Britain scraps Sellafield nuclear deal
Press TV – January 13, 2015
Britain said on Tuesday that it had scrapped a deal worth $30.2 billion with an international consortium to clean up the Sellafield nuclear facility in Cumbria in the northwest of the country.
The contractors of the project were Amec of Britain, Areva of France and URS, an American company. They have been fired from the job that was delegated to them six years ago after their leader was accused by the government of “delays and exceeding budgets”.
Meanwhile, there are reports that while rising costs have been a major motivation for the decision, among the problems encountered was the accidental shipping of radioactive waste to a landfill, which resulted in a fine of more than $1 million.
Despite the problems, members of parliament hesitated to tear up the contract last year in part because of concerns about the government’s ability to get the decommissioning job done, the Telegraph said.
The government’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) will now take ownership of the clean-up.
Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Davey described Sellafield as “the biggest and most complex nuclear site in Europe” and said “it’s right that we keep the way it’s being managed under constant review”.
He added that a “strategic partner” would be found from the private sector.
Minister leads UK-Egypt trade visit, despite human rights concerns
Reprieve | January 13, 2015
The UK has launched its biggest trade delegation to Egypt in a generation, despite widespread concerns about mass trials and death sentences handed down by authorities in the country.
The Foreign Office Minister for the Middle East and North Africa, Tobias Ellwood, is this week leading a major UK trade delegation to Egypt in an effort to take advantage of what the Foreign Office has called “signs of recovery after recent turbulence.” In a statement late last year, the Foreign Office said that the UK was “by far the largest foreign investor in Egypt” and that UK firms in the country have enjoyed “continued profitably [sic] and growth… even in the difficult years” – an apparent reference to the 2011 revolution and subsequent 2013 ousting of Mohammed Morsi’s government.
The UK embassy in Egypt tweeted last week that the visit was “the biggest British trade delegation to #Egypt in more than 15 years”.
Scores of protestors have been arrested in Egypt since 2013 and put on trial en masse, with hundreds receiving death sentences in proceedings that have been condemned by the UN, rights groups and countries including the UK. Speaking last September, Prime Minister David Cameron said the Egyptian government must “ensure human rights are respected in Egypt.”
Legal organisation Reprieve has written to Mr Ellwood raising concerns about the timing and scale of the trade visit in light of an ongoing mass trial of nearly 500 people, who face potential death sentences if convicted by the Cairo court. Among them is an Irish teenager, 19 year old Ibrahim Halawa, who was arrested at a 2013 protest when he was 17, and legally a juvenile. Mr Halawa has been subjected to continued mistreatment during his 2 years of confinement in Cairo’s Tora prison. Last week saw the latest of several recent hearings in which he was not brought into the court.
Maya Foa, director of the death penalty team at Reprieve, which is assisting Mr Halawa, said: “It beggars belief that the UK is taking a ‘business as usual’ approach to a country where hundreds of people, including children, face potential death sentences in farcical mass trials. If David Cameron’s proclamations about the need for human rights in Egypt are to be believed, why is his government boasting about its biggest trade visit there in 15 years?”
What is Going On in Spain?
The End of an Era and the Beginning of Podemos
By VICENTE NAVARRO | CounterPunch | January 9, 2015
Something is happening in Spain. A party that did not exist one year ago, Podemos, with a clear left-wing program, would win a sufficient number of votes to gain a majority in Spanish Parliament if an election were held today. Meanwhile, the leaders of the group G-20 attending their annual meeting in Australia were congratulating the president of the Spanish conservative-neoliberal government, Mr. Mariano Rajoy, for the policies that his government had imposed. (I use the term “imposed” because none of these policies were written in its electoral program.) These included: (1) the largest cuts in public social expenditures (dismantling the underfunded Spanish welfare state) ever seen since democracy was established in Spain in 1978 and (2) the toughest labor reforms, which have substantially deteriorated labor market conditions. Salaries have declined by 10% since the Great Recession started in 2007, and unemployment has hit an all-time record of 26% (52% among the youth). The percentage of what the trade unions defined as “shit work” (temporary, precarious work) has increased, becoming the majority of new contracts in the labor market (more than 52% of all contracts), and 66% of unemployed people do not have any form of unemployment insurance or public assistance.
These measures have created an enormous problem of lack of domestic demand, a major cause of the long-term recession. It has been only recently that very limited growth has appeared, due primarily to the decline in the price of gasoline, a devaluation of the euro, and a tentative commitment by the European Central Bank (ECB) to buy public bonds. The Spanish government did not have anything to do with any of these events, although it claims now that the short recovery is a result of its neoliberal policies.
These neoliberal policies were promoted by the European Union (EU) establishments (European Council, European Commission, and ECB) and by the International Monetary Fund. They were carried out in Spain with the support and encouragement of financial capital, major business enterprises, and their political instrument, the Popular Party (PP), now in government. It seems that the right-wing in Spain was finally getting what it had always wanted: the reduction of salaries and the weakening of social protection with a dismantling of the welfare state. Those policies are what the international elites of the G-20 who met in Australia were presenting as a model for all countries to follow, championing Spain as a model country.
The Historical Causes of These Events
I have written extensively about the reasons why Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Ireland are in deep trouble. I refer readers to one of these articles (“Capital-Labor: The Unspoken Causes of the Crises,” www.vnavarro.org, Economic Section). Let me briefly summarize it. All these countries, referred to rather unkindly in the Anglo-Saxon economic literature as PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain), have had ultra-right-wing dictatorships (fascist or fascistoid), except Ireland, governed by a very conservative party close to the Church. These dictatorships were the result of military coups (in the case of Spain, supported by Hitler and Mussolini in 1936) against democratically elected governments that had initiated meaningful reforms affecting the privilege of the oligarchy, i.e., the agricultural, financial, and (in the case of Catalonia and Basque Country in Spain) industrial bourgeoisie, in addition to the Catholic Church and the Army. The Spanish fascist coup established one of the most brutal repressions that has ever taken place in Western Europe during the 20th century. For every political assassination that Mussolini carried out, Franco’s dictatorship had 10,000. Even today, there are more than 120,000 people who were assassinated during the dictatorship whose bodies have yet to be found. After Cambodia, Spain has the second-largest number of people who have disappeared for political reasons without any trace of their bodies being found. Franco’s dictatorship was a class dictatorship against the working population. That dictatorship was responsible for the enormous economic and cultural underdevelopment in Spain. When the military coup took place in 1936, Spain’s Gross National Product (GNP) per capita was similar to Italy’s. In 1978, when the dictatorship ended and the democracy was established, Spain’s GNP per capita was only 62% of Italy’s. That was the economic cost of having a fascist dictatorship.
The Transition from Dictatorship to Democracy
When the dictator died in 1975, the dictatorship had lasted 40 years. The apparatus of the state, a coalition of fascist forces known as El Movimiento Nacional and the Opus Dei (a religious sect of the Catholic Church), as well as the Army and the Catholic Church, had wanted to continue the dictatorship under the leadership of Franco’s deputy Admiral Carrero Blanco. But this admiral had been killed by ETA, creating a vacuum in the leadership of the dictatorship.
Meanwhile, the antifascist resistance had been growing considerably, with strong and wide social agitation, led primarily by the working class in the major cities of Barcelona, Bilbao, and Madrid and in specific areas of Spain such as the mining region in Asturias (the Appalachia of Spain). The working class clearly was asking for change. From 1975 to 1978, Spain had the largest number of labor strikes (despite these being forbidden) in Western Europe. This labor unrest shook up the Spanish establishment, which included large sectors of the Spanish bourgeoisie who did not consider the continuation of the dictatorship as a viable option. They wanted to be integrated in the EU, and even the Eurozone, and the dictatorship represented an obstacle to achieving that goal. King Juan Carlos, who had been appointed by Franco, was leading the demand for state changes that would guarantee the continuation of the Spanish financial and industrial establishments under a different political regime. He appointed Adolfo Suarez, who had been the general secretary of Movimiento Nacional, as president of the country, with the mandate to establish changes in the Spanish state. These changes were aimed primarily at integrating the Social Democratic Party (PSOE) into the state apparatus and marginalizing the Communist Party (PCE), which had been the main force in the antifascist struggle.
Before dissolving, the Movimiento Nacional had imposed a series of conditions. One was that the electoral law would be designed to make it impossible for the Communist Party to have a major parliamentarian representation. The law was approved and later modified during the democratic period, although it continued to discriminate against the working class in urban centers (where most of the communist votes existed). As a consequence, whereas a conservative city like Salamanca needs 32,000 votes to elect a member of the Spanish Parliament, Barcelona (a city historically aligned to the left) needed 150,000 votes. The new electoral law did favor bipartidismo, i.e., the permanence of a two-party system—the conservative neoliberal (PP) and socialist party (PSOE) that control the whole state apparatus, under the hegemony of the PP.
The Dominance of the Conservative Forces in the State
In this way, the right-wing establishment had full control of all the branches of the state and all the media (press, radio, and television). The democratic forces (led by the Communist party), however, had just left the clandestinity and/or come back from exile. Thus, the transition took place under very difficult conditions for the left. There was no equilibrium between right-wing and left-wing forces. The product of that disequilibrium was the Spanish Constitution and the democratic institutions, clearly influenced by conservative establishments. It solidified the structure of power that existed during the dictatorship. Banking continued to be the major player in the economic life of the country. And the major industries (established primarily in Barcelona, Bilbao, and Madrid) that were powerful during the dictatorship continued to be equally powerful, with new additions: the privatization of major public enterprises—from energy to communications—which were now controlled by the elites of the political parties, particularly by the Partido Popular (PP), which appointed friends of the president of the government and of the party to top positions in these newly privatized businesses. As in Russia, the major businesses that used to be controlled by the party apparatus were now controlled by the same individuals, as part of the new plutocracy.
The major inheritor of the Spanish dictatorship is the governing party, the PP, a coalition of post-fascist groups (such as the Alliance Popular, with ultra-right-wing ideology), liberal associations (“liberal” in Europe means very right-wing forces representing the major business community, with antagonisms toward labor), and conservative (such as Christian democratic institutions close to the Catholic Church). The PP also has a large post-fascist, chauvinist, and anti-migrant component, which explains why Spain does not have a major chauvinist movement, since this movement is already within the PP.
The Social and the National Question
One major consequence of the right-wing domination of the state has been the poverty of the welfare state and the very poor conditions of the labor markets. Unemployment has been a constant in Spain, and the public social expenditures per capita are among the lowest in the EU-15 (the group of richest countries in the EU). These situations have become even worse because of the crisis.
Another consequence was the continuation of a vision of Spain, inherited from the dictatorship and previous monarchic regimes, which denied its plurinationality. Instead, the Spanish Constitution recognized only one nation, the Spanish nation, denying the historical demand of the left-wing parties—the Socialist and the Communist—that saw Catalonia, Basque Country, and Galicia as other nations within Spain. Both parties had, during the clandestine time, called for the right to self-determination for the different nations of Spain. This demand was put aside, however, during the transition due to the opposition of the Monarch and the Army. Since 1978, when the new Constitution was established and democracy started, the socialist party (PSOE) has fully accepted the uninational vision of Spain.
Europe, from a Dream to a Nightmare: The Integration of Spain in the Euro
During the dictatorship, Europe had been a dream for the anti-fascist democratic forces, struggling against the fascist regime under very difficult conditions. Democracy and the welfare state were then identified with Europe, and they were considered to be the objective to be reached when democracy was established. Europe was what Spanish democratic forces had always wanted. Europe was the dream to be realized later on. It has become, however, a nightmare. Why?
The design of the euro was the starting point of the nightmare. It was formulated by financial interests to give financial capital a strong command of the governance of the euro. It is not by chance that the ECB is physically located in front of the Bundesbank, the German Central Bank, in Frankfurt. The Bundesbank is basically the spokesperson of German financial capital, the center of the European financial system.
The ECB, however, is not a central bank: It is a lobby for the banks, primarily the German ones. The ECB prints money but it does not help the states: It does not buy states’ public debt, making them dependent on the financial markets (i.e., the private banks). The ECB lends money to the private banks at very low interest rates. And the banks buy public debt at extremely high interest. It is a killing for the private banks! These are the causes of the enormous growth of the Spanish public debt (of which, German banks own 20% of all the public debt owed by foreign banks, which is 50% of all Spanish public debt). Consequently, the second item in the Spanish budget, after social security, is payment of public debt interests. Germany has 700,000 million euros it lent to the PIGS (200,000 to Spain). This was the reason the EU lent up to 100,000 million euros to Spain (el Rescate Bancario) with the understanding that Spain must pay back the debt to German banks. Meanwhile, public debt in Spain is increasing to an unpayable level.
But there was another reason the euro hurt the Spanish state. The Maastricht criteria had indicated that the public deficit of the state could not be higher than 3% of the GNP. Since it was 6%, it had to be cut. And it was cut, not by increasing taxes or correcting tax fraud (Spain’s tax fraud is among the highest in the Eurozone, with 80,000 million euros evaded, 80% of which is done by the banks, large fortunes, and large enterprises whose sales are more than 150 million euros a year, representing 0.12% of all enterprises) but by reducing public expenditures (in particular, public social expenditures). Spanish entry into the Eurozone took place at the cost of weakening the Spanish welfare state, used primarily by the popular classes.
Why the Cuts?
The reduction of salaries and of the number of people receiving salaries, as well as the reduction of public expenditures, meant an enormous decline of domestic demand and, as a result, of economic growth. The waning of salaries meant increased indebtedness of families and of small and medium enterprises. Debt increased enormously. This meant that banking also increased enormously (Spain has one of the largest banking sectors in Europe, proportionally three times as large as in the United States). But the low profitability of the productive economy meant a large increase of banking investments in speculation, causing huge bubbles, the most important of which was the housing bubble.
When the bubble was occurring, there was a feeling of euphoria among the political establishment. None other than the governing socialist leader, José Luis R. Zapatero, felt that, in a time of such exuberant growth, taxes should be reduced. His slogan was “Reducing taxes should be an objective of the left!” He reduced taxes enormously, primarily on capital and high incomes. He announced his slogan in 2005. He passed the Tax Reform Act with the tax cuts in 2006. And in 2007, when the bubble exploded, a huge hole appeared in state revenues: 27,000 million euros. According to economists of the statistical office of the Ministry of Finances, 70% of this hole was due to the tax cuts and only 30% to the decline of economic activity at the beginning of the Great Recession.
This is how the cuts started, under the false argument that the country needed to face austerity measures because it was spending too much. Actually, when the crisis started, the Spanish state was on surplus. In reality, Spain’s public expenditure is far too low, much lower than its economic level of development would call for. The cuts demonstrate the class nature of those interventions. Socialist Zapatero froze public pensions to save 1,500 million euros, when he could have obtained much more money, 2,500 million, by recovering the property taxes that he had abolished, reversing the lowering of inheritance taxes (2,300 million), or reversing the reduced taxes of individuals making 120,000 euros a year (2,200 million). These cuts were expanded later by conservative-liberal Rajoy, who cut 6,000 million from the National Health Service, stressing, as Zapatero said before, that “there were not alternatives,” the most frequently used sentence in the official narrative. There were alternatives, however. He could have reversed the lowering of taxes on capital to large corporations that he had approved, obtaining 5,500 million. The economists Vicenç Navarro, Juan Torres, and Alberto Garzón wrote a book There are Alternatives (Hay Alternativas: Propuestas para Crear Empleo y Bienestar Social en España). The book showed, with clear and convincing numbers, that there were alternatives. The book became a major bestseller in Spain and was widely used by the indignados movement.
The Indignados Movement
These cuts of public social spending and the three labor market reforms carried out first by the socialist (PSOE) government, and later by the liberal conservative-liberal (PP) government, angered people, since not one of these measures had any popular mandate. None of those policies had been mentioned in the electoral program of the governing parties. The supposedly democratic representative institutions have acted on behalf of financial and large-employer interests, who were achieving the policies they always wanted—the decline of salaries and the dismantling of social protections—and presenting these policies as the only possible ones, since “there were no alternatives.” This message was also promoted by the European Council, European Commission, and ECB (plus the IMF). This is how the European dream became a nightmare.
In response to this nightmare, the indignados movement appeared and quickly spread all over the country. Its slogans, such as “They, the political class, do not represent us” became widely popular. Consequently, state institutions started losing legitimacy very quickly. The state responded with enormous repression. That did not stop the indignados, however. Many of their leaders were young—very affected by the crisis.
The indignados movement demanded a second transition, calling for an end to the 1978 regime (the political system established in 1978 when the dictatorship ended) and for the establishment of a new democratic order, explaining the need to substitute existing representative institutions with new ones, complemented by other forms of democratic participation such as referendums and/or popular assemblies. The goal was to establish an authentic democratic system with systems of direct forms of citizen participation such as referendums, plus indirect forms of participation such as representative democracy, requiring political parties that were much more democratic than they are today.
This movement had an enormous impact, and its starting movement (a major manifestation in Plaza del Sol) was a protest against the slogan “There are no alternatives.” In fact, the leadership of the indignados showed the book Hay Alternativas in front of the police who were trying to control the demonstration. The photograph of thousands of people showing the book was widely distributed within the movement and published in the press. Their major slogan was to question the claim that “there are no alternatives,” showing that there were indeed alternatives, and to question the legitimacy of the state, which was imposing policies that did not have any popular mandate.
The New Political Party: Podemos
Such a movement wanted to go beyond simply a protest movement to be perceived as the conscience of the country. The indignados became aware that they had to intervene in the political arena, and this is how Podemos appeared. The leaders of Podemos were drawn from individuals who had played a leading role in the indignados movement. Some are junior faculty in the Department of Political and Social Sciences in the largest public university in Spain, Complutense. Many have been active in the youth movements of the Spanish Communist Party. Regardless of where they come from, they all felt that the root of the problem was the control of the state by a caste of politicians, based primarily in the major parties—the liberal-conservative party (PP) and the socialist (PSOE)—who were closely related and tied to the major financial and banking corporations that have corrupted state institutions. They called for the establishment of a democratic state and a democratic Europe, “a Europe of the people, not the Europe of the bankers.”
They presented themselves in the elections to the European Parliament and the great surprise is that they received a much larger vote than they had expected. But the most important event was that all the polls showed a fantastic growth of their electoral support, to a point that in the last poll, it became clear that they could become the governing party, a situation that they never felt would be possible, and so fast. Podemos’s message, “Vote against the caste: Throw all of them out,” was highly successful. It was clear that the majority of people were fed up with the political and media establishments.
Their problem was the party did not have a structure. That created an urgent need to develop an organization, based on an assembly-like type of structure within a frame developed by the leadership. To prepare its program, they asked the economists Vicenç Navarro and Juan Torres (authors of the Hay Alternativas book) to prepare an outline of the economic program that the Podemos government should carry out. This outline would be the basis for a full discussion within the Party. The title Democratizar la Economía para Salir de la Crisis Mejorando la Equidad, el Bienestar y la Calidad de Vida: Una Propuesta de Debate para Solucionar los Problemas de la Economía Española (The Need to Democratize the Economy in Order to End the Crisis and Improve Justice, Well-Being and Quality of Life: A Proposal to Initiate a Debate to Resolve the Problems of the Spanish Economy) described the intention of the document. It was very widely distributed by Podemos, under the new title Un Proyecto Económico para la Gente (An Economic Project for the People). It had an enormous impact.
The presentation of the proposal by Pablo Iglesias and the authors of the document became the major event of the day in Spain. The hostility of the mainstream and economic media, as well as the intellectuals and spokespersons of the major governing parties (PP and PSOE) became enormously aggressive against that document and its authors. And in Europe, the President of the Bundesbank, the German Central Bank, indicated that the proposals put forward in the document will be very harmful to the Spanish and the European economies. Never before had a document created such a hostile response from the financial, economic, political, and media establishments. However, it created considerable positive responses at the street level in Spain and contributed substantially to change the character of the economic debate, because it challenged frontally the neoliberal ideology.
The economic document was not a budget for the future Podemos government, but rather the strategic lines to be followed. The analysis of the causes of the crisis focused on the enormous growth of inequalities responsible for the financial, economic, and political crisis. It puts at the center of the analysis the conflict of capital (under the hegemony of financial capital) against labor. That has led to an enormous decline of domestic demand caused by the decline of wages, increase in unemployment, and cuts of social public expenditures. The proposals, therefore, aimed at reversing that growth of inequalities by increasing domestic demand (via salaries and employment growth) and by expanding public expenditures and investments (in particular, the social infrastructure). It also underlined the need to expand public banking, as a way of providing credit to families and to small and middle-sized enterprises. It also proposed reducing the working week to 35 hours and reducing the age of retirement from 67 to 65, reversing policies approved by the PP and the PSOE. The impact of the program would strengthen labor at the cost of capital. Also, it showed the great need to correct gender inequalities as a way to increase employment. It also suggested how all the proposals could be funded, asking for substantial changes in the fiscal policies of the country and the reduction of tax fraud.
Why the Success of Podemos?
It is easy to answer this question. There is enormous anger toward what Podemos calls “la casta,” the cast. That includes the governing elites in the political establishment who have developed close complicities with the major financial and non-financial corporations that dominate the political and media institutions of the country. The call for “throwing all of them out” awakens general support among the majority of the Spanish people.
In addition, Podemos uses a language that people relate to, redefining class struggle as the conflict between those on the top and everyone else, a narrative that mobilizes a transversal support. A third reason for its wide appeal is that Podemos makes the calls for democracy center in its strategy, redefining democracy to include different forms of democracy such as referendums (defined as the right to decide, el derecho a decidir) together with indirect or representative forms of democracy. It is because of this commitment to democracy that it has accepted the right of self-determination for the different nations that exist in Spain, breaking with the vision of Spain as a uninational state. This understanding of Spain as a plurinational state has been a historic demand of all left-wing parties (including the PSOE), abandoned during the Transition by the socialist party because of the King (appointed by Franco) and the Army. The enormous popular demand by the Catalan population for the right of self-determination (not to be confused with the call for independence: 82% of Catalans support the first, 33% support the second) has created enormous tension with the central government and today is very unpopular. Podemos has become the first party in Catalonia, by popular support, according to the polls (if there were elections for the Spanish Parliament).
The success of Podemos has become a major threat to the Spanish (and to the European) establishment. Today, the Spanish financial, economic, political, and media establishments are on the defensive and in panic, having passed laws that strengthen the repression. The heads of the major banks in Spain are particularly uneasy. Mr. Botín, president of the major bank Santander, indicated four days before he died (a few weeks ago) that he was extremely worried, indicating that Podemos and Catalonia were very threatening to Spain. He, of course, meant his Spain. And he was right. The future is quite open. As Gramsci once indicated, it is the end of a period without a clear view of what the next one will be. Europe, Spain, and Catalonia are ending an era. This is clear. What still is unclear is what will come next. We will see.
Barcelona, 28th December 2014.
Vicente (Vicenç in Catalan) Navarro, is professor of Public and Social Policy in The John Hopkins University USA and the Pompeu Fabra University Catalonia, Spain. He is also the Director of the JHU-UPF Public Policy Center in Barcelona, Spain.
NYT Still Pretends No Coup in Ukraine
By Robert Parry | Consortium News | January 6, 2015
During my years at Newsweek in the late 1980s, when I would propose correcting some misguided conventional wisdom, I’d often be told, “let’s leave that one for the historians,” with the magazine not wanting to challenge an erroneous storyline that all the important people “knew” to be true. And if false narratives only affected the past, one might argue my editors had a point. There’s always a lot of current news to cover.
But most false narratives are not really about the past; they are about how the public perceives the present and addresses the future. And it should fall to journalists to do their best to explain this background information even if it embarrasses powerful people and institutions, including the news organizations themselves.
Yet, rather than take on that difficult task, most major news outlets prefer to embroider onto their existing tapestry of misinformation, fitting today’s reporting onto the misshapen fabric of yesterday’s. They rarely start from scratch and admit the earlier work was wrong.
So, how does the mainstream U.S. news media explain the Ukraine crisis after essentially falsifying the historical record for the past year? Well, if you’re the New York Times, you keep on spinning the old storyline, albeit with a few adjustments.
For instance, on Sunday, the Times published a lengthy article that sought to sustain the West’s insistence that the coup overthrowing elected President Viktor Yanukovych wasn’t really a coup – just the crumbling of his government in the face of paramilitary violence from the street with rumors of worse violence to come – though that may sound to you pretty much like a coup. Still, the Times does make some modifications to Yanukovych’s image.
In the article, Yanukovych is recast from a brutal autocrat willfully having his police slaughter peaceful protesters into a frightened loser whose hand was “shaking” as he signed a Feb. 21 agreement with European diplomats, agreeing to reduce his powers and hold early elections, a deal that was cast aside on Feb. 22 when armed neo-Nazi militias overran presidential and parliamentary offices.
Defining a Coup
One might wonder what the New York Times thinks a coup looks like. Indeed, the Ukrainian coup had many of the same earmarks as such classics as the CIA-engineered regime changes in Iran in 1953 and in Guatemala in 1954.
The way those coups played out is now historically well known. Secret U.S. government operatives planted nasty propaganda about the targeted leader, stirred up political and economic chaos, conspired with rival political leaders, spread rumors of worse violence to come and then – as political institutions collapsed – chased away the duly elected leader before welcoming the new “legitimate” order.
In Iran, that meant reinstalling the autocratic Shah who then ruled with a heavy hand for the next quarter century; in Guatemala, the coup led to more than three decades of brutal military regimes and the killing of some 200,000 Guatemalans.
Coups don’t have to involve army tanks occupying the public squares, although that is an alternative model which follows many of the same initial steps except that the military is brought in at the end. The military coup was a common approach especially in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s.
But the preferred method in more recent years has been the “color revolution,” which operates behind the façade of a “peaceful” popular uprising and international pressure on the targeted leader to show restraint until it’s too late to stop the coup. Despite the restraint, the leader is still accused of gross human rights violations, all the better to justify his removal.
Later, the ousted leader may get an image makeover; instead of a cruel bully, he is ridiculed for not showing sufficient resolve and letting his base of support melt away, as happened with Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran and Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala.
The Ukraine Reality
The reality of what happened in Ukraine was never hard to figure out. George Friedman, the founder of the global intelligence firm Stratfor, called the overthrow of Yanukovych “the most blatant coup in history.” It’s just that the major U.S. news organizations were either complicit in the events or incompetent in describing them to the American people.
The first step in this process was to obscure that the motive for the coup – pulling Ukraine out of Russia’s economic orbit and capturing it in the European Union’s gravity field – was actually announced by influential American neocons in 2013.
On Sept. 26, 2013, National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman, who has become a major neocon paymaster, took to the op-ed page of the neocon Washington Post and called Ukraine “the biggest prize” and an important interim step toward toppling Russian President Vladimir Putin.
At the time, Gershman, whose NED is funded by the U.S. Congress to the tune of about $100 million a year, was financing scores of projects inside Ukraine – training activists, paying for journalists and organizing business groups.
As for that even bigger prize – Putin – Gershman wrote: “Ukraine’s choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents. … Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”
At that time, in early fall 2013, Ukraine’s President Yanukovych was exploring the idea of reaching out to Europe with an association agreement. But he got cold feet in November 2013 when economic experts in Kiev advised him that the Ukrainian economy would suffer a $160 billion hit if it separated from Russia, its eastern neighbor and major trading partner. There was also the West’s demand that Ukraine accept a harsh austerity plan from the International Monetary Fund.
Yanukovych wanted more time for the EU negotiations, but his decision angered many western Ukrainians who saw their future more attached to Europe than Russia. Tens of thousands of protesters began camping out at Maidan Square in Kiev, with Yanukovych ordering the police to show restraint.
Meanwhile, with Yanukovych shifting back toward Russia, which was offering a more generous $15 billion loan and discounted natural gas, he soon became the target of American neocons and the U.S. media, which portrayed Ukraine’s political unrest as a black-and-white case of a brutal and corrupt Yanukovych opposed by a saintly “pro-democracy” movement.
The Maidan uprising was urged on by American neocons, including Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who passed out cookies at the Maidan and told Ukrainian business leaders that the United States had invested $5 billion in their “European aspirations.”
In the weeks before the coup, according to an intercepted phone call, Nuland discussed with U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt who should lead the future regime. Nuland said her choice was Arseniy Yatsenyuk. “Yats is the guy,” she told Pyatt as he pondered how to “midwife this thing.”
Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, also showed up, standing on stage with right-wing extremists from the Svoboda Party and telling the crowd that the United States was with them in their challenge to the Ukrainian government.
As the winter progressed, the protests grew more violent. Neo-Nazi and other extremist elements from Lviv and western Ukrainian cities began arriving in well-organized brigades or “sotins” of 100 trained street fighters. Police were attacked with firebombs and other weapons as the violent protesters began seizing government buildings and unfurling Nazi banners and even a Confederate flag.
Though Yanukovych continued to order his police to show restraint, he was still depicted in the major U.S. news media as a brutal thug who was callously murdering his own people. The chaos reached a climax on Feb. 20 when mysterious snipers opened fire on police and some protesters, killing scores. As police retreated, the militants advanced brandishing firearms and other weapons. The confrontation led to significant loss of life, pushing the death toll to around 80 including more than a dozen police.
U.S. diplomats and the mainstream U.S. press immediately blamed Yanukovych for the sniper attack, though the circumstances remain murky to this day and some investigations have suggested that the lethal sniper fire came from buildings controlled by Right Sektor extremists.
To tamp down the worsening violence, a shaken Yanukovych signed a European-brokered deal on Feb. 21, in which he accepted reduced powers and an early election so he could be voted out of office. He also agreed to requests from Vice President Joe Biden to pull back the police.
The precipitous police withdrawal then opened the path for the neo-Nazis and other street fighters to seize presidential offices and force Yanukovych’s people to flee for their lives. Yanukovych traveled to eastern Ukraine and the new coup regime that took power – and was immediately declared “legitimate” by the U.S. State Department – sought Yanukovych’s arrest for murder. Nuland’s favorite, Yatsenyuk, became the new prime minister.
Media Bias
Throughout the crisis, the mainstream U.S. press hammered home the theme of white-hatted protesters versus a black-hatted president. The police were portrayed as brutal killers who fired on unarmed supporters of “democracy.” The good-guy/bad-guy narrative was all the American people heard from the major media.
The New York Times went so far as to delete the slain policemen from the narrative and simply report that the police had killed all those who died in the Maidan. A typical Times report on March 5, 2014, summed up the storyline: “More than 80 protesters were shot to death by the police as an uprising spiraled out of control in mid-February.”
The mainstream U.S. media also sought to discredit anyone who observed the obvious fact that an unconstitutional coup had just occurred. A new theme emerged that portrayed Yanukovych as simply deciding to abandon his government because of the moral pressure from the noble and peaceful Maidan protests.
Any reference to a “coup” was dismissed as “Russian propaganda.” There was a parallel determination in the U.S. media to discredit or ignore evidence that neo-Nazi militias had played an important role in ousting Yanukovych and in the subsequent suppression of anti-coup resistance in eastern and southern Ukraine. That opposition among ethnic-Russian Ukrainians simply became “Russian aggression.”
This refusal to notice what was actually a remarkable story – the willful unleashing of Nazi storm troopers on a European population for the first time since World War II – reached absurd levels as the New York Times and the Washington Post buried references to the neo-Nazis at the end of stories, almost as afterthoughts.
The Washington Post went to the extreme of rationalizing Swastikas and other Nazi symbols by quoting one militia commander as calling them “romantic” gestures by impressionable young men. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ukraine’s ‘Romantic’ Neo-Nazi Storm Troopers.”]
Yet, despite the best efforts of the Times, the Post and other mainstream outlets to conceal this ugly reality from the American people, alternative news sources – presenting a more realistic account of what was happening in Ukraine – began to chip away at the preferred narrative.
Instead of buying the big media’s storyline, many Americans were coming to realize that the reality was much more complicated and that they were again being sold a bill of propaganda goods.
Denying a Coup
To the rescue rode the New York Times on Sunday, presenting what was portrayed as a detailed, granular “investigation” of how there was no coup in Ukraine and reaffirming the insistence that only Moscow stooges would think such a thing.
“Russia has attributed Mr. Yanukovych’s ouster to what it portrays as a violent, ‘neo-fascist’ coup supported and even choreographed by the West and dressed up as a popular uprising,” wrote Andrew Higgins and Andrew E. Kramer. “Few outside the Russian propaganda bubble ever seriously entertained the Kremlin’s line. But almost a year after the fall of Mr. Yanukovych’s government, questions remain about how and why it collapsed so quickly and completely.”
The Times’ article concluded that Yanukovych “was not so much overthrown as cast adrift by his own allies, and that Western officials were just as surprised by the meltdown as anyone else. The allies’ desertion, fueled in large part by fear, was accelerated by the seizing by protesters of a large stock of weapons in the west of the country. But just as important, the review of the final hours shows, was the panic in government ranks created by Mr. Yanukovych’s own efforts to make peace.”
Yet, what is particularly curious about this article is that it ignores the substantial body of evidence that the U.S. officials were instrumental in priming the crisis and fueling the ultimate ouster of Yanukovych. For instance, the Times makes no reference to the multitude of U.S.-financed political projects in Ukraine including scores by Gershman’s NED, nor the extraordinary intervention by Assistant Secretary of State Nuland.
Nuland’s encouragement to those challenging the elected government of Ukraine would surely merit mentioning, one would think. But it disappears from the Times’ version of history. Perhaps even more amazing there is no reference to the Nuland-Pyatt phone call, though Pyatt was interviewed for the article.
Even if the Times wanted to make excuses for the Nuland-Pyatt scheming – claiming perhaps it didn’t prove that they were coup-plotting – you would think the infamous phone call would deserve at least a mention. But Nuland isn’t referenced anywhere. Nor is Gershman. Nor is McCain.
The most useful part of the Times’ article is its description of the impact from a raid by anti-Yanukovych militias in the western city of Lviv on a military arsenal and the belief that the guns were headed to Kiev to give the uprising greater firepower.
The Times reports that “European envoys met at the German Embassy with Andriy Parubiy, the chief of the protesters’ security forces, and told him to keep the Lviv guns away from Kiev. ‘We told him: “Don’t let these guns come to Kiev. If they come, that will change the whole situation,”’ Mr. Pyatt recalled telling Mr. Parubiy, who turned up for the meeting wearing a black balaclava.
“In a recent interview in Kiev, Mr. Parubiy denied that the guns taken in Lviv ever got to Kiev, but added that the prospect that they might have provided a powerful lever to pressure both Mr. Yanukovych’s camp and Western governments. ‘I warned them that if Western governments did not take firmer action against Yanukovych, the whole process could gain a very threatening dimension,’ he said.
“Andriy Tereschenko, a Berkut [police] commander from Donetsk who was holed up with his men in the Cabinet Ministry, the government headquarters in Kiev, said that 16 of his men had already been shot on Feb. 18 and that he was terrified by the rumors of an armory of automatic weapons on its way from Lviv. ‘It was already an armed uprising, and it was going to get worse,’ he said. ‘We understood why the weapons were taken, to bring them to Kiev.’”
The Times leaves out a fuller identification of Parubiy. Beyond serving as the chief of the Maidan “self-defense forces,” Parubiy was a notorious neo-Nazi, the founder of the Social-National Party of Ukraine (and the national security chief for the post-coup regime). But “seeing no neo-Nazis” in Ukraine had become a pattern for the New York Times.
Still, the journalistic question remains: what does the New York Times think a coup looks like? You have foreign money, including from the U.S. government, pouring into Ukraine to finance political and propaganda operations. You have open encouragement to the coup-makers from senior American officials.
You have hundreds of trained and armed paramilitary fighters dispatched to Kiev from Lviv and other western cities. You have the seizure of an arsenal amid rumors that these more powerful weapons are being distributed to these paramilitaries. You have international pressure on the elected president to pull back his security forces, even as Western propaganda portrays him as a mass murderer.
Anyone who knows about the 1954 Guatemala coup would remember that a major element of that CIA operation was a disinformation campaign, broadcast over CIA-financed radio stations, about a sizeable anti-government force marching on Guatemala City, thus spooking the Arbenz government to collapse and Arbenz to flee.
But the Times article is not a serious attempt to study the Ukraine coup. If it had been, it would have looked seriously at the substantial evidence of Western interference and into other key facts, such as the identity of the Feb. 20 snipers. Instead, the article was just the latest attempt to pretend that the coup really wasn’t a coup.
~
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
Wobbles in US-EU axis against Russia
By FINIAN CUNNINGHAM | Press TV | January 6, 2015
French President Francois Hollande this week called for an end to Western sanctions on Russia. He is the latest senior European political figure to express misgivings about the hostile policy that Washington and Brussels have embarked on against Russia over the year-old Ukrainian crisis.
Hollande was speaking during a traditional New Year interview with French media covering a range of issues, both domestic and international. Referring to upcoming political negotiations in Kazakhstan aimed at finding an end to the Ukraine conflict, Hollande said that he was in favor of lifting sanctions imposed on Russia “if progress was made” at the talks.
Senior French, German and Russian officials are to meet in the Kazakh capital Astana on January 15, along with representatives from Ukraine. The aim is to find a lasting solution to the violence that has been raging in eastern Ukraine since last April. That conflict has taken nearly 5,000 lives and threatens to escalate, despite a shaky ceasefire put in place last month.
As a preliminary to the Astana summit, officials from the above countries were meeting in Berlin this week to sketch out a possible agreement. Significantly, American officials are not involved, even though Washington is closely aligned with the regime in Kiev that seized power illegally last February, and which has launched a military offensive on the eastern Donbas Russian-speaking population, who refuse to recognize the legitimacy of the coup.
Washington and Brussels have sought to blame Russia for the crisis, claiming that Moscow is fueling separatist fighters in Donbas to undermine the Western-backed Kiev regime. Russia has repeatedly denied any such involvement. Moscow has pointed to the dearth of evidence for Western claims. It says the crisis stems from the illegal intervention in the internal affairs of Ukraine by the Western states, and that the ethnic Russian populations of Crimea and the eastern regions have simply responded, out of their own volition, with dissent towards the neo-Nazi anti-Russian regime that seized power in Kiev.
The Washington-Brussels axis has slapped economic and diplomatic sanctions on Russia, which have been met by counter-sanctions from Moscow. The deterioration in relations is not only having economic impacts on Russia, it is rebounding to cast a pall over Europe’s own faltering economy. Trade and commerce between Russia and the European Union are tenfold that between Russia and the US, so in the unfolding economic war the EU has much more to lose than Washington.
This partly explains why EU leaders are increasingly showing trepidation over the widening impasse.
“France seeks end to Russia sanctions over Ukraine,” reported the BBC this week on Hollande’s public call for restraint. The French leader is the latest high-profile EU figure expressing serious doubts about the Washington-Brussels aggressive policy towards Russia.
As the BBC report added: “Politicians in Italy, Hungary and Slovakia are among those who want the sanctions eased.”
To that list we could append Germany, Austria, Spain, Greece, Czech Republic and Bulgaria, among others.
Last weekend, Czech President Milos Zeman deplored the warmongering attitude of the Kiev regime, denouncing the CIA-installed Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk as “the prime minister of war.”
The day before Hollande made his comments, Germany’s Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel warned against sanctions bringing Russia “to its knees” and risking “a conflagration.”
Germany’s second highest politician, and deputy to Chancellor Angela Merkel, is thus giving notice of significant opposition to the Washington-Brussels axis and its anti-Russian policy, which his boss, Merkel, has been up to now an ardent supporter of.
Gabriel told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper that the Washington-led policy is ruinous. “The goal was never to push Russia politically and economically into chaos,” said Gabriel, a member of the Social Democrat party, which historically prefers cordial relations with Russia.
In a hint at malign external forces thriving on conflict between Europe and Russia, Gabriel noted: “Whoever wants that [Russia’s political and economic chaos] will provoke a much more dangerous situation for all of us in Europe.”
At the end of last month, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a fellow Social Democrat member, also voiced disquiet over the Washington-Brussels axis that Merkel has dutifully followed.
“It cannot be in our interests that this runs out of control. We need to keep this in mind in our sanctions policy,” said Germany’s top diplomat, as reported in Deutsche Welle on December 19.
Hollande’s latest high-profile call for a reversal in policy towards Russia is not based on vague altruism. France, like Germany, is feeling the brunt of the sanctions war.
French unemployment hit a record high at the end of the year, reaching near 3.5 million or 10.5 per cent of the workforce. Bad news on the parlous state of the French economy keeps on piling up, and Hollande’s personal rating among increasingly angry French voters keeps on plumbing new depths.
European citizens know that the crisis over Ukraine and between Europe and Russia is wholly unnecessary. They know that the tensions have been whipped up by Washington for its own selfish strategic interests of driving a wedge into the continent. Up to now, EU leaders have stupidly gone along with this reckless policy even though it is rebounding in further economic hardship for EU citizens and risking an all-out war.
The latest wobble in the Washington-Brussels axis against Russia, as expressed this week by Francois Hollande, has to be seen as good news. In that, at last, finally, official Europe is coming to its senses about the dangerous course the US is driving.
A political theme that has gained momentum over the past year is the “democratic deficit” across the EU that is alienating millions of its citizens. What more disturbing democratic deficit can you get than Brussels slavishly following Washington’s warmongering policy against Russia – in total detriment to the interests of EU citizens over crucial matters of their livelihoods and ultimately over the risk of an all-out war in Europe.
British mis-leader David Cameron is too much of an American puppet to ever come to his senses. But with France’s Hollande now beginning to show some long overdue common sense towards Russia, there may be grounds to believe that European governments are waking up to the recklessness of the Washington-Brussels axis against Russia – and ditching it.
The Coming War on Pensions
By Michael Hudson | CounterPunch | January 5, 2015
On the Senate’s last day in session in December, it approved the government’s $1.1 trillion budget for coming fiscal year.
Few people realize how radical the new U.S. budget law was. Budget laws are supposed to decide simply what to fund and what to cut. A budget is not supposed to make new law, or to rewrite the law. But that is what happened, and it was radical.
Wall Street’s representatives in Congress – the Democratic leadership as well as Republicans – took the opportunity to create an artificial crisis. The press called this “holding the government hostage.” The House – backed by the Senate – said that it would shut the government down at some future date if two basic laws were not changed.
Most of the attention has been paid to Elizabeth Warren’s eloquent attack on the government guaranteeing bank trades in derivatives. Written by Citigroup lobbyists, this puts taxpayer funds behind future bank bailouts if banks make more bad bets on complex financial derivatives, such as packaged junk mortgage loans.
Critics have focused on how there must be a loser for every winner in a derivatives contract. The problem is that if banks lose, the government will bail them out just as it did in 2008.
Less attention has been paid to what happens if banks win. They will win largely in making bets against pension funds. Indeed, pension funds have not been treated well by Wall Street in recent years.
They are in a bind. Pension funds will fall further and further behind what they need to pay retirees if they do not make the impossibly high returns of 8.5%. The guiding philosophy of pension funds has been that instead of making employers pay enough to cover the pensions they have promised, funds can make money purely financially – by Wall Street sharpies.
The problem is that safe interest rates today are less than 1% for Treasury bonds. Everyithing else – stocks, corporate bonds, and hedge fund derivatives – are much more risky. And when Goldman Sachs, or JPMorgan Chase draw up a derivative for a client, their aim is to make money for themselves, not for the client.
So pension funds have been at the losing end. Most funds would have done better simply to turn their money over to Vanguard in an indexed fund, and saved management fees.
At the state and local levels, pension funds in New Jersey and other states threaten to go the way of Detroit pension funds – to be cut back so that bondholders can be paid.
Many corporate pension funds also are behind, because companies are using their record profits to pay higher dividends and to buy back their stocks to create price gains for speculators.
But the funds most under attack are union pension funds. These are the funds that Congress has gone after. The fight is not merely to scale back pension funds – and avoid the government’s Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp (PBGC) being bailed out – but to break the power of unions to attract members or to defend them.
The Congressional budget act states that pension funds with more than one employer – such as construction industry funds, teamster funds for truckers and public service workers funds – can be scaled back in order to pay Wall Street creditors.
Labor now is told to go to the back of the line behind Wall Street. If the economy is too debt strapped to pay everyone what is owed, then the new motto is Big Fish Eat Little Fish.
Wall Street is eating the pension funds.
This goes hand in hand with Obama’s fight to scale back Social Security and, ultimately, to privatize it. Now that Republicans are in a majority of both the House and Senate, the Democrats will be able to take an anti-labor position and then try to blame it on Republicans.
Yet Democrats themselves were the leading advocates of the anti-labor, anti-pension fund policy. This special “rider” to the budget bill was known last spring to the House Budget Committee. Yet something tricky happened: While the committee approved the anti-labor pension rule, no record was taken of which members and which party voted for the radical change, and who opposed it.
For instance, Marcy Kaptur, who replaced Dennis Kucinich from Cleveland after the Democrats helped the Republicans gerrymander his district, said that she should remember who voted which way on the House Appropriations Committee she served on.
So this is the problem: the supposedly liberal Democrats are in the lead for scaling back pension funding, Social Security and labor protection in general.
Here’s an indication of how bad the situation is. Pension funds – union pension funds as well as corporate pension funds – are supposed to be backed up by the PBGC. But that agency has been headed by a former Lazard Freres investment banker, Joshua Gotbaum. He’s now at the Democratic Party’s pro-Wall Street think tank to refine their anti-pension policies. He has explained to the press that he wants to “save” pensions – by scaling them back.
This is the new Orwellian anti-labor rhetoric. “Saving” pensions means reducing what workers were promised – back when they negotiated lower wage gains in exchange for greater retirement security.
The new law permits pension plan trustees – often Wall Street financiers – to cut benefits without having to ask the PBGC to take over the plan. This “balances the federal budget” by saving the bailout funds for Wall Street, not for labor.
The problem is that the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) of 1974 — vastly underpriced the contributions that employers would have to make in order to pay retirees. The problem was designed to fail from the beginning, because Wall Street and corporate lobbyists fought to underfund the program. They knew from the very beginning that pensions would fail in the end.
Yet at the same time, the law stated that benefits already earned by workers cannot be cut back. But last December’s Congressional budgetary coup d’état ruled that now, employee retirement benefits can indeed be cut back. Retiree claims are not treated on the same level as financial debts to Wall Street investors. They are sent to the bottom of the line of claimants.
Their strategy is basically Malthusian: to blame the pension problem on the fact that America is de-industrializing, leaving not enough new union members to pay the dues that are necessary to pay retirees. This is because the pensions were designed to be a Ponzi scheme from the outset – needing new contributors to pay the early entrants.
This is of course the argument that President Obama is making regarding the need to cut back Social Security too.
This turns out to be the big picture at work for the next two years. Outside of Wall Street, the economy is not really growing. Obama is escalating military spending in his heating-up confrontation with Russia and China, and that will take a large part of the budget. More bailouts and subsidies for Wall Street over their derivatives bets – the rule that Senator Warren criticized – will eat up more government revenue.
So something must give – and the PBGC is one of the designated victims. The aim is to avoid government help for pension funds in arrears – and nearly all funds are in arrears, because of the basically malstructured idea of making money financially instead of helping the economy actually grow by investing to produce more goods and services and raise living standards.
Congress has just legislated the right to scale back pension funds if they’re managed by labor unions, e.g. on multi-employer contributors. This will hit blue collar labor the hardest, especially unionized building superintendents, and service workers.
Once this is done, the idea of rolling back pensions can spread to other kinds of pension funds besides union funds. State and local pensions, corporate pensions and even insurance company annuities can be cut back.
And the great aim at the end is to privatize Social Security. Scaling back labor union and corporate pension funds will enable Wall Street propagandists to come out and say, “See, the only way you can be safe is to have your own private accounts, and manage your own money.”
The problem with this approach is that “managing our own money” turns out to be deciding which Wall Street firm is going to manage it – and of course, they manage it in their own interest first and foremost. They do this by raking high management fees that keep most of the returns for their own salaries and bonuses. In the end, they place their clients funds in bad bets.
The great argument for having Wall Street manage pension funds instead of labor union economists or their own people is that the mafia is strong in many unions. That’s indeed the case. In 1982 a federal consent degree stripped the Teamsters of its power to control its investments. The assumption was that if labor unions are crooked, then Wall Street must be more honest, is absurd. It’s basically one set of financial predators against another set.
Here’s how Prudential Insurance became notorious for ripping off the funds of clients it managed, for instance. It might make two bets on a given day: one, that a stock or bond would go up, and two that it would go down. At the end of the day it would put the winning bet in its own account, and the losing bet in the account of its clients.
This is how crooked commodity traders have worked for many decades. In Ghana, for instance, the cocoa commission traders would place two bets: one, that cocoa prices would rise, and two, that they would fall. They kept the winning bet for themselves or their family members; the losing bet would be placed on the government’s balance sheet.
In a nutshell, this is how Wall Street has been treating pension funds. This is why Orange County, California, sued Wall Street, and why other cities have sued Wall Street firms over mismanagement that have led to huge losses for their funds – and super gains for Wall Street at the other end of these trades. The idea of “fiduciary responsibility” is no longer enforced, now that Obama’s Justice Department has made it clear that it is not going to charge large Wall Street banks and their brokerage arms with criminal fraud. The gates are now wide open for such fraud, as Bill Black has described.
With this in mind, now let’s go back to the new Congressional budget law. It gives priority to debts owed to Wall Street; debts to labor now will go to the back of the line, and be scaled down so s to pay corporate raiders and banks.
The first great test case is expected to be the Teamsters’ Central States Fund. The rationale for cutting back pensions for drivers is that in 1980 it had four employees for every retiree. Today, it has just one driver for every five retirees. How can such a plan succeed?
The normal answer would be, by turning to the PBGC.
But let’s look more closely at the alleged source of the problem. It’s not just that there are so many fewer employees per retiree. The Teamsters Central States Fund is a prime example of Wall Street mismanagement. Goldman Sachs, Northern Trust and other firms make the decisions, not the Fund’s own board. A recent report has found that “Roughly a third of the pension system’s shortfalls — or almost $9 billion – can be traced to investment losses accrued during the financial industry’s 2008 collapse. These losses were in addition to more than $250 million in fees paid by the plan to financial firms in just the last 5 years.”
Obviously there is as much conflict of interest at work in letting Wall Street sharpies manage pension funds as there is in letting Mafiosi rip them off.
The important thing is that the PBGC has been as lax in oversight as the Federal Reserve has been lax in overseeing the banking system. But whereas the Fed then bailed out the banks in 2008 on the ground that they were systemically necessary for the economy to function, no such assumption is being made with regard to labor’s pensions.
It seems part of a long-term strategy to cut back pensions, privatize them into individual accounts managed by Wall Street investment banks and insurance companies, and then to privatize Social Security.
This is part of the strategy to use the demand for budgetary balance to privatize the nations’ infrastructure too as it falls apart – on the ground that the government is broke, and cannot raise taxes on the rich or simply print the money itself to fuel economic growth.
It looks like Greece may be the test case for where the American economy is heading.
Michael Hudson’s book summarizing his economic theories, “The Bubble and Beyond,” is now available in a new edition with two bonus chapters on Amazon. His latest book is Finance Capitalism and Its Discontents. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion. He can be reached via his website, mh@michael-hudson.com
New York Police Work Slowdown Backfires, Revealing Time Wasted on Petty Violations
By Steve Straehley | AllGov | January 5, 2015
An alleged work slowdown in a fit of pique by New York City police officers could turn out to have the opposite of its intended effect, causing Big Apple residents to lose respect for “New York’s Finest.”
The work slowdown is the latest NYPD tactic in its battle with New York Mayor Bill de Blasio. Officers turned their backs on the mayor when he spoke at the funeral of Rafael Ramos, an officer killed on December 20 by a gunman, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who cited police abuses as the reason for his crime. Now police officers, at the behest of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, are not enforcing the law “unless absolutely necessary.” During the week of December 22, arrests were down 66% and traffic and parking tickets and summons for minor offenses were down more than 90% from the same week in 2013.
Instead of concern, many are grateful for the diminished police presence. Tickets and summons have been issued disproportionally to those in the working class, forcing them to bear much of the city’s revenue burden. Now the targeting has stopped and those around the political spectrum wonder if it was ever necessary, according to BBC News.
“Well, we can only hope the NYPD unions and de Blasio settle their differences soon so that the police can go back to arresting people for reasons other than ‘when they have to’,” Scott Shackford of the libertarian Reason magazine wrote. In Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi’s response to the slowdown was that it “shines a light on the use of police officers to make up for tax shortfalls using ticket and citation revenue.”
And Harry Siegel wrote in the New York Daily News on what might be the effect on attitudes toward police. “It’s tough to run a protection racket when people don’t feel threatened, and New York ended 2014 with new lows in murders, rapes, burglaries, grand larcenies and robberies,” he wrote. “For over 20 years, crime has dropped as the NYPD has doubled and redoubled its enforcement efforts. At some point, the chemo is deadlier than the cancer.”
Police felt slighted by de Blasio when the mayor decried the decision of a grand jury not to indict the police officers responsible for the death of Eric Garner, who was put in a chokehold while being arrested for selling individual cigarettes. De Blasio said the decision was one that “many in our city did not want.”
He went on to speak of his son Dante, who is black. “I couldn’t help but immediately think what it would mean to me to lose Dante. Life would never be the same for me after,” de Blasio said. “Chirlane and I have had to talk to Dante for years about the dangers that he may face,” he added. “No family should have to go through what the Garner family went through.” NYPD officers and their union took that as a sign of disrespect.
Some police officers repeated their back-turning protest at Sunday’s funeral for Wenjian Liu, who was also killed by the man who killed Officer Ramos.
To Learn More:
Is New York Police’s ‘Virtual Work Stoppage’ a Boon For Critics? (by Anthony Zurcher, BBC News)
Arrests Plummet 66% With NYPD in Virtual Work Stoppage (by Larry Celona, Shawn Cohen and Bruce Golding, New York Post )
How Low Income New Yorkers Are Benefiting From the NYPD’s Work Stoppage (by Kira Lerner and Igor Volsky, ThinkProgress )
Respect for NYPD Squandered in Attacks on Bill de Blasio (New York Times )
Bill de Blasio Responds to Eric Garner Grand Jury Decision (by Sam Levine, Huffington Post )
The Overlooked Third Victim of the New York Cop Killer (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov )
Two Most-Sued Cops in New York Cost City $1.9 Million in Payouts (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov )
Bystanders Hit by Police Bullets in New York City Get Little Sympathy and No Compensation (by Noel Brinkerhoff and Danny Biederman, AllGov )
Rapprochement Between the United States and Cuba and Sanctions Against Venezuela
By WILLIAM CAMACARO and FREDERICK B. MILLS | CounterPunch | January 2, 2015
In a historic address on December 17, 2014 on “Cuba policy changes” President Barack Obama declared, “our shift in policy towards Cuba comes at a moment of renewed leadership in the Americas.” This “renewed leadership,” in our view, seeks to gradually undermine socialism in Cuba, check waning U.S. influence in the region, and inhibit a growing continental Bolivarian movement towards Latin American liberation, integration, and sovereignty. To be sure, normalization of relations with Cuba and the release of Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino and Antonio Guerrero were long overdue, and the reunification of Alan Gross with his family was an important and welcome gesture. The rapprochement between the United States and Cuba and the simultaneous imposition of a new round of sanctions by the U.S. against Venezuela, however, do not signal a change in overall U.S. strategy but only a change in tactics. As President of Venezuela Nicolas Maduro remarked in a letter to President Raul Castro “there is still a long road to travel in order to arrive at the point that Washington recognizes we are no longer its back yard…” (December 20, 2014).
From Embargo to Deployment of U.S. Soft Power in Cuba
The Obama gambit arguably seeks to move Cuba as far as possible towards market oriented economic reforms, help build the political community of dissidents on the island, and improve U.S. standing in the region, and indeed in the world. In a Miami Herald op-ed piece (December 22, 2014), John Kerry (Secretary of State), Penny Pritzker (Secretary of Commerce) and Jacob J. Lew (Treasury Secretary) wrote that normalization of relations between the U.S. and Cuba will “increase the ability of Americans to provide business training and other support for Cuba’s nascent private sector” and that this will “put American businesses on a more equal footing.” Presumably the op-ed is referring to “equal footing” with other nations that have been doing business for years with Cuba despite the embargo. The essay also indicates that the U.S. will continue its “strong support for improved human-rights conditions and democratic reforms in Cuba” by “empowering civil society and supporting the freedom of individuals to exercise their freedoms of speech and assembly.” Such a version of “empowering civil society” is probably consistent with decades of U.S. clandestine attempts to subvert the Cuban government, documented by Jon Elliston in Psy War on Cuba: The declassified history of U.S. anti-Castro propaganda (Ocean Press: 1999). It is also in line with more recent efforts, through USAID funded social media (phony Cuban Twitter) and a four year project to promote “Cuban rap music” both of which ended in 2012, designed to build dissident movements inside Cuba. In December 2014, Matt Herrick, spokesman for USAID, defended the latter unsuccessful covert program saying, “It seemed like a good idea to support civil society” and that “it’s not something we are embarrassed about in any way.” Moreover, a fact sheet on normalization published by the U.S. Department of State mentions that funding for “democracy programming” will continue and that “our efforts are aimed at promoting the independence of the Cuban people so they do not need to rely on the Cuban state” (December 17, 2014). The Cuban government, though, has a different take on the meaning of “independence of the Cuban people.” They emphasize “sovereign equality,” “national independence,” and “self determination.” In an address on normalization, Raul Castro insisted on maintaining Cuban sovereignty and stated “we have embarked on the task of updating our economic model in order to build a prosperous and sustainable Socialism” (December 17, 2014). Obviously the ideological differences between Washington and Havana will shape the course of economic and political engagement between these two nations in the months and years ahead.
Rapprochement Between the U.S. and U.S. Isolation in Latin America
Through normalization of relations with Cuba, the U.S. also seeks to end its increasing isolation in the region. Secretary of State John Kerry, in his Announcement of Cuba Policy Changes, remarked that “not only has this policy [embargo] failed to advance America’s goals, it has actually isolated the United States instead of isolating Cuba” (December 17, 2014). In October 2014, the United Nations General Assembly voted against the U.S. Cuba embargo for the 23rd year in a row, with only the U.S. and Israel voting in favor. The inclusion of Cuba in the political and, to a certain degree, economic life of Latin America, has also been part of a larger expression of Latin American solidarity that clearly repudiates regional subordination to Washington. Since the sixth Summit of the Americas in Cartagena (April 2012), the U.S. has been on very clear notice by the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) that there will be no seventh Summit of the Americas in Panama in April without Cuba, a condition to which Washington has ceded.
The flip side of Washington’s growing “isolation” has been the critically important regional diversification of diplomatic and commercial relations between Latin America and the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) and the construction of alternative development banks and currency reserves to gradually replace the historically onerous terms of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The financial powerhouse of the BRICS nations is China. Over the past year, China has sent high level delegations to visit CELAC nations and in some cases these meetings have resulted in significant commercial agreements. As a follow up, there will be a CELAC–China forum in Beijing in January 2015 whose main objective, reports Prensa Latina, “is exchange and dialogue in politics, trade, economy and culture.” These ties with BRICS and other nations are consistent with the Chavista goal that the Patria Grande ought to contribute to building a multi-polar world and resist subordination to any power block on the planet. By bringing a halt to its growing isolation, Washington would be in a better position to increase its participation in regional commerce. The terms of economic engagement with most of Latin America, however, will no longer be determined by a Washington consensus, but by a North—South consensus. The Obama gambit, though, appears to be trading one source of alienation (embargo against Cuba) for another (sanctions against Venezuela).
Obama’s Gambit: Pushing Back the Bolivarian Cause at its Front Line–Venezuela
The Obama administration’s move to normalize relations with Cuba, while a welcome change of course, can be seen as a modification in tactics to advance the neoliberal agenda as far as possible in Havana while ending a policy that only serves to further erode U.S. influence in the region. Such diplomacy is in line with what appears to be a major U.S. policy objective of ultimately rolling back the ‘pink tide’, that is, the establishment, by democratic procedures, of left and center left regimes in two thirds of Latin American nations. It is this tide that has achieved some measure of progress in liberating much of Latin America from the structural inequality, social antagonism, and subordination to transnational corporate interests intrinsic to neoliberal politics and economics. And it is the continental Bolivarian emphasis on independence, integration, and sovereignty that has fortified the social movements behind this tide.
The Obama gambit, from a hemispheric point of view, constitutes a tactical shift away from the failed U.S. attempt to isolate and bring the Cuban revolution to its knees through coercion, to an intensification of its fifteen year effort to isolate and promote regime change in Venezuela. The reason for this tactical shift is that Venezuela, as the front line in the struggle for the Bolivarian cause of an increasingly integrated and sovereign Latin America, has become the biggest obstacle to the restoration of U.S. hegemony and the rehabilitation of the neoliberal regime in the Americas.
If this interpretation of U.S. hemispheric policy is near the mark, Obama’s grand executive gesture towards Cuba is immediately related to the context of Washington’s unrelenting antagonism towards Chavismo and, in particular, to the latest imposition of sanctions against Caracas. The reason for this is quite transparent. It has been Venezuela, more than Cuba, during the past fifteen years, that has played the leading role in the change of the balance of forces in the region on the side of sovereignty for the peoples of the Americas, especially through its leadership role in ALBA, CELAC, UNASUR and MERCOSUR, associations that do not include the U.S. and Canada. Argentine sociologist Atilio Boron, in an interview with Katu Arkonada of Rebelión (June 24, 2014), points out, “It is no accident… that Venezuela in particular is in the cross hairs of the empire, and for this reason we must be clear that the battle of Venezuela is our Stalingrad. If Venezuela succumbs before the brutal counter offensive of the United States…the rest of the processes of change underway on the continent, whether very radical or very moderate, will end with the same fate.” The latest U.S. sanctions against Venezuela can be viewed as one component of this counter offensive. It is to a closer look at the sanctions bill, signed into law by the president on December 18, 2014, that we now turn.
The “Venezuela Defense of Human Rights and Civil Society Act of 2014” (S 2142) not only targets Venezuelan officials whom U.S. authorities accuse of being linked to human rights abuses by freezing their assets and revoking their travel visas (Sec. 5 (b) (1) (A) (B)), it also promises to step up U.S. political intervention in Venezuela by continuing “to support the development of democratic political processes and independent civil society in Venezuela” (section 4 (4)) and by reviewing the effectiveness of “broadcasting, information distribution, and circumvention technology distribution in Venezuela” (section 6). One of the instruments of this support for “democratic political processes” has been the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Sociologist Kim Scipes argues that, “the NED and its institutes are not active in Venezuela to help promote democracy, as they claim, but in fact, to act against popular democracy in an effort to restore the rule of the elite, top-down democracy” (February 28 – March 2, 2014). Independent journalist Garry Leech, in his article entitled “Agents of Destabilization: Washington Seeks Regime Change in Venezuela,” (March 4, 2014) examines Wikileaks cables that indicate similar efforts have been carried out in Venezuela by USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) during the past decade. Hannah Dreier (July 18, 2014), reported that “the State Department and the National Endowment for Democracy, a government-funded nonprofit organization, together budgeted about $7.6 million to support Venezuelan groups last year alone, according to public documents reviewed by AP.” The sanctions bill (S 2142), then, in light of these precedents, contains provisions that suggest an imminent escalation in the use of soft power to support the political opposition to Chavismo in Venezuela, though such funding has been banned by Caracas.
The current U.S. sanctions against Caracas are consistent with fifteen years of U.S. antagonism against the Bolivarian revolution. The measures send a clear signal of increased support for a Venezuelan political opposition that has suffered division and discord in the aftermath of their failed “salida ya” (exit now) strategy of the first quarter of 2014. The sanctions also undermine any near term movement towards normalization of relations between the U.S. and Venezuela. It is no surprise that provisions of the law that targets Venezuelan officials accused of human rights violations have gotten some limited traction inside this South American nation, with the executive secretary of the Venezuelan opposition Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD), Jesús Torrealba, openly supporting this measure. This is probably not going to get the MUD a lot of votes. According to a Hinterlaces poll taken in May, a majority of Venezuelans are opposed to U.S. sanctions. There has also been a swift repudiation of sanctions by the Maduro administration and the popular sectors. On December 15, 2014, in one of the largest and most enthusiastic gatherings of Chavistas in the streets of Caracas since the death of Hugo Chavez, marchers celebrated the fifteenth year anniversary of the passage by referendum of a new constitution (December 15, 1999) and vigorously protested against U.S. intervention in their country. Even dissident Chavistas appear to be toning down their rhetoric and circling the wagons in the face of Washington’s bid to assert “renewed leadership” in the region.
There is no doubt that the Maduro administration is under tremendous pressure, from left Chavistas as well as from the right wing opposition, to reform and improve public security and deal effectively with an economic crisis that is being exacerbated by falling petroleum prices. What the government of Venezuela calls an “economic war” against the country has domestic and well as international dimensions. Although there is no smoking gun at this time that exposes a conspiracy, some analysts interpret the recent fall in oil prices as part of a campaign to put severe economic pressure on Iran, Russia and Venezuela, countries whose fiscal soundness relies a great deal on petroleum revenues. For example, Venezuelan independent journalist, Jesus Silva R., in his essay entitled “The Government of Saudi Arabia is the Worst Commercial Enemy of Venezuela,” argues that the Saudis and Washington are complicit in the “economic strangulation, planned from the outside, against Venezuela” (December 22, 2014). Whatever the cause of falling petroleum prices and despite the domestic challenges facing Caracas, it will most probably be the Venezuelan electorate that decides, through upcoming legislative elections, whether to give Chavismo a vote of confidence, not outside intervention or a fresh round of guarimbas and terrorist attacks perpetrated by the ultra right. For the large majority of Venezuelans reject violence and favor constitutional means of resolving political contests.
U.S. Sanctions Against Venezuela Evoke Latin American Solidarity with Caracas
The good will generated by rapprochement between the U.S. and Cuba has already been tempered by the almost simultaneous new round of sanctions imposed by Washington against Venezuela. It is important to recall, perhaps with some irony, that it was precisely the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s establishment of fraternal ties with a formerly isolated Cuba that drew, in particular, the ire of Washington and the virulent antagonism of the right wing Venezuelan opposition. Now it is Latin American and to a significant extent, international solidarity with Venezuela that may prove to be a thorn in Washington’s side. On December 12, 2014, ALBA issued a strong statement against the Senate passage of the sanctions bill, expressing its “most energetic rejection of these interventionist actions [sanctions] against the people and government of the Bolivarian Government of Venezuela.” The statement also warned “that the legislation constitutes an incitement towards the destabilization of…Venezuela and opens the doors to anticonstitutional actions against the legal government and legitimately elected President Nicolas Maduro Moros.” The communiqué also expressed solidarity with Venezuela adding that the countries of ALBA “desire to emphasize that they will not permit the use of old practices already applied to countries in the region, directed at bringing about political regime change, as has occurred in other regions of the world.” MERCOSUR issued a statement on December 17, 2014 that “the application of unilateral sanctions… violate the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of States and does not contribute to the stability, social peace and democracy in Venezuela.” On December 22, the G77 plus China countries expressed solidarity and support for the government of Venezuela in the face of “violations of international law that in no way contributes to the spirit of political and economic dialogue between the two countries.” On December 23, the Movement of Non-Aligned Nations stated that it “categorically rejects the decision of the United States Government to impose unilateral coercive measures against the Republic of Venezuela…with the purpose of weakening its sovereignty, political independence and its right to the self determination, in clear violation of International Law.” It is also important to recall that on October 16, 2014 the UN General Assembly elected Venezuela (by a vote of 181 out of 193 members) to a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council with unanimous regional support, even crossing ideological lines. This UN vote came as a grave disappointment to opponents of the Bolivarian revolution and reinforced Venezuelan standing in CELAC. In yet another diplomatic victory, as of September 2015, Venezuela will assume the presidency of the Movement of Non-Aligned Nations for a three year term. Clearly, it is Washington, not Venezuela that has already become an outlier as the Obama administration launches its “renewed leadership in the Americas.” If these immediate expressions of solidarity with the first post-Chavez Bolivarian government in Venezuela are an indicator of a persistent and growing trend, then by the time of the upcoming seventh Summit of the Americas, April 10 – 11, 2015 in Panama, President Obama can expect approbation for Washington’s opening to Havana, but he will also face a united front against U.S. intervention in Venezuela and anywhere else in the region.
Note: Translations by the authors from Spanish to English of government documents are unofficial. Where citations are not present in the text, hyperlinks provide the source.
William Camacaro MFA. is a Senior Analyst at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs and a member of the Bolivarian Circle of New York “Alberto Lovera.”
Frederick B. Mills, Ph.D. is Professor of Philosophy at Bowie State University and Senior Research Fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs.
Putin’s Approval Spikes as US Admits Attack on Russian Economy
teleSUR | December 30, 2014
According to a survey made by Gallup, Vladimir Putin’s popularity increased by 29 percent compared with 2013 data, when 54 percent of Russians surveyed approved his role as leader of the country.
Gallup attributed recent nationalism following Crimea’s incorporation into Russia and the Sochi Winter Olympic Games to explain the rise in Putin’s popularity to 83 percent, despite the economic trouble that his nation currently faces due to the drop in oil prices.
“Despite U.S. and European sanctions earlier this year over Moscow’s intervention in Ukraine, more Russians see their economy getting better now than has been the case since 2008,” said Gallup.
This week, US President Barack Obama acknowledged a strategy to weaken Russia’s economy through sanctions as well as a drop in oil prices.
“For the first time since 2008, a majority of Russians (73%) believe their country’s leadership is leading them in the right direction. This renewed faith is apparent in their record-level confidence in the country’s military (78%), their national government (64%), and honesty of elections (39%),” states the survey.
Gallup also revealed that Russians also expressed increased satisfaction with their lifestyles.
In 2014, a record-high 65 percent of Russians said they were satisfied with their freedom.
After Ukraine: Are the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary Veering Off The NATO/EU Reservation?
By Christine Stone | Ron Paul Institute | December 15, 2014
Prague “red card” protest, November 2014
Despite the firmness shown by the EU’s biggest players when it comes to sanctioning Putin’s Russia, lower down the pecking order some member states are not happy. Unlike the most craven and obedient puppets — the Baltic States and Poland — it took some arm twisting to get the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary to agree to punish Moscow for annexing Crimea. Each country is dependent for much of its energy on Russia with which there are also valued economic ties. Why rock the boat? Despite hyperbole claiming that Vladimir Putin was intent on taking them over and rebuilding the iron curtain, in reality, Russia has been an unproblematic neighbor for a quarter of a century.
Could these ripples of discontent with the famed Washington consensus develop into something more troubling for both the US and Brussels? What can they do about it? All three countries are members of both NATO and the EU. Promoting regime change inside the Euro-Atlantic tent surely becomes more problematic. Or, does it? Let us examine each case separately and see what the auguries bode.
On 17th November 2014, it was drab and raining in Prague as the Czechs celebrated 25 years since the so-called “velvet revolution,” unlike the classic freezing, East European winter day of 17th November 1989. Demonstrations to mark the event were slated to take place and a mass of candles filled the passage way on Národní Třida (National Street) where student “Martin Šmid” died at the hands of the police, an event that was said to have triggered the collapse of the communist regime. But, hold on: it soon emerged that Martin Šmid didn’t exist; he had been invented by the Czechoslovak security services, the St. B. (Státní Bezpečnost) as part of a ploy to bring a new, reformed post-communist regime to power.
Emoting over a death that never took place seems weird but, in a way it sums up the banality that lays at the heart of all things connected with the “velvet” events. This was only reinforced later in the day when a group of anti-capitalist protesters snaked its way through the city centre wearing papier maché masks, some bearing the image of the evil Putin, others the reviled (at least, by the local cogniscenti) Czech president, Miloš Zeman. A few Ukrainian flags brought up the rear. Other banners denounced Ecuador’s left wing president, Rafael Correa, hardly a household name in Prague.[i] As the hundred or so protesters passed the Rudolfinum concert hall, a group of elderly rock musicians with lank, grey hair plugged away at some ancient protest songs watched by a handful of leather clad biker types.
Over the river, at Prague castle, a more serious group had been gathering during the afternoon: students bent on delivering a message to President Zeman that it was time to go. They did this by leaving a trail of red cards inside the presidential palace complex (the red card is used in football matches to send a player off the pitch). Several hundred protesters ended up under the ceremonial balcony demanding Zeman leave. Fluttering over the courtyard was the presidential flag denoting that Zeman was in residence. It is difficult to imagine such protests taking place in front of the White House or 10 Downing Street but, no one tried to remove the students who did not, to be fair, behave in a violent or intimidating manner. However, there had been scuffles earlier in the day at a “velvet revolution” ceremony attended by various European dignitaries, including Germany’s President Gauck. When students pelted Zeman (who was protected by an umbrella) with eggs one misdirected and managed to hit Gauck.
What, then, has caused the animus against Zeman? The president is a rather shambolic figure who, his detractors allege, besmirches his office by drinking heavily and speaking “off the cuff” (he even smokes and is regularly photographed with a lighted cigarette as if to highlight his malevolence).
As long time leader of the Czech Social Democrats and a former prime minister, Zeman earned the ire of the chattering classes by joining a coalition with former president Vaclav Klaus between 1998 and 2002. By then, Klaus had developed a healthy scepticism towards the EU and both men opposed US sponsored wars in Kosovo and later Iraq which led to their being anathematized by Brussels and Washington and, by extension, the local bien pensants, whose hero ex-dissident Vaclav Havel was the first Czech to advocate bombarding Belgrade since the Good Soldier Sweijk in 1914! When Klaus’s term ended in 2012, such people assumed that their candidate, Prince Kari Schwarzenberg, would be effortlessly elected to replace him. However, even though the Czech Republic is the repository of much Hapsburg charm in the form of castles and cultural artifacts, the electorate consists of a majority of post- communist bumpkins unlikely to feel represented by a Knight of the Golden Fleece. 54.8 percent voted for Zeman while 45.2 percent (mainly in Prague) chose Schwarzenberg.
As the role is mainly ceremonial, the president could have been ignored but Zeman has chosen to speak out on numerous occasions and in ways to infuriate his imperial masters. He has regularly demanded normal relations with Putin’s Russia, called the Ukrainian crisis a “civil war” and then, in a radio interview categorised Mikhail Khodorkovsky as a criminal while reminding listeners of the double entendre involved in the moniker “Pussy Riot.” Despite their usual boasts of über-liberal sexual mores, the intellectual elite of Prague expressed outrage at this outburst of vulgarity. “They don’t like him because he’s naughty,” a young reporter from Czech Television said of the student protesters. “How can we have a president like that,” they moan. “He must go”.
Added to their woes has been the seemingly inexorable rise of a new political party, Ano 11[ii], which came a close second in the 2013 parliamentary election and is now in coalition with the Social Democrats. Many people take it for granted that Ano’s founder, the billionaire Andrej Babiš, now the country’s minister of finance, will end up as prime minister; the party did well in autumn, 2014 local elections. What, then, is wrong with Ano 11?
According to the Czech media (and the Euro-American oriented elite) Babiš is a Berlusconi clone, boss of one of the Czech Republic’s largest conglomerates, Agrofert, who, like Berlusconi, is also buying up media outlets. Ano is composed of old secret policemen and headed by Informer-in-Chief, Babiš.[iii] A Slovak by origin, Babiš took the allegations to court and was cleared, but the rumours have persisted as has the intention to appeal. However, it seems clear that, apart from the twitterings of the Prague elite, ordinary Czechs are not particularly concerned by such allegations nearly 30 years after the Communists fell from power. Anyway, many of the alleged Ano nest of spies and informers were too young at the time of their “service” to have been very important cogs in the machine. All this is a smoke screen. Babiš has trodden on various entrenched local interests. He has also supported the extension of nuclear power in the Czech Republic which has angered the EU’s generously subsidised renewables lobby which probably sees the troubles with Russian gas as a golden opportunity to cash in.
Are things any better, more reliable from the Euro-Atlantic perspective, in neighbouring Slovakia? The answer is: not entirely. Slovakia has thrown up politicians frowned upon by the West since its independence was secured by Vladimir Mečiar in 1993. Milan Knažko, an old “sixty eighter” and sometime dissident feared that all the elderly would have to die off before Mečiar finally exited the stage. “Slovaks are stupid,” he said. But, it took twenty years to eliminate Mečiar as a political force only for him to be replaced by another “populist,” Robert Fico, whose leftish Smer (Direction) party won an overall victory in the last Slovak election in 2012. Fico has criticised the EU’s sanctions on Russia and seems to have been forced against his will to implement them, as well as allowing the reverse flow of gas to Ukraine from Slovakia’s own reserves. Of course, his hands are tied as Slovakia is a member of the EU and the single currency. Nevertheless, the empire demands 100 percent obedience, nothing less. Fico stood as a candidate in the March 2014 presidential elections but was surprisingly beaten by a maverick outsider, businessman Andrej Kiska, who made what is described as his “fortune” in hire purchase. Unlike Babiš, his business back ground is regarded as a plus rather than an exercise in predatory capitalism. He is popular with the elites both at home and in Brussels (unlike Fico) and will be an ideal advocate for pushing Slovakia in the “right” direction, for example, by recognising Kosovan independence, something it has refused so far to do to avoid trouble with its restless Hungarian minority.
But, nothing said or done by politicians in Prague and Bratislava equal the level of disobedience that has been coming from further down the Danube in Hungary. There, Prime Minister Viktor Orban has adopted an openly defiant position on a range of issues that have infuriated the EU. But even more dangerously for his long term survival, he has fallen into the cross hairs of Washington. Since summer 2014, demonstrations regularly take place on some pretext or other against the Orban government and long-term regime change watchers can only debate how the situation will finally be resolved. Supporters are confident Orban will survive as he is “popular,” but that never stopped the engine of regime change. Viktor Yanukovich’s party handily won elections in 2012 but he was deposed a year later; the hugely popular Hugo Chavez and Muammar Gaddafi both ended up dead.
Viktor Orban has come a long way from the days of his Soros scholarship at Pembroke College, Oxford. His party, Fidesz, was a classic middle of the road liberal outfit – a proud member of the Liberal International where it now sits somewhat uneasily. However, Hungarians have always been more nationalistic than many Europeans as manifested in their almost unique language; their sense of national identity and solidarity goes back a long time. When Fidesz won an overwhelming majority in the 2010 parliamentary elections, Viktor Orban, now prime minister, started to put Hungary first. In the wake of the 2008 financial collapse he threw out the IMF and cancelled Hungary’s debt repayments in foreign currency thus lowering the pain for ordinary Hungarians. In 2011, he expelled Monsanto – Hungary has banned the use of GM crops – lowered fuel prices and, in the same year, changed the voting system to a mixed majority and proportional system modeled on Germany. A new constitution has reduced the number of MPs by half. Something must have gone right because in spring 2014’s parliamentary election, Fidesz again won an overall majority. All this took place against the back drop of a broken political order with most Hungarian parties, particularly on the left, scarred by corruption and failure. The ultra-right Jobbik remained as the only functioning opposition party, something unappealing to most right thinking people, including in Hungary.
Accusations of Orban’s “authoritarianism” have gone on for some time, bolstered by a growing number of NGOs in Budapest (mainly foreign funded and backed) as well as tame academics like Princeton’s Kim Lane Scheppele who has tied herself in knots trying to show that Fidesz’s successive victories at the polls (in 2014 alone the party overwhelmingly won parliamentary, local and European elections) were really failures! Perhaps this might just rumble along, going nowhere while – as in Prague – providing low level political gossip for the chattering classes in Budapest to feed on, were it not for Orban’s rather bold foreign policy moves in the past year.
In January 2014 he announced that a deal had been reached with Russia to fund the expansion of Hungary’s Paks nuclear facility. As the Ukrainian events unfolded and energy security came under the spotlight, this could have been viewed as strategic foresight. Not so; the Americans were now very angry. On top of this, when sanctions came up for discussion after the Crimean annexation, Orban baulked at implementing them: “Why should Hungary ‘shoot itself in the foot,’” he said. Like Fico, he dragged his heels over providing Ukraine with reverse flow gas from Hungary’s reserves. As the hate campaign against Putin entered the stratosphere, Viktor remained committed to participating in the South Stream gas project which only came undone when Bulgaria, the weakest link in the chain, pulled out followed by Russia itself redirecting the pipeline to Turkey. According to observers on the ground in Budapest, Orban was now being “warned” by the Cosa Nostra in Washington that he was going “too far.”
At this time, Hungary was without a US ambassador. Colleen Bell, a producer of TV soap operas, was stuck in the congressional vetting process, so finger wagging was left to the Chargé d’Affaires in Budapest, André Goodfriend. Goodfriend has an impressive CV for such a lowly diplomat and his excursions into Hungarian political life, including the now formulaic support for LGBT events, have been high profile culminating in the announcement that six members of the Hungarian government were to be sanctioned and prevented from visiting the US. No names were mentioned but rumors abounded as to the whys and wherefores of the decision.
What to do? With a hopelessly divided and weak opposition given the implosion of the Hungarian Socialists who backed EU-demanded austerity all the way, and with the paramilitary, ultra-nationalist Jobbik as the only substantial alternative to Orban’s party, all that remains is to split Fidesz in the hope of producing something more compliant. On 23rd October, 2014, as if on cue, the BBC’s long time Budapest correspondent, Nick Thorpe, reported that “cracks” were appearing in the ruling party although he failed to put any substance behind the allegation, or name names.[iv] Otherwise, there are the NGOs of which there are numerous as well as blogs and online publications which trash Orban and the Fidesz government. In September 2014, the authorities in Budapest cracked down on the Ökotárs Foundation, which disbursed grants to local NGOs from Norway. In a way, this was quite a clever ruse as it followed an expose in the New York Times detailing Norway’s many involvements in influence peddling via NGO in Washington.[v]
Do these expressions of dissent in Prague, Bratislava and Budapest mean that the Euro-Atlanticist order that has ruled the post-communist world so comprehensively since the early 1990s is under threat? Not quite: in the end, even Orban caved in to Brussels’ demand for sanctions against Russia. He still maintains that Hungary is a loyal EU and NATO member. Ditto, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. But, there does seem to be a change in the air. After years filled with allegations of corruption, most political parties in Central Europe are morally bankrupt and derided by local populations. Massaging election results is becoming more difficult when parties acceptable to Brussels and Washington can barely make single percentage points. In the Czech Republic, Ano 11 is heading in the same direction as Fidesz with the prospect of getting overall control of parliament in the next parliamentary elections. Another headache for Washington looms if that happens.
These unexpected shifts away from former subservience in the Central European heartland of Euro-conformity may explain why many of the old anti-communists from the era of perestroika and glasnost are being brought out and dusted down. On 11th December, the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) “the only US think-tank dedicated to the study of Central and Eastern Europe” announced it was beefing up its membership with many formidable regime change figures including Toomas Hendrik Ilves, Anne Applebaum, Carl Bildt,Eliot A. Cohen,and Timothy Garton Ash.[vi] It is hard to see these old regime change advocates changing much without resources to put into play, but remember the successful application of their policies after 1989 resulted in socio-economic collapse and mass emigration from Poland and Baltic States where they were most influential. Does Central Europe want to repeat that implosion by following these horsemen of the apocalypse? It is unlikely that Central Europeans other than the sponsored demonstrators be asked.
Notes:
[i] The US embassy was listed at the top of the backers of the protest in a leaflet handed out as the procession marched by. This so-called “Prague Maidan” was an obvious imitation of the protests in Kiev’s main square a year ago which toppled the Ukrainian president.
[ii] Ano is short for the Action of Dissatisfied Citizens (Akce nespokojených občanů). “Ano” also means “yes” in Czech. The party was founded in 2011.
[iii] Fidesz has also been accused of co-opting Hungary’s former secret policemen
[iv] Nick Thorpe “Hungary’s Fidesz: Cracks emerge in ruling party” BBC 23rd October, 2014 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-29740030
[v] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/us/politics/foreign-powers-buy-influence-at-think-tanks.html?_r=0
[vi] See, the CEPA press release: http://hosted-p0.vresp.com/1111079/ea59c56522/ARCHIVE
Christine Stone is co-author of Post-Communist Georgia: A Short History.
2014: year of futility in the fight against climate change
By Steve Goreham | Communities Digital News | December 29, 2014
The year 2014 was another year of futility in the fight against climate change. Climatists redoubled efforts to convince citizens that urgent action is needed to stop dangerous global warming. But the gap between public warnings and actual events produced an endless stream of climate irony.
January began with a frosty bang as an arctic air mass descended on the central United States, following a similar event in December. What was once called a cold snap is now ominously christened a “polar vortex.” Record-low daily temperatures were recorded from Minnesota to Boston, along with all-time seasonal snowfalls in many cities.
In a White House video released on January 8, John Holdren, chief science advisor to President Obama, made the paradoxical statement, “But a growing body of evidence suggests that the kind of extreme cold being experienced by much of the United States as we speak is a pattern that we can expect to see with increasing frequency as global warming continues.”
Also in January, passengers of the research ship Akademik Shokalskiy were rescued after the ship was locked in ice for 10 days near the antarctic coast. The expedition lead by professor Chris Turney had intended to study how weather patterns near Antarctica were changing due to man-made global warming.
On February 16, during a presentation in Indonesia, Secretary of State John Kerry stated that climate change was “perhaps the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.” Only two days later, protestors set fire to Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, leading to the resignation of President Viktor Yanukovych. In March, Russia seized the Crimea. In July, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine, and political unrest continues today. In the Middle East, slaughter of innocent civilians and beheading of western captives became a growing trend. Man-made climate casualties seem remarkably scarce in comparison.
In March, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations released Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, part of its Fifth Assessment Report. The report said that man-made climate change would reduce world agricultural output. Lead author Dr. Mark Howden stated, “There’s increasing evidence that climate change is also impacting on agriculture, particularly on some of the cereal crops such as wheat and maize. The negative impacts are greater and quicker than we previously thought.”
Meanwhile, farmers continued to ignore the warnings of the IPCC. According to the US Department of Agriculture, world agricultural production set all-time records for all three major cereal crops in 2014, with rice output up 1.1 percent, wheat up 11.2 percent, and corn up a whopping 14.0 percent over 2013.
The Obama administration continued its attack on coal-fired power plants, which provide about 40 percent of US electricity. In June, the EPA proposed new restrictions on carbon emissions that would make it virtually impossible to build a new coal-fired plant in the US. At the same time, more than 1,200 new coal-fired plants are planned across the world, with two-thirds to be built in India and China.
In his 2007 Noble Prize acceptance speech, former Vice President Al Gore warned that the arctic ice could be gone in “as little as seven years.” But arctic sea ice rebounded in 2014 and antarctic sea ice has been growing for decades. According to the University of Illinois, satellites measured global sea ice area at above the 30-year average at the end of 2014.
In September, the United Nations held a climate summit in New York City to urge the world to conserve energy and reduce emissions. Spokesman Leonardo DiCaprio stated, “This disaster has grown beyond the choices that individuals make.” Mr. DiCaprio neglected to mention his frequent flights on carbon-emitting private jets or his ownership of the world’s fifth largest yacht, purchased from a Middle East oil tycoon.
In October, climate skeptics reported the eighteenth straight year of flat global temperatures. Satellite data shows no temperature increase since 1997. The “pause” in global warming is now old enough to vote or to serve in the military.
Hurricanes and tornadoes are favored events for generating alarming climate headlines, but US weather events were few in 2014. US tornadic activity was below average and the lack of strong hurricanes continued. No Category 3 or stronger hurricane has made US landfall for more than eight years, the longest period since records began in 1900.
The last half of 2014 witnessed a steep drop in world petroleum prices from over $100 per barrel to under $60 per barrel. Hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, technologies perfected by US geologists and petroleum engineers over the last two decades, produced an explosion in US oil production and triggered the fall in world prices.
But the concurrent drop in US gasoline prices to two dollars per gallon is not welcomed by man-made global warming believers. Former Energy Secretary Stephen Chu said in 2008, “So we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.” English journalist George Monbiot has lamented, “We were wrong about peak oil: there’s enough in the ground to deep-fry the planet.”
With all the climate fun in 2014, what will 2015 hold?
Steve Goreham is Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of the book The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania.Chi
The Prison State of America
By Chris Hedges | Truthdig | December 28, 2014
Prisons employ and exploit the ideal worker. Prisoners do not receive benefits or pensions. They are not paid overtime. They are forbidden to organize and strike. They must show up on time. They are not paid for sick days or granted vacations. They cannot formally complain about working conditions or safety hazards. If they are disobedient, or attempt to protest their pitiful wages, they lose their jobs and can be sent to isolation cells. The roughly 1 million prisoners who work for corporations and government industries in the American prison system are models for what the corporate state expects us all to become. And corporations have no intention of permitting prison reforms that would reduce the size of their bonded workforce. In fact, they are seeking to replicate these conditions throughout the society.
States, in the name of austerity, have stopped providing prisoners with essential items including shoes, extra blankets and even toilet paper, while starting to charge them for electricity and room and board. Most prisoners and the families that struggle to support them are chronically short of money. Prisons are company towns. Scrip, rather than money, was once paid to coal miners, and it could be used only at the company store. Prisoners are in a similar condition. When they go broke—and being broke is a frequent occurrence in prison—prisoners must take out prison loans to pay for medications, legal and medical fees and basic commissary items such as soap and deodorant. Debt peonage inside prison is as prevalent as it is outside prison.
States impose an array of fees on prisoners. For example, there is a 10 percent charge imposed by New Jersey on every commissary purchase. Stamps have a 10 percent surcharge. Prisoners must pay the state for a 15-minute deathbed visit to an immediate family member or a 15-minute visit to a funeral home to view the deceased. New Jersey, like most other states, forces a prisoner to reimburse the system for overtime wages paid to the two guards who accompany him or her, plus mileage cost. The charge can be as high as $945.04. It can take years to pay off a visit with a dying father or mother.
Fines, often in the thousands of dollars, are assessed against many prisoners when they are sentenced. There are 22 fines that can be imposed in New Jersey, including the Violent Crime Compensation Assessment (VCCB), the Law Enforcement Officers Training & Equipment Fund (LEOT) and Extradition Costs (EXTRA). The state takes a percentage each month out of prison pay to pay down the fines, a process that can take decades. If a prisoner who is fined $10,000 at sentencing must rely solely on a prison salary he or she will owe about $4,000 after making payments for 25 years. Prisoners can leave prison in debt to the state. And if they cannot continue to make regular payments—difficult because of high unemployment—they are sent back to prison. High recidivism is part of the design.
Corporations have privatized most of the prison functions once handled by governments. They run prison commissaries and, since the prisoners have nowhere else to shop, often jack up prices by as much as 100 percent. Corporations have taken over the phone systems and charge exorbitant fees to prisoners and their families. They grossly overcharge for money transfers from families to prisoners. And these corporations, some of the nation’s largest, pay little more than a dollar a day to prison laborers who work in for-profit prison industries. Food and merchandise vendors, construction companies, laundry services, uniforms companies, prison equipment vendors, cafeteria services, manufacturers of pepper spray, body armor and the array of medieval instruments used for the physical control of prisoners, and a host of other contractors feed like jackals off prisons. Prisons, in America, are a hugely profitable business.
Our prison-industrial complex, which holds 2.3 million prisoners, or 25 percent of the world’s prison population, makes money by keeping prisons full. It demands bodies, regardless of color, gender or ethnicity. As the system drains the pool of black bodies, it has begun to incarcerate others. Women—the fastest-growing segment of the prison population—are swelling prisons, as are poor whites in general, Hispanics and immigrants. Prisons are no longer a black-white issue. Prisons are a grotesque manifestation of corporate capitalism. Slavery is legal in prisons under the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. It reads: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States. …” And the massive U.S. prison industry functions like the forced labor camps that have existed in all totalitarian states.
Corporate investors, who have poured billions into the business of mass incarceration, expect long-term returns. And they will get them. It is their lobbyists who write the draconian laws that demand absurdly long sentences, deny paroles, determine immigrant detention laws and impose minimum-sentence and three-strikes-out laws (mandating life sentences after three felony convictions). The politicians and the courts, subservient to corporate power, can be counted on to protect corporate interests.
Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest owner of for-profit prisons and immigration detention facilities in the country, had revenues of $1.7 billion in 2013 and profits of $300 million. CCA holds an average of 81,384 inmates in its facilities on any one day. Aramark Holdings Corp., a Philadelphia-based company that contracts through Aramark Correctional Services to provide food to 600 correctional institutions across the United States, was acquired in 2007 for $8.3 billion by investors that included Goldman Sachs.
The three top for-profit prison corporations spent an estimated $45 million over a recent 10-year period for lobbying that is keeping the prison business flush. The resource center In the Public Interest documented in its report “Criminal: How Lockup Quotas and ‘Low-Crime Taxes’ Guarantee Profits for Private Prison Corporations” that private prison companies often sign state contracts that guarantee prison occupancy rates of 90 percent. If states fail to meet the quota they have to pay the corporations for the empty beds.
CCA in 2011 gave $710,300 in political contributions to candidates for federal or state office, political parties and so-called 527 groups (PACs and super PACs), the American Civil Liberties Union reported. The corporation also spent $1.07 million lobbying federal officials plus undisclosed sums to lobby state officials, according to the ACLU. CCA, through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), also lobbies legislators to impose harsher detention laws at the state and federal levels. The ALEC helped draft Arizona’s cruel anti-immigrant law SB 1070.
The United States, from 1970 to 2005, increased its prison population by about 700 percent, according to statistics gathered by the ACLU. The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, the ACLU report notes, says for-profit companies presently control about 18 percent of federal prisoners and 6.7 percent of all state prisoners. Private prisons account for nearly all newly built prisons. And nearly half of all immigrants detained by the federal government are shipped to for-profit prisons, according to Detention Watch Network.
But corporate profit is not limited to building and administering prisons. Whole industries now rely almost exclusively on prison labor. Federal prisoners, who are among the highest paid in the U.S. system, making as much as $1.25 an hour, produce the military’s helmets, uniforms, pants, shirts, ammunition belts, ID tags and tents. Prisoners work, often through subcontractors, for major corporations such as Chevron, Bank of America, IBM, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Starbucks, Nintendo, Victoria’s Secret, J.C. Penney, Sears, Wal-Mart, Kmart, Eddie Bauer, Wendy’s, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Fruit of the Loom, Motorola, Caterpillar, Sara Lee, Quaker Oats, Mary Kay, Microsoft, Texas Instruments, Dell, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Nordstrom’s, Revlon, Macy’s, Pierre Cardin and Target. Prisoners in some states run dairy farms, staff call centers, take hotel reservations or work in slaughterhouses. And prisoners are used to carry out public services such as collecting highway trash in states such as Ohio.
States, with shrinking budgets, share in the corporate exploitation. They get kickbacks of as much as 40 percent from corporations that prey on prisoners. This kickback money is often supposed to go into “inmate welfare funds,” but prisoners say they rarely see any purchases made by the funds to improve life inside prison.
The wages paid to prisoners for labor inside prisons have remained stagnant and in real terms have declined over the past three decades. In New Jersey a prisoner made $1.20 for eight hours of work—yes, eight hours of work—in 1980 and today makes $1.30 for a day’s labor. Prisoners earn, on average, $28 a month. Those incarcerated in for-profit prisons earn as little as 17 cents an hour.
However, items for sale in prison commissaries have risen in price over the past two decades by as much as 100 percent. And new rules in some prisons, including those in New Jersey, prohibit families to send packages to prisoners, forcing prisoners to rely exclusively on prison vendors. This is as much a psychological blow as a material one; it leaves families feeling powerless to help loved ones trapped in the system.
A bar of Dove soap in 1996 cost New Jersey prisoners 97 cents. Today it costs $1.95, an increase of 101 percent. A tube of Crest toothpaste cost $2.35 in 1996 and today costs $3.49, an increase of 48 percent. AA batteries have risen by 184 percent, and a stick of deodorant has risen by 95 percent. The only two items I found that remained the same in price from 1996 were frosted flake cereal and cups of noodles, but these items in prisons have been switched from recognizable brand names to generic products. The white Reebok shoes that most prisoners wear, shoes that last about six months, costs about $45 a pair. Those who cannot afford the Reebok brand must buy, for $20, shoddy shoes with soles that shred easily. In addition, prisoners are charged for visits to the infirmary and the dentist and for medications.
Keefe Supply Co., which runs commissaries for an estimated half a million prisoners in states including Florida and Maryland, is notorious for price gouging. It sells a single No. 10 white envelope for 15 cents—$15 per 100 envelopes. The typical retail cost outside prison for a box of 100 of these envelopes is $7. The company marks up a 3-ounce packet of noodle soup, one of the most popular commissary items, to 45 cents from 26 cents.
Global Tel Link, a private phone company, jacks up phone rates in New Jersey to 15 cents a minute, although some states, such as New York, have relieved the economic load on families by reducing the charge to 4 cents a minute. The Federal Communications Commission has determined that a fair rate for a 15-minute interstate call by a prisoner is $1.80 for debit and $2.10 for collect. The high phone rates imposed on prisoners, who do not have a choice of carriers and must call either collect or by using debit accounts that hold prepaid deposits made by them or their families, are especially damaging to the 2 million children with a parent behind bars. The phone is a lifeline for the children of the incarcerated.
Monopolistic telephone contracts give to the states kickbacks amounting, on average, to 42 percent of gross revenues from prisoner phone calls, according to Prison Legal News. The companies with exclusive prison phone contracts not only charge higher phone rates but add to the phone charges the cost of the kickbacks, called “commissions” by state agencies, according to research conducted in 2011 by John E. Dannenberg for Prison Legal News. Dannenberg found that the phone market in state prison systems generates an estimated $362 million annually in gross revenues for the states and costs prisoners’ families, who put money into phone accounts, some $143 million a year.
When strong family ties are retained, there are lower rates of recidivism and fewer parole violations. But that is not what the corporate architects of prisons want: High recidivism, now at over 60 percent, keeps the cages full. This is one reason, I suspect, why prisons make visitations humiliating and difficult. It is not uncommon for prisoners to tell their families—especially those that include small children traumatized by the security screening, long waits, body searches, clanging metal doors and verbal abuse by guards—not to visit. Prisoners with life sentences frequently urge loved ones to sever all ties with them and consider them as dead.
The rise of what Marie Gottschalk, the author of “Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics,” calls “the carceral state” is ominous. It will not be reformed through elections or by appealing to political elites or the courts. Prisons are not, finally, about race, although poor people of color suffer the most. They are not even about being poor. They are prototypes for the future. They are emblematic of the disempowerment and exploitation that corporations seek to inflict on all workers. If corporate power continues to disembowel the country, if it is not impeded by mass protests and revolt, life outside prison will soon resemble life in prison.
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From the Archives
Britain’s secret role in the brutal US war in Vietnam
By Mark Curtis | MintPress News | November 16, 2022
There is a myth the UK did not support Washington’s war against Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, Labour and Conservative governments backed every phase of US military escalation and played secret roles in the conflict, declassified files show.
- UK sent SAS team to Vietnam in 1962, flew secret RAF missions to deliver arms, and provided intelligence to US
- UK governments lied to parliament they were not providing military advice to South Vietnam’s brutal regime
- Labour government secretly gave arms to US for use in Vietnam, stressing need for “no publicity”
- It also connived with Washington to deceive UK public over its support for US
- UK governments knew of atrocities against civilians but backed US war aims
- Whitehall only started to advocate a peaceful solution, on US terms, once the war became unwinnable
During its war in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s the US dropped more bombs than in the whole of World War Two, in a conflict that killed over two million people. The wholesale destruction of villages and killing of innocent people was a permanent feature of the US war from the beginning, along with widespread indiscriminate bombing.
Britain’s role in the war has been largely buried and must be almost completely unknown to the public. When the UK media mentions the war now, reports often simply reference the refusal by Harold Wilson’s government to agree to US requests to openly deploy British troops.
Although this was certainly a public rebuff to Washington, Britain did virtually everything else to back the US war over more than a decade, the declassified documents show. … continue
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