Perhaps the most humiliating legacy of our nation-building venture in Afghanistan is the stubborn narco-state flourishing under our noses. The opium crop in Afghanistan has doubled since US forces deposed the Taliban, and the drug trade threatens to dominate the country as never before when our forces leave in 2014. How did this happen?
By and large, it seems US forces followed a policy of turning a blind eye to the opium crop, on the premise that poor farmers are not our main enemies in Afghanistan, and attacking their livelihood would turn them to the Taliban. To combat opium production, our principal initiatives included helping farmers cultivate alternate crops, and setting up an independent court system to try traffickers. While these have shown some promise, progress has been slow, and funding for these programs is drying up. Crop eradication was on our minds, too, but we charged the Afghan forces with that task. Their efforts, however, have been undermined by political corruption on the ground.
Underscoring the futility of our drug war in Afghanistan is the impact of the current blight on opium poppies in the country. At first glance, this might sound like a God-send: crop eradication at its best. However, something happened that we American capitalists should have anticipated. With opium supply suddenly scarce, the price of the crop soared. This has in turn enriched –and entrenched—the big dealers, inspired farmers to double down on next year’s crop to make up for current losses, and likely attracted more people to the drug trade in a very poor country. The result of this blight illuminates the main problem of crop eradication: it drives up prices, providing more incentives surrounding the drug trade.
In Latin America, our anti-narcotic efforts have largely featured interdiction, eradication, and assaulting the drug gangs. Our tactics on this front were recently highlighted by reports of a bloody incident in Honduras where local forces, with US financing and support, have been intercepting drug traffickers from South America in the remote Honduran jungle. The Honduran forces mistakenly killed unarmed civilians while intercepting a drug shipment. Notable in our efforts in Honduras is the extensive involvement of the US military. The Honduran forces who conducted this raid flew out of one of the three bases the US military operates in that country. The forces were tipped off by our military’s Southern Command in Miami, carried to the location by State Department helicopters, and accompanied by DEA agents. For all intents and purposes, the US seems to be waging war in Latin America.
So far it seems the most obvious result of our aggressive approach in Latin America is increasingly grotesque violence. Since Mexico started its crack down on the drug cartels, thanks to US prodding and support, the country has suffered 50,000 deaths. Mexican cartels have exploded, resorting to mass killings, beheadings, mutilation—body parts found in bags in public squares—assassinations of government officials. Savage violence surrounding the drug trade is spreading through the countries of Central America as we ramp up interdiction efforts there. The brazen and pervasive violence is testimony to what’s at stake, namely, the incredibly lucrative US drug market. The sum total of our efforts in Latin America compounds the problem.
As the New York Times Magazine explained in a recent expose on the Mexican drug cartels (“The Snow Kings of Mexico”, 6/17/12), the cost of drugs on the street is largely determined by the amount of risk assumed in getting the product to market. So: make the risk greater and the prices rise; more dealers get involved, and jockey (or kill) for a piece of the action.
This is why, our former ambassador to Colombia has argued, we must pair our negative policies with economic development in Latin America. If we build schools and hospitals, and help develop businesses in the region, we can reduce incentives to enter the drug trade. And yet, as long as the drug trade remains so lucrative, it’s reasonable to suppose, incentives to enter it will always be powerful.
What strikes me in the many prongs of our current war on drugs is how we seem to focus on everything but ourselves—and go to great efforts in so doing. We monitor the nations our drugs come from, and toil to frustrate traffickers thousands of miles from our borders. We work to change the economic conditions on the ground in very poor nations—no small task—while poor neighborhoods at home beg for attention. We enlist our military, the largest in the world, to stem the flow of drugs northward. And none of it works. These efforts have the opposite effect of what we intend, for they drive up prices and stoke the drug trade. The traffickers will do anything to get the product to market as a result: Colombian gangs have built submarines for this purpose; the Mexican cartels use catapults to launch drugs over our multi-million dollar border fences.
We’d rather do anything but zero in on demand here, but it’s so clear this would be the cheapest, most direct, most effective, most humane solution. It makes you wonder if we want to win the war on drugs at all.
Firmin DeBrabander is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Reuel Marc Gerecht, the Wall Street Journal’s always available advocate of “let us reason together before we bomb Iran,” is now urging an immediate US surrogate attack on Syria by “unleashing the CIA.” Gerecht, a former CIA officer who served in Istanbul and Paris, once described the Agency disparagingly as a mixture of Monty Python and Big Brother, so it is particularly ironic that now he wants to go about unleashing it. He apparently hopes that the Big Brother component will prevail because Monty Python would no doubt prefer to execute a silly walk.
Gerecht, who currently perches at the neocon Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, argues that unless there is a “muscular CIA operation” to arm the rebels with “paralyzing weaponry” and other support that would provide them with a military advantage there will be between 200,000 and 4.5 million deaths in Syria. The numbers appear to be plucked out of the ethosphere and it should also be noted that Gerecht’s knowledge of paralyzing weapons and their deployment is limited as he never served in the US military.
The call for a humanitarian intervention in Syria comes oddly from Gerecht, who has never hesitated to call for the killing of any Iranian civilians who might get in the way of a US/Israeli assault, using inter alia the argument that Iranians have “terrorism in their DNA.” It also ignores the dismal record of various US interventions over the past fifty years and conveniently avoids the subject of blowback. The operation would be eerily reminiscent of the support for insurgents in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation, an initiative that drove the Russians out to be sure, but also produced chaos in Afghanistan and created al-Qaeda. The situation in Syria is somewhat similar, at least in terms of potential downside, as Assad’s departure would create a power vacuum and no one really knows who the rebels are and what they represent.
But perhaps Gerecht is not really thinking about what is good for Syria and the Syrian people at all. He is a former employee of Doug Feith’s Pentagon Office of Special Plans that produced the disastrous war against Iraq and is also a close friend and associate of Richard Perle, who, together with Feith, drafted the 1996 proposal “A Clean Break”, which recommended specific policies to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “A Clean Break” endorsed encouraging Arab states hostile to Israel to splinter along tribal and ethnic lines, similar to what has been happening in Iraq. What could be better than replacing a unified and hostile Syria with a chaotic civil war in which Alawites, Sunnis, and Shia are at each others’ throats while the Christian minority frantically looks for a way out? The Washington based Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), which was founded by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), apparently agrees, noting that the disruption caused by the Arab Spring has actually been good for Israel in strategic terms.
In April 2011 – Turkish President Abdullah Gul in a New York Times Op-Ed, warned both Benjamin Netanyahu and Barack Obama that the “Arab Revolution is aimed at Israel”. However, later events in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria proved that Abdullah Gul was totally wrong.
Last week, Gabriel M. Scheinmann, a visiting Fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), admitted that the Zionist entity is in fact the winner of the so-called “Arab Spring”.
“The so-called “Arab Spring” has, paradoxically, made Israel stronger as Israel’s enemies have turned on each other. While Arab capitals burn, Jerusalem has calmly and carefully steeled itself against the possible immediate deleterious effects, building fences along its Egyptian and Jordanian borders and accelerating the deployment of its Iron Dome anti-missile system,” wrote Scheinmann. He then added: “Even as it rightly plans for the changes wrought by the “Arab Spring”, Israel should also recognize that as the Middle East convulses, it is more likely to be left alone. As Alawites battle Arab Sunnis and Kurds in Syria, as Kurds target Turks in Turkey, as the Imazighen fight Arabs in Libya, as the Army contends with Islamists in Egypt, and as Sunnis and Christians confront Shiites in Lebanon, people don’t have the time, energy, or resources to fight the Jews in Israel. The more the region tears itself apart, the more Israel floats to the top, unscathed economically, militarily, or diplomatically. While an Islamist ascent is undesirable, the intervening disorder only makes Israel stronger.”
Karen DeYoung, in Gen. Colin Powell’s biography, ‘SOLDIER: The life of Colin Powell’, has quoted Powell twice saying that “the Iraq war was the product of Donald Rumsfeld’s absorption in the “JINSA crowd.” By the way, Dick Cheney was on JINSA’s Board of Advisors before becoming vice president, where he was joined by Ledeen, Feith, Perle, James Woolsey, and John Bolton.
Both AIPAC and JINSA are behind Washington’s regime change in Tehran.” So far the Israel lobby has failed to make its dream come true, as Vali Nasr, author of The Shia Revival, wrote: “The wars of 2001 and 2003 have fundamentally changed the Middle East to Iran’s advantage.”
Lebanon’s interior minister, retired Maj. Gen. Marwan Charbel in a recent interview with RT has claimed that the Zionist entity is the only country which has benefited from the so-called “Arab Spring”.
The so-called “Arab Spring” is the defacto working of Zionist elements in the United States. The brainchild is within the Israel-Firsters, and by extension the Zionist entity.
A case adjudicated in the Jerusalem municipal court recently illustrates the total lack of equal justice for Palestinians. It also demonstrates how the Israeli press often elides details from the English version of its news reports which are condemnatory of Jewish Israeli society.
A Jerusalem teenager, identified only as “A,” was given an astonishingly short 8- year sentence after a plea bargain for the stabbing death of an Arab man, Hussam Rawidi, in what was a brutal and apparently unprovoked attack. The charge was reduced from “murder” to” killing (manslaughter)” which enabled the court to impose the lenient sentence. The crime occurred on February 11, 2011. Rawidi was 24-years-old when he was killed.
According to the Israeli daily newspaper, Ha’aretz:
“The incident took place in the center of Jerusalem, on a Friday night. The defendant and three of his friends, residents of Jerusalem, Beit-El and Itamar, heard Rawidi talking with his friend Murad Jelani in Arabic. A friend of the defendant’s began voicing racist remarks toward the two.
“In its ruling, the court said that at the time, the defendant was not aware of the racist remarks made by his friend. However, he joined the quarrel after seeing his friend beating the two.
Judge Zvi Segal said that, ‘At some point, the young man pulled out a barber’s razor blade and assaulted the deceased, causing a deep cut in his face, from the ear to his cheek.’ It also states that while Rawidi was bleeding to death, two of the friends also began beating Rawidi.”
Two friends of “A” were apprehended by police when they returned to the stabbing scene and attempted to remove evidence of the crime. (Hebrew report only.)
Two of the defendant’s friends were convicted of causing a severe injury, as part of a deal reached with the prosecution, and were sentenced to six months of community service. It is not clear from the reports if these two were also the youths who attempted to conceal the crime or what is the disposition of the case of the third friend of “A.” All the perpetrators’ names did not appear in the report, but the names of both victims were given.
In addition to the prison term, the defendant was ordered to pay a sum of 5000 shekels (approx. 1200 US dollars) to the family of the victim. This sum was described by Ha’aretz as miniscule. (Hebrew report only).
The father of the victim, Hussain Rawidi, told the newspaper, “This is not worth anything, that he serves eight years for what he did…. Those are the courts, I can’t do anything. He murdered my son just because he is an Arab.” (Hebrew only)
Yariv Oppenheimer, the director of Peace Now, said, “If the perpetrator was an Arab and the victim was Jewish, the sentence would have been life. Only in Israeli courts, the life of an Arab is worth no more than 5000 shekels. The prosecution must appeal the sentence.” (Hebrew only)
Again in the Hebrew version only, the paper provides this instructive comparison. “In similar cases the judgment was far harsher. In 2009, Eric Karp was murdered on a Tel Aviv beach by Arab youths. These attackers were also convicted of killing [as opposed to murder, IG] but they were sentenced to a 26-year prison term and forced to compensate the family in the amount of 300,000 shekels.”
– Ira Glunts is a secular American Jew who opposes the Israeli occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people. He lives in Madison, NY; and with his wife owns and operates a used and rare book business. Mr. Glunts first lived in Israel in 1972-3, where he taught English and physical education in a small rural school in the Negev.
Sources:
– Hasson, Nir, “Jewish teen sentenced to 8 years in jail for killing Arab in Jerusalem,” Ha’aretz, July 12, 2012 (English)
– Hasson, Nir, “5000 shekel compensation to the family of an Arab who was stabbed to death by a Jew,” Ha’aretz, July 12, 2012 (Hebrew)
Canadian Senator Lt. Gen. Roméo A. Dallaire, (Ret’d) has issued an open petition to Israel-Firster Stephen Harper’s Public Safety Minister Vic Toews to bring former Canadian child soldier, Omar Khadr, from America’s notorious Guantánamo Bay concentration camp to Canada.
“The case of Omar Khadr – a Canadian citizen and former child soldier – is a stain upon our society and shows a blatant disregard for Canada’s obligations under international law,” says Roméo A. Dallaire.
Omar Khadr, who turns 26 this year – was captured in 2002 by America’s Afghan collaborators, Northern Alliance warlords, for killing a US army medic while visiting his parents’ family in Afghanistan at the age of 15. He was first kept at the US detention facility at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan before being transfered to Guantánamo Bay. Omar was tried as “a terrorist” and not a juvenile prisoner, by a military commission conceived by Israel-Firster former vice-president Dick Cheney and his Zionist advisers.
Omar was sentenced to 40 year in jail via a kangroo trail which was unrelated to any other form of US justice or the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child – which specifically recognizes “the special needs of those children who are particularly vulnerable to recruitment or use in hostilities,” and requires its signatories to promote “the physical and psychosocial rehabilitation and social reintegration of children who are victims of armed conflict.”
Both the US and Canada are signatory to the Optional Protocol. The way Omar has been tortured, humiliated and kept in isolation at Guantánamo Bay for the last ten years and the way Ottawa has abdicated its responsibilities towards him – should be a source of shame for the moral citizens of both countries.
A declassified report prepared by US Department of Defense (DoD) deputy inspector-general in September 2009 – admitted that detainees in custody of the US military were interrogated while drugged with powerful antipsychotic and other medications that “could impair an individual’s ability to provide accurate information“.
Omar’s defense lawyers have asked the federal court to force Vic Toews to make decision as to whether Khadr can return to Canada to serve his remaining sentence.
Just days ago, Marine Col. Jeffrey Colwell, chief defense counsel for military commissions openly chastised Canada for crippling US efforts to enter into plea agreements: If the US “can’t carry through on their end of the bargain, it has a chilling effect on the willingness of others to plead. There was an expectation by all parties involved that Khadr was going to be home last fall. It’s July, and he’s not.”
The pro-Israeli groups have turned Khadr’s case into an Islamophobiawar. For example, the Toronto book launch of Omar Khadr, Oh Canada was met by threats of violence and a demonstration by the the Jewish Defense League, a Jewish militant group which is declared a terrorist group by FBI and known for violence at Canadian Campuses.
Israeli propaganda and hacker website, BlazingCatFur, put the headline: “Vic Toews, Canadian Minister of Public Safety can Block Omar Khadr’s return to Canada by refusing to sign the ‘Prisoner Transfer Agreement’.”
Vic Toews’ parents and grandparents were immigrants from Ukraine.
Iraq says it wants back all the archeological treasures, stolen by US forces in 2003, but Washington has offered to return only half.
Iraq rejected the offer made by the United States to bring back half of the Iraqi Jewish Archive, previously transferred from Baghdad to the United States during the US-led invasion of the country, insisting that Baghdad had to restore the whole archive, Iraqi newspaper al-Sabah reported on Sunday.
The archive includes centuries-old Torah scrolls and plenty of other documents in Hebrew, Arabic, and English.
Iraqi Tourism and Archaeology Minister Liwaa Smaisim reiterated that “it (the Iraqi Jewish Archive) is part of the Iraqi heritage,” the ministry’s media office chief Hakim al-Shammari quoted him as saying.
On June 11, Smaisim said that the US had transferred the archive to Israel in addition to about 1,000 Iraqi antiquities.
The information angered archeologists and officials who accuse Washington of looting Iraq’s cultural heritage, and dissuaded Iraqi authorities from continuing cultural cooperation with the US.
“The ministry recently suspended cooperation with the American universities and their excavation missions in the country,” the Iraqi minister added.
A short documentary on the effects of thr racist Orange order marches through the small Republican community of Ardoyne in North Belfast on the 12th of July.
Filmed by Robin Wallace. Starring Joe Gilmartin. Thanks to the Ardoyne community for their cooperation in making this film.
Gadi military base (disused) – location of new settlement
Israeli settlers are establishing yet another new colony in the Jordan Valley. With the support of the Israeli Prime Minister, Netanyahu, they are taking over a disused army base close to two Palestinian communities and claiming the land for themselves, just as the notorious Maskiyyot settlers did in 2002.
In recent weeks the settlers’ contractors have started to renovate the buildings of the disused Gadi military base, in the Abu Al Ajaj area of Al Jiftlik village, in the heart of the Jordan Valley. These new colonialists are clearly working closely with the settlement run ‘Jordan Valley Regional Council’ and the neighbouring settlement of Massu’a. One of the most aggressive colonies in the Jordan Valley, Massu’a settlers are responsible for a series of land grabs whereby they have violently stolen land from Abu Al Ajaj on three separate occasions in recent years.
Gadi military base
The establishment of a new settlement was announced on Israeli Army Radio on 10th March 2011, when Netanyahu visited Gadi base. At the time David Alhiani, head of the Jordan Valley Regional Council, said:“Neither the defense minister nor the prime minister will build a new settlement in the Jordan Valley, not now. Maybe later, when there’s sovereignty in the valley”.
Israel doesn’t have sovereignty of the Jordan Valley today, any more than they had a year ago. Their occupation is just as illegal as it was a year ago. But their attempts to take over the valley have become more aggressive and transparent. Thus, in September 2011 news broke of Israel’s plans to embark on the systematic removal of 27,000 Bedouin from East Jerusalem, the Jordan Valley, and the rest of Area C.
It has been reported that the new settlement will be run by the Israeli Bnei Hamoshavim youth organisation, and will specifically encourage young Israeli’s who have experienced poor mental health or addiction, to join in the Jordan Valley colonisation project.
Prior to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank in 1967 the Gadi military base was used by the Jordanian army, and around 10,000 Palestinians lived to the south and east in Abu Al Ajaj refugee camp. All that remains of the refugee camp today are the cemetery and the UNWRA school. The mosque still stands on the hill, within the fence surrounding the new IOF (Israeli Occupation Force) base, and Palestinians have been prevented from using it for the last 45 years.
Mosque confiscated and within fence of IOF military base
Since the refugee camp was destroyed, soon after the occupation, the Palestinian community of Abu Al Ajaj has eked out a living by farming a little land and grazing their sheep on the hillsides. There are around 120 families now living in the community, some originally from the Al Jiftlik area, and others who came as refugees from Yata’ near Hebron, when they were driven out by the settler’s there.
UN OCHA: Expansion of Massu’a settlement
Over the last eight years the settlers of the nearby Massu’a settlement have worked hand-in-hand with the IOF to attempt the drive the Palestinians from the land. On three separate occasions (in 2004, 2008 and 2010) they have selected an area of land that they want, removed any Palestinian buildings or possessions that were there, and taken the land for their own use: They erected greenhouses to cultivate grapes in 2004, took a field to grow their crops in 2008, and in 2010 attacked local Palestinians when they came and fenced off yet more land, and later erected another row of greenhouses. See UN OCHA Humanitarian Report . On each occasion the IOF stood by and supported them. During the same period the community has received countless demolition orders, and been subjected to dawn raids, with many of their homes and animal shelters being demolished and destroyed by the IOF.
Demolitions in Abu Al Ajaj November 2010
There are around 30 homes that have had demolition orders served against them. The families live with the fear that one day the IOF will arrive, and it will be their turn to have their home and livelihood destroyed. They have had their water pipes destroyed, their animals killed, and their access to grazing land stopped, and their land stolen in front of their eyes.
Other local farmers have also been harassed by the IOF. Waleed Abu Hania, living near the cemetery, has been uprooted from his farm three times by the IOF, each time attempting to claim that he’s using state land! A little further up the road, the Saaidh family have received a demolition order for the metal shipping container on their small farm of date trees.
The small nearby community of Koursiliyya, comprised of four families, is even more vulnerable. Tucked away in the valley to the west of Gadi military base, they have already been stopped from accessing water from a small nearby natural spring, and are under threat of forced transfer.
All these Palestinian families are continuing to live on their land against the odds. They are showing a steadfastness beyond belief, but also have nowhere else to go. This is their home. They are facing the concerted effort of the Israeli state to forcibly remove them from their land, and have experienced verbal abuse and physical assault from the illegal settlers from Massu’a. Now they face the prospect of another group of young settlers, given impunity by their government to use violence, aggression and harassment against their Palestinian neighbours.
While nothing in its policy guidelines say it’s supposed to be this way, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has distributed the vast majority of its nonprofit security grants to Jewish organizations.
During one three-year period (2007-2010), Jewish groups received 73% of DHS’ Nonprofit Security Grant Program (NSGP) awards. This share grew larger in 2011 (80%) and still larger in 2012 (97%).
In total dollars, Jewish institutions will take in $9.7 million in NSGP grants this year out of $10 million available.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano explained the results of the program’s grant awards this way: “Unfortunately there are risks attendant on the Jewish community that are not attendant on all other communities.”
The point of the NSGP funding is to help nonprofits at risk of terrorist attacks to better protect themselves. Orthodox Jewish groups in particular have done better than non-Orthodox Jewish groups in receiving assistance, presumably because they are more likely to be targeted by anti-Semitic movements. Of the 109 NSGP grants in 2012, 35 went to groups linked to Chabad, an orthodox Hasidic organization. A majority of the funding went to groups in the areas of New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles.
Only a few the NSGP recipients this year were not Jewish. These included a San Diego church, a Planned Parenthood center in Washington and a New York City Catholic church.
DHS policy defines preferred recipients as those having “the highest risk of terrorism-related activity due to their ideology, beliefs and mission.”
Tightening security screws in the US serves the ultimate goal – to implant the atmosphere of fear in the American society. It serves to raise sales of security equipment, independent journalist Charlie McGrath told RT.
The latest initiative of the US Department of Homeland Security is to develop laser-based security scanners capable of identifying any chemical substance in human body. Independent journalist Charlie McGrath sees it as a further erosion of the basic human rights in favor of Military-Industrial Complex profits.
Officials insist the scanners will be used to detect explosives at airports and border crossings. They say that if a person has nothing to hide he won’t mind subjecting to the procedure.
But some experts are prompting concern for civil liberties in America.
“There is no threat of terror, that is a canard,” states categorically the founder of Wide Awake News Charlie McGrath. He explained that as an American he has a 662,000:1 chance of winning an Olympic medal. While taking a bath he has a 685,000:1 chance of drowning in that bath. Walking outside he has a 2.3 million:1 chance of being struck dead by lightning. But the chance of being killed by a terrorist amounts to 3.2million:1 for an average person on our planet.
“What we see built out of 9/11, the Patriot Act… and every other peace of the so-called legislation protecting people is the enriching of the financial super-elite in the Security Industrial Complex,” states Charlie McGrath.
The journalist predicts that the American society will soon be under the eye of Big Brother, explaining that the declared security reasons behind governmental initiatives have no grounds whatsoever.
“All this talk of fearing Ahmadinejad coming out of every closet and from underneath of everybody’s bed is nothing but a fear tactic so that we can enrich a very few people on this planet,” McGrath proclaimed.
The reason why Americans should be concerned with the laser security scanners is that this “humiliation on steroids” is going to be paid for with the taxpayers’ money, reminds McGrath.
“Since introduction of the Patriot Act we’ve seen non-stop legislation eroding our liberties one after another,” McGrath claims. “It has come to point we’re just coming used to it. But we need to understand that with every passing piece of legislation, every piece of equipment installed every other day, we’re becoming more and more a Stasi-style police state,” he concluded.
McGrath assures that the equipment installed to be on the guard of security in airports and other public places will definitely make it into everyday life of Americans. He recalled military drones that were once made for the army and CIA operations overseas, but now are flying American skies to protect security at home.
The United States has experienced the biggest political upheaval in its recent history: the transformation of a burgeoning welfare state into a rapidly expanding, highly intrusive and deeply entrenched police state, linked to the most developed technological innovations.
The ‘Great Transformation’ occurred exclusively from above, organized by the upper echelons of the civil and military bureaucracy under the direction of the Executive and his National Security Council. The ‘Great Transformation’ was not a single event but a process of the accumulation of powers, via executive fiats, supported and approved by compliant Congressional leaders. At no time in the recent and distant past has this nation witnessed the growth of such repressive powers and the proliferation of so many policing agencies engaged in so many areas of life over such a prolonged period of time (a time of virtually no internal mass dissent). Never has the executive branch of government secured so many powers to detain, interrogate, kidnap and assassinate its own citizens without judicial restraint.
Police state dominance is evident in the enormous growth of the domestic security and military budget, the vast recruitment of security and military personnel, the accumulation of authoritarian powers curtailing individual and collective freedoms and the permeation of national cultural and civic life with the almost religious glorification of the agents and agencies of militarism and the police state as evidenced at mass sporting and entertainment events.
The drying up of resources for public welfare and services is a direct result of the dynamic growth of the police state apparatus and military empire. This could only take place through a sustained direct attack against the welfare state – in particular against public funding for programs and agencies promoting the health, education, pensions, income and housing for the middle and working class.
The Ascendancy of the Police State
Central to the rise of the police state and the consequent decline of the welfare state have been the series of imperial wars, especially in the Middle East, launched by every President from Bush (father), Clinton, Bush (son) and Obama. These wars, aimed exclusively against Muslim countries, were accompanied by a wave of repressive ‘anti-terrorist’ laws and implemented through the rapid build-up of the massive police state apparatus, known as ‘Homeland Security’.
The leading advocates and propagandists of overseas militarism against countries with large Muslim populations and the imposition of a domestic police-state have been dedicated Zionists promoting wars designed to enhance Israel’s overwhelming power in the Middle East. These American Zionists (including dual US-Israeli citizens) secured strategic positions within the US police state apparatus in order to terrify and repress activists, especially American Muslims and immigrants critical of the state of Israel.
The events of 9/11/01 served as the detonator for the biggest global military launch since WWII, and the most pervasive expansion of police state powers in the history of the United States. The bloody terror of 9/11/2001 was manipulated to institute a pre-planned agenda – transforming the US into a police state while launching a decade-long series of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen and, now, Syria as well as covert proxy wars against Iran and Lebanon. The military budget exploded and government deficits ballooned while social programs and welfare were denigrated and dismantled as the ‘Global War on Terror’ swung into full gear. Programs, designed to maintain or raise living standards for millions and increase access to services for the poor and working class, fell victim to ‘9/11’.
As the wars in the Middle East took center-stage, the US economy tanked. On the domestic front vital public investment in education, infrastructure, industry and civilian innovations were slashed. Hundreds of billions of tax payer dollars flowed into the war zones, paying mercenaries (private contractors), buying off corrupt puppet regimes and providing a golden opportunity for military procurement officers and their private contractor-cronies to run up (and pocket) huge billion dollar cost overruns.
As a result, US military policy vis a vis the Middle East, military policy, which at one time had been designed to promote American imperial economic interests, now took on a life of its own: wars and sanctions against Iraq, Iran, Syria and Libya had undermined profitable oil contracts negotiated by US multi-nationals while enhancing militarism. Indeed, the Zionist-Israeli power configuration in the United States has become far more influential in directing US Middle East military policy than any combination of Big Oil – and all to the benefit of Israeli regional power.
Imperial Wars and the Demise of the Welfare State
From the end of World War II to the end of the 1970’s, the US managed to successfully combine overseas imperial wars with an expanding welfare state at home. In fact, the last major pieces of welfare legislation took place during the bloody, costly US-Indo-Chinese war, under Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. The economic basis of welfare-militarism was the powerful industrial-technological foundations of the US war-machine and its dominance over world markets. Subsequently, the declining competitive position of the US in the world-economy and the massive relocation of US-MNC (and their jobs) overseas strained the ‘marriage’ of domestic welfare and militarism to the breaking point. Fiscal and trade deficits loomed even as the demands for welfare and unemployment payments grew in part because of the shift from stable well-paid manufacturing jobs to low paid-service work. While the global US economic position declined, its global military expansion accelerated as a result of the demise of the Communist regimes in the USSR and Eastern Europe and the incorporation of the new regimes of the former Eastern bloc into the US-dominated NATO military alliance.
The demise of the Communist states led to the end of competing global welfare systems and allowed capitalists and the imperial state to slash welfare to fund their massive global military expansion. There was virtually no opposition from labor: the gradual conversion of Western trade unions into highly authoritarian organizations run by self-perpetuating millionaire ‘leaders’ and the reduction of trade union membership from 30% of the work force in 1950 to less than 11% by 2012 (with over 91% of private sector workers without any representation) meant that American workers have been powerless to organize strikes to protect their jobs, let alone apply political pressure in defense of public programs and welfare.
Militarism was on the ascendency when President Jimmy Carter launched his multi-billion dollar ‘secret war’ against the pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan and President Ronald Reagan initiated a series of ‘proxy wars’ throughout Central America and Southern Africa and sent the US Marines into the tiny island of Grenada. Reagan oversaw the escalation of military spending boasting that he would ‘bankrupt’ the Soviet Union with a new ‘arms race’. President George Bush, Sr. invaded Panama and then Iraq, the first of many US invasions in the Middle East. President Bill Clinton accelerated the military thrust, along the way slashing public welfare in favor of ‘private workfare’, bombing and destroying Yugoslavia, bombing and starving Iraq while establishing colonial enclaves in Northern Iraq and expanding the US military presence in Somalia and the Persian Gulf.
The constraints on US militarism imposed by the massive popular anti-Vietnam War movement and the US military defeat by the Vietnamese Communists, were gradually eroded, as successful short term wars (like Grenada and Panama) undermined the Vietnam Syndrome –public opposition to militarism. This prepared the American public for incremental militarism while chipping away at the welfare system.
If Reagan and Bush built the foundation for the new militarism, Bill Clinton provided three decisive elements: together with Vice-President Al Gore, Clinton legitimized the war on welfarism, stigmatizing public assistance and mobilized support from religious and political leaders in the black community and the AFL-CIO. Secondly, Clinton was key to the ‘financialization’ of the US economy, by de-regulating the financial system (repealing the Glass-Steagal Act of 1933) and appointing Wall Street financiers at the helm of national economic policy. Thirdly, Clinton appointed leading Zionists to the key foreign policy positions related to the Middle East, allowing them to insert Israel’s military view of reality into strategic decision-making in Washington. Clinton put in place the first series of repressive police state ‘anti-terrorist’ legislation and expanded the national prison system. In sum, Bill Clinton’s Middle East war policies, his ‘financialization’ of the US economy, his ‘war on terror’, his Zionist orientation towards the Arab world and, above all, his own ideological anti-welfarism led directly to Bush Junior’s full scale conversion of the welfare state into the police state .
Exploiting the trauma of 9/11, the Bush and later the Obama regimes nearly tripled the military budget and launched serial wars against Arab states. The military budget rose from $359 billion in 2000, to $544 billion in 2004 and escalated to $903 billion in 2012. Military expenditures financed major foreign military occupations and colonial administrations in Iraq and Afghanistan, border wars in Pakistan and US Special Forces covert operations (including kidnappings and assassinations) in Yemen, Somalia, Iran and seventy-five other countries world-wide.
Meanwhile financial speculation ran rampant, budget deficits ballooned, living standards plunged, international trade deficits reached record levels and public debt doubled in fewer than eight years. Multiple imperial wars dragged on without end; the costs of these wars multiplied while the financial bubble burst. The contradiction between domestic welfare and militarism exploded. Finally, the massive roll back of basic social programs for all Americans topped the Presidential and legislative agenda.
Previous ‘untouchable programs’ like Social Security, Medicare, the US Post Office, public sector employment, services to the poor, elderly and handicapped and food stamps were all put on the butcher’s block. At the same time the federal government increased its funding of private military and police contractors (mercenaries) overseas and extended the scope and depth of US Special Forces clandestine operations. Bush-Obama vastly increased spending for the military and espionage agents in support of wildly unpopular, brutal collaborator regimes in Pakistan and Yemen. They funded and armed foreign mercenaries in Libya, Syria, Iran, and Somalia. By the first decade of the new century it had become clear that imperial militarism and domestic welfarism were in a zero sum game: as imperial wars multiplied, domestic programs were slashed.
The severity and depth of the cuts to popular domestic welfare programs were only in part the result of imperial wars; equally important was the huge increase in the funding for personnel and surveillance technology for the burgeoning police state at home.
The Origins of the Conversion of the Welfare State to the Police State
The precipitous decline of the welfare state and the dismantling of social services, public education and access to affordable health care for the working and middle classes cannot be explained by the demise of organized labor, nor is it due to the ‘right-turn’ of the Democratic Party. Two other deep structural changes loom large as fundamental to the process: the transformation of the US economy from a competitive manufacturing economy into a ‘FIRE’ (finance, insurance and real estate) economy; and secondly, the rise of a vast police legal-political-administrative state apparatus engaged in permanent ‘internal warfare’ at home, designed to sustain and complement permanent imperial warfare abroad.
Agencies and personnel of the police state expanded dramatically during the first decade of the new century. The police state penetrated telecommunications systems, patrolled and controlled transport outlets; dominated judicial procedures and oversaw the major ‘news outlets’, academic and professional associations. The expanded police state covertly and overtly entered the private lives of tens of millions of Americans.
The loss to taxpayers in terms of citizen rights and the welfare state has been staggering.
As the biggest and most intrusive component of the police state apparatus, christened ‘Homeland Security’, grew exponentially, the budget and agencies providing welfare and public services, health, education and unemployment shrank. Tens of thousands of domestic spies have been hired and costly intrusive spyware has been purchased with tax-payer money, while hundreds of thousands of teachers and public health and social welfare professionals have lost their jobs.
The Department of Homeland Security (as of the end of 2011) is composed of approximately 388,000 employees, including both federal and contracted agents. Between 2011-2013 the DHS budget of $173 billion has faced no serious cuts. Homeland Security’s rapid expansion occurred at the expense of Health and Human Services, education and the Social Security Administration, which currently face large scale ‘retrenchment’.
Among the top officials, appointed by the Bush, Jr. Administration to key positions in the police state apparatus, there are two who have been the most influential in setting policy: Michael Chertoff and Michael Mukasey.
Michael Chertoff headed the Criminal Division of the Justice Department (from 2001 – 2003). During that time he was responsible for the arbitrary arrest of thousands of US citizens and immigrants of Muslim and South Asian heritage, who were held incommunicado without charge and subject to physical and psychological abuse – without a single resident alien or Muslim US citizen linked to 9/11. In contrast, Chertoff quickly intervened to free scores of Israeli spy suspects and 5 Israeli Mossad agents who had been witnessed filming and celebrating the destruction of the World Trade Center and were under active investigation by the FBI. More than any other official, Michael Chertoff has been the chief architect of the ‘Global War on Terror’ – co-author of the notorious ‘Patriot Act’ which trashed habeas corpus and other essential components of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights. As Secretary of Homeland Security from 2005-2009, Chertoff promoted ‘military tribunals’ and organized the vast internal spy network, which now preys on private US citizens.
Michael Mukasey, the Bush-appointed US Attorney General, was an enthusiastic defender of the Patriot Act, supporting military tribunals, torture and overseas assassinations of individuals suspected of what he called ‘Islamic terrorism’ without trial.
Both Chertoff and Mukasey are zealous Zionists with longstanding ties to Israel. Michael Chertoff was believed to hold dual US-Israeli citizenship as he launched the Administration’s domestic war on US citizens.
A cursory review of the origins and direction of the police-state apparatus and the top echelons of the global war on ‘Islamic terrorism’ – code languages for military imperialism – reveals a disproportionate number of Israel-Firsters, who placed greater importance on persecuting potential US critics of the Middle East wars for Israel than in upholding Constitutional guarantees and the Bill of Rights.
Back in ‘civilian’ life, Michael Chertoff profited greatly from the bogus ‘War on Terror’ promoting radioactive and degrading body scanning technology in airports throughout the US and Europe. He established his own security consulting firm Chertoff Groups (2009) to represent the manufacturers of surveillance body scanners. Americans can thank Michael Chertoff every time they pass through the humiliation of an airport body scan.
The fusion of the police state apparatus with the industrial-security complex and its prominent overseas links with its corporate security counterparts in the state of Israel, underscores the imperial state’s ties to the Israeli military establishment.
As the police state has grown it has created a powerful lobby of high tech surveillance industry backers and beneficiaries who push federal and state ‘security’ spending at the expense welfare programs.
The police state’s squeeze on social programs, education and welfare has a powerful ally on Wall Street, which emerged as the dominant sector of US capital in terms of access to and influence over US Treasury and its budgetary allocations.
Unlike the manufacturing sector, financial capital does not need a population of educated, healthy and productive workers. Its own ‘labor force’ is composed of a small educated elite of speculators, analysts, traders and brokers at the top and middle levels and a small army of ‘contract’ office sweepers, secretaries and menial workers at the bottom. They have their own ‘invisible’ army of domestic servants, cooks, caterers, gardeners and nannies devoid of any ‘Social Security’, health coverage and pension plans. And the financial sector has its own private networks of doctors and clinics, schools, communications systems and messengers, estates and clubs, and security agencies and body guards; it needs not an educated, skilled public sector; and it certainly does not want national wealth to support high quality public health and educational systems. It has no interest in supporting this mass of public institutions which it views as an obstacle to ‘freeing up’ vast amounts of public wealth for speculation. In other words, the dominant sector of capital has no objection to ‘Homeland Security’; indeed it shares many sentiments with the proponents of the police state and supports shrinking the welfare state. It is concerned about lowering taxes on finance capital and increasing Federal bail-out funds for Wall Street while controlling the impoverished citizenry.
Conclusion
The conversion of a welfare state to a police state is the result of militarized imperialism abroad and the ascendancy of finance capital at home, as well as the proliferation of security state agencies and related private industries and the strategic role of rightwing Zionists in top positions of the police state apparatus.
This convergence of international and domestic structural changes took hold during the 1980’s and 1990’s and then accelerated during the first decade of the 21st century. The downgrading of the vast public services of the welfare state was covered up by a massive government propaganda campaign to promote the ‘global war on terror’ together with a fabricated widespread domestic ‘terrorist threat’ involving the most hapless of suspects (including oddball Haitian millenarianists entrapped by FBI agents). The supporters and beneficiaries of the welfare state found themselves on the margins of any national debate. The mass media/regime propaganda campaign demanded and successfully secured massive increases in centralized powers of domestic policing, surveillance, provocations, disappearances and arrests. Throughout the past decade what the welfare state lost in support and funding, the police state gained. The rise of financial capital and the deregulation of the financial system crowded out any public subsidies to promote and sustain the competitiveness of the US manufacturing sector. This has led to a major break in the links between industry, labor and the welfare state. Huge tax write-offs to big business, combined with the growth in expenditures for a non-productive police state bureaucracy and the series of costly overseas wars, has caused unsustainable budget and trade deficits, which then became the pretext to further savage the welfare state.
Significant political, cultural and ideological shifts have aided the rise of the police state over the public welfare state. The success of prominent American Zionists in securing power within key media propaganda mills and obtaining appointments to critical positions in the top echelons of the police state apparatus, judiciary and in the imperial state bureaucracy (Treasury and State Department) has put Israel’s colonial interests and its own police-state apparatus at the center of US politics. The US police state has adopted Israeli-styled repression targeting US citizens and residents.
US society is now split into two sectors: the ‘winners’ linked to the expanding and lucrative financial – security complex embedded in the police state while the ‘losers’, tied to the manufacturing – welfare sector, are relegated to an increasingly marginalized ‘civil society’. The police state purges dissidents who question the ‘Israel-First doctrine’ of the US security-military apparatus. The financial sector, embedded in its own luxurious ‘cocoon’ of private services, demands the total gutting of public services directed toward the poor, working and middle classes. The public treasury has been taken over in order to finance bank bailouts, imperial wars and police state agencies while paying the bondholders of US debt.
Social Security is on target to be privatized. Pensions are to be reduced, delayed and self-financed. Food stamps, access to affordable health care and unemployment support will be slashed. The police state cannot pay for glitzy new repressive technologies, greater policing, more intrusive surveillance, arrests and prisons while financing the existing welfare state with its vast educational, health and human services and pension benefits.
In sum, there is no future for social welfare in the United States within its powerful financial-imperial-police state system. Both major political parties nurture this system, support serial wars, appeal to the financial elites and debate over the size, scope and timing for further cuts in social welfare.
The American social welfare system was a product of an earlier phase of US capitalism where US global industrial supremacy allowed for both military spending and welfare support and where US military spending was constrained by the demands of the domestic socio-economic sectors of manufacturing capital and ‘labor’. In an earlier phase Zionist influence was based on wealthy individuals and their congressional ‘lobby’ — they did not occupy key Federal policymaking positions setting the agendas for war in the Middle East and domestic police state.
Times have changed for the worse: a police state, linked to militarism and perpetual imperial wars in the Middle East has gained ascendancy and now impacts our everyday life. Underlying both the growth of the police state and the erosion of the welfare state is the rise of an inter-locking ‘financial-security power elite’, held together by a common ideology, unprecedented private wealth and the relentless drive to monopolize the public treasury to the detriment of the vast majority of Americans. A confrontation and full exposure of all the self-serving propaganda, which undergirds the power elite is an essential first step. The enormous budgets for imperial wars are the greatest threat to US welfare. The police state erodes real public services and undermines social movements. Finance capital pillages the public treasury demanding bailouts and subsidies for the banks. Israeli Firsters, in key decision-making positions, serve the interests of a foreign police state against the interests of the American people. The state of Israel is the mirror opposite of what we Americans want for ourselves and our children: a free and independent secular republic without colonial settlements, clerical racism, and destructive self-serving militarism.
Today the fight to restore the advances in citizens’ welfare established through public programs of the recent past requires that we transform an entire structure of power: true welfare reform requires a revolutionary strategy and, above all, a grass-roots mass movement breaking with the entrenched ‘two party’ regime tied to the financial- imperial- internal security system.
A pension crisis of major dimensions is growing in the US across all three forms of defined benefit plans (DBPs)—public, private single employer, and private multi-employer plans.
Corporate America and its political friends have begun to use the economic crisis that commenced in 2007 as an opportunity to initiate and expand yet another offensive aimed at further undermining defined benefit pensions in the U.S. Having already begun in 2009-10 with a new attack by governors on public employees’ pension plans, the Corporate Offensive over the subsequent eighteen months has expanded to include new coordinated attacks on private sector multi-employer and single employer DBPs as well.
Contrary to corporate, press and politicians’ claims, the crisis in pensions has had nothing to do with pension benefit increases for the workers. In many cases pension benefits have been frozen or actually reduced over the past decade and especially so since 2008.
Rather the crisis is directly attributable to government and corporate policies that have been implemented over the past thirty years—including, but not limited to, two decades of government encouraged management practices reducing pension funding, stagnant jobs and wage growth since 2001, massive speculative investment losses by pension funds, the collapse of the economy, jobs, and pension contributions after 2007, and the failure of the US economic recovery to restore jobs and wages the past three years, 2009-12.
Brief Overview of the Pensions Funding Gap
Multi-employer defined benefit pensions in the 1990s averaged shortfalls in funding (i.e. ratio of assets to liabilities) of only a very manageable $30 billion throughout the decade.
A 2009 Report by the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, the quasi-government agency responsible for ensuring pension funds stability and solvency in the private sector, had a funding shortfall of $355 billion. A similar scenario applies to ratios and shortfalls in funding for single employer pensions, with funding shortfalls of approximately $407 billion. The highly respected Pew Center’s 2008 estimated public sector pensions gap for 2008 of $452 billion.
But the shortfalls in all the defined benefit pensions are overwhelming the result of economic conditions, government policies, and corporate practices over the past 12 years. In 1999, state public employee pensions were 103% funded, according to the Pew Center. Similarly, private pensions—multi-employer as well as single employer—were in good shape at the beginning of 2000. Whatever has happened is therefore clearly a consequence of events and policies since 2000.
Employers sense an opportunity today to falsify the facts regarding the causes of defined benefit pension shortfalls, and to use that falsification to attack and dismantle what’s left of defined benefit pensions that now cover barely 18% of the workforce compared to three decades ago when the percentage of coverage was two thirds or more. What facts are being conveniently ignored in this new corporate offensive?
Corporate Manipulation of the Pension Funding Gap
Corporations have not hesitated to take advantage of the funding gap that they themselves have largely created, with the help of compliant politicians.
On the multi-employer side, the employer new offensive is evident in a series of banks’ reports claiming the funding gap is even greater than it is. By making extreme low-ball assumptions on returns, banks’ research departments and corporations argue the gap for multi-employer plans is significantly higher than even the PBGC has estimated. Their conclusion is major reductions in pension benefits are therefore required, even though pension benefit payments are not the source of the problem.
This strategy of overestimation of the funding gap, cherry-picking the worst assumptions and then extrapolating the losses in a straight line out for decades, has been adopted as well by governors and state politicians intent on cutting pension benefit payments to resolve a crisis workers did not create.
A typical, extreme case is New Jersey governor, Chris Christie, who over-exaggerates an estimated $2.5 trillion funding gap in 2010—i.e. six times greater than that estimated by the respected Pew Center. Christie’s answer to the shortfall in New Jersey is a massive gutting of public employee pension benefits. However, Christie conveniently hides the fact that his state, New Jersey, only made 31% of the required contributions to its employee pension fund in 2009, thus contributing significantly to its relatively low funding ratio of 66%. Like Christie, governors complaining the most about State pension funding gaps are typically those who created those gaps by refusing repeatedly to make the required contributions to their pension funds in the first place.
Single Employer Pension funds are also under a similar direct attack, exemplified by the latest efforts of American Airlines to project massive losses in its fund as a way to justify dumping it on the PBGC and thereby shedding $9 billion in contributions it should have made, but didn’t, for decades. American Airlines for decades has been one of the most egregious practicers of ‘pension contribution holidays’, refusing year after year to make legally required contributions to its fund, and thereby ensuring it would be under-funded.
Fundamental Causes of the Pension Funding Crisis
The deterioration in defined benefit pensions over the past decade has had virtually nothing to do with providing more generous benefits for workers. Nor is it the case that workers are retiring in greater numbers all at once. The causes of the pension shortfalls are due to reductions in employer contributions to the pension funds for multiple reasons, to speculative investments gone bad and massive losses in pension funds over the preceding decade, a major collapse in jobs since 2000 due to repeated and protracted recessions, jobless recoveries, and shifting of jobs offshore that have further undermined total pension fund contributions, and government policies since 2008 that have ensured pension fund returns on investment are reduced to below-normal historical rates of return..
The following is a partial summary short list of a dozen true causes of shortfalls in defined benefit pension funding.
Two recessions since 2000 and two bouts of ‘jobless recoveries’ (2002-05 and 2009-12) resulting in sharp reductions in contributions to the funds
Structural unemployment due to offshoring and free trade that has in addition to #1 progressively reduced jobs and therefore contributions, especially in tech and manufacturing industries
Government allowed ‘pension contribution holidays’ that permitted suspension of employer contributions for decades, thus further lowering the contributions base of the funds
Employer manipulation of actuarial assumptions, like phony overstated rates of return and projected hirings that never happen, that covered up the shortfalls
Government rules that allow the diversion of pension funds to cover 20% of rising employer health care insurance costs
De-unionization of the workforce, resulting in employers suspending private pension plan participation for new workers, thus further reducing contributions.
Shift in U.S. job markets to part time and temp ‘contingency’ jobs and workers by tens of millions, who are excluded from participating (and thus contributing) to DBPs
Legislation and court decisions over the past decade that have promoted 401k plans and conversion to ‘Cash Balance Plans’, diverting contributions to what would have been to defined benefit pension funds.
Phony business bankruptcy policies that have permitted easy dumping of pensions on the PBGC, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation that ensures DBPs, encouraging employers to underfund the pensions to create justifications for dumping the pensions.
Easing of restrictions allowing companies to leave multi-employer plans and for single employers exiting the PBGC
Pension Protection Act of 2006 that allowed pension funds to partner with high-risk speculators like hedge funds, resulting in pension funds’ headlong rush into speculative investing in subprime mortgages and other high risk real estate and financial markets, the consequence of which was massive fund losses in 2000-02 and again in 2008-12.
Low rates of return in general over the last decade on investments by pension funds, attributable largely to the protracted recession since 2008 and, even more so, to the Federal Reserve Bank’s still continuing policy of zero interest rates for four consecutive years.
Fundamental Solutions to the Pension Crisis
Pension funds are financial institutions. They perform much like commercial banks by lending to other non-financial institutions.
In 2008-09, the Federal Reserve bailed out the banks to the tune of $9 trillion by providing zero interest loans to banks for the past four years. The Fed also bought up bonds, especially mortgage notes, from the banks at their full value instead of their real depressed market values, thus further directly subsidizing the banks. The Fed in this manner not only bailed out banks and investment banks, but big conglomerates like GE and GM and their credit arms. So why shouldn’t it similarly provide assistance to financial institutions like the pension funds?
Given that the real causes of current pension fund shortfalls are: insufficient contributions by employers, bad investments by fund managers as a result of high risk speculation and losses, government rules allowing the undermining of pensions, and poor rates of return on investments by funds due to government economic policies since 2000—real solutions to the crisis should tackle the real causes.
Therefore, Congress, the President, and the Federal Reserve should:
Provide short term 2 to 5 year bridge loans as needed to pension funds temporarily whose funding falls below 70%–i.e. funding provided at the same rate the Federal Reserve has been bailing out banks for the past four years, at a rate of 0.25% interest.
Allow pension funds to issue their own bonds, much like corporations now issue bonds, and the Fed purchase those bonds long term, 10 and 30 years, to provide additional funding as necessary to pension funds.
Prohibit pension funds from partnering in investments with hedge funds and other high risk financial institutions and financial instruments.
Cities and local municipalities should be reimbursed for losses due to banks’ fraudulent and false promotion of derivatives and interest rate swap deals of the last decade, just as other institutional investors have been reimbursed for fraudulent subprime mortgages deals of recent years.
Pension funding contribution holidays should be legally banned. Diversion of pension funds’ resources to subsidize employer health plans should be further prohibited.
Corporate bankruptcy laws should be amended to prevent dumping of single employer plans. All non-pension assets in bankruptcy should be ruled subordinate to pension assets, requiring all other assets disposed of before pension funds are considered.
Restrictions on employers exiting from multi-employer plans and from the PBGC should be strengthened.
Public employee plans’ spending on consultants should be limited by law to no more than 1% of annual contribution levels.
Employers should be prohibited from exempting ‘contingent’ workers from participation in plans, and should be required make pension fund contributions for all part time and temporary workers proportional to their total hours worked.
Restore jobs and wage growth. The most important long run source of restoration of pension fund solvency is the creation of jobs at an historically acceptable rate.
A sustained economic recovery—not the current ‘stop-go’ economy—that would raise rates of return on normal pension fund investments to restore losses of recent years
The crisis in Defined Benefit Plans is a crisis that has been brewing for decades, but that has appreciably worsened since 2000 and significantly further deteriorated after 2007. It is a crisis of falling and insufficient contributions fundamentally and not a crisis of excess liabilities or benefit payments to workers. Employers, both private and public, are now using the crisis they created that reduced contributions for decades to attack benefits. Fundamental solutions to the pension funding problems in DBPs must rectify the source problems on the contributions side of the fund ledger.
Jack Rasmus is the author of the April 2012 book, “Obama’s Economy: Recovery for the Few”, published by Pluto Books and Palgrave-Macmillan, which includes a final chapter on ‘An Alternative Program for Economic Recovery’.
UAE security officers detained, tortured, and killed Emirati poet and news editor Habib al-Sayegh in August 2019, shortly after he published a column opposing UAE normalization with Israel, according to a newly published book.
“Princes and Thieves,” a book by investigative journalist Matthew Cole published on 25 October, alleges that UAE security officers raided Sayegh’s Abu Dhabi home shortly after the publication of the column, hooded him in front of his wife and took him to a detention facility where he was tortured to death.
His interrogators reportedly pulled out several of his teeth with pliers and beat him repeatedly with a sharp metal object.
On 11 August 2019, Sayegh criticized the UAE’s plan to normalize relations with Israel as part of the Abraham Accords in his weekly column for Khaleej newspaper. The column was titled “Israel Is Our Real Enemy and A Dangerous Project.”
Sayegh described Israel as “a real and natural enemy” while questioning “who authorized the normalizers to speak on behalf of everyone?”
Nine days after the column was published, Emirati state media announced his death, without stating a cause. … continue
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