Big Food Wants You To Believe Obesity is Caused by Lack of Exercise not Junk Food and the Spin Is Working

Martha Rosenberg

There are now more than 700 million obese people worldwide, 108 million of them children, reported the New York Times in 2017. In Brazil, food giant Nestle sends vendors door to door hawking its high-calorie junk food and giving customers a full month to pay for their purchases. Nestle calls the junk food hawkers, who are themselves obese, “micro-entrepreneurs.”

Big Food is increasingly targeting poor countries as “emerging markets” to please Wall Street and shareholders––perhaps because getting people fat and hooked on junk food in rich countries has plateaued.

Supplanting the indigenous diets of people in poor countries with fast food, packaged goods and soft drinks is unethical for many reasons. In addition to creating obesity, diabetes, heart disease, chronic illnesses and dental degradation, the junk food supplants subsistence agriculture crops with GMO corn and soybeans. Even philanthropic groups like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have drunk Big Food’s Kool-Aid about GMOs “feeding the world.” Actually, GMOs drench the fields of poor communities with toxic pesticides and pollute their waters.

Nestle’s exploitation of the poor goes back more than 40 years when it convinced poor mothers to reject their own breast milk—the one thing poor mothers actually have to give their babies—in favor of its infant formula. Activist groups say babies die in poor areas of Asia, Africa and Latin America because their mothers bottle-feed them with Western-style infant milk.

“The single largest donor to congressional candidates was the Brazilian meat giant JBS, which gave candidates $112 million in 2014,” reports the Times about Big Food’s influence in Brazil. (JBS acquired Swift & Company, the third largest US beef and pork processor, in 2007 and slaughters an astounding 51.4 thousand head per day.) In 2014, Coca-Cola gave $6.5 million in campaign contributions in Brazil and McDonald’s donated $561,000.

A few years 
ago, Reuters reported that the World Health Organization’s Pan American Health Organization takes hundreds of thousands of dollars and “obesity” advice from junk food and soft drink companies. No wonder the advice stresses “exercise” and gives aggressive marketing to children a pass. Was anyone surprised when Coke became Mexico’s top-selling soft drink under its former president and chief executive who was also Mexico’s president, Vicente Fox?

Coca-Cola has bought itself a huge economic footprint. It provides funding to the American Heart Association, the American Lung Association, the American College of Cardiology, the American Academy of Pediatrics and Harvard Medical School/Partners in Health. It donates to major universities, recreation and fitness groups and organizations serving ethnic and minority groups whose members are especially challenged with obesity.

Coca-Cola also donates to the CDC itself through the non-profit CDC Foundation created by Congress in 1992 to encourage “relationships” between industry and government.

Even the press is affected. Last year, the BMJ reported on Coca-Cola’s secret influence on medical and science journalists through funding of journalism conferences including those held by the prestigious Washington, D.C.-based National Press Foundation. No wonder “obesity is caused by lack of exercise” not by junk food like Coke is heard not just from governments and medical professionals but from reporters. (Disclosure–I was once invited by Big Food on an expense-paid press junket to view industrial egg farms in Colorado and then disinvited when they read my reporting.)

In the 2014 movie “Fed Up” Katie Couric exposed how the US government admonishes people to eat right, while pushing the foods that make them fat, and how school lunchrooms have also been bought by Big Food. The film reveals how the egg, sugar and other Big Food industries revised guidelines generated from the 1977 McGovern Report that recommended people eat less foods high in fat and sugar to favor them, overruling Sen. McGovern.

In 2006, a similar Big Food triumph occurred. Faced with the United Nations’ WHO food recommendations that were similar to the McGovern Report, then Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Tommy G. Thompson actually flew to Geneva to threaten WHO that if the guidelines stood, the US would withdraw its WHO financial support. Yes––supporting agriculture is more important to the US government than the health of its people.

Last summer, the New York Times revealed the devastating toll that junk food, obesity and diabetes have on poor people in Appalachia, most of whom have minimal or no health care. People in Appalachia are sicker than in Central America, note Dr. Joseph Smiddy, a health volunteer in Virginia. “In Central America, they’re eating beans and rice and walking everywhere. They’re not drinking Mountain Dew and eating candy. They’re not having an epidemic of obesity and diabetes.” Of course he was talking about areas not yet invaded by Nestle, Coca-Cola and McDonald’s.

In Chicago last year there was a bitter fight over a penny-per-ounce tax that had been levied on sweetened beverages. The beverage industry spent more than $1.4 million on television ads trying to reverse the tax and won.  The industry cast the desire to drink high-calorie, obesity-, diabetes- and dental cavity-causing soft drinks as “consumer choice.” The biggest supporters of the tax repeal were poor communities in Chicago–– the ones most hurt by soft drinks and “food deserts” where better food is not readily available.

Someone on a typical 2,000-calorie-a-day diet should derive only 200 calories a day from sugar—equal to one 16- ounce soda. Yet most Americans consume at least twice the recommended amount and few people who have the soda “habit” only drink one soft drink a day. Some admit they are addicted.

Once upon a time, “sugar” meant sugar from sugar cane or sugar beets. But since 1980, soft drink producers have favored high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and they have been followed by most major food producers and processors. Trade restrictions in other countries to protect local sugar production made sugar more expensive to use even as US farmers were growing copious amounts of corn because of farm subsidies and GMO seeds. HFCS is also cheaper to produce, store and ship.

HFCS is linked to obesity, diabetes, liver damage, memory problems and even possible mercury but that does not mean artificial sweeteners are better. An increase in the use of aspartame, found in Diet Coke, and sucralose, found in Pepsi One, actually correlated with a rise in the number of people who are obese, reported the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine.

Big Food spends millions marketing junk food to consumers and more millions telling them that is not why they are fat. Does anyone believe that?

Russian Duma presses ahead with pension reform in face of overwhelming popular opposition

Clara Weiss

On Tuesday, August 21, the Russian parliament (Duma) held a hearing that made clear it is pushing forward with a deeply unpopular pension reform that would raise the retirement age for men from 60 to 65 and for women from 55 to 63.

The raising of the retirement age constitutes the most drastic assault on the living standards of the working class, intelligentsia and agricultural population under the Putin regime. Polls indicate that at least 90 percent of the population opposes it. The raising of the retirement age will mean that about a third of Russian men will not live to see their pensions.

It will slash the living standards of broad layers of the working class, as entire families are often dependent on the meager pensions as an addition to the miserable salaries they receive for their work. The state will effectively steal 1 million rubles (US$16,000) from every working woman and 1.5 million rubles (US$24,000) from every working man as a result of the reform.

The Duma hearing was dominated by proponents of the pension reform, which is, in the words of the newspaper Gazeta.Ru, essentially a “settled issue.”

It was held under conditions in which half the deputies were still on vacation because of the summer break. Some 600 people participated, among them Duma deputies, government officials and representatives of social organizations and trade unions. The Duma hearing was designed to provide the reform with a thin veil of democratic legitimacy with advocates of the reform dominating, and leaders of the “loyal” opposition, the Stalinist KPRF, the fascistic LDPR and the right-wing nationalist “Just Russia” trying to present themselves as “men of the people.”

The case in favor of the reform was made principally by Alexei Kudrin, the former finance minister of Russia (2000-2011) and current chairman of the Accounts Chamber. It is widely known, but was never made official, that the current pension reform plan is based on proposals elaborated by Kudrin’s think tank, the Center for Strategic Research.

Kudrin argued that Russia was facing an economic turning point: It could either raise taxes, something that was out of the question because big business was opposed to it, or take a “new view on the situation”—i.e., implement the pension reform. He pointed to the growing number of pensioners relative to the working population as well as the rapidly shrinking Russian workforce, maintaining that low pensions could be raised if the retirement age was raised.

He insisted that the pension reform was necessary to maintain the Russian state budget and that it was “long overdue.” It should have been prepared 10 years ago, Kudrin argued. Indeed, Kudrin and others, especially among the pro-Western liberal opposition, have for a decade or more pressed for complete reversal of the pension system.

Deputies of the ruling “United Russia” party echoed his arguments, saying that the pension reform was necessary and long overdue, and that it had to be adopted as quickly as possible.

The head of the Stalinist and far-right nationalist KPRF, Gennady Zyuganov, denounced the reform as a “law which, in defiance of all logic, splits society.” Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the head of the fascistic LDPR (Liberal Democratic Party of Russia), also denounced the reform before arguing that it was essentially necessary, but should be implemented in a different form. The head of “Just Russia,” Sergei Mironov, warned that they were facing an “army of hungry people” and called for a referendum on the reform. All of them have for decades served as key props of the Putin regime while acting as a loyal opposition. Their main role consists in diverting popular anger and channeling it in a right-wing, nationalist direction.

As a result of the Duma hearing, a “working group” was created that will include Kudrin, the labor minister Maxim Topilin; Valerii Fadeev, the secretary of the Social Chamber of the Duma; Vladimir Mau from the Economic Council under President Putin; and Mikhail Shmakov, the head of the state-controlled trade union federation FNPR.

The fact that the Kremlin, the government and the Duma are pressing ahead with the raising of the retirement age in defiance of overwhelming popular opposition signals a major escalation of the oligarchy’s class warfare against the working class in Russia. There is no question that the coming months will see a significant upsurge in social opposition to the Putin regime.

The arguments by Kudrin, which amount to the same old lie that “there is no money” other than that which is pumped out of the working class through austerity, is, of course, an offensive lie. The Russian mafia-oligarchy controls immense riches, much of which are not even declared but disappear somewhere along the way to the Virgin Islands through money laundering and other criminal activities.

According to a report from 2017, the country’s top decile owns a stunning 89 percent of all household wealth, compared to 78 percent in the United States and 73 percent in China. Russia has the world’s third-largest number of billionaires (96) and is home to around 79,000 dollar millionaires.

That the Russian economy, almost three decades after the destruction of the Soviet Union, borders on permanent recession, is anemic, and has extraordinarily low rates of labor productivity is above all the result of the restoration of capitalism in the USSR, which was accompanied by a historically unprecedented destruction of productive forces—outside of periods of major wars.

Capitalist restoration has created an economy that relies largely on the export of raw materials, and in which almost 50 percent of GDP is generated in gray areas like human and drug trafficking, illegal financial transactions and other criminal activities.

The demographic crisis in Russia is a result of an ongoing social crisis that has taken its toll on the health and ability to work of several generations of Russians. Life expectancy in Russia plunged in the 1990s and still is among the lowest in the developed world.

Now, the Russian oligarchy uses this economic and social disaster that it has created through its rule over the past decades to justify further assaults on the working class.

It is telling that Western media and think tanks, always eager to portray Putin and his regime as anti-democratic and authoritarian, have essentially backed the pension reform, despite it being opposed by virtually the entire population. This type of assault on working class living standards is precisely what the imperialist powers and their media outlets, as well as Russia’s liberal opposition, have been pushing for all along when acting as “democratic” opponents of the Putin regime.

Tuesday’s Duma hearing occurred just one day before the 14th anniversary of Putin’s signing the law on the “monetization of benefits” in 2004. This reform meant that social benefits for pensioners, veterans and others were “monetized”—i.e., free subway and bus rides, and many tickets for daily use and culture that had hitherto been free for these social groups were abolished, and their former recipients received meager substitutes in rubles. The ensuing mass protests by pensioners, workers and youth against this reform were the main motivator for President Putin to make his promise in 2005 that he would never raise the retirement age, a measure that was then already being discussed in the oligarchy.

Today, his regime feels forced to push ahead with this reform under conditions that are far more unstable and explosive, both in terms of social tensions and in terms of the economic and international situation as a whole.

So far, Putin has personally not made any public comment on the planned pension reform— most likely out of fear of the consequences of his public backing for a reform that has been developed and pushed for by one of his longest-standing and closest allies, Alexei Kudrin. However, Putin did allow the ruling party “United Russia,” which is at this point the main driving force behind the pension reform, to declare itself the “president’s party” during the campaign for elections in some 80 Russian regions on September 9.

By contrast, in this year’s presidential elections in March, he had sought to distance himself from the widely detested party. His decision to now align himself with it is an expression of the deep crisis of his regime and the recognition that the party might otherwise suffer a catastrophic vote of no confidence in the regional elections. In polls, United Russia has plummeted already by some 13 points since early July, falling to 35.3 percent nationwide. Putin’s alignment with United Russia and its austerity policy in this situation will serve to further discredit Putin and his regime as a whole.

Sixth Australian prime minister ousted in 11 years

Mike Head 

Amid unprecedented scenes of chaos and conflict, Malcolm Turnbull was today ousted as prime minister of Australia after a political campaign against him organised by the most right-wing faction of the ruling Liberal Party. The extraordinary events of the past week point to the mounting instability and fragility wracking the parliamentary order.

After a narrow, 45 to 40 party room vote to oust Turnbull, Treasurer Scott Morrison ultimately prevailed over Turnbull’s extreme right-wing challenger, ex-Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton by a similar margin. Turnbull’s deputy leader, Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop, had been eliminated in the first round of voting.

Australia, often falsely depicted as an exceptional and stable country, has become one of the most graphic examples of how longstanding political parties and institutions are breaking down under the pressure of mounting geo-strategic and class tensions internationally.

Since John Howard lost his own seat in the landslide defeat of the Liberal-National Coalition in 2007, every prime minister, whether Coalition or Labor, has been ousted. Counting Morrison, Australia has now had seven prime ministers in the past 11 years, four of whom were removed by backroom coups within their own parties.

The tearing down of Turnbull has surpassed the previous leadership coups in the bitterness and ferocity with which both factions fought for control of the government.

A political and ideological schism has opened up in the Liberal Party in response to the disintegration of the post-war global order and the bellicose efforts of US imperialism to maintain its waning world dominance. The Australian capitalist class has come under immense pressure from Washington to line up unconditionally behind its plans for a military confrontation with China, on whose markets significant sections of the Australian ruling elite depend heavily. This has been taken to a new height by the Trump administration’s naked “America First” program of trade war and militarism.

At the same time, the Australian ruling class faces the prospect of an eruption of working-class resistance to decades of falling real wages, declining social conditions and the attacks on fundamental democratic rights. The Australian economy is deeply vulnerable to another global financial crisis, or trade retaliation by China over Canberra’s backing of Washington.

The attempt to elevate Dutton is part of an ongoing effort, backed by sections of the ruling class and the Rupert Murdoch-owned media, to refashion the Liberal Party into a Trump-style, extreme right-wing movement. The aim of the Dutton wing, which includes former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, is to disorientate sections of the population with nationalism and anti-immigrant xenophobia, while trying to forge a base of support for US-Australian militarism against China and police-state repression of the working class.

In broad terms, the extreme-right in Australia is paralleled by the Trump “alt-right” in the US and the range of ultra-right and neo-fascist parties that have come into prominence across Europe.

Other sections of the ruling class, personified by Turnbull, a millionaire former merchant banker, fear the potentially disastrous implications for capitalist rule of making such a shift. They are alarmed that the divisive and racist program of the far right will only further radicalise workers and youth, who are already moving to the left in opposition to the ever-widening gulf between the super-rich and the working class.

Turnbull told a media conference yesterday that the coup against him was “a very deliberate effort to pull the Liberal Party further to the right.” He went further, declaring: “The reality is that a minority in the party room supported by others outside the parliament have sought to bully, intimidate others into making this change of leadership that they’re seeking.”

Corporate media outlets interpreted these remarks as a reference to stridently conservative anti-Turnbull voices in the Murdoch media, including Sky TV, as well as Sydney’s Radio 2GB. He may well, however, have been obliquely referring to interventions from Washington or by the Australian intelligence agencies.

Among those leading the charge against Turnbull have been figures closely associated with the US-linked military and intelligence forces, such as ex-military commanders Senator Jim Molan and Andrew Hastie, the parliamentary intelligence committee chairman. Over the past two years, a succession of key figures in the US ruling elite, including former National Intelligence Director James Clapper, ex-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and US Vice President Mike Pence, have visited Australia to insist that Canberra remain totally committed to Washington’s geostrategic confrontation with China.

Since taking office in 2015, Turnbull has done everything possible to assure, first the Obama White House and then Trump’s, of his unalloyed fidelity to the US military and security alliance, on which the Australian ruling elite has relied since World War II. He had to do so because in 2011, while in opposition, he accused former Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s Labor government of going too far in signing up to Obama’s military and strategic “pivot” to Asia to confront China, which included agreeing to host US Marines in Darwin.

Moreover, Turnbull was aware that Gillard’s predecessor, Kevin Rudd, was removed in 2010 by Labor Party and trade union factional heavyweights, acting in concert with the US embassy, because Rudd had proposed that Washington should make some accommodation to the rise of China.

Earlier this month, however, Turnbull gave a speech that would not have pleased the US ruling elite. He vowed his determination to maintain a “very deep” and strengthening relationship with China, the source of lucrative profits for mining companies, agribusinesses and universities. The move against Turnbull was certainly not opposed in Washington, if not tacitly endorsed.

Indicating how much is at stake, Turnbull threatened his colleagues that he would immediately resign his parliamentary seat if he was removed by Dutton, ending the government’s one-seat majority and possibly forcing an early election. He has not yet indicated if he will follow through on that threat given Morrison won the leadership ballot.

Morrison, a former property and tourism executive, was backed by Turnbull’s supporters and by the financial elite. This morning’s Australian Financial Review editorial said he appeared to be the Liberal Party’s “best hope of bringing together the party’s warring factions” and containing “boiling” vote anger after “four prime ministerial decapitations in eight years.”

Another factor in Morrison’s win may well have been Turnbull’s last-minute bid to block Dutton by insisting that Solicitor-General Stephen Donaghue, the federal government’s top legal officer, supply advice to the Liberal Party by 8.30 this morning on the allegations that Dutton is constitutionally ineligible to sit in parliament because he and his wife control childcare centres that receive government subsidies.

Donoghue’s less than clear advice was that Dutton was “not incapable of sitting” but there was “some risk” that the High Court could rule against him.

Morrison, a deeply right-wing figure himself, will try to straddle between the Dutton-Abbott faction and the Turnbull wing, which represents the most powerful, globally-connected financial and corporate interests. As immigration minister, he initiated “Operation Sovereign Borders” to militarily turn back refugee boats. As social services minister, he slashed welfare spending. Promoted to treasurer by Turnbull, he presided over austerity and efforts to push through massive corporate tax cuts.

Whatever overtures Morrison makes to achieve “unity,” the closeness of the leadership vote leaves no doubt that the turmoil engulfing the Coalition will continue, raising the possibility of a split in the Liberal Party. While Dutton failed to take the leadership, his faction will seek to dictate the policy agenda of the government as the price for its ostensible loyalty. It will bide its time and most likely launch a challenge against Morrison at the first opportunity.

The crisis wracking the Liberal Party may well pave the way for the return of a Labor government. Any such government, led by former trade union head and key Rudd-Gillard minister Bill Shorten, would be no less committed than a Coalition government to the US alliance and to imposing the requirements of the ruling capitalist class, including by fomenting nationalist and anti-immigrant xenophobia as a means of splitting the working class.

Beijing’s Bid for Global Power in the Age of Trump

Alfred W. McCoy

As the second year of Donald Trump’s presidency and sixth of Xi Jinping’s draws to a close, the world seems to be witnessing one of those epochal clashes that can change the contours of global power. Just as conflicts between American President Woodrow Wilson and British Prime Minister Lloyd George produced a failed peace after World War I, competition between Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and American President Harry Truman sparked the Cold War, and the rivalry between Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and President John F. Kennedy brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, so the empowered presidents of the United States and China are now pursuing bold, intensely personal visions of new global orders that could potentially reshape the trajectory of the twenty-first century — or bring it all down.

The countries, like their leaders, are a study in contrasts. China is an ascending superpower, riding a wave of rapid economic expansion with a burgeoning industrial and technological infrastructure, a growing share of world trade, and surging self-confidence. The United States is a declining hegemon, with a crumbling infrastructure, a failing educational system, a shrinking slice of the global economy, and a deeply polarized, divided citizenry. After a lifetime as the ultimate political insider, Xi Jinping became China’s president in 2013, bringing with him a bold internationalist vision for the economic integration of Asia, Africa, and Europe through monumental investment in infrastructure that could ultimately expand and extend the current global economy. After a short political apprenticeship as a conspiracy advocate, Donald Trump took office in 2017 as an ardent America First nationalist determined to disrupt or even dismantle an American-built-and-dominated international order he disdained for supposedly constraining his country’s strength.

Although they started this century on generally amicable terms, China and the U.S. have, in recent years, moved toward military competition and open economic conflict. When China was admitted to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, Washington was confident that Beijing would play by the established rules and become a compliant member of an American-led international community. There was almost no awareness of what might happen when a fifth of humanity joined the world system as an economic equal for the first time in five centuries.

By the time Xi Jinping became China’s seventh president, a decade of rapid economic growth averaging 11% annually and currency reserves surging toward an unprecedented $4 trillion had created the economic potential for a rapid, radical shift in the global balance of power. After just a few months in office, Xi began tapping those vast reserves to launch a bold geopolitical gambit, a genuine challenge to U.S. dominion over Eurasia and the world beyond. Aglow in its status as the world’s sole superpower after “winning” the Cold War, Washington had difficulty at first even grasping such newly developing global realities and was slow to react.

China’s bid couldn’t have been more fortuitous in its timing. After nearly 70 years as the globe’s hegemon, Washington’s dominance over the world economy had begun to wither and its once-superior work force to lose its competitive edge. By 2016, in fact, the dislocations brought on by the economic globalization that had gone with American dominion sparked a revolt of the dispossessed in democracies worldwide and in the American heartland, bringing the self-proclaimed “populist” Donald Trump to power. Determined to check his country’s decline, he has adopted an aggressive and divisive foreign policy that has roiled long-established alliances in both Asia and Europe and is undoubtedly giving that decline new impetus.

Within months of Trump’s entry into the Oval Office, the world was already witnessing a sharp rivalry between Xi’s advocacy of a new form of global collaboration and Trump’s version of economic nationalism. In the process, humanity seems to be entering a rare historical moment when national leadership and global circumstances have coincided to create an opening for a major shift in the nature of the world order.

Trump’s Disruptive Foreign Policy

Despite their constant criticism of Donald Trump’s leadership, few among Washington’s corps of foreign policy experts have grasped his full impact on the historic foundations of American global power. The world order that Washington built after World War II rested upon what I’ve called a “delicate duality”: an American imperium of raw military and economic power married to a community of sovereign nations, equal under the rule of law and governed through international institutions such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organization.

On the realpolitik side of that duality, Washington constructed a four-tier apparatus — military, diplomatic, economic, and clandestine — to advance a global dominion of unprecedented wealth and power. This apparatus rested on hundreds of military bases in Europe and Asia that made the U.S. the first power in history to dominate (if not control) the Eurasian continent.

Even after the Cold War ended, former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski warned that Washington would remain the world’s preeminent power only as long as it maintained its geopolitical dominion over Eurasia. In the decade before Trump’s election, there were, however, already signs that America’s hegemony was on a downward trajectory as its share of global economic power fell from 50% in 1950 to just 15% in 2017. Many financial forecasts now project that China will surpass the U.S. as the world’s number one economy by 2030, if not before.

In this era of decline, there has emerged from President Trump’s torrent of tweets and off-the-cuff remarks a surprisingly coherent and grim vision of America’s place in the present world order. Instead of reigning confidently over international organizations, multilateral alliances, and a globalized economy, Trump evidently sees America standing alone and beleaguered in an increasingly troubled world — exploited by self-aggrandizing allies, battered by unequal trade terms, threatened by tides of undocumented immigrants, and betrayed by self-serving elites too timid or compromised to defend the nation’s interests.

Instead of multilateral trade pacts like NAFTA, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), or even the WTO, Trump favors bilateral deals rewritten to the (supposed) advantage of the United States. In place of the usual democratic allies like Canada and Germany, he is trying to weave a web of personal ties to avowedly nationalist and autocratic leaders of a sort he clearly admires: Vladimir Putin in Russia, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Narendra Modi in India, Adel Fatah el-Sisi in Egypt, and Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman of Saudi Arabia.

Instead of old alliances like NATO, Trump favors loose coalitions of like-minded countries. As he sees it, a resurgent America will carry the world along, while crushing terrorists and dealing in uniquely personal ways with rogue states like Iran and North Korea.

His version of a foreign policy has found its fullest statement in his administration’s December 2017 National Security Strategy. As he took office, the nation, it claimed, faced “an extraordinarily dangerous world, filled with a wide range of threats.” But in less than a year of his leadership, it insisted, “We have renewed our friendships in the Middle East… to help drive out terrorists and extremists… America’s allies are now contributing more to our common defense, strengthening even our strongest alliances.” Humankind will benefit from the president’s “beautiful vision” that “puts America First” and promotes “a balance of power that favors the United States.” The whole world will, in short, be “lifted by America’s renewal.”

Despite such grandiose claims, each of President Trump’s overseas trips has been a mission of destruction in terms of American global power. Each, seemingly by design, disrupted and possibly damaged alliances that have been the foundation for Washington’s global power since the 1950s. During the president’s first foreign trip in May 2017, he promptly voiced withering complaints about the supposed refusal of Washington’s European allies to pay their “fair share” of NATO’s military costs, leaving the U.S. stuck with the bill and, in a fashion unknown to American presidents, refused even to endorse the alliance’s core principle of collective defense. It was a position so extreme in terms of the global politics of the previous half-century that he was later forced to formally back down. (By then, however, he had registered his contempt for those allies in an unforgettable fashion.)

During a second, no-less-divisive NATO visit in July, he charged that Germany was “a captive of Russia” and pressed the allies to immediately double their share of defense spending to a staggering 4% of gross domestic product (a level even Washington, with its monumental Pentagon budget, hasn’t reached) — a demand they all ignored. Just days later, he again questioned the very idea of a common defense, remarking that if “tiny” NATO ally Montenegro decided to “get aggressive,” then “congratulations, you’re in World War III.”

Moving on to England, he promptly kneecapped close ally Theresa May, telling a British tabloid that the prime minister had bungled her country’s Brexit withdrawal from the European Union and “killed off any chance of a vital U.S. trade deal.” He then went on to Helsinki for a summit with Vladimir Putin, where he visibly abased himself before NATO’s nominal nemesis, completely enough that there were even brief, angry protests from leaders of his own party.

During Trump’s major Asia tour in November 2017, he addressed the Asian-Pacific Economic Council (APEC) in Vietnam, offering an extended “tirade” against multilateral trade agreements, particularly the WTO. To counter intolerable “trade abuses,” such as “product dumping, subsidized goods, currency manipulation, and predatory industrial policies,” he swore that he would always “put America first” and not let it “be taken advantage of anymore.” Having denounced a litany of trade violations that he termed nothing less than “economic aggression” against America, he invited everyone there to share his “Indo-Pacific dream” of the world as a “beautiful constellation” of “strong, sovereign, and independent nations,” each working like the United States to build “wealth and freedom.”

Responding to such a display of narrow economic nationalism from the globe’s leading power, Xi Jinping had a perfect opportunity to play the world statesman and he took it, calling upon APEC to support an economic order that is “more open, inclusive, and balanced.” He spoke of China’s future economic plans as an historic bid for “interconnected development to achieve common prosperity… on the Asian, European, and African continents.”

As China has lifted 60 million of its own people out of poverty in just a few years and was committed to its complete eradication by 2020, so he urged a more equitable world order “to bring the benefits of development to countries across the globe.” For its part, China, he assured his listeners, was ready to make “$2 trillion of outbound investment” — much of it for the development of Eurasia and Africa (in ways, of course, that would link that vast region more closely to China). In other words, he sounded like a twenty-first century Chinese version of a twentieth-century American president, while Donald Trump acted more like Argentina’s former presidente Juan Perón, minus the medals. As if to put another nail in the coffin of American global dominion, the remaining 11 Trans-Pacific trade pact partners, led by Japan and Canada, announced major progress in finalizing that agreement — without the United States.

In addition to undermining NATO, America’s Pacific alliances, long its historic fulcrum for the defense of North America and the dominance of Asia, are eroding, too. Even after 10 personal meetings and frequent phone calls between Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Donald Trump during his first 18 months in office, the president’s America First trade policy has placed a “major strain” on Washington’s most crucial alliance in the region. First, he ignored Abe’s pleas and cancelled the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact and then, as if his message hadn’t been strong enough, he promptly imposed heavy tariffs on Japanese steel imports. Similarly, he’s denounced the Canadian prime minister as “dishonest” and mimicked Indian Prime Minister Modi’s accent, even as he made chummy with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and then claimed, inaccurately, that his country was “no longer a nuclear threat.”

It all adds up to a formula for further decline at a faster pace.

Beijing’s Grand Strategy

While Washington’s influence in Asia recedes, Beijing’s grows ever stronger. As China’s currency reserves climbed rapidly from $200 billion in 2001 to a peak of $4 trillion in 2014, President Xi launched a new initiative of historic import. In September 2013, speaking in Kazakhstan, the heart of Asia’s ancient Silk Road caravan route, he proclaimed a “one belt, one road initiative” aimed at economically integrating the enormous Eurasian land mass around Beijing’s leadership. Through “unimpeded trade” and infrastructure investment, he suggested, it would be possible to connect “the Pacific and the Baltic Sea” in a proposed “economic belt along the Silk Road,” a region “inhabited by close to 3 billion people.” It could become, he predicted, “the biggest market in the world with unparalleled potential.”

Within a year, Beijing had established a Chinese-dominated Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank with 56 member nations and an impressive $100 billion in capital, while launching its own $40 billion Silk Road Fund for private equity projects. When China convened what it called a “belt and road summit” of 28 world leaders in Beijing in May 2017, Xi could, with good reason, hail his initiative as the “project of the century.”

Although the U.S. media has often described the individual projects involved in his “one belt, one road” project as wasteful, sybaritic, exploitative, or even neo-colonial, its sheer scale and scope merits closer consideration. Beijing is expected to put a mind-boggling $1.3 trillion into the initiative by 2027, the largest investment in human history, more than 10 times the famed American Marshall Plan, the only comparable program, which spent a more modest $110 billion (when adjusted for inflation) to rebuild a ravaged Europe after World War II.

Beijing’s low-cost infrastructure loans for 70 countries from the Baltic to the Pacific are already funding construction of the Mediterranean’s busiest port at Piraeus, Greece, a major nuclear power plant in England, a $6 billion railroad through rugged Laos, and a $46 billion transport corridor across Pakistan. If successful, such infrastructure investments could help knit two dynamic continents, Europe and Asia — home to a full 70% percent of the world’s population and its resources — into a unified market without peer on the planet.

Underlying this flurry of flying dirt and flowing concrete, the Chinese leadership seems to have a design for transcending the vast distances that have historically separated Asia from Europe. As a start, Beijing is building a comprehensive network of trans-continental gas and oil pipelines to import fuels from Siberia and Central Asia for its own population centers. When the system is complete, there will be an integrated inland energy grid (including Russia’s extensive network of pipelines) that will extend 6,000 miles across Eurasia, from the North Atlantic to the South China Sea. Next, Beijing is working to link Europe’s extensive rail network with its own expanded high-speed rail system via transcontinental lines through Central Asia, supplemented by spur lines running due south to Singapore and southwest through Pakistan.

Finally, to facilitate sea transport around the sprawling continent’s southern rim, China has already bought into or is in the process of building more than 30 major port facilities, stretching from the Straits of Malacca across the Indian Ocean, around Africa, and along Europe’s extended coastline. In January, to take advantage of Arctic waters opened by global warming, Beijing began planning for a “Polar Silk Road,” a scheme that fits well with ambitious Russian and Scandinavian projects to establish a shorter shipping route around the continent’s northern coast to Europe.

Though Eurasia is its prime focus, China is also pursuing economic expansion in Africa and Latin America to create what might be dubbed the strategy of the four continents. To tie Africa into its projected Eurasian network, Beijing already had doubled its annual trade there by 2015 to $222 billion, three times that of the United States, thanks to a massive infusion of capital expected to reach a trillion dollars by 2025. Much of it is financing the sort of commodities extraction that has already made the continent China’s second largest source of crude oil. Similarly, Beijing has invested heavily in Latin America, acquiring, for instance, control over 90% of Ecuador’s oil reserves. As a result, its commerce with that continent doubled in a decade, reaching $244 billion in 2017, topping U.S. trade with what once was known as its own “backyard.”

A Conflict with Consequences

This contest between Xi’s globalism and Trump’s nationalism has not been safely confined to an innocuous marketplace of ideas. Over the past four years, the two powers have engaged in an escalating military rivalry and a cutthroat commercial competition. Apart from a shadowy struggle for dominance in space and cyberspace, there has also been a visible, potentially volatile naval arms race to control the sea lanes surrounding Asia, specifically in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. In a 2015 white paper, Beijing stated that “it is necessary for China to develop a modern maritime military force structure commensurate with its national security.” Backed by lethal land-based missiles, jet fighters, and a global satellite system, China has built just such a modernized fleet of 320 ships, including nuclear submarines and its first aircraft carriers.

Within two years, U.S. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson reported that China’s “growing and modernized fleet” was “shrinking” the traditional American advantage in the Pacific, and warned that “we must shake off any vestiges of comfort or complacency.” Under Trump’s latest $700-billion-plus defense budget, Washington has responded to this challenge with a crash program to build 46 new ships, which will raise its total to 326 by 2023. As China builds new naval bases bristling with armaments in the Arabian and South China seas, the U.S. Navy has begun conducting assertive “freedom-of-navigation” patrols near many of those same installations, heightening the potential for conflict.

It is in the commercial realm of trade and tariffs, however, where competition has segued into overt conflict. Acting on his belief that “trade wars are good and easy to win,” President Trump slapped heavy tariffs, targeted above all at China, on steel imports in March and, just a few weeks later, punished that country’s intellectual property theft by promising tariffs on $50 billion of Chinese imports. When those tariffs finally hit in July, China immediately retaliated against what it called “typical trade bullying” with similar tariffs on U.S. goods. The Financial Times warned that this “tit-for-tat” can escalate into a “full bore trade war… that will be very bad for the global economy.” As Trump threatened to tax $500 billion more in Chinese imports and issued confusing, even contradictory demands that made it unlikely Beijing could ever comply, observers became concerned that a long-lasting trade war could destabilize what the New York Times called the “mountain of debt” that sustains much of China’s economy. In Washington, the usually taciturn Federal Reserve chairman issued an uncommon warning that “trade tensions… could pose serious risks to the U.S. and global economy.”

China as Global Hegemon?

Although a withering of Washington’s global reach, abetted and possibly accelerated by the Trump presidency, is already underway, the shape of any future world order is still anything but clear. At present, China is the sole state with the obvious requisites for becoming the planet’s new hegemon. Its phenomenal economic rise, coupled with its expanding military and growing technological prowess, provide that country with the obvious fundamentals for superpower status.

Yet neither China nor any other state seems to have the full imperial complement of attributes to replace the United States as the dominant world leader. Apart from its rising economic and military clout, China, like its sometime ally Russia, has a self-referential culture, non-democratic political structures, and a developing legal system that could deny it some of the key instruments for global leadership.

In addition to the fundamentals of military and economic power, “every successful empire,” observes Cambridge University historian Joya Chatterji, “had to elaborate a universalist and inclusive discourse” to win support from the world’s subordinate states and their leaders. Successful imperial transitions driven by the hard power of guns and money also require the soft-power salve of cultural suasion for sustained and successful global dominion. Spain espoused Catholicism and Hispanism, the Ottomans Islam, the Soviets communism, France a cultural francophonie, and Britain an Anglophone culture. Indeed, during its century of global dominion from 1850 to 1940, Britain was the exemplar par excellence of such soft power, evincing an enticing cultural ethos of fair play and free markets that it propagated through the Anglican church, the English language and its literature, and the virtual invention of modern athletics (cricket, soccer, tennis, rugby, and rowing). Similarly, at the dawn of its global dominion, the United States courted allies worldwide through soft-power programs promoting democracy and development. These were made all the more palatable by the appeal of such things as Hollywood films, civic organizations like Rotary International, and popular sports like basketball and baseball.

China has nothing comparable. Its writing system has some 7,000 characters, not 26 letters. Its communist ideology and popular culture are remarkably, even avowedly, particularistic. And you don’t have to look far for another Asian power that attempted Pacific dominion without the salve of soft power. During Japan’s occupation of Southeast Asia in World War II, its troops went from being hailed as liberators to facing open revolt across the region after they failed to propagate their similarly particularistic culture.

As command-economy states for much of the past century, neither China nor Russia developed an independent judiciary or the autonomous rules-based order that undergirds the modern international system. From the foundation of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague in 1899 through the formation of the International Court of Justice under the U.N.’s 1945 charter, the world’s nations have aspired to the resolution of conflicts via arbitration or litigation rather than armed conflict. More broadly, the modern globalized economy is held together by a web of conventions, treaties, patents, and contracts grounded in law.

From its founding in 1949, the People’s Republic of China gave primacy to the party and state, slowing the growth of an autonomous legal system and the rule of law. A test of its attitude toward this system of global governance came in 2016 when the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague ruled unanimously that China’s claims to sovereignty in the South China Sea “are contrary to the Convention [on the Law of the Sea] and without lawful effect.” Beijing’s Foreign Ministry simply dismissed the adverse decision as “invalid” and without “binding force.” President Xi insisted China’s “territorial sovereignty and maritime rights” were unchanged, while the state Xinhua news agency called the ruling “naturally null and void.” Although China might be well placed to supplant Washington’s economic and military power, its capacity to assume leadership via that other aspect of the delicate duality of global power, a network of international organizations grounded in the rule of law, is still open to question.

If Donald Trump’s vision of world disorder is a sign of the American future and if Beijing’s projected $2 trillion in infrastructure investments, history’s largest by far, succeed in unifying the commerce and transport of Asia, Africa, and Europe, then perhaps the currents of financial power and global leadership will indeed transcend all barriers and flow inexorably toward Beijing, as if by natural law. But if that bold initiative ultimately fails, then for the first time in five centuries the world may face an imperial transition without a clear successor as global hegemon. Moreover, it will do so on a planet where the “new normal” of climate change — the heating of the atmosphere and the oceans, the intensification of flood, drought, and fire, the rising seas that will devastate coastal cities, and the cascading damage to a densely populated world — could mean that the very idea of a global hegemon is fast becoming a thing of the past.

Cultures of Death: Pope Francis, Apology and Child Abuse

Binoy Kampmark

It was long overdue, but Pope Francis’s letter of condemnation and apology regarding the abuse of children by Catholic priests did sent a few ripples of comfort and reckoning.  He conceded that the Church “showed no care for the little ones; we abandoned them”.  He acknowledged the “heart-wrenching pain” of the victims who had been assaulted by the clerical class, and the cries “long ignored, kept quiet or silenced”.

“With shame and repentance,” went the Pope’s grave words, “we acknowledge as an ecclesial community that we were not where we should have been, that we did not act in a timely manner, realizing the magnitude and the gravity of the damage done to so many lives.”

What is left hanging in the air is any system of defined accountability, one characterised by an ancient institution mothballed by secrecy and obfuscation.  In the pointed words of Irish abuse survivor Marie Collins, “Statements from the Vatican or Pope should stop telling us how terrible abuse is, and how all must be held accountable.”

The Pope had been given a prompting this month, a nasty reminder he acknowledged in his note.  “Even though it can be said that most of these cases belong to the past, nonetheless as time goes on we have come to know the pain of the many of the victims.”  The Pennsylvania Supreme Court had made a near 900 page grand jury report investigating clerical sex abuse of minors public, a digging enterprise spearheaded by the Pennsylvania state Attorney General Josh Shapiro.  The grizzly bounty came to 301 accused priests, with some 1,000 victims throughout the state, and even then, it only covered six of the eight dioceses in the state.

The details read like chillingly lurid pornography: a priest in the Diocese of Erie who “fondled boys and told them he was giving them a ‘cancer check’”; a priest in the Diocese of Allentown who impregnated a 17-year-old and “forged another pastor’s signature on a marriage certificate”.  What also accompanied such acts of molestation was the divine remit: victims were assured that their sexual provision was part of a broader Godly purpose.

The exploits of some of the accused resemble catalogues of brutal overachievement.  Rev. Edward R. Graff, who served in the diocese of Allentown for 35 years, could add scores of victims to his repertoire. Much of his conduct was executed on the premise that he was “an instrument of god”.

After the abuse comes the vast apparatus, the doctrinally directed cover-ups that warn of continuing offending behaviour while still keeping matters bolted and in-house.  The report notes the point.  “What we can say, though, despite some institutional reform, individual leaders of the church have largely escaped public accountability.  Priests were raping little boys and girls, and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing; they hid it all.  For decades.”  Within the church itself, church officials received protection and succour. “Monsignors, auxiliary bishops, bishops, archbishops, cardinals have mostly been protected; many, including some named in this report, have been promoted.”

Matters have been particularly heady in the field of child abuse accusation this US summer.  Cardinal Theodore McCarrick resigned his cardinalship after accusations of abuse from adult seminarians and children.  On the other side of the planet, one of the Vatican’s highest ranking officials, Australia’s Cardinal George Pell, is busy battling charges of historical sex abuse.

Resistance to prodding from the secular world remains trenchant in some branches of the Church. In Australia, despite the passage of legislation breaching the sacred seal of the confession, priests have openly stated that they would sooner go to prison than reveal the contents of a penitent’s confession, even if it discloses instances of child abuse.  Church business remains resistant, defiantly so.

To that end, the shaking measures of legal action may be one of few mechanisms to ensure accountability.  Criminal prosecutions have tended to rarely succeed; issues of evidence and the passage of time often condemn them.  Civil lawsuits, as Timothy D. Lytton of Georgia State University argues, might have more prospects of success.  This, however, will face bars imposed by the statute of limitations. “Unless lawmakers across the country pass reforms to extend or suspend the statute of limitations in their states, I believe that the church will never provide a full accounting of the scandal.”

The language of Pope Francis can be misconstrued as healing and resolving.  It does neither.  The Church sprawls and continues to exist with its own rationales, its basis of functioning. It was the world’s first operational corporation, its crimes and infractions as much to do with that logic than anything else.  Until its approach to the powerful clerical class is reformed, the abuses will continue in the shadow of misused divinity.