Severance Pay: Corporate Obligation to Long-Term Workers

Dean Baker

In recent months there have been a number of large retail companies that went into bankruptcy, most notably Sears and Toys “R” Us. In these and other cases, the public is naturally concerned about the plight of long-term workers who have often spent decades working for the same company.

We know from much research that many of these workers will never be able to find employment again at comparable wages, especially older workers in their 50s and 60s. In situations where workers are fortunate enough to have unions, they are generally entitled to some amount of severance pay, based on their years of employment. However, with the share of the private sector workforce in unions now under 7.0 percent, most workers can expect nothing if their employer shuts the doors.

U.S. workers are the exception in this area. Every other wealthy country in the world guarantees long-term employees some amount of severance pay if they lose their job. Only Montana guarantees any compensation to workers who are dismissed without cause.

There has been some recent movement to have the United States catch up to the rest of the world in this area. Senator Tammy Baldwin has proposed legislation which would require private equity funds to pay severance to workers they lay off.

This is a good start, but there is no obvious reason to treat workers employed by private equity differently from other workers. It would be reasonable to guarantee all workers severance pay if they are dismissed without cause.

A reasonable scale would be two weeks of pay for each year of service up to a maximum of 40 weeks. This would ensure that long-term workers at least get something when their company makes large-scale layoffs.

But more important than the money being paid to workers is the altered incentive structure for employers. If an employer can lay off a worker after 25 years, and not give them a dime, they won’t think twice about dumping a worker that they don’t think they need.

That story changes substantially if employers have to provide a long-term employee with 40 weeks of pay. In that situation, employers have a strong incentive to find ways to keep the worker employed. If the reason for the layoff is that they are changing their line of business so that the worker’s position is no longer needed, then the severance pay requirement gives the employer an incentive to retrain the worker to fit into the new line of business.

On the job worker training is an area where the United States seriously lags other countries, most notably Germany. While we will not be able to catch up to the best practices in other countries with a single measure, making it more difficult for companies to lay off workers will be a big step in the right direction.

A way to think about the severance pay requirement is that it requires the company to bear a burden that would otherwise fall on the worker and the government. Longer-term employees are likely to experience long periods of unemployment and then see substantial reductions in pay if and when they find a new job. This is a huge burden to them and their family.

In addition, they will likely to be drawing unemployment insurance and other benefits from the government, quite possibly for an extended period of time. Severance pay forces companies to internalize some of these costs.

Just to be clear, a severance pay requirement does not prevent employers from firing workers who are not doing their job, violate workplace rules, or provide other grounds for dismissal. Severance pay only applies to workers who are losing their job only for business reasons, not for cause. There will always be some borderline cases, but that is a small price to pay for giving long-term workers some measure of job security.

There is a new push, at both the state and federal levels, to provide U.S. workers with many of the benefits that workers in other countries have long taken for granted. The list includes paid family leave, paid sick days, and paid vacation. Severance pay should also be on this list. It should not be as easy to discard a worker who put in a quarter-century with the company as it is to take out the garbage.

Concealing The Truth

Chandra Muzaffar

Concealing the truth from the people is not unusual in politics. It is perhaps more pronounced in global politics partly because it is more difficult to hold powerful global actors accountable. That might is right is an adage that rings true at the international level more than in the domestic arena.

There are currently a number of international issues where the truth is concealed or camouflaged. The demonstrations in Hong Kong for instance which have gone on for weeks are perceived by a lot of people as a struggle for freedom and democracy against an authoritarian government in Beijing. The truth may be a little more complex. It may be in the interest of certain elements in some Western capitals to encourage mass protests in Hong Kong as part of their larger agenda to create instability in China. This in turn may be aimed at curbing China’s rise as a global power which its adversaries perceive as a challenge to their hegemony of the planet.

The crisis in Kashmir is another example of an issue where the entire story may not be known to the people. While changes made to the Indian Constitution have been presented by the government in New Delhi as an attempt to integrate the disputed territory into the national structure, the real reason may be more closely aligned to the ideological orientation of the present BJP leadership. This is why it may have serious repercussions for India’s religious diversity which has been its civilizational hallmark.

A third region in crisis may also reveal that the underlying causes may be quite different from what has been portrayed in the media. Iran has been depicted as the country that is responsible for the present tensions in West Asia. Even if we confined our observation to the immediate circumstance, it is obvious that it is the United States’ decision to scuttle the Iran nuclear deal of July 2015 that is the real reason for the tensions. Why President Trump moved in that direction has a lot to do with increased Israeli and Saudi influence over the White House and their misperception of the power dynamics in West Asia.

Perhaps an even more blatant instance of concealing the truth is the continuing crisis in Venezuela. The US and some of its allies are trying to convey the impression that if the oil-rich state is grappling with serious economic challenges it is due entirely to an oppressive leadership pursuing socialist policies. The truth is that unending schemes and ploys bythe US since the presidency of Hugo Chavez which even witnessed a failed coup against him in April 2002 are the main cause of Venezuela’s woes.

If the truth about what is happening in relation to Venezuela, Iran, Kashmir and Hong Kong is not widely known it is largely because the media, old and new, serve the interests of the powerful. This may not be obvious to many of us because these are on-going crises in constant flux. A quick look at some past episodes may be useful.

In August 1964, the US leadership alleged that North Vietnamese ships had fired at US ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. The allegation provided the justification for the US to intensify its aggression against North Vietnam. The truth is there was no North Vietnamese attack against US ships. The incident was invented as the US Secretary of Defence at that time Robert McNamara admitted years later.

To justify US military action against Iraq when the latter invaded Kuwait in August 1990, a story was concocted that accused Iraqi soldiers of plucking babies out of their incubators and throwing them onto the floor of a hospital in Kuwait. The fabrication was designed to incite public anger against an “utterly brutal and inhuman regime” in Baghdad.  A few years later a monstrous lie was invented about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in order to convince the world that the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003 was totally justified.

A more recent example of political lying was the accusation that Bashar Al-Assad of Syria was responsible for a chemical gas attack in Eastern Ghouta on the 21st of August 2013.  It was the celebrated investigative journalist Seymour Hersh who revealed the truth: that the Western backed rebels were behind the chemical attack.

More than any country in West Asia it is tiny Cuba that has borne the brunt of its huge neighbour’s lies and distortions. Since its Revolution in 1959, it has been constantly accused of fomenting instability and violence in Latin America. And yet, it is the US through its agents and proxies that has orchestrated acts of terror against Cuba the most infamous of which was the downing of a Cuban commercial plane on the 6th of October 1976 that killed 73 people including a number of children. The mastermind of that heinous crime Posada Carilles was given protection in the US until his death in May 2018.

Why lies are propagated so frequently and the truth sacrificed so easily, it is not difficult to understand. It is because the powerful want to protect their power at all costs. Sometimes this would require targeting their foes without proof.

This may be true of two final episodes which I have kept to the end because both have not been investigated thoroughly and therefore one cannot draw definite conclusions. The 9-11 tragedy and the MH 17 disaster though different in many ways are similar in some respects. In both cases, a certain party pointed fingers at the “culprits” almost immediately without presenting an iota of evidence. US officials and the media accused Osama bin Laden of planning  9-11 within hours of the attacks upon the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Similarly, the then US Secretary of State, John Kerry stated that “There is overwhelming evidence of Russia complicity in the downing of a Malaysia airline plane,” as quoted in the BBC on the 21st of July 2014, 4 days after the disaster.  Kerry did not bother to provide any evidence.

It is equally significant that in both cases important questions about the actual episodes have remained unanswered. In the 9-11 episode, it is still unclear what caused the collapse of a third tower in the vicinity of the Twin Towers and what exactly hit the Pentagon. Likewise, in the case of MH 17, the official version of what had caused the downing of the plane does not blend with some eye-witness accounts or with expert analysis of the nature of the damage to the cockpit.

9-11 was the raison d’etre for the US led onslaught on Afghanistan on the 7th of October 2001. More important, it ignited the US led War on Terror that lasted more than a decade and was seen by many Muslims as an affront to their identity and their dignity. Is it a coincidence that after the July 17th air disaster — the overwhelming majority killed were Europeans —- European governments were more supportive of severe economic sanctions against Russia proposed by the US some months before?  Did the disaster unwittingly achieve some geopolitical objective?

It is only if we continue to ask probing questions that the truth that is concealed will be revealed for the good of everyone.

Sins of The Arab Leaders

 Elias Akleh

An American friend asked me the following question: How is it that the large Arab World that extends from the Persian Gulf east all the way to the Atlantic Ocean west, and from Turkish border north to the Indian Ocean south with all its wealth of oil and gas, and spending trillions of dollars acquiring American, British and French sophisticated weapons could not stop Zionism from occupying Palestine and is still unable today to defeat the tiny terrorist state of Israel?

Due to the Zionist controlled and poor American education system, and the Zionist control over the media, it is difficult for the average American to understand the modern Arab history in general and the Palestinian cause in specific. You have to live it in order to understand the depth of the real history especially the vast oral history and the undocumented events.

The Middle Eastern region was inhabited by many separate Arab Bedouin tribes until they were united by the Islamic rule in 661 A.D and became a part of the Islamic Umayyad Caliphate that extended from India east all the way to Spain west, covering Middle Eastern and north African regions. This situation lasted for more than 600 years under different forms of Islamic Caliphates until 1362 A.D. when the Ottoman Empire took over governing the whole Middle Eastern region for 400 years until the beginning of WWI.

According to the Sykes-Picot Agreement, Britain and France divided The Middle East into different mandates and installed their own Arab puppet rulers. Britain, also, gave Palestine to Zionist Jews. To maintain their British gold salaries and their ruling positions over their perspective region (state) those installed Arab puppets had tacitly accepted and agreed to sacrifice Palestine to the Zionists. Fearing for their rules from popular revolts those Arab leaders, pretending to oppose the unjust and illegal 1948 UN Partition Plan of Palestine, sent few troops; a total of 20 thousand Arab soldiers to Palestine to fight the 80 thousand Zionist terrorist militias. The real goal for these troops was not to destroy the unilaterally declared terrorist state of Israel, rather to prevent Israel from occupying territories assigned to a Palestinian state according to the Partition Plan. Arab leaders wanted a buffering Palestinian state preventing Zionist expansion.

Since 1948 until this very day, most of Arab leaders including the Arab League, although pretending to support the Palestinian cause, have not only abandoned the Palestinians to face Zionist genocidal terror alone as if they were non-Arab foreign population, but also had covertly conspired against them and against any Arab organization or government that would support them.  They shared the Israeli first Prime Minister; Ben Gurion’s, false hope, who said that the “old [Palestinians] will die and the young will forget.” Yet the Palestinian successive new generations are still carrying the keys for their grandfather’s homes in Palestine, and are more aggressively fighting for their freedom and for their right of return.

Here follows a short history of the sins of some Arab leaders:

Saudi rulers: Their history started with Hussein ibn Ali Al-Hashemi, who was the Sharif (ruler) of Mecca in the Arabian Peninsula, who entered into agreement with the British, known as Hussein-McMahon Agreement, where he agreed to enter WWI on the British side and lead an Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire, in return Britain would help him establish a Pan-Arab State in the Middle East. After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire Sharif Hussein discovered that Britain had betrayed him by entering into agreement with France (Sykes-Picot agreement) in order to divide the region among themselves, and by Balfour Declaration promising Palestine to the Zionists.

Due to Hussein’s opposition to this betrayal the British supported and armed Abdul Aziz Al-Saud with his extremist Wahhabi militias, to topple Hussein in 1925 and to establish the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932. For the British support Abdul Aziz wrote a letter to sir Percy Cox, the British High Commissioner, expressing his agreement to hand over Palestine to Zionist Jews. It is important to mention, here, that Al-Saud family is originally Jewish (Arabic source, English source) from the city of Isfahan, whose founding grandfather was called Mordechai bin Abraham bin Moshe Al-Donamy, who changed his name to Marikhan Al-Saud when immigrated to the Arabian Peninsula.

It has to be said that policies of the successive Saudi kings had the most drastic effects in spreading political chaos, divisions, hatred, wars and destructions within the Arab states generally and the worst detrimental effect on Palestine specifically for the sole benefit of the Zionist Israeli project.

In 1945 King Abdul Aziz shifted allegiance from Britain to the USA; the main supporter to Israel. Although reports indicated that the Saudi king expressed his opposition to the Israeli project to President Roosevelt during their meeting on the USS Quincy destroyer, yet the secret Saudi Israeli intelligence cooperation and military collaboration continued as has been revealed many times lately.

This military collaboration, exposed by Foreign Affairs, was played in 1964 in Yemen during the North Yemen civil war when an Israeli military pilot; Aryeh Oz, conducted 14 air drops of Saudi weapons to Yemeni royalists. Such military air collaboration is still going on today in the Yemeni theatre. Israeli air force planes were reported delivering Israeli weapons; missiles and other military equipment to Saudi Khamis Mushait base in Asir. Israeli officers were also reported killed by Yemeni’s Scud missiles targeting this base. During the present Saudi war against Yemen Israel, with the agreement of Saudi king, took this opportunity to test its tactical nuclear weapons and to help the Saudi king when in May 2015 Israeli military pilots dropped nukes on Sana’a, Yemen.

In 1966 the Saudi king Faisal bin Abdel Aziz sent a letter to the American president Lyndon Johnson urging him to push Israel to attack Egypt, Jordan, and Syria and to occupy Gaza, Sinai, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights, thus ending the Palestinian cause and disrupting Egyptian President Nasser’s plans to form an Arab Union.  The king also urged Johnson to establish a Kurdish state in Iraq. This was a push towards the 6 days war in 1967.

Saudi Arabia had also provided military intelligence to Israel during its 2006 war in Lebanon. In 2014 it was reported that Saudi Arabia had financed most of Israel’s weapons build up and paid $1 Billion for the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists. According to Panama Papers Saudi king Salman bin Abdul Aziz helped finance the election campaign of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in 2015.

It is known to the whole world that Saudi Arabia partnered with Qatar, Turkey, Israel and the US in creating, financing and arming all the terrorist groups; ISIS and its off shoots, to destroy Syria even before Qatar former Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim’s confession.

Saudi anti-Arab posture in support to Israel was not exclusive to the ruling family. Saudi princes, business men, and clergy had many times expressed their support to Israel blaming Palestinian resistance and Intifadas. The statements of Saudi billionaire Al-Walid bin Talal during an interview with the Kuwaiti paper “Alqabas” was just one example. Al-Walid expressed his support to Israel against the Palestinian Intifada, and called for a Saudi Israeli coalition against what he called the Iranian threat.

The myth of the Iranian threat is being widely used by the Saudi, Israeli and American politicians and media narratives in an attempt to divert attention from the real Israeli threat to the region. The Saudi Israeli political and military cooperation has come to the open, and is been claimed as an example to follow for the rest of the Gulf States to face the Iranian threat. As part of this Saudi Israeli military cooperation the two countries formed a joint militia to control the Red Sea. Lately Saudis are seeking to acquire Israeli Iron Dome missiles in an attempt to stop Yemeni rockets.

The Saudi treachery against Arabs and cooperation with the terrorist Israeli state would fill volumes. It has come recently to the open, and one needs only follow the news to understand its depth.

Egyptian rulers: Saudi rulers are not the only Arab traitors. Egyptian rulers had also played the same role. Gamal Abdel-Nasser was the only genuine leader who pushed for Arab unity and supported the Palestinians. He created and supported the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) under the leadership of Yasir Arafat. Yet, he was betrayed and is suspected to be assassinated rather than dying of a heart attack.

After Nasser’s death (assassination) Muhammad Anwar el-Sadat became the president. Sadat got rid of all the influential Egyptian politicians by either forced retirement or by imprisonment, and turned Egyptian economy upside down by divorcing the Soviet Union and cozying up to pro-Israel USA. Sadat is known for two accomplishments (sins); the 1973 October war and peace treaty with Israel.

After the 6 Days War the Suez Canal was closed against international traffic. This closure was costly for the western corporations as well as for Egypt.  The 1973 October War was Henry Kissinger’s (then the American Secretary of State) plan to fix this problem. This war was a conspiracy between Sadat and Kissinger in order to re-open the Suez Canal for business and to destroy the Syrian military forces (Alan Hart’s “Zionism, The Real Enemy of The Jews; Volume II). This conspiracy was also confirmed in a memo by Vladimir Vinogradov; the Soviet Ambassador in Cairo:

“Sadat entered into conspiracy with the Israelis, betrayed his ally Syria, condemned the Syrian army to destruction and Damascus to bombardment, allowed General Sharon’s tanks to cross without hindrance to the western bank of the Suez Canal, and actually planned a defeat of the Egyptian troops in the October War.”

After the cease fire Sadat visited Israel giving a speech in the Knesset, and entered into peace agreements that was culminated in 1979 with Camp David Accords providing free passage to Israeli ships through Suez Canal and recognizing the Strait of Tiran and the Gulf of Aqaba as international waterways. Such recognition, plus the Egyptian exit from the Israeli Arab conflict were great gains for Israel. With the Egyptian army neutralized the whole Israeli army was free to focus on the PLO in Lebanon that eventually led to the 1982 Israeli invasion and devastation of Lebanon.

In 1981 Sadat was assassinated and was succeeded by Hosni Mubarak, who ruled Egypt for 30 years. Besides being Egyptians, Mubarak’s family members are also British citizens. Besides his oppressive rule and theft of around $134 billion of Egyptian wealth, Mubarak was a good friend for Israel. He sold Israel Egyptian natural gas for a lot cheaper than the global market price. His wife; Suzanne Mubarak, received $300 million Israeli bribe in order to affect changes in the Egyptian educational curriculum, especially in historical and religious studies, to reflect positive attitude towards Israel.

Mubarak instigated enmity against Palestinians especially in Gaza Strip, who used to be Egyptian citizens before 1967. When Israel enforced a siege against Gaza Strip in 2007, Mubarak joined Israel in the siege and closed Rafah Crossing; the only life line left for Gaza. Worse than that he constructed in 2009 an underground steel barrier on the Egyptian border with Gaza, and flooded Gaza’s food smuggling tunnels.  As a mediator between Fatah and Hamas Mubarak actually sabotaged any possible compromise between the two parties.

Abdel Fattah El-Sisi became the Egyptian president in 2014. He is a Sephardi crypto Jew; the son of a Moroccan Jewish mother; Malikah Titani, and the nephew of Uri Sabbagh; a member in David Ben Gurion’s political party. He was the only surviving Egyptian captain of the 1999 crash of EgyptAir 990 because he changed his flight plan at the last minute. There were 33 Egyptian military officers, including three Egyptian nuclear scientists, on the plane returning from military training in the US.

El-Sisi had accused Hamas of terrorism and tightened the siege against Gaza. He evacuated and destroyed the whole town of Rafah on the Gaza/Egypt border to create an 8 miles buffer zone to destroy Gaza tunnels and to choke and starve Gaza Palestinians. He gave ownership of the two strategic islands; Sanafir and Tiran on the Red Sea, to Saudi Arabia, who in turn turned them to Israel. The two islands control the sea passage to ports of Aqaba in Jordan and Eilat in Israel. El-Sisi claims that Egypt is mediating Hamas/Fatah reconciliation talks for unification when the facts show that El-Sisi is actually sabotaging these reconciliation attempts to keep Palestinians divided.

After eliminating any real political opposition (former head of armed forces Sami Anan, human rights lawyer Khaled Ali, former prime minister Ahmed Shafik, and army colonel Ahmed Konsowa)  El-Sisi won 2018 election with 97% of votes; a suspicious percentage used by previous Egyptian presidents as a proof of popularity. Yet, voters’ turnout was only 41%. The election featured only one other candidate – himself an ardent El-Sisi supporter.  Running against El-Sisi was Moussa Mustafa Moussa, chairman of the liberal El-Ghad Party, and an El-Sisi loyalist. Mousa was just a placeholder to give election a democratic face.

Jordanian kings: In 1921 Trans-Jordan (Jordan) was carved out of the Ottoman Empire and became a British protectorate according to Sykes-Picot agreement. The British installed Abdullah bin Hussein bin Ali as the ruler with his tacit agreement and acceptance of the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. King Abdullah met several times with Golda Meier, then the representative of the Jewish Yishuv, and formed what was known as a Hashemite-Zionist Accord, according which the Zionist would occupy more Palestinian land that allotted to them by the Partition Plan, while Abdullah would grab the West Bank under his rule. This was done in 1948. On his way to pray in Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and then to meet some Israeli generals afterwards, King Abdullah was assassinated by a nationalist Palestinian.

Hussein bin Talal; the grandson of King Abdullah, became king of Jordan in 1952 when he was still 17 years old. He was raised and educated under the pro-Israel British supervision. He was a graduate of the British Harrow School and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. The salaries of his administration as well as his own salary were paid originally by the British government and later on by the successive American administrations. As an employee he had to follow his employer’s orders.

Many successful diaspora Palestinians, who returned home to establish businesses/factories in the West Bank to improve the economy faced two major obstacles. First, they would not get licenses or permits for their businesses unless they establish the business in the East Bank of Jordan and mainly in the capital Amman. The second is that the fees for such a business license include an under-the-table large bribe or part ownership to ministers in charge. These indicate a foreknowledge of the future Israeli occupation of the West Bank that took place in 1967.

I lived through the Six Days War.  Contrary to the reports, Israeli, not Jordanian, army initiated the attack. My house overlooked the main battle for Jerusalem. On a high hill in my town there was a Jordanian military base strategically overlooking the whole Jerusalem city. Before any shot was fired this military base was completely evacuated, and the military trucks drove to the East Bank on an old desert road south passing the city of Hebron. Few Palestinian soldiers defied the withdrawal orders and engaged the invading Israeli tanks on the opposite hill until they ran out of ammunition. Israeli warplanes saturated the area with napalm bombs.

After the war I was told by a distant relative, who was a captain in the Jordanian army based in Amman, that his brigade was loaded unarmed in closed trucks and driven to Jericho to face the Israeli army. He was told that they would receive arms there. But no arms were delivered, and eventually he ordered his troops to go home.

After March 1968 Karameh Battle when PLO fighters and the Jordanian army rebelled an Israeli incursion against the town, the PLO grew in number and in arms. When in September 1970 the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked three passenger planes to a deserted Jordanian air field King Hussein came under American pressure to destroy PLO bases in Jordan. Using imported Israeli “uzi” machine guns the Jordanian army was able to destroy PLO bases and evict Arafat out of Jordan.  This was known as Black September.

King Hussein conducted separate secret contacts with Israeli officials including Moshe Dayan, Yigal Alon, Yitzhak Rabin, and Golda Meier. He used to fly his own helicopter to Israeli-occupied Jerusalem or cross the border at Aqaba/Eilat ports for these meetings. Before October 1973 War he warned Golda Meier of the impending attack.

The present King Abdullah II is not better than his father nor his grandfather. With his salary being paid by the American administration Abdullah has to jump according to American orders. His kingdom has been a major conduit for Israeli products to the Arab World. Jordan is working with Israel on the Two Seas Canal; known also as Red Sea-Dead Sea Water Conveyance, whose declared purpose is to save the Dead Sea from evaporation, while its long term concealed purpose is to be a preliminary water canal connecting the Red Sea to the Mediterranean through Occupied Palestine (Israel) to circumvent the Egyptian Suez Canal. The kingdom had announced in September 2016 that it will import gas (Palestinian stolen gas) from Israel for $10 Billion, despite Algiers’ offer to provide Jordan with all needed gas for much lower prices.

Worse than that is the Jordanian Israeli American military cooperation against Syria. Irbid; a Jordanian city adjacent to the southern Syrian border, had a military operation center that included Jordanian, Israeli and American military officers, who worked together training new ISIS recruits before entering the Syrian territory. Jordan had also sent 12 of its military captains to Israel in September 2016, where they met with Israeli military officials in the Israeli military academy in the city of Netanya according to Israeli Yede’ot Ahranot. Such Jordanian Israeli intelligence cooperation is still going on under the guise of fighting terrorist groups.

Palestinian leaders: Many consider Yasser Arafat as a Palestinian freedom fighter hero. Actually, he was the worst that had happened to the Palestinians. He accepted the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and had virtually initialed his approval stamp on Balfour Declaration when he signed the Oslo Accord. Balfour gave a “promise” for a Jewish home land, a land he had no right to promise, then Arafat fulfilled  Balfour’s promise, and ignoring the rights of Palestinian land owners, he even gave Zionists more Palestinian land; land he never had any right to give away.

One should have the courage to state clearly that Arafat was a corrupt military dictator. Since taking over the PLO in 1969 he insisted on having total control over all decisions and finance without any accountability. Although he was selected as the leader of the PLO through devious methods, Arafat was never officially elected/selected by Palestinians under Israeli occupation or in refugee camps to represent them. He had forced his representation on them.

Many would be surprised to learn that Arafat had long accepted the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and all what he wanted was a small part of it for Palestinians; a two-state solution. This was a solution that Palestinians would not originally accept, and Arafat had to gradually sell it to them. In 1968 he came up with a political programme for a democratic state of Palestine; one-state solution, where Jews and Arabs live together with equal rights. In February 1974 the Central Council of the PLO issued the “Working Paper” calling for Arab and international recognition of Palestinian right to “establish a national authority on any lands that can be wrested from Zionist occupation.” This is a two-state solution, yet without any stipulation about Jerusalem. (Alan Hart: “Arafat: Terrorist or Peacemaker?”)

Arafat was a lousy politician. He was not able to gain Jordanian love and respect that led his PLO to be kicked out of Jordan in 1970 Black September. Rather than learning from his Jordanian experience he did the same mistake in Lebanon; a mistake led to his discharge from the country in 1982 civil war. Unlike the rest of Arab leaders, who distant themselves from Iraqi Saddam Hussein after his invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Arafat rushed to meet and to embrace him hoping for more financial support. Although the embrace is an Arab cultural greeting, yet it had cost Arafat the anger of Arab Gulf leaders and their financial aid.

Arafat’s worst mistake: most detrimental to Palestinians, was his signature on Oslo Accords in 1993. During the Arab/Israeli peace negotiations the Arab team was divided; each Arab country negotiated separately with Israel, leaving the Palestinian negotiating team in a weaker position. In his rush to achieve a political victory, Arafat circumvented the Palestinian negotiating team and signed the Oslo Accords without studying its deliberate contorted legal statements and its dangerous loopholes. The Accords granted Israel full and unconditional recognition and right to exist on usurped Palestinian land but no promise for a Palestinian state, no recognition of UNSC resolutions 242 (Israeli withdrawal from 1967 occupied territories), no recognitions of UNSC resolution 194 (Palestinian right of return), no end to Israeli occupation, no freeze on Israeli illegal colonies (settlements), and no reparations for all the destroyed Palestinian towns and for all the Palestinian massacres perpetrated by Israel.

More dangerous than that was when Arafat labeled Palestinian struggle for freedom and independence as acts of terrorism and violence and pledged PLO’s commitment to protect Israel’s security. In what is known as the “exchange of letters” between Arafat and Rabin, Arafat stated in his September 9th, 1993 letter that:

“The PLO recognizes the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security …. The PLO renounces the use of terrorism and other acts of violence and will assume responsibility over the PLO elements and personnel in order to assure their compliance to prevent violations and discipline violators …”

Trained by the American general Keith Dayton, the Palestinian security forces became Israel’s proxy police force suppressing Palestinian dissent and arresting many Palestinian activists. Arafat surrendered the fate of his Palestinian Authority and the fate of his people to Israeli whims when he agreed that Israel will function as the Palestinian tax collecting agency before depositing money into PA’s accounts.

Despite all of his political concession to Israel Arafat was poisoned by polonium; a radioactive substance, to clear the way for a more agreeable and a more conciliatory dictator; Mahmoud Abbas.

Abbas is the worst Palestinian traitor. He conducted secret negotiations with the Israelis leading to the devastated Oslo Accords. Arafat did not trust him and initially denied him entry to the West Bank. Later, the US and Israel forced Abbas onto Arafat and onto the Palestinians in March 2003 as a prime minister of the Palestinian National Authority.  A power struggle issued between Abbas and Arafat over the control of the Palestinian Security Services that led Abbas to resign 130 days later in September 2003. After Arafat was “removed” in November 2004, and after the removal of better suitable successors such as Marwan Barghouti, who was imprisoned by Israel, Abbas won the planned fake presidential election in January 2005. He is still the president today even though his term had expired in January 2009.

Farouk Kaddoumi; a co-founder of Fatah and later Chairman of Fatah’s Central Committee, accused Abbas and Mohammed Dahlan; head of the Preventive Security Forces in Gaza at the time, of conspiring with Ariel Sharon to assassinate Arafat and other Palestinian officials (Arabic source). He is also accused of conspiring with Israel in the assassination of Khalil al-Wazir; a military leader and cofounder of Fatah. Al-Wazir was assassinated by Israeli assassins in Tunis in April 1988. Abbas was living next door to al-Wazir and had ordered his guards not to save al-Wazir.

Abbas is a worse dictator than Arafat. He was welcomed by butcher Ariel Sharon in his speech to AIPAC, and by former Israeli cabinet minister; Efraim Sneh, who call him “the most courageous partner we have had.” As the president of Palestinian Authority, the Chairman of the PLO, and the Chairman of Fatah, Abbas controlled the three powers of legislative, judicial and executive, thus virtually controlling every aspect of Palestinian life; politically, security, financially, economically and even socially. He immediately got rid of Arafat’s old guards by either forced retirement or imprisonment.

Abbas and his two sons; Yasser and Tarek, were so corrupt stealing Palestinian money and monopolizing major businesses that led Fatah to lose the 2006 legislative elections to Hamas. Abbas, then, and Mohammed Dahlan planned the failed military insurrection in Gaza against Hamas that led to Palestinian division; Abbas in West Bank and Hamas in Gaza Strip.

Abbas’s policies are core-Zionist anti-Palestinian. He surrendered his right to the town of his birth; Safad. The Zionist colonies (settlements) in the West Bank and al-Quds had quadrupled from 230,000 occupiers in 2005 to more than 750,000 occupiers in 2018 without any serious objection by the PA.  He considered “security cooperation” with Israel; protecting Israelis rather than Palestinians, a very SACRED matter in his own words, which led to suppression of all Palestinian dissent, the capture of many Palestinian resistant fighters, and imprisonment and torture of many Palestinian activists by Abbas’s security guards as reported by Arab Organization for Human Rights in the UK (AOHRUK). Abbas has turned Fatah from once self-claimed liberator to oppressor of Palestinians.

During his dictatorship the Palestinian budget deficit skyrocketed to $15 billion in 2018. He forced early retirement and cut down employees’ salaries to almost 50% and eliminated many public jobs raising unemployment to 56%. He suppressed freedom of speech and issued cyber-crimes law to suppress electronic dissent. He withheld money and humanitarian aid due to Gaza Strip, and defended and supported Israeli wars against Gaza in 2008/9, in 2012 and in 2014.

The Palestinian peace negotiators continued their fruitless charade negotiation with Israelis giving up more land to Israel while gaining virtually nothing to a point where chief negotiator Sa’eb Erekat stated that they offered Israel the “biggest Yerushalayim in history.”

During his meeting with president Trump in September 20th. 2017 Abbas expressed his willingness to accept Trump’s peace deal (Deal of the Century), yet Trump announced after two months his administration’s plans to move the American embassy to al-Quds (Jerusalem) declaring the city the capital of Israel.

With Arab leaders like these how could Palestinians regain their homeland and their freedom, and how could Arabs unite into united Arab states under one administration? With leaders like these, who needs enemies?

Gulf wealth: All that glitters is not gold

James M. Dorsey

Little suggests that fabulously wealthy Gulf states and their Middle Eastern and North African beneficiaries have recognized what is perhaps the most important lesson of this year’s popular uprisings in Algeria and Sudan and the 2011 Arab revolts: All that glitters is not gold.

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and to a lesser extent Kuwait have in the last decade invested billions of dollars in either reversing or hollowing out the revolts’ achievements in a bid to ensure that political change elsewhere in the region does not come to haunt them.

Qatar, in a counterintuitive strategy that has earned it the ire of the rulers of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, has sought to achieve the same goal by attempting to be on the right side of the region’s forces of change.

The irony is that both approaches, despite also involving huge investments at home in economic diversification, education, and healthcare, could produce the very result Gulf states seek to avoid: a region that has many of the trappings of 21st century knowledge states but that is incapable of catering to the aspirations of a youth bulge expected to annually increase the work force by a million people over the next 12 years.

UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, concluded earlier this year, that the region’s youth bulge was a double-edged sword. It could either pose a threat to regional stability or be an asset for development.

Turning the youth bulge into an asset “requires urgent and significant investment to create opportunities for meaningful learning, social engagement and work, all of which are currently limited, particularly for young women and the most vulnerable,” the UN agency said in a report entitled MENA (Middle East and North Africa) Generation 2030.

UNICEF arrived at its conclusion even though Gulf states have adopted grandiose plans that envision them becoming within a matter of a decade or two diversified, knowledge-driven economies that enact the social reforms needed to create opportunity for all segments of society.

The group’s conclusion applies as much to the wealthy Gulf states as it does to the Arab beneficiaries of their politically motivated financial largesse.

The problems with the flexing of the Gulf states’ financial muscle as well as the implementation of reform plans are multi-fold.

They relate as much to quality of the upgrading of services such as education as they are about how political intent shapes development efforts and how high domestic debt in countries like Egypt, where 27 percent of government expenditure goes to interest payments, and Lebanon, which spends 38 percent of its budget on debt servicing, benefits Gulf banks and stymies social and economic development.

Credit rating agency Fitch recently downgraded Lebanon’s creit drating to CCC from B- because of “intensifying pressure on Lebanon’s financing model and increasing risks to the government’s debt servicing capacity.”

Gulf scholar Rohan Advani notes that Gulf institutions account for most of the financial sector investment in countries like Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, and Yemen.

“In Lebanon, just over 50 percent of the country’s bank assets are held by GCC-related banks, in Palestine this figure is 63 percent, and in Jordan it is as high as 86 percent,” Mr. Advani wrote in a review of political economist Adam Hanieh’s study of Gulf finance, Money, Markets, and Monarchies.

Mr. Hanieh argues that the bulk of the debt payments are to financial establishments whose major shareholders include Gulf institutions in a process in which “the Arab state…increasingly mediates the transfer of national wealth to large Gulf-related banks.”

Mr Advani warned that “indebted governments are compelled to intensify a politics of austerity, further trapping these societies in cycles of debt. Investments in social programs or infrastructural developments are often stalled. Popular movements are unable to realize their demands at the state level due to the requirements of foreign creditors and domestic capitalists. The ensuing scenario is one where alternative politics are asphyxiated and increasingly circumscribed by an atrophied status quo.”

That may well be the purpose of the exercise with economic diversification efforts in the Gulf being driven more by the need of autocracies to upgrade their autocratic style and create opportunity for a restive youth in a bid to ensure regime survival rather than by the acknowledgement of a government’s responsibility to serve the people.

The result is a flawed approach to all aspects of reform.

In Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030 economic and social reform plan that calls for greater private sector involvement has turned into a top down effort that emphasizes state control with the government’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) as they key player.

A combination of depressed oil prices and the recent replacement of energy minister Khalid al-Falih as chairman of the board of Aramco by PIF head Yasir al-Rumayyan, a close associate of Prince Mohammed, raises questions about the state oil company’s positioning in advance of a much-touted initial public offering.

Ellen Wald, an energy analyst and author of a history of Aramco, the kingdom’s main source of revenue, noted that at PIF Mr. Al-Rumayyan had overseen investments more geared towards speculative gains than the sustainable growth of Saudi wealth.

Ms. Wald said that raised the question whether Mr. Al-Rumayyan’s objective with Aramco would be to serve the company’s long-term interests or those of the PIF.

Aramco this year bought a 70 percent stake in petrochemicals maker Saudi Basic Industries Corp for US$ 69 billion in an effort to raise funds for PIF and delay the Aramco IPO that had originally been scheduled for 2018 but has since been delayed until 2020 or 2021. The megadeal is expected to boost the oil company’s downstream growth plans.

Nonetheless, Ms. Wald cautions that Mr. Al-Rumayyan’s appointment “doesn’t necessarily bode well for Aramco, which is a different kind of company. It has to make stable decisions for the long term,” she said.

By the same token, UNICEF warned that poverty, violent conflict, restrictive social norms, patriarchy, rights violations and lack of safe spaces for expression and recreation were limiting opportunities as well as civic adolescent and youth engagement.

Gulf emphasis on geopolitical dominance, regime survival and return on financial investment produces short term solutions that often exacerbate conflict, produce little trickle-down effect and few prospects for long-term stability.

“As a result, adolescents and youth in MENA (the Middle East and North Africa) feel disillusioned, with girls and young women, refugees, those with disabilities and the poor being particularly marginalised and underrepresented,” the UNICEF report said.

“Youth unemployment in the region is currently the highest in the world. Education systems are failing to prepare adolescents and youth for the workplace, and markets are not generating urgently needed jobs,” the report warned.

Gulf wealth glitters but if the UNICEF report is anything to go by, it has yet to demonstrate that it can produce the gold of a development that is sustainable and benefits not only all segments of Gulf societies but also of those across the region that have become dependent on it.

Invasion! Who Are the Real Invaders on Planet Earth?

Tom Engelhardt


He crossed the border without permission or, as far as I could tell, documentation of any sort. I’m speaking about Donald Trump’s uninvited, unasked-for invasion of my personal space. He’s there daily, often hourly, whether I like it or not, and I don’t have a Department of Homeland Security to separate him from his children, throw them all in degrading versions of prison — without even basic toiletries or edible food or clean water — and then send him back to whatever shithole tower he came from in the first place. (For that, I have to depend on the American people in 2020 and what still passes, however dubiously, for a democracy.)

And yes, the president has been an invader par excellence in these years — not a word I’d use idly, unlike so many among us these days. Think of the spreading use of “invasion,” particularly on the political right, in this season of the most invasive president ever to occupy the Oval Office, as a version of America’s wars coming home. Think of it, linguistically, as the equivalent of those menacing cops on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, back in 2014, togged out to look like an occupying army with Pentagon surplus equipment, some of it directly off America’s distant battlefields.

Not that many are likely to think of what’s happening, invasion-wise, in such terms these days.

Admittedly, like so much else, the worst of what’s happening didn’t start with Donald Trump. “Invasion” and “invaders” first entered right-wing vocabularies as a description of immigration across our southern border in the late 1980s and 1990s. In his 1992 attempt to win the Republican presidential nomination, for instance, Patrick Buchanan used the phrase “illegal invasion” in relation to Hispanic immigrants. In the process, he highlighted them as a national threat in a fashion that would become familiar indeed in recent years.

Today, however, from White House tweets to the screed published by Patrick Crusius, the 21-year-old white nationalist who killed 22 people, including eight Mexican citizens, in an El Paso Walmart, the use of “invasion,” or in his case “the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” has become part of the American way of life (and death). Meanwhile, the language itself has, in some more general sense, has continued to be weaponized.

Of course, when you speak of invasions these days, as President Trump has done repeatedly — he used the word seven times in less than a minute at a recent rally and, by early August, his reelection campaign had posted more than 2,000 Facebook ads with invasion in them — you’re speaking of only one type of invasion. It’s a metaphorical-cum-political one in which they invade us (even though they may not know that they’re doing it). Hundreds of thousands of them have been crossing our southern border, mostly on their own individual initiative. In some cases, however, they have made it to the border in “caravans.”  Just about every one of them, however, is arriving not with mayhem in mind, but in search of some version of safety and, if not well-being, at least better-being in this country.

That’s not the way the White House, most Republicans, or right-wing media figures are describing things, however. As the president put it at a White House Workforce advisory meeting in March:

“You see what’s going on at the border… We are doing an amazing job considering it’s really an onslaught very much. I call it ‘invasion.’ They always get upset when I say ‘an invasion.’ But it really is somewhat of an invasion.”

Or as Tucker Carlson said on Fox News, “We are so overwhelmed by this — it literally is an invasion of people crossing into Texas”; or as Jeanine Pirro plaintively asked on Fox & Friends, “Will anyone in power do anything to protect America this time, or will our leaders sit passively back while the invasion continues?” The examples of such statements are legion.

The True Invaders of Planet Earth

Here’s the strange thing, though: in this century, there has been only one true invader on planet Earth and it’s not those desperate Central Americans fleeing poverty, drugs, violence, and hunger (for significant aspects of which the U.S. is actually to blame).

The real invader in this world of ours happens to be the United States of America. I’m speaking, of course, about the only nation in this century whose armed forces have, in the (once) normal sense of the term, invaded two other countries. In October 2001, the administration of President George W. Bush responded invasively to a nightmarish double act of terrorism here. An extremist Islamist outfit that called itself al-Qaeda and was led by a rich Saudi (whom Washington had, in the previous century, been allied with in a war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan) proved responsible. Instead of organizing an international policing operation to deal with bin Laden and crew, however, President Bush and his top officials launched what they quickly dubbed the Global War on Terror, or GWOT. While theoretically aimed at up to 60 countries across the planet, it began with the bombing and invasion of Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden and some of his crew were indeed there at the time, but the invasion’s aim was, above all, to overthrow another group of extreme Islamists, the Taliban, who controlled most of that land.

So, Washington began a war that has yet to end. Then, in the spring of 2003, the same set of officials did just what a number of them had been eager to do on September 12, 2001: they unleashed American forces in an invasion of Iraq meant to take down autocrat Saddam Hussein (a former U.S. ally who had nothing to do with 9/11 or al-Qaeda). In fact, we now know that, within hours of a hijacked jet crashing into the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was already thinking about just such an invasion. (“Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not,” he reportedly said that day, while urging his aides to come up with a plan to invade Iraq.)

So American troops took Kabul and Baghdad, the capitals of both countries, where the Bush administration set up governments of its choice. In neither would the ensuing occupations and wars or the tumultuous events that evolved from them ever truly end. In both regions, terrorism is significantly more widespread now than it was then. In the intervening years, millions of the inhabitants of those two lands and others swept up in that American war on terror were displaced from their homes and hundreds of thousands killed or wounded as chaos, terror, and war spread across the Greater Middle East (later compounded by the “Arab Spring”) and finally deep into Africa.

In addition, the U.S. military — equally unsuccessfully, equally long-lastingly, equally usefully when it came to the spread of terrorism and of failed or failing states — took action in Libya, Somalia, Yemen (largely but not only via the Saudis), and even Syria. While those might have been considered interventions, not invasions, they were each unbelievably more invasive than anything the domestic right-wing is now calling an invasion on our southern border. In 2016, in Syria, for instance, the U.S. Air Force and its allies dropped an estimated 20,000 bombs on the “capital” of the Islamic State, Raqqa, a modest-sized provincial city. In doing so, with the help of artillery and of ISIS suicide bombers, they turned it into rubble. In a similar fashion from Mosul to Fallujah, major Iraqi cities were rubblized. All in all, it’s been quite a record of invasion, intervention, and destruction.

Nor should we forget that, in those and other countries (including Pakistan), the U.S. dispatched Hellfire missile-armed drones to carry out “targeted” strikes that, once upon a time, would have been called “assassinations.” In addition, in 2017 alone, contingents of the still-growing elite Special Operations forces, now about 70,000 personnel, had been dispatched, in war and peace, to 149 countries, according to investigative journalist Nick Turse. Meanwhile, American military garrisons by the hundreds continued to dot the globe in a historically unprecedented fashion and have regularly been used in these years to facilitate those very invasions, interventions, and assassinations.

In addition, in this period the CIA set up “black sites” in a number of countries where prisoners, sometimes literally kidnapped off the streets of major cities (sometimes captured in the backlands of the planet), were for years subjected to unbearable cruelty and torture. U.S. Navy ships were similarly used as black sites. And all of this was just part of an offshore Bermuda Triangle of injustice set up by Washington, whose beating heart was a now notorious (and still open) prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Since 2001, the U.S. has succeeded in squandering staggering amounts of taxpayer dollars unsettling a vast swath of the planet, killing startling numbers of people who didn’t deserve to die, driving yet more of them from their homes, and so helping to set in motion the very crisis of migrants and refugees that has roiled both Europe and the United States ever since. The three top countries sending unwanted asylum seekers to Europe have been Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, all deeply embroiled in the cauldron of the American war on terror. (Meanwhile, of course, we live in a country whose president, having called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” during his election campaign in 2015, has done his best to follow through on just such a Muslim ban.)

And by the way, those original invasions and interventions were all surrounded by glorious explanations about the bringing of “democracy” to and the “liberation” of various societies, explanations no less bogus than those offered by the El Paso killer to explain his slaughter.

Still in the Land of the Metaphorically Invaded

Invaders, intruders, disrupters? You’ve got to be kidding, at least if you’re talking about undocumented immigrants from south of our border (even with the bogus claims that there were “terrorists” among them). When it comes to invasions, we should be chanting “USA! USA!” Perhaps, in fact, you could think of this country, its leadership, its military, and its war on terror as a version of the El Paso killer raised to a global scale. In this century at least, we have been the true invaders and disrupters on planet Earth (with the Russians in Crimea and the Ukraine coming in a distant second).

And how have Americans dealt with the real invaders of this world? It’s a reasonable question, even if seldom asked in a country where “invasion” is now a matter of almost obsessional discussion and debate. True, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, a striking number of Americans had the urge not to go to war. The streets of major cities and small towns filled with protesters demanding that the Bush administration not do what it was obviously going to do anyway. When the invasion and occupation happened, it should have quickly been clear that it would be a destructive disaster. The initial shock-and-awe air campaign to “decapitate” Saddam Hussein’s regime, for example, managed not to touch a single key Iraqi official but, according to Human Rights Watch, killed “dozens of civilians.” In this way, the stage was set for so much of what would follow.

When the bad news (Mission Unaccomplished!) started coming in, however, those antiwar protestors disappeared from the streets of our country, never to return. In the years that followed, Americans generally ignored the harm the U.S. was doing across significant parts of the globe and went on with their lives. It did, however, become a tic of the times to “thank” the troops who had done the invading for their “service.”

In the meantime, much of what had transpired globally in that war on terror was simply forgotten (or never noted in the first place). That’s why when, in mid-August, an ISIS suicide bomber blew himself up at a wedding party in Kabul killing at least 63 people, the New York Times could report that “weddings, the celebration of union, had largely remained the exception” to an Afghan sense of risk-taking in public. And that would be a statement few Americans would blink at — as if no weddings had ever been destroyed in that country. Few here would remember the six weddings U.S. air power had obliterated in Afghanistan (as well as at least one each in Iraq and Yemen). The first of them, in December 2001, would kill about 100 revelers in a village in Eastern Afghanistan and that would just be the beginning of the nightmare to come. This was something I documented at TomDispatch years ago, but it’s generally not even in the memory bank here.

In 2016, of course, Americans elected a man who had riled up what soon be called his “base” by launching a presidential campaign on the fear of Mexican “rapists” coming to this country and the necessity of building a “big, fat, beautiful wall” to turn them away. From scratch, in other words, his focus was on stopping an “invasion” of this land. By August 2015, he was already using that term in his tweets.

So, under Donald Trump, as that word and the fears that went with it spread, we became the invaded and they the invaders. In other words, the world as it was (and largely remains) was somehow turned on its head. As a result, we all now live in the land of the metaphorically invaded and of El Paso killers who, in these years, have headed, armed with military-style weaponry, for places ranging from synagogues to garlic festivals to stop various “invaders” in their tracks. Meanwhile, the president and a bipartisan crew of politicians in Washington continued to pour ever more money into the U.S. military (and into little else, except the pockets of the 1%).

As for me, in all those years before Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign, I had never watched his reality TV shows. Though I lived in New York City, I had never walked into Trump Tower. I had never, in other words, invaded his space, no matter how metaphorically. So, with invasions in the air, I continue to wonder why, every day in every way, he invades mine. And speaking of invasions, he and his crew in Washington are now getting ready to invade the space not just of people like me, but of endangered species of every sort.

Of course, the president who feeds off those “invaders” from the south doesn’t recognize me as a species of anything. For him, the only endangered species on this planet may be oil, coal, and natural gas companies.

Believe me, you’re in his world, not mine, and welcome to it!