Lafarge was financing the very terror militias in Syria whose attacks were cited as a reason to impose the state of emergency.

Le Monde called the investigation of Lafarge executives “a political thunderbolt,” adding: “This is the first time a CAC-40 CEO has been implicated in terrorist activity.”

Moreover, Lafarge resorted to lies and the production of false documents to justify its financing of terror groups. The National Service of Judiciary Customs (SNDJ), who carried out the questioning of Lafarge executives that led to their indictment, concluded that the company’s French management “allowed for these financial transfers by creating false accounting documents.”

The evidence provided by Lafarge itself refutes its alibi—the claim that it paid off the terror groups only because IS was threatening a Lafarge cement factory located near Raqqa, the IS stronghold in Syria. A report by London-based auditor PriceWaterhouseCoopers, commissioned by Lafarge, found that Lafarge paid $13 million to various Islamist militias in Syria from 2011 to 2015. This financing went on into 2015, well after Lafarge closed its Raqqa cement factory in September 2014.

According to lawyers for Sherpa—the NGO that first brought a suit in 2016 over this issue for “endangerment of human life,” and thus triggered an investigation for “financing a terrorist entity” by three anti-terror or financial judges in the Paris prosecutor’s office—most of this money went directly or indirectly to IS.

Another report by US law firm Baker McKenzie, also commissioned by Lafarge, found that Lafarge’s Syrian subsidiary alone paid nearly $5.6 million to various terror militias, including $500,000 to IS. The son of former Syrian Defense Minister Firas Tlass reportedly served as the intermediary for the payments.

Thus, while the French political establishment was debating in 2014 or 2015 whether to bomb IS in Syria, Lafarge was still financing the terror group. Hollande ultimately gave the order to bomb IS positions in Syria after the 13 November 2015 attacks. Until then, France only bombed IS positions in Iraq, leaving open the possibility of profiting from IS actions in Syria as part of its war for regime change in that country.

What emerges from this inquiry is not the image of a company that stayed in Syria, as its executives claimed, to represent France or to extract profits from France’s largest non-oil-related investment in the Middle East, and therefore had to pay protection money to IS. Rather, a deliberate decision was taken to finance organizations that the PS government was at the time presenting as legitimate allies of convenience in its war, carried out with the aid of Washington and the other NATO powers, to topple the Syrian government.

A bitter battle is proceeding inside official circles in France over this scandal, which financial and judicial circles in the US and UK are also clearly following closely.

This week, Sherpa asked the prosecutor’s office to launch an inquiry for obstruction of justice, accusing Lafarge of having aimed to “buy the silence” of its six indicted executives and to “get ahead of the interrogations that they might be subjected to.”

The NGO repeated its demand that the investigation not concentrate only on Lafarge, but also reveal the role of French state authorities at the time. Its spokesmen criticized “the nervousness, the complacency, or even the complicity” of these authorities. Its lawyer, Marie Dosé, asked: “Who can guarantee that in the meantime, part of the money paid to IS did not ultimately go to finance a terror attack in France?”

In fact, the Lafarge affair raises not only the role of France but of all the major NATO imperialist powers, including the United States. Starting in 2011, these powers set up with the Persian Gulf oil sheikdoms networks to arm and finance the Syrian terror groups to the tune, ultimately, of billions of dollars. This has devastated Syria, claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, and forced over 10 million Syrians to flee their homes.

The media and political authorities in the NATO countries tried to downplay as much as possible the politically criminal character of this war—and in particular the fact, admitted by US officials in 2012, that NATO’s allies in Syria were terror militias tied to Al Qaeda.

The Lafarge affair also highlights the reactionary and lying role of petty-bourgeois pseudo-left groups like France’s New Anti-capitalist Party, who were supporters and accomplices of the war. They shamelessly presented Islamist militias in Syria as products of a mass popular uprising. As the CAC-40 financed various Islamist militias on the ground in Syria, a former French colony, these groups took up the task of promoting the lie that this was a Syrian democratic revolution.

Under these conditions, the question must be asked: why are PS officials not on trial, starting with former President Hollande himself? Hollande took the extraordinary step in 2012 to recognize the Islamist militias in Syria as that country’s legitimate government. A document issued by Sherpa this October has in fact demanded that French ambassadors to Syria and former PS Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius be investigated. However, French media are largely downplaying this central aspect of the affair.

Lafarge’s actions in Syria also underscore the politically illegitimate and fraudulent character of the state of emergency, whose anti-democratic provisions President Emmanuel Macron has now adopted permanently as law by passing his anti-terror legislation. While imperialism financed IS terrorists, it used their crimes in Europe to justify repressing constitutionally-protected protests by workers and youth against attempts to suppress their social and democratic rights, acquired over generations of struggle by the working class.

US workplace fatalities rose 7 percent in 2016

Jerry White 

There were 5,190 fatal workplace injuries recorded in the United States in 2016, up seven percent from the 4,836 workers killed on the job in 2015, according to figures released by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics Tuesday.

The 2016 data—the most current made available by the US government—means that annual workplace fatalities have increased three consecutive years since 2013. Last year was also the first year since 2008 in which more than 5,000 fatalities have been recorded by the Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (CFOI) since 2008. The fatal injury rate increased to 3.6 per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers, up from 3.4 in 2015 and the highest rate since 2010.

The number of reported deaths is inching up towards the pre-Great Recession levels of 5,214 (2008) and 5,657 (2007). This suggests that the decline in fatalities in 2009 (4,551) and 2010 (4,693) was chiefly due to a sharp reduction in the number of employed workers and total hours worked after the 2008 economic crash. Total hours worked fell from 272 billion in 2008 to 255 billion in 2009, according to the BLS. The number has now surpassed pre-recession levels, rising to an estimated 277 billion in 2015 and 282 billion in 2016, with the number of workplace fatalities rising along with it.

The rising death toll in the final years of the Obama administration coincided with stagnating wages, the proliferation of low-paid, temporary and part-time jobs, and the shifting of health care and pension costs onto the backs of the working class. In other words, the doubling of the stock market, the record corporate profits and the historic transfer of wealth to the top during Obama’s so-called economic recovery was achieved primarily through ramping up working-class exploitation and over the lives and bones of tens of thousands of workers.

This period coincided with the suppression of the class struggle by the trade unions, which virtually banned all strikes by workers who were determined to recover their lost wages and benefits and improve working conditions. The strikes that were called, including the 2015 oil refinery strike, when workers explicitly demanded an end to grueling work schedules and fatigue, were isolated and defeated by the unions. The period from 2007 to 2016 was the lowest decade on record for work stoppages involving 1,000 workers or more since the BLS began recording such figures in 1947.

In 2016, injuries involving transportation incidents remained the most common fatal event, accounting for 40 percent (2,083) of the fatalities. Deaths caused by exposure to harmful substances or environments, including electrocution, rose 22 percent in 2016.

Fatal work injuries from falls, slips, or trips continued a general upward trend that began in 2011, increasing six percent to 849 in 2016 and 25 percent overall since 2011. Falls increased more than 25 percent in 2016 for roofers, carpenters, tree trimmers and pruners, and heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers.

In a measure of the deep social crisis and the unions’ abandonment of the most elemental protections for workers, workplace suicides increased by 62 to 291 in 2016, the most suicides since the CFOI began reporting data in 1992. Overdoses from the nonmedical use of drugs or alcohol while on the job increased from 165 in 2015 to 217 in 2016, a 32-percent increase. Overdose fatalities have increased by at least 25 percent annually since 2012.

Workplace homicides also increased, by 83 cases to 500 in 2016, the highest homicide figure since 2010. Overall violence and other injuries by persons or animals increased 23 percent to become the second-most common fatal event in 2016.

The occupations with the highest rate of fatalities were:

• Farming, fishing and forestry occupations (24.9 fatalities per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers), with deaths among agricultural workers, which include migrant workers, accounting for more than half of the total. The number of fatalities among loggers increased from 67 in 2015 to 91.

• Transportation and material moving (15.5 per 100,000) accounted for more than a quarter of all work-related fatalities. The number of workers killed last year was up 7 percent to 1,388, the highest count since 2007.

• Construction and extraction (12.4 per 100,000) accounted for 970 deaths. This includes first-line supervisors of construction and extraction workers with 134 fatal injuries, and roofers with 101.

Occupations with increases greater than 10 percent in the number of fatal work injuries in 2016 include food preparation and serving-related occupations (64 percent); leisure and hospitality sector (32 percent); installation, maintenance, and repair occupations (20 percent); building and grounds cleaning and maintenance occupations (14 percent); and sales and related occupations (11 percent).

Foreign-born workers make up about one-fifth of the total fatal work injuries. Thirty-seven percent of these workers were born in Mexico, followed by 19 percent from Asian countries.

Asian workers accounted for 160 fatal injuries, up from 114 in 2015 and the highest percentage increase (40 percent) among any race or ethnic origin. There was a nominal decline in the number of reported deaths of Latino workers, from 903 in 2015 to 879 in 2016.

African-American workers had a large percentage increase (19 percent), with 587 fatal injuries compared to 495 in 2015.

The overwhelming majority of workers suffering fatal injuries (3,481) were white. Men of all races accounted for 4,803 deaths, while 387 women were killed at work in 2016.

Reflecting the trend of workers laboring for longer years due to the lack of any retirement security, workers age 55 years and over had 1,848 fatal injuries, the highest number for this cohort since CFOI began reporting national data in 1992. In 1992, workers age 55 and over accounted for 20 percent of fatalities; in 2016, they accounted for 36 percent. These workers also have a higher fatality rate than other age groups.

The raw data provides only a glimpse of the human suffering that the capitalist system visits upon workers and their families. Since the beginning of the month alone, reported fatal accidents have taken the lives of: Yesenia Espinoza, 31-year-old construction worker and a mother of two, at a Texas oil refinery; Bruce Biron, a 55-year-old employee at the Ethan Allen furniture plant in Beecher Falls, Vermont; construction worker Charles Jones, 57, of Shannon, North Carolina; Ivan Bridgewater, a 41-year-old electrician and father of a two-year-old child, who was killed at Ford’s Kentucky Truck Plant in Louisville; Alfred Cadena, a 61-year-old steelworker at the ArcelorMittal mill in East Chicago, Illinois; William Stubbs, a 51-year-old United Parcel Service worker near Atlanta, Georgia; and 62-year-old Samuel Martinez, a Guatemalan native and a father who was killed at a meatpacking plant in Canton, Ohio.

The new report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics has been ignored by the corporate-controlled media, which is consumed instead by the campaign over alleged sexual misconduct. As of this writing, none of the major news outlets covered the report, with the exception of the Wall Street Journal, which focused its article on the rise in drug and alcohol deaths.

The media and politicians from both the Democratic and Republican parties sense that any broader awareness of this industrial carnage will only further incense workers who are already angered over Trump’s massive tax giveaway to the rich, historically unprecedented levels of social inequality in America and the plans of the ruling class to gut whatever is left of safety and health regulations in order to further boost corporate profits.

India-EU Partnership for Non-Proliferation: Challenges and Opportunities

Manpreet Sethi


Despite being a strong economic entity of 28 major European countries, and India’s largest trading partner, the European Union (EU) does not figure prominently in India’s foreign policy conversation. The general perception of the bloc has been one of an economic player with little political weight and influence in international relations. The India-EU political relationship has been particularly constrained in the dimension of nuclear non-proliferation. But, the situation might be changing in contemporary times. Given the increased focus of the EU itself on non-proliferation and its changed view of India, given India’s own outreach on the uniqueness of its relationship with the cause and instruments of non-proliferation, and given the transformed international context, there is an opportunity for the long-standing estrangement to blossom into a non-proliferation partnership. 

Among the traditional roadblocks in cooperation between India and EU has been the latter’s own lack of focus on non-proliferation in the 1970s-1980s, a period in which India was grappling with growing nuclear and missile proliferation from China to Pakistan and beyond. Engaged as the EU was until the early 1990s on internal consolidation issues, there was no unitary approach on the risks from nuclear non-proliferation. This issue, in fact, came into the EU's sharp focus only in the run up to the NPT Review and Extension Conference in 1995. It was then that the EU put its weight behind the unconditional and indefinite extension of the NPT, a treaty which has never been a favourite with India. Three years later when India felt the imperative to demonstrate its nuclear weapons capability through the conduct of tests, the EU (as a bloc) displayed little understanding for Indian security compulsions, though some member states such as France were less critical. Subsequently, EU’s continued insistence on the universality of the NPT and its championing of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) have been among the major reasons for keeping it distant from India.

The relationship, however, began to show signs of change in the first half of the 2000s. The two entered into a Strategic Partnership in 2004 and this presaged the EU's ability to become a facilitator in India’s accommodation into the non-proliferation regime once the US began the process in 2005. Of course, some of the EU member states did not find this easy in view of India’s ‘defiance’ of the NPT. The issue of making an exception for India in the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) was vociferously projected as a test case for EU’s own commitment to non-proliferation. Some EU member states still argue as before that allowing India access to international nuclear commerce without getting it to accept a non-nuclear weapons status under the NPT amounts to undermining the regime. 

However, India’s proactive outreach to the EU as a whole, and to its individual members, has enabled a better understanding of Indian support for the principles of non-proliferation despite its inability to join the NPT in its current formulation. EU support, en masse, for India’s membership of the NSG would, in fact, help to underline, not undermine, the distinction between responsible and irresponsible nuclear behaviour and encourage non-proliferation. It is a specious argument to tie India’s membership to the NSG with similar treatment of other non-NPT states. Especially so, when the cases are so dissimilar in their non-proliferation history, behaviour, nuclear doctrines, and capability build-up, leave alone in fomenting dangers of nuclear terrorism from state support for non-state actors. The EU can help mark this distinction and rapidly change the course of India-EU non-proliferation partnership for the benefit of the larger international community.

Another aspect that is different today and bodes well for India-EU cooperation is EU’s own wider focus on the issue of non-proliferation. After having tasted success in the conclusion of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran in which the EU played a seminal role, the body has become more conscious of its own potential. This awakening is happening simultaneously with the relative retreat of the US under President Donald Trump from the major global non-proliferation issues. Therefore, India and EU find themselves on the same side in arguing for the full and effective implementation of the Iran deal, diplomatic handling of the US-North Korea stand-off, concerns on terrorism, including nuclear terrorism, and support for export controls and nuclear safety. 

Many potential areas for a non-proliferation partnership, therefore, can be identified. The first of these could be cooperation in nuclear security, including through collaboration between the Centres of Excellence on both sides that could undertake joint/complementary research in nuclear forensics, training of customs or border officials, or sharing of information or best practices on cyber challenges staring commonly at all in the coming times. Joint research and development on new and more proliferation resistant reactors as also the nuclear safety dimension is another area ripe with possibilities. It may be mentioned that the European Atomic Energy Community (EURATOM) and Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) have envisaged an agreement on R&D cooperation in peaceful uses of nuclear energy, as also on fusion energy research. 

Another area of partnership can be found in promotion of nuclear disarmament through joint work on verification. Many countries of the EU, as also India, are skeptical of the ability of the recently concluded treaty on prohibition of nuclear weapons (more colloquially called the ban treaty) to be able to achieve a nuclear weapons-free world. Among the drawbacks of the treaty is its inability to have fleshed out the thorny issues of how to verifiably get rid of existing nuclear weapons. Indeed, lack of verification procedures and mechanisms remains an impediment to the acceptance of the feasibility of disarmament. This is an area that needs collaborative effort and the EU and India could find some common ground to work here. 

Having remained estranged on non-proliferation for many decades, India and EU have plenty of scope for a meaningful partnership in the current times. There is a shared concern on non-proliferation which is perhaps being felt with equal intensity, and there is a willingness to explore common solutions. The possibilities are immense and must be exploited prudently by both sides to further a cause that is central to international security.