Understanding Nelson Mandela’s Complex Legacy Honors Him The Most

Doug Allen

When Nelson Mandela died on December 5, 2013 at the age of 95, the outpouring of praise from the political elite and establishment media around the world was overwhelming. In larger-than-life terms, Mandela was lionized and romanticized as the world’s most admired human being.

In some ways, such praise is encouraging in our age when the wealthy and powerful, usually lacking any admirable values, are held up by their mass media as our success stories. In a world with such dehumanizing, violent, and unjust images and unworthy role models, the overwhelming praise for Mandela is hopeful. His was a life of dedicated struggle for freedom, self-sacrifice, suffering, courage, and admirable moral, economic, and political values.

In other ways, such praise is hollow, hypocritical, self-serving, and troubling, especially when uttered by many who condemned Mandela during his lifetime of struggles for freedom and who continue to uphold the most anti-Mandela priorities and values. The powerful, lavish in their praise for Mandela, conveniently fail to mention how our economic and political elite favored white apartheid South Africa and classified Mandela as a “terrorist.” During the Nixon Administration, the Kissinger Doctrine singled out white supremacist, apartheid South Africa as one of America’s pivotal allies. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher opposed the anti-apartheid divestment movement, despised the “terrorist” Mandela and opposed his release from prison. Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense and later Vice President under George Bush, was extreme in expressing his contempt for Mandela, viciously labeling him a terrorist who should not be freed.

In general, those with corporate economic, political, and military power in the U.S. identified with the anti-Mandela white power elite in South Africa, who were pro-Western, anti-Communist, and provided access to South Africa’s diamonds and other vast economic resources and their exploited labor. Indeed, the elite professing current admiration for Mandela conveniently fail to note that he remained on the U.S. terrorist list until 2008, even while he served as President of South Africa’s first multiracial democratic government.

The establishment now praises Mandela by emphasizing his great humanity and his ability to forgive his enemies, even those who imprisoned him for 27 years. Yet it conveniently omits his radical critique of U.S. and other unjust relations of domination, corporate capitalism, imperialism, inequality and exploitation, militarism and war making, racism and other forms of oppression.

It is important to distinguish between celebrating Mandela, in which there is so much to celebrate in appropriating what we can learn and apply from his life and values, and packaging and commodifying him. In reducing Nelson Mandela to a celebrity, those with power define how we should honor him. They selectively soften a completely political person who repeatedly proclaimed “the struggle is my life.” In return, we get a fake and depoliticized icon, not a complex human being with strengths and weaknesses.

What exacerbates this problem is the global yearning of so many who suffer, including many oppressed and impoverished South Africans, to regard the very human leader as a kind of Messiah figure. In fairness, Mandela also contributed to this celebrity transformation, especially during the last two decades of his life. Partially based on very practical calculations, but enhanced by some personality weaknesses, Mandela, for all of his integrity, enjoyed rubbing shoulders with the rich and the powerful.

Therefore, in assessing the significance of Nelson Mandela for us today, we are confronted with many contradictory questions: Which Nelson Mandela? Do we accept the disempowering narrative in which Mandela is celebrated as a kind of Messianic leader who will save us and overcome widespread injustice? Or do we accept a Mandela narrative more consistent with how he actually viewed his struggles as a remarkable but flawed human being; a complex narrative we can selectively appropriate in ways that are contextually relevant to our social justice struggles?

Mandela was primarily a revolutionary, a freedom fighter for equality and justice. As he developed as a freedom fighter, he developed his remarkable capacity for self-control, controlling his emotions, self-discipline, strength of will, focus, and seeing the world with its injustices clearly so that one could respond intelligently and most effectively.

Mandela also emphasized the importance of core principles, of which one could then work out appropriate tactics and strategy. He was a radical egalitarian who believed in the core principle that everyone should have equal rights. During the 1980s while in prison and after his release on February 11, 1990, he focused on the core belief that South Africa should become a multiracial, democratic, constitutional, unified nation with a one-person, one-vote basis.

Although he experienced so much racism, classism, exploitation, humiliation, and inhumanity, Mandela believed that human beings are basically good, which was central to his remarkable focus on forgiveness. Not only are human beings basically good, but if you approach them as if they are, it will more likely bring out the best in them.

In contrast to our dominant Western view of the separate individual with one’s individualistic orientation, Mandela emphasized the basic interconnectedness and unity of life. This is often expressed through the African concept of Ubuntu: I am an integral part of a meaningful whole, and I am human only in relation to others. This belief system was part of the tribal decision-making process of Mandela’s youth in which group consensus was valued over conflict; in his view of his African National Congress as a collective, in which others were “comrades” and part of a unified community; and his emphasis on restorative justice, depersonalizing evil, and struggling for freedom and equality in which each one of us can realize our true interconnected unity.

Although Mandela should be seen as a freedom fighter in the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi, who spent 21 years in South Africa, and Martin Luther King, Jr., he did not fully endorse their views of nonviolence. Mandela personally disliked violence, but he disagreed with earlier African National Congress policies upholding nonviolence starting with its founding in 1912; the position of Chief Albert Luthuli, the proponent of nonviolence and head of the ANC, who had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1960, as was Mandela in 1993; and the philosophies of Gandhi and King, both of whom he greatly admired. For Mandela, nonviolence is not an absolute principle, philosophy, or way of life. In different contexts, where nonviolence is not possible or effective, the use of violence may be justified.

Nelson Mandela’s real legacy raises difficult questions about the contexts within which Mandela and we live, and how they reveal limitations of what we can achieve. These contextual power structures and relations are both limiting and enabling. From his youth and throughout his life, Mandela was willing to take big risks, defy authority, challenge or evade status quo limitations, and radically change his own positions. But there were always real economic, political, military, cultural, and historical limitations on his remarkable achievements. In other words, in dealing with the real world, and not some utopian world of his imagination, Mandela had many personal and political setbacks, and he was necessarily limited in the extent to which he and his comrades could reshape their South African world in ways that reflected his vision.

It is certainly open to debate as to how Nelson Mandela understood the changing limits throughout his life, and whether he redefined his positions in the most adequate ways. A small sample of such topics on contextual limits would include the following: Mandela’s earlier anti-white, Africanist view of the African National Conference as only open to blacks and his later formulations of a multiracial ANC and South Africa; his earlier anti-Communist views and exclusion of Communists from the ANC and his later embrace of important Communists as among his mentors and closest comrades in the ANC; his conclusion that policies of nonviolence had become ineffective and suicidal, with his launching of the Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK, the Spear of the Nation) in 1961 as the arm of the ANC dedicated to armed struggle directed at weakening the hold of the white apartheid regime; his conclusion while in prison that the liberation forces could not defeat the white racist regime through armed struggle; his subsequent decision, defying the ANC positions on negotiating and on collective leadership, that he would negotiate on his own with representatives of the white power structure; and most controversially, his secret meetings and negotiations with the most powerful white economic leaders after his release from prison that led to radical shifts in his own values and policies.

The ongoing debate often focuses on what limits necessitated changes in values, priorities, and policies and which changes were not necessary but reflected disastrous shifts, concessions, and even betrayals. This is significant in terms of Mandela’s ineffectiveness in realizing many of his major goals during his Presidency. It is especially significant when examining Mandela’s post-apartheid, independent South Africa with growing class inequality, incredible poverty and frustration and violence among the black masses, continuing white power and privilege, and the rapid emergence of a corrupt, wealthy, black elite.

Through his secret negotiations with the white power elite, Mandela accepted loan arrangements with the International Monetary Fund and its structural adjustment requirements, endorsed what has been labeled as “the U.S. Consensus Plan,” and adopted policies of neoliberalism promoted by globalized corporate capitalism. The results for the overwhelming majority of South Africa have been disastrous.

In fairness, the situation that confronted Mandela was very complex and daunting with South Africa’s large debt; the collapse of the Soviet Union and the aggression of triumphalist globalized capitalism; the fact that Mandela and the ANC were part of a freedom movement with limited knowledge of economics and of the politics of running a nation; and, most importantly, Mandela’s understandable immediate priority of avoiding a likely civil war, with an incredible bloodbath, and creating a unified, multiracial, democratic nation that would not repeat the patterns of extreme divisiveness, dictatorship, tribalism, religious hatred and violence, and genocide found throughout Africa.

It is easy to second guess and have a critical analysis in hindsight, recognizing what has happened to South Africa and the globalized world, but it is fair to ask whether Nelson Mandela was pressured, flattered, and seduced by those with dominant power in ways that greatly sabotaged and subverted his vision, core values, and priorities, often expressed upon his release from prison and to the end of his life. Mandela is often praised for adopting a more “mature” and realistic “pragmatism,” but questions remain as to whether he compromised too much and unwisely gave away concessions that were not pragmatically necessary. Did he give such a high priority to overcoming the fears of whites and winning over their trust that he deemphasized the needs of the disadvantaged masses and what was needed for radical changes in the unjust power relations?

“Apartheid” is a Dutch Afrikaans word in South Africa meaning “separateness.” It was the name used for an economic, political, legal, and social system of the separation and control of black Africans and other nonwhites by the dominant white minority. It finally became the official system of apartheid or “separate development” of the Afrikaner National Party that ruled South Africa from 1948 until 1994.

Educating ourselves about the system of apartheid, showing solidarity with the liberation movement in South Africa and throughout the world, and exposing U.S. and University of Maine complicity in profiting from apartheid became major issues at UMaine, starting in the late 1970s and continuing for a decade. In 1982, the University of Maine (and the Maine System) agreed to divest all of their holdings in corporations and banks doing business in South Africa (one-third of the principle portfolio). We became one the first ten universities in the U.S. to divest completely. It took six more years of intense organizing and struggle before the semi-private University of Maine Foundation agreed to divest its large holdings in apartheid South Africa. We had the sense of a spectacular, rare, significant, and meaningful victory.

At this celebratory event, I read some of Mandela’s heroic and defiant speech at the Ravonia Trial in 1964 before his imprisonment. This included his words that had so inspired us, proclaiming that he was prepared to die for freedom: “I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination.” Mandela continued: “I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

In 1990, after his dramatic release from prison, Mandela went on a tour of the United States that included being honored at a huge evening gathering at Yankee Stadium in New York. A group of us, who had been anti-apartheid activities for many years, gathered during the day at a church for workshops and celebrations. Suddenly, to our great surprise, Nelson Mandela appeared, much to the overwhelming tearful and joyful responses of the activists. I’ll always remember his words. “Tonight, all of the famous influential politicians and dignitaries will praise me. However, I want you to know that I’ll never forget who my real friends are, those who struggled all those years against the apartheid system and for my freedom.” In the last years of his life, Mandela made similar kinds of statements.

While preparing several Nelson Mandela talks after his death and in writing this article, it struck me how most students and community members easily admire Mandela and his message and genuinely believe in equality, freedom, democracy, and the need to overcome the injustices and oppressions of economic exploitation, racism, sexism, and environmental destruction. But we feel powerless, are so easily discouraged, and are often cynical. When one begins to appreciate what Mandela went through, his suffering and sacrifice and long struggle, it really puts into perspective how easily we become discouraged, feel hopeless, and give up.

Mandela leaves us with a legacy of hope; that even in the darkest of times, we can live meaningful value-based lives of integrity and bring about dramatic, qualitative changes in the unjust status quo. Mandela shows us that we can live lives of admirable courage, even when we have deep fears and insecurities, as he often had. In an age when we are socialized to desire instant rewards and gratifications, Mandela teaches us the necessary value of disciplined will power and perseverance, as evidenced in the title of his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, and in his frequent declarations that we must view what we are doing in the long run. Mandela shows us the importance of having worthy principles, of clarifying what we really believe, and then, as he quoted Gandhi, “Be the change you seek.”

In an age when I am socialized to view myself as separate, isolated I-me, egotistic individual, who lives in an adversarial world of win-lose competitions and learns to calculate what is in my own narrow self-interest, Mandela teaches us that such aggressive self-interested individualism is false and destructive; that I am really an integral part of interconnected unified wholes in which others are a necessary part of who I am and how I can live a meaningful life.

It is now up to us to understand, appreciate, and selectively appropriate what is of lasting value in Mandela’s vision, values, and ideals and to contextualize his legacy in ways that inspire us, give us hope, and inform our lives as integral to an action-oriented interconnected movement working for a much better world.

Vietnam: Some History

Andy Piascik

Vietnam is much in the news lately. Articles and commentaries aplenty have appeared in recent weeks to mark the 50th anniversary of the first battle between US soldiers and the army of what was then known in this country as North Vietnam. Come April, we can expect far more commentary on the 40th anniversary of the end of the fighting in that war-ravaged nation and what is still referred to here as the “Fall of Saigon.”

In addition, the Pentagon recently posted a lengthy version of its history of the Vietnam War (the Vietnamese, whose struggle for independence was waged against the Chinese, the French and the Japanese, in addition to the United States, refer to this same period as the American War). Many sifting through the commentaries or the Pentagon’s website might be surprised or confused, as those stories undoubtedly differ dramatically from what one would hear from a veteran of the war or of the movement against it, let along the Vietnamese. Here’s some history generally left out of the official narratives.

Pinpointing where US aggression in Vietnam began depends on how one determines how a war starts. It’s silly in the extreme, however, to claim it began in February of 1965, as tens of thousands of Vietnamese were already dead at US hands by that point. Better to trace the origins to 1945 when the United States refused to recognize the new government established by Vietnamese independence forces. Japan had invaded Vietnam some years earlier and the French colonialists ran away and ceded the country to the Japanese.

That left it to the Vietnamese to do all the heavy lifting and they performed as heroically during the Second World War as any people anywhere. When in 1945 the French colonialists finished sipping cognac in Paris and decided to re-invade Vietnam, the US backed them to the hilt with weapons, financing and diplomatic cover. The Vietnamese, not surprisingly, were not so enthusiastic and resisted just as they had resisted other occupiers for centuries.

As the French inflicted horrific violence in their failed attempt at re-conquest, the US bore more and more of the war’s burden until, in 1954, the Vietnamese had again seemingly achieved independence. It was not to be, though, as the US destroyed that possibility by undermining elections that Washington knew Ho Chi Minh would win in a landslide. As in dozens of other cases over the past 100+ years, the US opposed democracy in favor of aggression. Elections are all well and good but only if the right people win; if the wrong people win, then out come the machine guns.

So the US flew Ngo Dinh Diem in from New Jersey and installed him as dictator of South Vietnam. After nine years murderous years, the Kennedy administration eventually found Diem too unreliable and had him whacked, a mere three weeks before Kennedy himself was similarly assassinated. This was not, however, before Kennedy began ongoing saturation bombing of South Vietnam, ordered the use of napalm and other chemical weapons of mass destruction, introduced ground troops and organized strategic hamlets. Such a great phrase, strategic hamlets; kinda like calling Auschwitz a country getaway.

Lyndon Johnson’s fabrication of the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964 was another turning point. Within six months, the Peace Candidate who had startled the world with a campaign ad attacking Barry Goldwater as a warmonger (5…4…3…2…1) extended the invasion and the bombing to the whole of Vietnam. So it remained until the Super Rich grew antsy about the financial costs of the war, the US’s growing international embarrassment, unprecedented domestic upheaval, an army that increasingly wouldn't fight, and the stark realization that there was no way the Vietnamese could lose militarily. I recall reading years ago something a Vietnamese elder who had probably seen as much death and destruction as anyone who ever lived said (I’m paraphrasing): We can settle this now or we can settle it a thousand years from now. It’s up to the Americans.

It’s impossible to calculate with precision the Vietnamese death toll. Whatever Vietnam has said has been dismissed by the powerful here as anti-American propaganda and US elites have never bothered with a reckoning. Their attitude was captured perfectly by a general speaking of a more recent conflagration: “We don’t do body counts.” Not, anyway, when the dead bodies are victims of US violence.

Three million Vietnamese deaths is a popular figure but undoubtedly far too low. Also completely ignored here is the Vietnamese experience of Agent Orange and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, for example. Take the terrible suffering of US soldiers and multiply their numbers ten thousand fold or more and we get a sense of the damage to the Vietnamese. Additionally, Vietnam and the rest of Indochina (it’s often conveniently forgotten that the US also waged war against Laos and Cambodia) are full of unexploded ordinances that regularly cause death and injuries, to this day. There’s also the starvation deaths of hundreds of thousands throughout Indochina immediately after the war. A countryside ravaged by bombing, combined with the curtailment of airlifts, doomed those hundreds of thousands once the US imposed an ironclad embargo. That’s an unpleasant truth, though; so much easier to blame everything on the Vietnamese Communists and the despotic Khmer Rouge.

Discussions of Vietnam are hardly academic exercises; the US is on a global rampage and falsifying history has paved the way to the US-caused deaths of three million Iraqis since the first invasion in 1991, to cite just one of many recent examples. We remain in the grips of people who worship wealth and are in love with death so any truth and reckoning about Vietnam and the role we play in the world will have to come from us.

Stop The Fast Track To A Future Of Global Corporate Rule

Kevin Zeese & Margaret Flowers

Several major international agreements are under negotiation which would greatly empower multinational corporations and the World Economic Forum is promoting a new model of global governance that creates a hybrid government-corporate structure. Humankind is proceeding on a path to global corporate rule where transnational corporations would not just influence public policy, they would write the policies and vote on them. The power of nation-states and people to determine their futures would be weakened in a system of corporate rule.

The Obama administration has been negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) over the past five years is currently pushing Congress to pass trade promotion authority (known as fast track) which would allow him to sign these agreements before they go to Congress. Then Congress would have a limited time to read thousands of pages of technical legal language, debate the contents and be banned from making amendments.

Fast track would drive us down a dangerous path. The TPP and TTIP have been negotiated with unprecedented secrecy. For the first time texts of international agreements have been classified so that members of Congress have had very limited access and are not able to discuss what they've read. These are more than trade agreements. The portions that have been leaked show that they will affect everything that we care about from the food we eat to the jobs we have to the health of the planet. The fast track legislation could last seven years, meaning that more agreements could be rushed through Congress without open consideration of their potential impacts, cementing corporate rule.

Given the harm that has already been done to economies, human rights and the environment by neo-liberal economic systems required by the World Trade Organization and ‘free' trade agreements such as NAFTA; this is not the time to be rushing into new agreements or to cede our power to write the future of the planet.

We are in the midst of a critical political conflict over the future of global governance. Do we want to be ruled by corporations or ruled democratically? This not the time to fast track , it is the time to step back and re-think how to conduct global trade and manage the global economy to prevent further exploitation and harm.

Twenty Years of Experience: Lost Jobs, Trade Deficits and Increased Inequality

Globalization was initiated in its current form by President Bill Clinton when he signed NAFTA and the World Trade Organization (WTO). NAFTA came into force on January 1, 1994 and the WTO became law on January 1, 1995. Modern trade agreements have had serious negative effects on the US economy. Reuters reports:

“Since the pacts were implemented, U.S. trade deficits, which drag down economic growth, have soared more than 430 percent with our free-trade partners. In the same period, they've declined 11 percent with countries that are not free-trade partners. Since fast-track trade authority was used to pass NAFTA and the U.S. entrance into the World Trade Organization, the overall annual U.S. trade deficit in goods has more than quadrupled, from $218 billion to $912 billion.”

Trade agreements have also undermined jobs in the United States. Reuters continues: “Nearly 5 million U.S. manufacturing jobs — one in four — have been lost since NAFTA and the various post-NAFTA expansion deals were enacted through fast track.” And, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports: 3 out of 5 displaced workers who found a job are earning less money and one-third took a pay cut of 20% or more.

These are just two examples of many of the negative economic impacts. The impacts in other countries are also negative. The only beneficiaries are trans-national mega corporations which desire to move capital and businesses across borders without restrictions. Trade agreements consistently expand the wealth divide and increase income inequality as transnational corporations seek lower wages and costs in order to increase profits.

The current global economic system is unstable because of the connections between global trade and global financial markets. Interconnectedness and a lack of regulation of finance created a cascading worldwide impact during the 2008 financial crisis. Around the world, this has led to tremendous economic dislocation and revolts against the unfair economy and the financial institutions and governments that are responsible.

With this record it is not time to fast track more of the same rigged corporate agreements through Congress; it is time to stop and ask: How can global trade be made to work for everyone?

At a Crossroads in Global Governance

The economic crash raised doubts about whether international governmental institutions can handle the globalized economy. It resulted in calls for transformation of the government and economy from both grass roots revolts protesting lost jobs, lower incomes, austerity, corruption and an unfair economy as well as from corporate elites.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) began a Global Redesign Initiative (GRI) as a result of the 2008 economic crash (GRI is bankrolled mainly by Qatar). WEF participants saw globalization threatened because there has been a loss of legitimacy and ineffectiveness of global governance: Too many countries, organizations and people were openly critical of globalization and multinational banking. The WEF blames nation-states, the United Nations and groups like the G-8 for failing to respond appropriately to the economic crisis. In an analysis of the GRI, the Center for Governance and Sustainability at the University of Massachusetts Boston writes:

“WEF is concerned that such widespread public skepticism can lead to widespread doubt about the underlying principles of the global system. They recognize that when corporate leaders are seen as lacking morals, it does not take much for the institutions of globalization to be seen as immoral. In this situation, it would become harder and harder for the G20, for the IMF, or for individual corporate spokespersons to command respect and effective leadership on global matters of concern to the Davos community. They know that it would be increasingly problematic if important messages from the world's elite leaders were ignored by large communities of people around the world.”

To save globalization the WEF believes governance must be redesigned. David Sogge describes their view in “Davos Man”: “When it comes to tackling global problems, nation-states and their public politics are not up to the job. Their old, run-down institutions should be re-fitted …” The WEF solution is a greater role for multi-national corporations in decision making and the weakening of nation-states. They want the UN remade into a hybrid corporate-government entity, where corporations are part of decision-making. The goal is to end nation-centric decision making and include corporations as decision makers.

The WEF points to how trade rules have stalled in the WTO as an example of the failure of nation-state governance. They believe by making corporations partners in decision making the ‘can do' attitude of business will push these rules forward where the ‘failure mentality' of the state-centric system stalls trade rules. From the perspective of people's movements, this is an example of why we do not want corporations to replace nations as decision makers.

The WTO has been stalled because their rules are opposed by people around the globe. There have been massive protests at their negotiations because, for example, international trade agreements (misnamed “free” trade, really rigged trade for transnational corporations) have had a devastating impact on agriculture by destroying traditional farming, forcing farmers into cities and creating a downward depression of wages. Social movements oppose policies that promote private profit over public necessities. A growing worldwide movement led by communities most affected by globalization seeks another direction.

In light of the failure of the WTO, the elite's push toward global corporate rule is now being codified into law through international agreements like the TPP and Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. Under these agreements corporate sovereignty will increase while the sovereignty of governments shrinks and people lose their ability to influence public policy. These corporate trade agreements will create a series of laws designed to aid corporate profits over the health, safety, income and well-being of most people and further undermine the already at-risk ecology of the planet.

National and local laws will be required to be rewritten to be consistent with trade agreements negotiated in secret. This “harmonization” will require a new bureaucracy to review all laws and regulations for consistency.

The profits of transnational corporations will become so important that governments can be sued if their laws to protect public health, safety or the planet interfere with expected profits. The cases will be heard in special trade tribunals, staffed mainly by corporate lawyers on leave from their corporate jobs. Their decisions cannot be appealed to any other courts. This makes the public interest secondary to the market interests of big business.

The WEF sees itself as the model for future governance writing “The time has come for a new stakeholder paradigm of international governance analogous to that embodied in the stakeholder theory of corporate governance on which the World Economic Forum itself was founded.” The Center for Governance and Sustainability describes this in the context of the UN:

“This integration of global executives with UN diplomats and civil servants was seen as a way to rejuvenate the acceptance of globalization. The thinking is that, if globalization leaders were more involved in the policy development and program implementation of the UN, then organizations and peoples throughout the world may well look more favorably on the legitimacy of their combined efforts.”

People will react in horror to the dystopian idea of the UN becoming a corporate-government hybrid. People already see corporations wielding too much influence at the UN and within nations. The WEF approach will inflate corporate power, creating a corporate neo-feudalism that will kill democracy and the body politic.

How did the WEF arrive at this proposal that so narrowly focuses on building the power of corporations, while weakening national sovereignty? The Center for Global Governance and Sustainability describes the process:

“A key constraint for the broad acceptability of WEF's new system is the narrow band of experts they convened to develop their proposals. WEF did not call openly for proposals. It did not invite a number of key international constituencies to participate in the process. And it did not even establish a website for public comments. WEF selected its friends to work on its Global Redesign Initiative. Over 50% of WEF's experts were working in the US while advising World Economic Forum on this project, hardly an indication of a geographically well balanced team. Even though GRI's finances came heavily from non-OECD countries, only 2% of its experts were working in developing countries at the time. Of WEF's friends, only 17% were women. This narrow base has serious consequences. It undermines the WEF claims that it truly understands a multi-polar world and that it has the ability to pick the global leaders of today and tomorrow.”

This process is exactly what must be avoided in the debate on global trade and why we mustn't allow new agreements to be fast tracked through Congress. The current system has already been too dominated by the interests of multi-national corporations and has excluded the voices of those who are harmed by its impacts.

We need a broader debate on how globalization should be handled. What is the role of transnational corporations? How can transnational corporations with larger wealth than some nations be regulated? How do we ensure the planet's ecology is protected at this critical time of the climate change tipping point, mass species die-off, oceans under severe stress, depleting aquifers, floods and increasing desertification? How do we shrink the wealth divide that is impacting almost every country, creating widespread poverty and strife?

Twenty years into modern corporate globalization, we need to stop, think, discuss and debate, not blindly fast track more of the same failed system. Fast track would permit presidents to approve secretly negotiated trade agreements and rush them through Congress without transparency, public participation or real congressional review for the next seven years. This is the opposite of is needed.

Similar Rhetoric, Different Visions for the Future

There is a shared frustration in the global community with the inability of governments and international organizations to respond to the global financial crisis. The United Nations has shortcomings. As the Center got Global Governance and Sustainability puts it:

“Some are frustrated with the international system because urgent state functions in the international arena are not solved by the UN system. There are wars and the UN cannot stop them. There are major ecological catastrophes and the international system cannot get relief supplies into the affected areas fast enough. There are starving people in Africa and the IGOs do not prevent their unnecessary deaths.”

The WEF uses language very similar to what social movements use. For example, the WEF claims it seeks “bottom-up” decision-making, but does not define what that would look like. For social movements, this means less hierarchy, public participation, transparency, democracy and governments listening to the people at the bottom, rather than taking their cue from the elites at the top.

The WEF promotes a philosophy couched in the concept of “multi-stakeholderism,” another idea consistent with the view of social movements that the world is not unipolar, it has many actors. The WEF uses this concept to give transnational corporations, undemocratic non-state actors, decision-making power, while social movements see big business already having too much influence.

Multi-national corporations wield great influence over the global economy. They decide the distribution of vital necessities, e.g. the prices and quantities of food and medicine, how much workers will be paid as well as the distribution of wealth and the selection of products to be manufactured and where. Control of international markets is more in the decision-making power of transnational corporations than of governments. WEF sees this as a reason to formalize the decision making power of transnational corporations, making them part of government, while people's movements see a need to expand public participation in government to act in the public interest rather than the private interest for commercial profit.

Which Path Forward? What You Can Do

David Sogge writes in the “State of Davos” that “By custom and by law, the formal management of international affairs is a matter for sovereign nations and their representatives.” He points out “the UN Charter begins with ‘We the peoples' and affirms the ‘equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.'”

As globalization begins its third decade, the question before us is, do we want corporate rule or people's rule? Is the wealth of a few more important than human rights? What can be done to empower people? Should the nation-state become a thing of the past and corporate sovereignty reign, or is there another path? This is a debate that cannot be fast tracked; it must be brought into the open before trade agreements cement corporate rule for decades to come.

We urge people to put their effort into stopping fast track legislation in Congress. This will not be easy because it is high on the president's agenda, many pro-business legislators and entities like the Chamber of Congress. It can only be stopped if people work together persistently to oppose it. Get involved here.

We expect that as fast track legislation moves through Congress, the White House and corporate lobbyists will inundate members of Congress with promises in exchange for votes. In the past, votes were held open past the legal time limit as members of Congress were picked off one by one until there were enough votes to pass.

We need to maintain persistent pressure on Congress to oppose fast track. When we stop fast track, there should be a broad discussion of our vision for a globalized world structured to support universal human rights and protection of the planet.

The Real Story Behind The Oil Price Collapse

Michael T. Klare

Many reasons have been provided for the dramatic plunge in the price of oil to about $60 per barrel (nearly half of what it was a year ago): slowing demand due to global economic stagnation; overproduction at shale fields in the United States; the decision of the Saudis and other Middle Eastern OPEC producers to maintain output at current levels (presumably to punish higher-cost producers in the U.S. and elsewhere); and the increased value of the dollar relative to other currencies. There is, however, one reason that's not being discussed, and yet it could be the most important of all: the complete collapse of Big Oil's production-maximizing business model.

Until last fall, when the price decline gathered momentum, the oil giants were operating at full throttle, pumping out more petroleum every day.  They did so, of course, in part to profit from the high prices.  For most of the previous six years, Brent crude, the international benchmark for crude oil, had been selling at $100 or higher.  But Big Oil was also operating according to a business model that assumed an ever-increasing demand for its products, however costly they might be to produce and refine.  This meant that no fossil fuel reserves, no potential source of supply -- no matter how remote or hard to reach, how far offshore or deeply buried, how encased in rock -- was deemed untouchable in the mad scramble to increase output and profits.

In recent years, this output-maximizing strategy had, in turn, generated historic wealth for the giant oil companies.  Exxon, the largest U.S.-based oil firm, earned an eye-popping $32.6 billion in 2013 alone, more than any other American company except for Apple.  Chevron, the second biggest oil firm,posted earnings of $21.4 billion that same year.  State-owned companies like Saudi Aramco and Russia's Rosneft also reaped mammoth profits.

How things have changed in a matter of mere months.  With demand stagnant and excess production the story of the moment, the very strategy that had generated record-breaking profits has suddenly become hopelessly dysfunctional.

To fully appreciate the nature of the energy industry's predicament, it's necessary to go back a decade to 2005, when the production-maximizing strategy was first adopted.  At that time, Big Oil faced a critical juncture.  On the one hand, many existing oil fields were being depleted at a torrid pace, leading experts to predict an imminent “peak” in global oil production, followed by an irreversible decline; on the other, rapid economic growth in China, India, and other developing nations was pushing demand for fossil fuels into the stratosphere.  In those same years, concern over climate change was also beginning to gather momentum, threatening the future of Big Oil and generating pressures to invest in alternative forms of energy.

A “Brave New World” of Tough Oil

No one better captured that moment than David O'Reilly, the chairman and CEO of Chevron.  “Our industry is at a strategic inflection point, a unique place in our history,” he told a gathering of oil executives that February.  “The most visible element of this new equation,” he explained in what some observers dubbed his “Brave New World” address, “is that relative to demand, oil is no longer in plentiful supply.”  Even though China was sucking up oil, coal, and natural gas supplies at a staggering rate, he had a message for that country and the world: “The era of easy access to energy is over.”

To prosper in such an environment, O'Reilly explained, the oil industry would have to adopt a new strategy.  It would have to look beyond the easy-to-reach sources that had powered it in the past and make massive investments in the extraction of what the industry calls “unconventional oil” and what I labeled at the time “tough oil”: resources located far offshore, in the threatening environments of the far north, in politically dangerous places like Iraq, or in unyielding rock formations like shale.  “Increasingly,” O'Reilly insisted, “future supplies will have to be found in ultradeep water and other remote areas, development projects that will ultimately require new technology and trillions of dollars of investment in new infrastructure.”

For top industry officials like O'Reilly, it seemed evident that Big Oil had no choice in the matter.  It would have to invest those needed trillions in tough-oil projects or lose ground to other sources of energy, drying up its stream of profits.  True, the cost of extracting unconventional oil would be much greater than from easier-to-reach conventional reserves (not to mention more environmentally hazardous), but that would be the world's problem, not theirs.  “Collectively, we are stepping up to this challenge,” O'Reilly declared.  “The industry is making significant investments to build additional capacity for future production.”

On this basis, Chevron, Exxon, Royal Dutch Shell, and other major firms indeed invested enormous amounts of money and resources in a growing unconventional oil and gas race, an extraordinary saga I described in my book The Race for What's Left.  Some, including Chevron and Shell, started drilling in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico; others, including Exxon, commenced operations in the Arctic and eastern Siberia.  Virtually every one of them began exploiting U.S. shale reserves via hydro-fracking.

Only one top executive questioned this drill-baby-drill approach: John Browne, then the chief executive of BP.  Claiming that the science of climate change had become too convincing to deny, Browne argued that Big Energy would have to look “beyond petroleum” and put major resources into alternative sources of supply.  “Climate change is an issue which raises fundamental questions about the relationship between companies and society as a whole, and between one generation and the next,” he had declared as early as 2002.  For BP, he indicated, that meant developing wind power, solar power, and biofuels.

Browne, however, was eased out of BP in 2007 just as Big Oil's output-maximizing business model was taking off, and his successor, Tony Hayward, quickly abandoned the “beyond petroleum” approach.  “Some may question whether so much of the [world's energy] growth needs to come from fossil fuels,” he said in 2009.  “But here it is vital that we face up to the harsh reality [of energy availability].”  Despite the growing emphasis on renewables, “we still foresee 80% of energy coming from fossil fuels in 2030.”

Under Hayward's leadership, BP largely discontinued its research into alternative forms of energy and reaffirmed its commitment to the production of oil and gas, the tougher the better.  Following in the footsteps of other giant firms, BP hustled into the Arctic, the deep water of the Gulf of Mexico, and Canadian tar sands, a particularly carbon-dirty and messy-to-produce form of energy.  In its drive to become the leading producer in the Gulf, BP rushed the exploration of a deep offshore field it called Macondo, triggering the Deepwater Horizon blow-out of April 2010 and the devastating oil spill of monumental proportions that followed.

Over the Cliff

By the end of the first decade of this century, Big Oil was united in its embrace of its new production-maximizing, drill-baby-drill approach.  It made the necessary investments, perfected new technology for extracting tough oil, and did indeed triumph over the decline of existing, “easy oil” deposits.  In those years, it managed to ramp up production in remarkable ways, bringing ever more hard-to-reach oil reservoirs online.

According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA) of the U.S. Department of Energy, world oil production rose from 85.1 million barrels per day in 2005 to 92.9 million in 2014, despite the continuing decline of many legacy fields in North America and the Middle East.  Claiming that industry investments in new drilling technologies had vanquished the specter of oil scarcity, BP's latest CEO, Bob Dudley, assured the world only a year ago that Big Oil was going places and the only thing that had “peaked” was “the theory of peak oil.”

That, of course, was just before oil prices took their leap off the cliff, bringing instantly into question the wisdom of continuing to pump out record levels of petroleum.  The production-maximizing strategy crafted by O'Reilly and his fellow CEOs rested on three fundamental assumptions: that, year after year, demand would keep climbing; that such rising demand would ensure prices high enough to justify costly investments in unconventional oil; and that concern over climate change would in no significant way alter the equation.  Today, none of these assumptions holds true.

Demand will continue to rise -- that's undeniable, given expected growth in world income and population -- but not at the pace to which Big Oil has become accustomed.  Consider this: in 2005, when many of the major investments in unconventional oil were getting under way, the EIA projected that global oil demand would reach 103.2 million barrels per day in 2015; now, it's lowered that figure for this year to only 93.1 million barrels.  Those 10 million “lost” barrels per day in expected consumption may not seem like a lot, given the total figure, but keep in mind that Big Oil's multibillion-dollar investments in tough energy were predicated on all that added demand materializing, thereby generating the kind of high prices needed to offset the increasing costs of extraction.  With so much anticipated demand vanishing, however, prices were bound to collapse.

Current indications suggest that consumption will continue to fall short of expectations in the years to come.  In an assessment of future trends released last month, the EIA reported that, thanks to deteriorating global economic conditions, many countries will experience either a slower rate of growth or an actual reduction in consumption.  While still inching up, Chinese consumption, for instance, is expected to grow by only 0.3 million barrels per day this year and next -- a far cry from the 0.5 million barrel increase it posted in 2011 and 2012 and its one million barrel increase in 2010.  In Europe and Japan, meanwhile, consumption is actually expected to fall over the next two years.

And this slowdown in demand is likely to persist well beyond 2016, suggests the International Energy Agency (IEA), an arm of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (the club of rich industrialized nations).  While lower gasoline prices may spur increased consumption in the United States and a few other nations, it predicted, most countries will experience no such lift and so “the recent price decline is expected to have only a marginal impact on global demand growth for the remainder of the decade.”

This being the case, the IEA believes that oil prices will only average about $55 per barrel in 2015 and not reach $73 again until 2020.  Such figures fall far below what would be needed to justify continued investment in and exploitation of tough-oil options like Canadian tar sands, Arctic oil, and many shale projects.  Indeed, the financial press is now full of reports on stalled or cancelled mega-energy projects.  Shell, for example, announced in January that it had abandoned plans for a $6.5 billion petrochemical plant in Qatar, citing “the current economic climate prevailing in the energy industry.”  At the same time, Chevron shelved its plan to drill in the Arctic waters of the Beaufort Sea, while Norway's Statoil turned its back on drilling in Greenland.

There is, as well, another factor that threatens the well-being of Big Oil: climate change can no longer be discounted in any future energy business model.  The pressures to deal with a phenomenon that could quite literally destroy human civilization are growing.  Although Big Oil has spent massive amounts of money over the years in a campaign to raise doubts about the science of climate change, more and more people globally are starting to worry about its effects -- extreme weather patterns, extreme storms, extreme drought, rising sea levels, and the like -- and demanding that governments take action to reduce the magnitude of the threat.

Europe has already adopted plans to lower carbon emissions by 20% from 1990 levels by 2020 and to achieve even greater reductions in the following decades.  China, while still increasing its reliance on fossil fuels, has at least finally pledged to cap the growth of its carbon emissions by 2030 and to increase renewable energy sources to 20% of total energy use by then.  In the United States, increasingly stringent automobile fuel-efficiency standards will require that cars sold in 2025 achieve an average of 54.5 miles per gallon, reducing U.S. oil demand by 2.2 million barrels per day.  (Of course, the Republican-controlled Congress -- heavily subsidized by Big Oil -- will do everything it can to eradicate curbs on fossil fuel consumption.)

Still, however inadequate the response to the dangers of climate change thus far, the issue is on the energy map and its influence on policy globally can only increase.  Whether Big Oil is ready to admit it or not, alternative energy is now on the planetary agenda and there's no turning back from that.  “It is a different world than it was the last time we saw an oil-price plunge,” said IEA executive director Maria van der Hoeven in February, referring to the 2008 economic meltdown.  “Emerging economies, notably China, have entered less oil-intensive stages of development… On top of this, concerns about climate change are influencing energy policies [and so] renewables are increasingly pervasive.”

The oil industry is, of course, hoping that the current price plunge will soon reverse itself and that its now-crumbling maximizing-output model will make a comeback along with $100-per-barrel price levels.  But these hopes for the return of “normality” are likely energy pipe dreams.  As van der Hoeven suggests, the world has changed in significant ways, in the process obliterating the very foundations on which Big Oil's production-maximizing strategy rested.  The oil giants will either have to adapt to new circumstances, while scaling back their operations, or face takeover challenges from more nimble and aggressive firms.

Report alleges systemic neglect of special needs students at New Orleans charter school

Tom Hall

The Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education voted Friday to shutter Lagniappe Academies, a charter school in an impoverished New Orleans neighborhood, at the end of the school year. The move followed a lengthy report released last week by the state government exposing widespread corruption, particularly in relation to the neglect of students with special needs.

The corruption uncovered at Lagniappe Academies is only the most extreme expression thus far uncovered of the devastating social consequences of the right-wing charter “reform” pushed through in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Only six out of the 82 schools in the city are still traditional public schools. Most of the city’s schools, including Lagniappe Academies, operate under the state-run Recovery School District, which took over public schools after Katrina in order to convert them into charter schools.

Lagniappe Academies, described as a “community school” by its operators, opened in 2010 in the historically black working class neighborhood of Treme. Its 160 students are housed in six connected portable buildings in the parking lot of an abandoned grocery store, across the street from the burned-out remains of the closed Iberville housing projects. The school’s board of directors is headed by Ray Smart, president of the Smart Foundation, founded by the former publisher of Esquire magazine. The Smart Foundation had been involved extensively in charter schools throughout the country.

According to the report, Lagniappe Academies routinely fails to provide special education to students who require it and actively discourages parents with special needs children from enrolling in the school. Parents in New Orleans are required to go through a drawn-out application process, known as OneApp, to enroll their children in publicly-funded charter schools.

Former staff claim that the school operates a “do not call list” to keep parents of special needs students from even applying to the school. In addition to the abysmal quality of the special education actually provided by the school, this contributes to Lagniappe Academies having some of the lowest rates of special education students in the city, around only 4 percent at the start of the current school year, compared to a district-wide average of 13 percent.

Administrators refuse to screen students for special education, even in cases where families had diagnoses from their doctors. In one case, a child with behavioral problems, instead of being screened for special education, was suspended for ten days. He was not allowed to come back unless his parents administered a blood test to prove that he was receiving medication for his behavioral problems.

The special education infrastructure at the school is virtually non-existent. One former staff member told interviewers that Lagniappe’s administrators said to limit the number of special needs evaluations in the 2014-2015 school year to five for budgetary reasons. The school has no special education classroom. During visits by state officials, the school administrators often moved furniture around to create the impression that they did have one.

Those special needs students who do undergo testing are often simply ignored. One teacher, referred to by the report as “staff member 2,” said that she was directed by the school’s administration not to provide accommodations to students with special needs, and then forced to sign a document claiming that Lagniappe had provided such accommodations.

A visit last year by the Louisiana Department of Education found that of the eight students at Lagniappe with special needs, five were not receiving special education services in English, four were not receiving special education services in math, and none received speech therapy or regular progress reports for their parents, as required by state law. Two special education students received no education at all, and were simply shuffled around and left unsupervised for long periods of time. “They often slept or sat with nothing to do,” according to an affidavit by a former assistant to the principal.

Lagniappe Academies was also found to have held back students at wildly disproportionate rates, ranging from 10 percent in 2013-2014 to fully one-third of the student body in 2014-2015. In many cases, parents were not notified of the school’s decision, and proper documentation was often missing. Over half of those held back in 2014-2015 have transferred to other schools.

Despite this, Lagniappe Academies received scores that are at or above the average for the Recovery School District on the state-mandated School Performance Score metric in the past two school years. This is largely because the standardized test scores of students were either forged outright or falsely inflated.

Every layer of the political establishment is implicated in the present scandal. The Louisiana Department of Education was well aware of irregularities surrounding special education at Lagniappe for years, having released previous reports in 2011 and 2014. Just two months ago, the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) successfully courted Lagniappe Academies away from the state-run Recovery School District as part of its ongoing battle for jurisdiction over the city’s charter schools. Lagniappe administrators were enticed by the prospect of having OPSB provide services that they currently contract out themselves, such as nursing and buses. They were also hopeful that the district would help them find a permanent facility.

New Orleans schools have been mired in scandal in recent months. Last year, the state filed nepotism charges against Doris Hicks, the CEO of the Friends of King charter group, which operates Martin Luther King Charter School in the Lower Ninth Ward. Friends of King has also repeatedly violated the state’s open meeting laws, including with a $70,000 staff retreat to a casino in Mississippi. In December, Friends of King voted to move Martin Luther King Charter School to OPSB.

On Friday, three days after the Lagniappe Academies report was released, OPSB member and former board president Ira Thomas was charged by the US Attorneys’ Office with accepting a bribe during his unsuccessful campaign for sheriff in 2013. Thomas allegedly solicited $5,000 through an OPSB employee to fix a janitorial contract. Thomas resigned from OPSB later that day.

Los Angeles school district approves hundreds of education layoffs

Dan Conway

The Los Angeles Unified School District Board voted on Tuesday to deliver “reduction in force” notices to 609 elementary school teachers, counselors, foreign language teachers, art teachers and others. Five of the seven board members voted in favor of the layoffs. The vote was conducted after only 56 seconds of discussion, according to local National Public Radio affiliate KPCC.

The recent pink slip announcement, along with the district’s intransigence in negotiations, indicate that a rotten deal is being prepared to ram down the throats of teachers. In this, they have the full support of the United Teachers of Los Angeles, which is doing everything possible to prevent a mobilization of teachers against the Democratic Party and the drive to privatize education.

In the face of emerging struggles of oil and dockworkers in the Los Angeles area, the UTLA has made no effort to link the struggles of teachers with other sections of the working class. The union instead makes the claim that the needs of the teachers can be met through the district’s existing budget alone, neglecting the fact that cuts to teacher salaries are the product of years of cuts enacted by both Republican and Democratic state governments alike.

The district, as in previous-year negotiations, was able to reach an agreement with the Associated Administrators of Los Angeles and SEIU before the current impasse with the UTLA. The UTLA has in fact deliberately divorced the interests of teachers from administrators and staff as part of its campaign to “keep cuts away from the classroom.”

During negotiations, the UTLA leadership has not even raised the savage attacks on public education being carried out by the US ruling class, including the destruction of teacher job protections and the fact that private charter operators and their billionaire backers are using the Los Angeles school district, the nation’s second largest, as a testing ground for nationwide efforts to roll back public education.

The unions’ complicity in this assault on workers comes after two landmark decisions were reached drastically undermining teacher job protections and laying the groundwork for increased attacks on public education.

The California Teachers Association (CTA) praised the State Assembly Bill 215, which limited due process rights for teacher dismissal.

The CTA has “long supported the streamlining of the dismissal process, so we are pleased to see this legislation approved by the legislature and signed by the governor,” union President Dean Vogel enthused.

Teachers throughout Los Angeles increasingly see the UTLA as a representative of their political and class enemies.

Teachers “would only get a better deck chair on the Titanic” even were the union to receive token salary increases, one teacher writing in the comments section of the LA School Report website remarked.

Instead of opposing the introduction of charter schools to begin with, the union is proposing wholly symbolic palliative measures such as a requirement that charter school board meetings take place in a geographically close area to the school in question.

These provisions are nothing more than a smokescreen, as the union knows fully well. The promotion of charter schools is the means by which the financial elite is seeking to arrogate more than $500 billion in annual public education funding nationwide into its own hands. A struggle against charter schools can succeed only in opposition to both the Democrats and Republicans and the capitalist system they defend, which is the last thing the union wants.

The union’s latest offer includes a one-time teacher salary increase of 8.5 percent along with a $1,000 annual stipend for supplies and support materials. Class size requirements proposed by the union would include a 24-to-1 student teacher ratio up until grade 3, a 27-to-1 ratio between grades 4 and 8, and a 31-to-1 ratio between grades 9 and 12.

The union, moreover, has made little mention about provisions in the proposed contract related to its Public School Accountability Act and union-led charter oversight. In particular, the union at no point has claimed that it is opposed to the creation of charter schools, but merely wants a more substantial “piece of the action” as the latest contract proposal makes clear.

The UTLA has quietly accepted the notorious Parent Trigger Law, which allows charter school astroturf organizations to manipulate school district votes to secure “local” approval for charterization.

Protests in New Zealand against Trans Pacific Partnership

John Braddock

Last Saturday thousands of people joined nationwide rallies in New Zealand against the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, which is being negotiated by 12 Pacific Rim countries, including New Zealand and the US.

The protests took place in 22 cities and regional centres. The “National Day of Action” against the secretive negotiations was the fifth such event to be held in the past year and followed demonstrations in 2012 and 2013. National Party Prime Minister John Key has indicated a TPP deal, which has been repeatedly delayed, could be signed by mid-year.

In Auckland 3,000 people marched down Queen Street with a mock Trojan horse symbolising, according to organisers, that “elite US corporations” are “pulling the strings behind the scenes” on the TPP. Over 1,000 people marched through the Wellington CBD to parliament while 3,000 participated in Christchurch and 1,500 in Dunedin.

The Obama administration is aggressively pushing the TPP as a weapon for dictating economic and trading terms to countries throughout the Asia-Pacific. The grouping began in 2005 with an agreement between Brunei, Chile, New Zealand and Singapore to manage trade and integrate their economies. After Washington joined the group in 2011, negotiations were expanded to cover Australia, Brunei, Chile, Canada, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the US and Vietnam.

The TPP has become the economic front in Washington’s confrontational “pivot to Asia,” mirroring the rapidly intensifying US military build-up throughout the region aimed at China. At the Asia Pacific Economic (APEC) summit in Beijing last November, Obama called a special meeting of TPP participants to steer the conference to isolate and undercut China and establish the TPP as “the model for trade in the 21st century.”

The TPP is a mechanism through which Wall Street’s demands to open up economies in the Asia Pacific for American trade and investors. The US is pressing in particular the dismantling of national regulatory measures, including those favouring state-owned enterprises, and the protection of the “intellectual property rights” of American corporations in areas such as software, media and pharmaceuticals. Governments that fail to comply could face multi-million dollar lawsuits or exclusion from the US market.

Key sections of New Zealand capital are also seeking to benefit. The finance sector, which dominates the country’s economy, wants more financial deregulation. The dairy industry is also pressing for freer access to the US market while fighting off new restrictions on access into China. In joining the TPP, New Zealand, like every other country in the region, is forced to balance its trade relationship with China against its long-standing strategic alliance with the US.

The recent protests have tapped into widespread concern over the potential impact of the TPP. An open letter to the government from 260 health practitioners last May warned that any attempt to regulate the activities of businesses that affect community health, such as the advertising and sale of tobacco or alcohol, will be over-ridden by the TPP. Higher costs for medicines are forecast as pharmaceutical companies oppose national programs that regulate prices.

Underlying this relentless drive for pro-market restructuring is the deepening crisis of global capitalism. However, far from challenging in any way the profit system, the organisers of the anti-TPP campaign in New Zealand seek to divert opposition into reactionary nationalist channels.

The protests have been co-ordinated by the well-funded “It’s Our Future New Zealand” organisation, an umbrella for an assortment of trade unions, academics, Greens, and the Maori nationalist Mana Party—all dedicated to the defence of capitalism.

Chairing Wellington rally last Saturday, Sandra Grey, the Tertiary Education Union president, declared that the TPP would place a straightjacket over “our ability to make the laws that govern us,” and said the government should be “ashamed of itself” for giving away “our sovereignty.” Grey called on protesters to fight the agreement “in any way we can,” including by petitioning parliament and local authorities.

In a statement, Green Party MP James Shaw demagogically declared that “National’s TPP deal will make us second class citizens in our own country by ceding sovereignty over policy decisions to big businesses.” Mana member John Minto similarly told TV1 that the deal was “not in New Zealand’s interests,” but those of “US corporations to come and plunder the New Zealand economy.”

Big business, however, already dictates the country’s policies and has always done so. These politicians and their servants in the trade unions and the pseudo-left outfits merely represent sections of New Zealand business which fear that international competition through the TPP will cut across their own interests.

Maori-owned companies represented by Mana have significant stakes in tourism, forestry, fishing and agriculture, and are adamantly opposed to any “foreign” threats to their profits.

Mana, which is supported by the pseudo-left groups Fightback, Socialist Aotearoa and the International Socialist Organisation, calls for “withdrawal from free trade agreements that favour multinationals over local production or prevent support for locally owned businesses.” Like the racist New Zealand First Party, Mana advocates a ban on foreigners buying houses and discrimination against migrant workers.

NZ First MP Fletcher Tabuteau, who was invited to address a rally in Rotorua last November and in Wellington on Saturday, declared that “New Zealanders must rule our country, not foreign businesses.”

Since 2012, the Greens and Mana, along with Labour and the anti-immigrant NZ First Party, have also been involved in protests against investment from China. This chauvinist anti-Chinese campaign happens to dovetail with US efforts to incorporate New Zealand more fully into its “pivot to Asia,” including intelligence and military cooperation.

Other sections of New Zealand business, including the ICT and high-end manufacturers, have also expressed reservations over the TPP. Prominent investment banker and multi-millionaire Gareth Morgan, an advocate of “free trade,” criticises provisions which would “stop our government being able to legislate for the public good if that hurts an international business interest.”

The TPP is part of the relentless drive to impose the burden of the global capitalist breakdown on working people. All sections of the New Zealand capitalist class—both those for and against the TPP—support the austerity measures that destroy the jobs and living standards of workers and youth. The working class can only defend its interests through a unified international struggle against the profit system to establish a world planned socialist economy. This requires the rejection of all forms of nationalism and chauvinism.

Japan pushes forward with plans for overseas intelligence agency

Ben McGrath

On the pretext of responding to the recent killings of two Japanese citizens in the Middle East by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the Japanese government is stepping up its plans to create an overseas intelligence body similar to the US CIA or British MI6.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe stated in early February: “It is vital to strengthen the government’s intelligence functions and gather more accurate, prompt information that will be reflected in the state’s strategic decision-making.”

The Abe government is politically exploiting the brutal slayings of Kenji Goto and Haruna Yukawa by ISIS in January, claiming that more sophisticated intelligence gathering is necessary to protect Japanese lives abroad.

In reality, the creation of such an agency is part of the government’s agenda of remilitarization. Japan’s ruling elite views an overseas intelligence agency as vital to becoming a “normal country,” or in other words, allowing Japan to end the constraints on the use of its military and intelligence agencies to pursue its imperialist interests.

Following World War II, the US dismantled the Japanese intelligence apparatus, which included its military intelligence and the Kempeitai—secret police—as part of its agenda to eliminate Japan as a threat to Washington’s hegemony. Today, the Obama administration is actively encouraging Tokyo to remilitarize as part of Washington’s “pivot to Asia,” designed to isolate and undermine China.

Japan’s intelligence operations are currently scattered among several agencies, including the Cabinet Intelligence Research Office (Naicho), the National Police Agency, the Public Security Intelligence Agency at the Justice Ministry, and the Defense Ministry’s Defense Intelligence Headquarters.

Lawmaker Takeshi Iwaya from Abe’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) is leading a team of officials who will meet with US and British officials to lay the groundwork for a unified Japanese intelligence agency. According to Iwaya, legislation will be drafted in the fall and possibly be enacted the following summer.

Abe’s government has already set up a US-style National Security Council (NSC) as well as enacted a sweeping state secret law. The NSC allows the prime minister to exercise control over foreign and defense policy, enhancing cooperation with the United States, while the state secret law hides these machinations from the public’s view. Along with the creation of the NSC, Naicho was also reorganized in preparation for the establishment of a centralized intelligence organization.

Last summer, Abe’s cabinet approved a reinterpretation of Japan’s constitution that allows for “collective self-defense.” In other words, it permits Japan to take part in wars of aggression overseas as long as an ally, such as the United States, or partner claimed to be under threat. The government is now preparing a collection of new laws that would codify this “reinterpretation.”

If passed, this “collective self-defense” legislation, slated to be presented to the Diet (Japan’s parliament) in the spring, would immediately allow Japan to take part in activities such as mining sweeping in the Persian Gulf in aid of US operations in the Middle East. It would also enable Abe’s cabinet to dispatch the Self-Defense Forces, the official name of the Japanese military, more quickly while clamping down on opposition more easily at home.

Abe has also begun to a campaign to change Japan’s post-war constitution, including Article 9, which formally renounced war and declared that land, air and sea forces would never be maintained.

However, there is widespread opposition to the Abe government’s plans to change the constitution and to remilitarization. The Yomiuri Shimbun showed that in annual surveys between 2004 and 2014 opposition to altering the constitution rose from 46 percent to 60 percent, while approval fell from 44 percent to 30 percent.

By exploiting the ISIS killings, the Abe government is preying on people’s fears while running roughshod over their objections to war. Iwaya stated: “It was a fact that we didn’t have enough presence in the Middle East and had to rely mainly on foreign countries beginning with Jordan and Turkey… So the public has begun to think they want information gathering and analysis to be done properly.”

However, even in the direct aftermath of the hostage crisis, a Jiji Press poll in February found that 53 percent of people were opposed to Japan’s involvement in overseas military operations as proposed in the “collective self-defense” legislation. Kanta Shimura, an architecture student, told the media outlet: “I am worried that we might one day get dragged into someone else’s war. I’m concerned about Japan always following the United States.”

The ISIS slayings are in fact the excuse for a move that has been in the preparation for several years. A US cable from October 2008 revealed by WikiLeaks showed that the LDP governments of Yasuo Fukuda (2007–2008) and Taro Aso (2008–2009) were working to develop an overseas intelligence branch under Naicho, with the support of the United States.

The US embassy in Tokyo reported to Washington: “The decision has been made to go very slowly with this process as the Japanese realize that they lack knowledge, experience, and assets/officers. A training process for new personnel will be started soon.”

In a conversation with then US State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research chief Randall Fort, Naicho director Hideshi Mitani said the main priority was a “human intelligence collection capability.” The purpose of such an agency was to gather intelligence on “China and North Korea, as well as on collecting intelligence information to prevent terrorist attacks,” Toshio Yanagi, then head of Japan’s internal security at the Public Security Information Agency, told the US intelligence official.

As these cables document, the establishment of a new Japanese overseas intelligence agency would primarily be aimed at China and its ally North Korea, increasing tensions in a region that has already been transformed into a powder keg.