We are entering a new age of algorithmic, authoritarian control, where our thoughts, moods, and biology are monitored and judged by the state.

This is the dark promise behind the newest campaign by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, to push for a future in which all Americans wear biometric health-tracking devices.

Under the guise of public health and personal empowerment, this initiative is nothing less than the normalization of 24/7 bodily surveillance, ushering in a world where every step, heartbeat, and biological fluctuation is monitored not only by private companies but also by the government.

In this emerging surveillance-industrial complex, health data becomes currency. Tech firms profit from hardware and app subscriptions, insurers profit from risk scoring, and government agencies profit from increased compliance and behavioral insight.

This convergence of health, technology, and surveillance is not a new strategy—it’s just the next step in a long, familiar pattern of control.

Surveillance has always arrived dressed as progress.

Every new wave of surveillance technology—GPS trackers, red light cameras, facial recognition, Ring doorbells, Alexa smart speakers—has been sold to us as a tool of convenience, safety, or connection. But in time, each became a mechanism for tracking, monitoring, or controlling the public.

What began as voluntary has become inescapable and mandatory.

The moment we accepted the premise that privacy must be traded for convenience, we laid the groundwork for a society in which nowhere is beyond the government’s reach—not our homes, not our cars, not even our bodies.

RFK Jr.’s wearable plan is just the latest iteration of this bait-and-switch: marketed as freedom, built as a cage.

According to Kennedy’s plan, which has been promoted as part of a national campaign to “Make America Healthy Again,” wearable devices would track glucose levels, heart rate, activity, sleep, and more for every American.

Participation may not be officially mandatory at the outset, but the implications are clear: get on board, or risk becoming a second-class citizen in a society driven by data compliance.

What began as optional self-monitoring tools marketed by Big Tech is poised to become the newest tool in the surveillance arsenal of the police state.

Devices like Fitbits, Apple Watches, glucose trackers, and smart rings collect astonishing amounts of intimate data—from stress and depression to heart irregularities and early signs of illness. When this data is shared across government databases, insurers, and health platforms, it becomes a potent tool not only for health analysis—but for control.

Once symbols of personal wellness, these wearables are becoming digital cattle tags—badges of compliance tracked in real time and regulated by algorithm.

And it won’t stop there.

The body is fast becoming a battleground in the government’s expanding war on the inner realms.

The infrastructure is already in place to profile and detain individuals based on perceived psychological “risks.” Now imagine a future in which your wearable data triggers a mental health flag. Elevated stress levels. Erratic sleep. A skipped appointment. A sudden drop in heart rate variability.

In the eyes of the surveillance state, these could be red flags—justification for intervention, inquiry, or worse.

RFK Jr.’s embrace of wearable tech is not a neutral innovation. It is an invitation to expand the government’s war on thought crimes, health noncompliance, and individual deviation.

It shifts the presumption of innocence to a presumption of diagnosis. You are not well until the algorithm says you are.

The government has already weaponized surveillance tools to silence dissent, flag political critics, and track behavior in real time. Now, with wearables, they gain a new weapon: access to the human body as a site of suspicion, deviance, and control.

While government agencies pave the way for biometric control, it will be corporations—such as insurance companies, tech giants, and employers—who act as enforcers for the surveillance state.

Wearables don’t just collect data. They sort it, interpret it, and feed it into systems that make high-stakes decisions about your life: whether you get insurance coverage, whether your rates go up, whether you qualify for employment or financial aid.

As reported by ABC News, a JAMA article warns that insurers could easily use wearables to deny coverage or increase premiums based on personal health metrics, such as calorie intake, weight fluctuations, and blood pressure.

It’s not a stretch to imagine this bleeding into workplace assessments, credit scores, or even social media rankings.

Employers already offer discounts for “voluntary” wellness tracking and penalize nonparticipants. Insurers give incentives for healthy behavior—until they decide unhealthy behavior warrants punishment. Apps track not just steps, but mood, substance use, fertility, and sexual activity—feeding the ever-hungry data economy.

We now face the quiet erosion of autonomy through the normalization of constant monitoring.

We must ask: when surveillance becomes a condition of participation in modern life—such as employment, education, and healthcare—are we still free? Or have we become, as in every great dystopian warning, conditioned not to resist, but to comply?

That’s the hidden cost of these technological conveniences: today’s wellness tracker is tomorrow’s corporate leash.

Once health tracking becomes a de facto requirement for employment, insurance, or social participation, it will be impossible to “opt out” without penalty. Those who resist may be painted as irresponsible, unhealthy, or even dangerous.

This is not merely an expansion of healthcare. It is the transformation of health into a mechanism of control—a Trojan horse for the surveillance state to claim ownership over the last private frontier: the human body.

Once biometric data becomes currency in a health-driven surveillance economy, it’s only a matter of time before that data is used to determine whose lives are worth investing in—and whose are not.

This isn’t a left or right issue.

The conquest of physical space—our homes, cars, public squares—is nearly complete.

What remains is the conquest of inner space: our biology, our genetics, our psychology, our emotions. As predictive algorithms grow more sophisticated, the government and its corporate partners will use them to assess risk, flag threats, and enforce compliance in real time.

The goal is no longer simply to monitor behavior but to reshape it—to preempt dissent, deviance, or disease before it arises.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, now is the time to draw the line—before the body becomes just another piece of state property.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

Since the beginning of its genocidal assault on Gaza twenty-one months ago, the Israeli government has deprived millions of Palestinians of food and other basic necessities for life. Now, amid the widespread starvation that it has created, the Netanyahu government has sidelined the U.N.’s neutral, internationally recognized Gaza-wide system of aid delivery in favor of GHF’s privatized and militarized model, which one U.N. expert describes as a “death trap.” Israeli soldiers were ordered to fire on Palestinians waiting for food, according to a report in Haaretz.

GHF’s system was designed to align with the Israeli’s government stated goal of forcibly displacing Palestinians from the north to the south of Gaza – a war crime under international law. While the UN’s 400 distribution sites largely sit dormant, GHF delivers aid at a handful of sites primarily located in the south. In fact, internal planning documents reveal that people involved in the development of GHF understood the risk that its distribution hubs would force the displacement of Palestinians.

In its FOIA request, the Center for Constitutional Rights seeks records that could reveal whether GHF was also created to further President Trump’s “Gaza Riviera” redevelopment – and ethnic cleansing – plan. The Center of Constitutional Rights has previously joined other human rights and legal organizations in warning that individuals and entities involved in GHF could face legal liability for complicity in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.

It is against this backdrop that the State Department approved a $30 million United States Agency for International Development (USAID) grant for GHF, which is chaired by Johnnie Moore, an evangelical preacher who worked in the first Trump administration. GHF has not disclosed information about its funding, yet in announcing the grant, the State Department exempted it from the audit required for groups receiving USAID funds for the first time.

“It is outrageous that rather than investigating GHF and the private military contractors at its distribution hubs for complicity in war crimes, the Trump administration has doubled down in furthering Israel’s ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians in Gaza by giving GHF tens of millions of dollars,” said, Center for Constitutional Rights Senior Staff Attorney Katherine Gallagher. “The GHF operation raises many concerning questions about U.S. long-term plans for Gaza, and we will use this FOIA to get answers. The United States must stop sending arms and contractors to Gaza, and instead demand that the United Nations be permitted to resume its aid operations until Palestinians can fully return and rebuild a free Gaza.”

With its FOIA request, the Center for Constitutional Rights seeks all relevant records from the State Department and USAID from October 1st, 2024 to present, including information about GHF’s creation, the role of consulting groups like the Boston Consulting Group, its leadership, and financing. The FOIA also seeks information about the U.S. government links to the newly formed private military contractors in Gaza, Safe Reach Solutions (SRS) and UG Solutions.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

A 26-second clip showing police personnel recovering the body of a woman from a refrigerator is being widely circulated on social media platforms. Users have claimed that the remains are of a Muslim woman named Gulnaz, who was murdered by her husband Sanjay. The video is being shared as another case of ‘Bhagwa Love Trap’.

‘Bhagwa Love Trap‘ is a conspiracy theory popular among select groups of Muslims as a counter narrative to the ‘Love Jihad’ claims of the Right Wing. In ‘Bhagwa Love Trap‘, according to the theory’s proponents, Hindu men purposefully lure Muslim women into romantic relationships to coerce them to embrace Hinduism or Sanatan Dharma and move away from Islam.

The clip of the woman’s body being recovered was shared by X (formerly Twitter) account @T_A_backup on January 26. The caption said that the victim, Gulnaz, had converted to Hinduism after marrying Sanjay and threatened to report her parents to the police when they protested. “Gulnaz’s rotting body was later found in a FRIDGE with Sanjay nowhere to be found,” this person added. (Archive)

Another X user, @NazneenAkhtar23, shared the same clip on January 24 with a Hindi caption that said, “The incident is from Dewas, Madhya Pradesh. Hindu #Sanjay Patidar and Muslim girl Gulnaz eloped and got married and were living in rented accommodation. The room was locked up for 4 days and when people broke in to check, they found Gulnaz’s dismembered body in the fridge. Now tell me, su/varon (pigs), who is the jihadi?” (Archive)

Others, too, shared the clip with similar claims:

Fact Check

Taking cue from the social media posts, we first ran a keyword search with the location, Dewas, Madhya Pradesh. This led us to news reports from January 11 on an alleged murder. A report by The Hindu quoting the Dewas police superintendent Puneet Gehlot, said that a woman named Pratibha Prajapati had been found murdered and the accused was her live-in partner, Sanjay Patidar.

The report further said that Patidar was a married man who had been living with Prajapati for the last five years. He allegedly killed her with the help of a friend after she insisted on getting married. A postmortem examination of Prajapati’s body revealed that was killed over seven months ago.

On January 12, The Times Of India reported that Prajapati’s family refused to accept her remains. Her body was later handed over to a community member for her last rites.

The victim’s last name Prajapati, which means ‘progenitor’ or ‘lord of creatures’, has roots in the Hindu tradition and mythology and the community of Prajapatis is affiliated with the Hinduism.

From the above findings, it is clear that there was no communal angle to this crime. Both the accused and the victim belong to the same faith, Hinduism.

The post Woman’s murder in MP given false communal angle, peddled as ‘Bhagwa love trap’ appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Oishani Bhattacharya.

For most of the last 30 years I managed to stay busy with creative pursuits. I’ve certainly had jobs, but nothing that I wasn’t willing to quit to go on tour. There was quite a learning curve with finding a balance between a normal job and creating, but the timing was such that the pandemic started nine months into [starting] my business. So it was all then nothing with music. It softened the blow of losing the ability to play shows, and for a couple of years I was just doing the job. I think that was really good for me because I didn’t have a lot of practice being part of capitalism. It was a harsh toke but it taught me a lot about the value of my time and how to find creative inspiration in my day-to-day life. It reminded me that songs are everywhere.

Also, having a store, I get more human interaction than I ever have in my life. I’ve had so many lovely conversations with strangers over the last five years, and that in itself is a boiling pot of inspiration soup. People want to tell their stories and I want to listen. Reciprocity is one of the most important things about being an artist, to me.

Has it always been important?

No, I had a lot more anxiety when I was young. I was a lot more shy and insecure. It was a process over 30 years of learning how to let myself be vulnerable and to trust people, not only with my story but to trust that I can handle whatever they have to tell me. I’m in a way better place to give and receive, and that’s from years of therapy. I love it now. It’s now very meaningful to interact with people at Softies shows, as much as I feel comfortable with.

What have other people’s perceptions of your music revealed to you?

When I write, I’m telling a really big story in my mind, but I try to do it with economy. I leave a lot out but hope that enough is infused in the song. It is consistently surprising to me how I can be really vague about my intentions in a song and people will still see between the lines. I’ve learned that people will hear what you’re putting in it and that has led to me trusting listeners more. As an artist, it’s been amazing how much that’s expanded my craft.

Is there any part of your songwriting process that you feel very precious about?

Lyricism is very important to me. Pop songwriting is this beautiful framework of possibility. It’s about packing the most emotion and imagery into a two-and-a-half minute song, so how do you use those limited measures or syllables? Intention is important to me—every single line should be something you stand behind.

By those standards, your early songs are considerably more wordy.

I hold back a little bit more now. Back then I was more free but I also had a lot to say. I wanted every line to feel full of something. I still love those songs because in the craftsmanship I can see my growth in this really sweet, linear way as I learned how to write songs and discovered what intuitively felt right to me.

Here’s the way I see my own relationship to songwriting: I’ve been a music fan since I was so young, and I was precocious. I know what I love; I know what sounds good to me. But there’s a disconnect between the sophistication of how I hear and think about music and my musical abilities and training. That place in between is where I create my music, and it’s this beautiful liminal space where it’s almost a dissonant clashing. I’ll never take a music lesson, so everything I know is from 30 years of playing.

I don’t make music, but in my experience it can be really scary to believe in yourself from that place.

But what you end up with is something that, thank god, doesn’t sound like someone else. It’s the thing that only you could make. And isn’t it cool when your best is kind of interesting? You tried to do something and you didn’t achieve it, but what you ended up with was maybe something unique. I often say that about my first band, Tiger Trap: we didn’t know what we were doing. We ended up with something really unique and special because we literally didn’t know how to do anything else. I’m still kind of living in that space.

Tiger Trap was getting attention from major labels after a well-received debut [in 1993]. Instead, you decided to break up the band. How do you feel about that decision today?

There’s a song on the new Softies album about that decision, “When I Started Loving You.” The refrain is, “My life started when I started loving you.” That band was my dream come true, it was my everything, but it was a great act of self-love to leave it. That was the first time I had done anything like that for myself, and, truly, my life started when I learned to prioritize myself and my mental health. I feel really proud of myself.

How do you define success for yourself today?

When I was young and starting my journey with punk and independent music, I internalized the idea that selling out is the worst thing you could do. I still feel that way today, to some extent. The music industry is such a pit of horrible darkness and misogyny and all these awful things. So to me, success meant continuing to make music [while] having the respect of my peers and community, and maintaining my dignity. I had opportunities to sell out a couple times. I couldn’t have done it; it never would have felt true. Punk is speaking to truth and and never pandering to other people’s ideas of who you were supposed to be. That’s basically all the music industry asks of women: to constantly pander to an idea of what it means to be a female musician, or where you fit in culture. I was just like, “I don’t really fit anywhere, so I’m just going to find this little pocket of a community where I feel safe.”

I have a unique perspective on living as a musician because of the way I was raised—my parents were professional musicians. They worked four nights a week, playing bars, playing weddings, and doing recording sessions. The pursuit of making music didn’t have a “fame” end game. It was a job; it was a fulfilling way of life.

You have released so much music over the years. Have you ever put anything out and felt like the response wasn’t commensurate with the heart and energy you put into making it?

Some of my music is more visible or accessible but it’s all the same to me. It’s all part of this larger arc of my life’s work. I’ve made 18 or 19 albums and people maybe know eight of them, but that doesn’t make the other ones any less important. All I want after I die is for there to be an amazing box set. I want people to find the work that maybe didn’t rise to the top. It’s not up to me to tell people that or to rank my own music in the order of importance. Surrendering to the whimsies of the listening world is a beautiful part of being an artist. You might get one song in a movie that a million people hear, but you made a way better song that only a couple thousand people heard. You get to sit back and wait for people to find it.

As a prolific songwriter, how much is in the archives?

Not a lot. If I write something that I think is good, I’m gonna find a way to put it out. There are a few songs that other people maybe would have liked, but I have to love it. Never throw away an idea. You can map every song back to its first elemental idea—so even in a song that maybe doesn’t come out the way you wanted it to, that little spark of magic that made you want to build a song is still there. Sometimes I’ll revisit those or remember that I had an intention or maybe just one good line and find a way to work it into something else.

There’s a Ron Sexsmith song with a line that goes, “For every song you ever heard/ How many more have died at birth?” It goes along with the idea that a lot of artists have, that you have to just create, create, create. For every 10 bad songs you write, you’ll write one really great one. But I’m always of the mind that in those 10 supposedly bad songs, there are elements of something wonderful.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Quinn Moreland.

To improve its energy security after this upheaval, South Korea is doubling down on its imports. The country is using government financing to develop liquid natural gas (LNG) supply terminals, both at home and abroad. Its over-investment in LNG has already been costly: Citizens of South Korea are paying higher energy prices, without any gains in energy security, economic strength, or sustainability. 

And even as the government invests billions in new capacity, the country’s demand for natural gas over the next decade is projected to plummet. By the time the new South Korean terminals start operating, they may end up sitting idle for much of the time. 

A complex and expensive fuel 

Today, natural gas fuels about 25% of South Korea’s energy mix, used for everything from cookstoves to industrial manufacturing. Much of this is transported as liquified natural gas, or LNG — a process which cools the gas until it transforms into fluid, making it safer and easier to transport. The process requires enormous, specialized infrastructure. Custom cooling and regasification terminals must be built on either end of the shipping route, and the specially built tankers that move the LNG also require super-cooled tanks. 

This infrastructure is colossally expensive. From 2013 to 2023, South Korea’s public finance investment in new LNG carrier ships totaled approximately $44.1 billion, and the government plans to pay as much as $5 billion U.S. dollars for the new LNG terminals in the next few years.

“This will hinder the country’s energy transition to cheaper, domestically sourced renewable energy,” writes Michelle Kim, an energy finance specialist with the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, in a recent report about South Korea’s LNG industry. Kim’s research shows that the country is on track to more than double its LNG import capacity. Yet as the country works to transition to net-zero by 2050, the government’s own projections show a dramatic decrease in natural gas demand.  The new terminals South Korea are building are projected to fall to under 20% of their capacity by 2036. This will create what is known as “stranded assets,” meaning the government is investing billions of dollars into highly specialized infrastructure that soon will sit nearly unused. 

South Korea’s focus on LNG also has major implications for the global climate. “What we’re seeing is the development of a massive surplus capacity of LNG, compared to what’s needed for keeping warming to 1.5 degrees,” says scientist Bill Hare, the CEO of Climate Analytics, a climate science and policy institute. A new report by a global collaborative of clean energy advocates shows that South Korea is one of the top international public financiers of fossil fuels.

Over the past decade, South Korea has invested over $3 billion of government financing into major U.S LNG infrastructure projects, such as the enormous new Rio Grande and Port Arthur facilities. And South Korean energy giant Hanwha is planning to invest still more in the Rio Grande project, with multi-million dollar loans from public and private banks in Korea.  

This investment is dramatically increasing the United States LNG export capacity. “The US is set to double its existing capacity by the end of 2027,” says Jamie Lee, an international climate specialist at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). “That’s startling because the United States is already the top LNG exporter in the world.” Much of this rapid expansion is driven by South Korea’s investment – the country is one of the largest consumers of United States LNG exports.

Such investment is out of step with other developed countries, who are throttling back on gas: Other regions, including the European Union, the UK, and Canada, have committed to halt government financing for international fossil fuel infrastructure.

Ironically, the South Korean government has prioritized natural gas in part because of a misconception that it is cleaner than coal, which plays a large role in South Korea’s energy use. But when the emissions from its extraction, transport, processing, and consumption are taken into account, natural gas shows little or no improvement over other fossil fuels. In fact, natural gas currently accounts for 22% of global fossil fuel emissions.

Sejong Youn, the founder of the climate policy advocacy organization Plan 1.5, says, “The myth was appealing. If you didn’t look too closely, it appeared to be a better alternative. And that myth allowed policymakers and companies to continue business as usual, without the complexities that renewable energy introduces to the energy system.”

A financial black hole

Youn also points out other dangers of pouring public money into new natural gas infrastructure. “Whatever we build at this point will decide our future. Expanding gas infrastructure locks our country into a fossil fuel system,” he says. 

Public financing of LNG infrastructure is based on financial calculations that assume it will be used for many decades. But to meet the country’s goal of global carbon neutrality by 2050, these facilities would need to cease operations well before their functional lifetime expires, creating an enormous net loss for South Korea’s government. 

But despite the government’s current illogical funding trajectory, it may still be possible to reverse course. 

Think globally, act locally 

The coastal South Korean city of Dangjin is a fossil fuel hub, where coal-fired power plants and blast furnace steel mills spew pollutants. A 2021 report from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air found that pollution from Dangjin’s plants causes over 210 premature deaths annually. Plans for new LNG terminals would add to these pollutants, making the city the third-largest LNG storage hub in the world. 

Jungjin Kim, a leading local activist with the Korea Federation for Environmental Movements (KFEM), says Dangjin bears the burden of powering the country, while energy demand is concentrated in densely urban areas like Seoul. “Because most energy facilities cause large environmental impact and damage, these facilities are located in Dangjin to avoid the backlash from city residents,” he says. 

Focusing public investment on natural gas, he says, also has serious economic risks for the area. “If all the jobs are in the fossil fuel sector, the entire region will be in a very dire economic situation when the demand for it declines,” he says. “It will be similar to what happened to Detroit.”

Government investment in domestic renewables could have the opposite effect. Research by Climate Analytics shows that if the South Korean government refocused on offshore wind, solar, and other domestic production, it could both boost employment and increase energy security. “There’s enormous potential in South Korea for renewable energy development that would create a net increase in local jobs,” says Hare. This could also support other industries in South Korea, such as transitioning LNG shipbuilders into green fuel transport to support the country’s chemical and steel industries. A 2023 report by NRDC shows that replacing LNG with renewable alternatives could be far less costly for both the government and consumers.

Despite the push to build natural gas infrastructure, activists in Dangjin have already successfully halted government funding for coal there. Korea Beyond Coal, a coalition of South Korean climate organizations working to end coal, successfully campaigned to end their government’s overseas coal investments in 2021. The effort helped shift private investment away from the sector. “South Korea can play a major role in accelerating the global energy transition,” says Dongjae Oh, the head of the oil and gas program at Solutions for our Climate (SFOC). “South Korea can shift its massive overseas fossil financing to renewable energy and work with other governments to expand clean, healthy and affordable energy, such as solar and wind.” 

That’s not to say the path to energy security and economic growth via renewable energy would be smooth. The Korean Peninsula’s history of geopolitical instability, South Korea’s mountainous terrain, and urban population concentration all present challenges. But the biggest barrier to renewable energy is the lack of political will and concrete policies to support the country’s renewable energy production potential.

And that potential is huge: A 2023 report  by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that with the right government policies and supports, South Korea could meet 80% of the country’s electricity needs with clean power by 2035. 

A golden opportunity 

Advocates argue that despite its difficulties, such a transition would be deeply worthwhile. “Renewables are the biggest economic opportunity we’ve had since the Second World War,” says Hare. “The scale of government investment needed is huge, and it will generate many more jobs than continued funding of fossil fuels. It’s a win-win. Governments can make investments that get us to zero emissions, and citizens will benefit economically.”

Project 1.5 founder Sejong Youn agrees. “The government should spend money on renewable energy infrastructure and creating jobs,” he says. “It’s an area where, as citizens, we can and should demand change.”

Solutions for Our Climate (SFOC) is an independent non-profit organization based in South Korea that works to accelerate global greenhouse gas emissions reduction and energy transition. SFOC leverages research, litigation, community organizing, and strategic communications to deliver practical climate solutions and build movements for change.  We work collaboratively with partners from around the world and aim to grow and strengthen the global network of climate actors that drive bold solutions.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline South Korea’s energy trap: Government-funded dead end fossil fuel investments on May 21, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Grist Creative.

The post Climate Debt Trap, A “Vicious Circle” for Vulnerable Nations appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Vins.

In fact, nuclear reactors cannot survive global warming. But that’s only the start of serious issues with the world’s newly found love affair with nuclear energy. This article examines the likelihood of nuclear energy as a fixit for global warming, or is it a victim?

The world is turning to nuclear energy as one solution for raging global warming, which has been in the news on a real time basis drying up commercial rivers, depleting major reservoirs and spreading wildfires like there’s no tomorrow. Yet, that’s only a sampling of global warming knockoffs. Significantly, it’s getting worse by the year, and there are some who wonder how much worse before the climate system literally implodes with destructive capacity beyond Hollywood’s wildest imagination.

In consequence, nuclear energy’s popularity is on the rise in concert with rising global temperatures. The hotter it gets the more supporters jump on the bandwagon, but there are plenty of reasons to believe it’s a fool’s paradise. History will likely judge this worldwide movement for nuclear energy as one of the biggest traps of all-time. Nevertheless, the nuclear energy trap is coming onstream faster and faster and without much opposition. Maybe there should be some.

A Gallup survey found 55% of U.S. adults in support of nuclear energy, which is the highest in over a decade. The Biden administration views nuclear as a key climate solution to net zero. Japan is restarting its idled plants and plans on building more as it commences the absolute insanity of releasing radioactive toxic water in storage tanks at Fukushima’s TEPCO nuclear plant directly into the readily available, right-next-door Pacific Ocean, as its neighbors squeal and many smart scientists squirm. Meanwhile, China, with 24 nuclear energy plants currently under construction, ambitiously plans to build at least 150 new reactors over the next 15 years. India is planning to commission 20 reactors by 2031. Worldwide, 60 new reactors are under construction.

Nuclear energy is on the move at a time when more and more exposure of cancer cases and deaths become public knowledge, as follows:

• A BBC Future Planet article d/d July 25, 2019, The True Toll of the Chernobyl Disaster: “According to the official, internationally recognized death toll, just 31 people died as an immediate result of Chernobyl while the UN estimates that only 50 deaths can be directly attributed to the disaster. In 2005, it predicted a further 4,000 might eventually die as a result of the radiation exposure… Brown’s research, however, suggests Chernobyl has cast a far longer shadow.”
• “The number of deaths in subsequent decades remains in dispute. The lowest estimates are 4,000; others 90,000 and up to 200,000.” ¹
• According to an article in USA Today d/d February 24, 2022, What Happened at Chernobyl? What to Know About Nuclear Disaster: “At least 28 people were killed by the disaster, but thousands more have died from cancer as a result of radiation that spread after the explosion and fire. The effects of radiation on the environment and humans is still being studied.”

In time, Fukushima will reflect statistics, often times second-third-fourth generations.

According to Chernobyl Children International, 6,000 newborns are born every year in Ukraine with congenital heart defects called “Chernobyl Heart.”

The newest nuclear energy craze is Small Modular Reactors to be built and installed throughout the world. Thereby, the entire planet could easily go nuclear energy at every mining site, on every ship, and every favorite shopping mall or telephone booth. Just imagine a world filled with small nuclear energy plants! No problem, until there is one.

Meanwhile, America’s left is onboard the let’s go-for-it nuclear cruise ship. The acid test of America’s left-leaning greenish advocates suddenly in favor of nuclear energy is leftist-leaning California, the birthplace of America’s anti-nuclear movement, which decided to extend the life of Diablo Canyon nuclear reactor, the state’s last nuclear energy plant, rather than close it down. Beyond this shift of allegiance to nuclear in greenish California, National Public Radio ran a report on the outbreak of support for nuclear, August 30, 2022, entitled: Why Even Environmentalists are Supporting Nuclear Energy Today.

But on a cautionary note, nuclear energy has an adversarial voice that’s difficult to ignore: “Multiple and unexpected failures are built into society’s complex and tightly coupled nuclear reactor systems. Such accidents are unavoidable and cannot be designed around.” ²

The widespread rousing excitement over nuclear energy is a trap. In part because global warming is the kiss of death for reactors. Global warming and nuclear energy clash, incompatible, mutually destructive. Global warming is the enemy of nuclear energy, out to destroy it by drying rivers and overheating ocean waters amidst rising seas that cascade onto shoreline reactors a la Fukushima. Reactors only survive at the mercy of cool waters, and they’re seriously challenged/damaged by increasing levels of ocean surges. Nuclear reactors are not drought-tolerant, which is one of global warming’s biggest weapons.

The truth about nuclear energy’s fallibility is enunciated in a recent interview with one of the world’s leading experts Dr. Paul Dorfman, chair of the Nuclear Consulting Group, former secretary to the UK Scientific Advisory Committee on Internal Radiation, and Visiting Fellow, University of Sussex, who said:

It’s important to understand that nuclear is very likely to be a significant climate casualty.  For cooling purposes nuclear reactors need to be situated by large bodies of water, which means either by the coast or inland by rivers or large water courses. Sea levels are rising much quicker than we had thought and inland the rivers are heating up, potentially drying up, and also subject to significant flooding and flash-flooding and inundation. The key issue for coastal nuclear is storm surge, which is basically where atmospheric conditions meet high tide, which is essentially what happened in Fukushima. ³

In recent years, nuclear plants across Northern Europe have been forced to shut down or reduce output because seawater became too warm to safely cool the reactor cores. Over the past decade, the Millstone energy plant in Connecticut saw a series of shutdowns on hot summer days until regulators raised the temperature limit of its cooling waters by 5 degrees Fahrenheit. ⁴

France is an example of nuclear energy going wrong. The French Court of Auditors’ Report on the Safety and Operation of France’s Fifty-six (56) Reactors recently highlighted an increasingly unstable supply of water necessary for the country’s cooling reactors. ⁵

In France, Loire River is the longest river in the country at 625 miles. As of early 2023, global warming had clobbered the river, some areas completely dry with flow rate down to 1/20^th of normal. Some of the country’s nuclear energy plants depend upon the river for cooling purposes. To date, forced shutdowns have only occurred in the summer, but France’s Court of Auditors warned that such events are likely to become 3-to-4 times more frequent unless global warming somehow subsides, yet France’s environmental minister thinks 4°C is on the horizon for the country. Moreover, for the first time since 1980, France has been a net importer of electricity, losing its 40-year net exporter status as its celebrated nuclear energy capability (70% electricity for France) caved-in to global warming.

Since water-cooled (95% of the 436) conventional nuclear energy reactors are vulnerable to global warming, then is a molten salt reactor a magical solution?

Answer: No, it is not!

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists published a detailed analysis of molten salt reactors entitled: “Molten Salt Reactors Were Trouble in the 1960s – and Remain in Trouble Today”, June 20, 2022. The lengthy article traces the attempted development of molten salt reactors dating back to the 1950s. The various avenues of experimentation with halting results consumes paragraph after paragraph. For example, here’s one excerpt:

These problems remain relevant. Even today, no material can perform satisfactorily in the high-radiation high-temperature, and corrosive environment inside a molten salt reactor. In 2018, scientists at the Idaho National Laboratory conducted an extensive review of different materials and, in the end, could only recommend that ‘a systematic development program be initiated.’ In other words, fifty years after the molten salt reactor was shut down, technical experts still have questions about materials development for a new molten salt reactor design. ⁶

In conclusion, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists claims that if molten salt reactors are constructed, they are unlikely to operate reliably and would result in various safety and security risks and would produce several different waste streams, all of which require extensive processing and serious disposal challenges. Accordingly, according to the Bulletin: “Investing in molten salt reactors is not worth the cost or the effort.”

If not large-scale reactors, will Small Modular Reactors (“SMR”) save the day?

According to a 2021 article in The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists: SMRs are at an early stage of development and are speculative technologies. It will take at least a decade to get them off drawing boards into serious production and longer to determine if they really work according to plans. It’s too slow and too costly to meet climate deadlines.

Stanford News published a SMR study: “Stanford-led Research Finds Small Modular Reactors Will Exacerbate Challenges of Highly Radioactive Nuclear Waste”. The study concludes that SMRs will generate more radioactive waste than conventional nuclear energy plants. “Our results show that most small modular reactor designs will actually increase the volume of nuclear waste in need of management and disposal, by factors of 2 to 30 for the reactors in our case study.” (Stanford)

A SMR analysis by Bent Flyvbjerg, the leading global academic in megaproject failures and successes, consulted on over 100 mega projects: ⁷

Then, to satisfy the overwhelming popularity to go nuclear, are any modern “advanced” nuclear reactor designs worth pursuing?

Answer: No. According to a study by the Union of Concerned Scientists: “Report Finds That ‘Advanced’ Nuclear Reactor Designs Are No Better Than Current Reactors— and Some Are Worse”, March 18, 2021. The 140-page report highlights studies of (1) sodium-cooled reactors (2) molten salt-fueled reactors (3) high-temperature gas-cooled reactors and whether they meet the requirements of (a) safer (b) more secure (c) lower risk of nuclear proliferation and terrorism than the existing fleet of nuclear reactors. None of the three satisfactorily passed the study.

Additionally, the report analyzed unsubstantiated claims developers are making about designs and using little hard evidence to advance their causes. For example, Bill Gates’ statements about the 345-megawatt Natrium claiming it will produce less nuclear waste and be safer than conventional light-water reactors. The UCS report found the sodium-cooled fast reactor Natrium to be less “uranium-efficient,” and it would not reduce the amount of waste, and it’s subject to serious safety problems not at issue with conventional light-water reactors;  e.g., sodium coolant can burn when exposed to air or water, and its fast-reactor could experience uncontrollable energy increases leading to rapid core melting, which is the overriding bane of nuclear energy.

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists: Timing is another killer of contemporary designs. According to requirements to be met by federal regulators, it could take up to 20 years and billions of dollars to commercialize non-light-water reactors, fuel cycle facilities, and related infrastructure. Timing, timing, timing is everything when it comes to meeting the necessity of reaching net zero emissions as global warming is not waiting around for solutions. It is accelerating like never before as stated by Dr. James Hansen (Columbia University): “There has been a staggering increase in Earth’s energy imbalance.” Hansen’s formula supporting that statement points to a distinct possibility of 1.5C right around the corner. Which begs the question: How long does it take to plan, approve, build, and commission a nuclear reactor? Oh, well!

In conclusion, the Union of Concerned Scientists recommends:

The DOE and Congress should consider spending more research and development dollars on improving the safety and security of light-water reactors, rather than on commercializing immature, overhyped non-light-water reactor designs.

As usual in cases with extremely difficult circumstances dealing with nature there are no easy answers but plenty of traps. In that regard, is nuclear energy a Trojan Horse for devastating global warming?

END NOTES

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Robert Hunziker.

Image by Jametlene Reskp.

Nuclear reactors are directly in the line of fire of global warming.

In fact, nuclear reactors cannot survive global warming. But that’s only the start of serious issues with the world’s newly found love affair with nuclear energy. This article examines the likelihood of nuclear energy as a fixit for global warming, or is it a victim?

The world is turning to nuclear energy as one solution for raging global warming, which has been in the news on a real time basis drying up commercial rivers, depleting major reservoirs and spreading wildfires like there’s no tomorrow. Yet, that’s only a sampling of global warming knockoffs. Significantly, it’s getting worse by the year, and there are some who wonder how much worse before the climate system literally implodes with destructive capacity beyond Hollywood’s wildest imagination.

In consequence, nuclear energy’s popularity is on the rise in concert with rising global temperatures. The hotter it gets the more supporters jump on the bandwagon, but there are plenty of reasons to believe it’s a fool’s paradise. History will likely judge this worldwide movement for nuclear energy as one of the biggest traps of all-time. Nevertheless, the nuclear energy trap is coming onstream faster and faster and without much opposition. Maybe there should be some.

A Gallup survey found 55% of U.S. adults in support of nuclear energy, which is the highest in over a decade. The Biden administration views nuclear as a key climate solution to net zero. Japan is restarting its idled plants and plans on building more as it commences the absolute insanity of releasing radioactive toxic water in storage tanks at Fukushima’s TEPCO nuclear plant directly into the readily available, right-next-door Pacific Ocean, as its neighbors squeal and many smart scientists squirm. Meanwhile, China, with 24 nuclear energy plants currently under construction, ambitiously plans to build at least 150 new reactors over the next 15 years. India is planning to commission 20 reactors by 2031. Worldwide, 60 new reactors are under construction.

Nuclear energy is on the move at a time when more and more exposure of cancer cases and deaths become public knowledge, as follows:

* A BBC Future Planet article d/d July 25, 2019, The True Toll of the Chernobyl Disaster: “According to the official, internationally recognized death toll, just 31 people died as an immediate result of Chernobyl while the UN estimates that only 50 deaths can be directly attributed to the disaster. In 2005, it predicted a further 4,000 might eventually die as a result of the radiation exposure… Brown’s research, however, suggests Chernobyl has cast a far longer shadow.”

* “The number of deaths in subsequent decades remains in dispute. The lowest estimates are 4,000; others 90,000 and up to 200,000.” (Source: Janata Weekly: Cuba and the Children of Chernobyl, May 7, 2023)

* According to an article in USA Today d/d February 24, 2022, What Happened at Chernobyl? What to Know About Nuclear Disaster: “At least 28 people were killed by the disaster, but thousands more have died from cancer as a result of radiation that spread after the explosion and fire. The effects of radiation on the environment and humans is still being studied.”

In time, Fukushima will reflect statistics, often times second-third-fourth generations.

According to Chernobyl Children International, 6,000 newborns are born every year in Ukraine with congenital heart defects called “Chernobyl Heart.”

The newest nuclear energy craze is Small Modular Reactors to be built and installed throughout the world. Thereby, the entire planet could easily go nuclear energy at every mining site, on every ship, and every favorite shopping mall or telephone booth. Just imagine a world filled with small nuclear energy plants! No problem, until there is one.

Meanwhile, America’s left is onboard the let’s go-for-it nuclear cruise ship. The acid test of America’s left-leaning greenish advocates suddenly in favor of nuclear energy is leftist-leaning California, the birthplace of America’s anti-nuclear movement, which decided to extend the life of Diablo Canyon nuclear reactor, the state’s last nuclear energy plant, rather than close it down. Beyond this shift of allegiance to nuclear in greenish California, National Public Radio ran a report on the outbreak of support for nuclear, August 30, 2022, entitled: Why Even Environmentalists are Supporting Nuclear Energy Today.

But on a cautionary note, nuclear energy has an adversarial voice that’s difficult to ignore: “Multiple and unexpected failures are built into society’s complex and tightly coupled nuclear reactor systems. Such accidents are unavoidable and cannot be designed around.” (Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents, Princeton University Press, 1999)

The widespread rousing excitement over nuclear energy is a trap. In part because global warming is the kiss of death for reactors. Global warming and nuclear energy clash, incompatible, mutually destructive. Global warming is the enemy of nuclear energy, out to destroy it by drying rivers and overheating ocean waters amidst rising seas that cascade onto shoreline reactors a la Fukushima. Reactors only survive at the mercy of cool waters, and they’re seriously challenged/damaged by increasing levels of ocean surges. Nuclear reactors are not drought-tolerant, which is one of global warming’s biggest weapons.

The truth about nuclear energy’s fallibility is enunciated in a recent interview with one of the world’s leading experts Dr. Paul Dorfman, chair of the Nuclear Consulting Group, former secretary to the UK Scientific Advisory Committee on Internal Radiation, and Visiting Fellow, University of Sussex, who said: “It’s important to understand that nuclear is very likely to be a significant climate casualty. For cooling purposes nuclear reactors need to be situated by large bodies of water, which means either by the coast or inland by rivers or large water courses. Sea levels are rising much quicker than we had thought and inland the rivers are heating up, potentially drying up, and also subject to significant flooding and flash-flooding and inundation. The key issue for coastal nuclear is storm surge, which is basically where atmospheric conditions meet high tide, which is essentially what happened in Fukushima.” (Source: Interview of Dr. Paul Dorfman, Nuclear Energy Is Already a Climate Casualty, Hot Globe, July 19, 2023)

“In recent years, nuclear plants across Northern Europe have been forced to shut down or reduce output because seawater became too warm to safely cool the reactor cores. Over the past decade, the Millstone energy plant in Connecticut saw a series of shutdowns on hot summer days until regulators raised the temperature limit of its cooling waters by 5 degrees Fahrenheit.” (Source: Nuclear Energy Plants are Struggling to Stay Cool, Wired, July 21, 2022)

France is an example of nuclear energy going wrong. The French Court of Auditors’ Report on the Safety and Operation of France’s Fifty-six (56) Reactors recently highlighted an increasingly unstable supply of water necessary for the country’s cooling reactors. (Source: Climate Change, Water Scarcity Jeopardizing French Nuclear Fleet, Balkan Green Energy News, March 24, 2023)

In France, Loire River is the longest river in the country at 625 miles. As of early 2023, global warming had clobbered the river, some areas completely dry with flow rate down to 1/20^th of normal. Some of the country’s nuclear energy plants depend upon the river for cooling purposes. To date, forced shutdowns have only occurred in the summer, but France’s Court of Auditors warned that such events are likely to become 3-to-4 times more frequent unless global warming somehow subsides, yet France’s environmental minister thinks 4°C is on the horizon for the country. Moreover, for the first time since 1980, France has been a net importer of electricity, losing its 40-year net exporter status as its celebrated nuclear energy capability (70% electricity for France) caved-in to global warming.

Since water-cooled (95% of the 436) conventional nuclear energy reactors are vulnerable to global warming, then is a molten salt reactor a magical solution?

Answer: No, it is not!

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists published a detailed analysis of molten salt reactors entitled: Molten Salt Reactors Were Trouble in the 1960s – and Remain in Trouble Today, June 20, 2022. The lengthy article traces the attempted development of molten salt reactors dating back to the 1950s. The various avenues of experimentation with halting results consumes paragraph after paragraph. For example, here’s one excerpt: “These problems remain relevant. Even today, no material can perform satisfactorily in the high-radiation high-temperature, and corrosive environment inside a molten salt reactor. In 2018, scientists at the Idaho National Laboratory conducted an extensive review of different materials and, in the end, could only recommend that ‘a systematic development program be initiated.’ In other words, fifty years after the molten salt reactor was shut down, technical experts still have questions about materials development for a new molten salt reactor design.”

In conclusion, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists claims that if molten salt reactors are constructed, they are unlikely to operate reliably and would result in various safety and security risks and would produce several different waste streams, all of which require extensive processing and serious disposal challenges. Accordingly, according to the Bulletin: “Investing in molten salt reactors is not worth the cost or the effort.”

If not large-scale reactors, will Small Modular Reactors (“SMR”) save the day?

According to a 2021 article in The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists: SMRs are at an early stage of development and are speculative technologies. It will take at least a decade to get them off drawing boards into serious production and longer to determine if they really work according to plans. It’s too slow and too costly to meet climate deadlines.

Stanford News published a SMR study: Stanford-led Research Finds Small Modular Reactors Will Exacerbate Challenges of Highly Radioactive Nuclear Waste. The study concludes that SMRs will generate more radioactive waste than conventional nuclear energy plants. “Our results show that most small modular reactor designs will actually increase the volume of nuclear waste in need of management and disposal, by factors of 2 to 30 for the reactors in our case study.” (Stanford)

A SMR analysis by Bent Flyvbjerg, the leading global academic in megaproject failures and successes, consulted on over 100 mega projects: Nuclear Fallacy: Why Modular Reactors Can’t Compete With Renewable Energy, Cleantechnica, February 18, 2023.

Then, to satisfy the overwhelming popularity to go nuclear, are any modern “advanced” nuclear reactor designs worth pursuing?

Answer: No. According to a study by the Union of Concerned Scientists: Report Finds That ‘Advanced’ Nuclear Reactor Designs Are No Better Than Current Reactors— and Some Are Worse, March 18, 2021. The 140-page report highlights studies of (1) sodium-cooled reactors (2) molten salt-fueled reactors (3) high-temperature gas-cooled reactors and whether they meet the requirements of (a) safer (b) more secure (c) lower risk of nuclear proliferation and terrorism than the existing fleet of nuclear reactors. None of the three satisfactorily passed the study.

Additionally, the report analyzed unsubstantiated claims developers are making about designs and using little hard evidence to advance their causes. For example, Bill Gates’ statements about the 345-megawatt Natrium claiming it will produce less nuclear waste and be safer than conventional light-water reactors. The UCS report found the sodium-cooled fast reactor Natrium to be less “uranium-efficient,” and it would not reduce the amount of waste, and it’s subject to serious safety problems not at issue with conventional light-water reactors, e.g., sodium coolant can burn when exposed to air or water, and its fast-reactor could experience uncontrollable energy increases leading to rapid core melting, which is the overriding bane of nuclear energy.

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists: Timing is another killer of contemporary designs. According to requirements to be met by federal regulators, it could take up to 20 years and billions of dollars to commercialize non-light-water reactors, fuel cycle facilities, and related infrastructure. Timing, timing, timing is everything when it comes to meeting the necessity of reaching net zero emissions as global warming is not waiting around for solutions. It is accelerating like never before as stated by Dr. James Hansen (Columbia University): “There has been a staggering increase in Earth’s energy imbalance.” Hansen’s formula supporting that statement points to a distinct possibility of 1.5C right around the corner. Which begs the question: How long does it take to plan, approve, build, and commission a nuclear reactor? Oh, well!

In conclusion, the Union of Concerned Scientists recommends: “The DOE and Congress should consider spending more research and development dollars on improving the safety and security of light-water reactors, rather than on commercializing immature, overhyped non-light-water reactor designs.”

As usual in cases with extremely difficult circumstances dealing with nature there are no easy answers but plenty of traps. In that regard, is nuclear energy a Trojan Horse for devastating global warming?

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Robert Hunziker.

The Akosombo Dam in the Volta River, inaugurated in 1965 during Kwame Nkrumah’s presidency.

In June, the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Solutions Network published its Sustainable Development Report 2023, which tracks the progress of the 193 member states towards attaining the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). ‘From 2015 to 2019’, the network wrote, ‘the world made some progress on the SDGs, although this was already vastly insufficient to achieve the goals. Since the outbreak of the pandemic in 2020 and other simultaneous crises, SDG progress has stalled globally’. This development agenda was adopted in 2015, with targets intended to be met by 2030. However, halfway to this deadline, the report noted that ‘all of the SDGs are seriously off track’. Why are the UN member states unable to meet their SDG commitments? ‘At their core’, the network said, ‘the SDGs are an investment agenda: it is critical that UN member states adopt and implement the SDG stimulus and support a comprehensive reform of the global financial architecture’. However, few states have met their financial obligations. Indeed, to realise the SDG agenda, the poorer nations would require at least an additional $4 trillion in investment per year.

No development is possible these days, as most of the poorer nations are in the grip of a permanent debt crisis. That is why the Sustainable Development Report 2023 calls for a revision of the credit rating system, which paralyses the ability of countries to borrow money (and when they are able to borrow, it is at rates significantly higher than those given to richer countries). Furthermore, the report calls on the banking system to revise liquidity structures for poorer countries, ‘especially regarding sovereign debt, to forestall self-fulfilling banking and balance-of-payments crises’.

It is essential to place the sovereign debt crisis at the top of discussions on development. The UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) estimates that ‘the public debt of developing countries, excluding China, reached $11.5 trillion in 2021’. That same year, developing countries paid $400 billion to service their debt – more than twice the amount of official development aid they received. Most countries are not borrowing money to invest in their populations, but to pay off the bondholders, which is why we consider this not financing for development but financing for debt-servicing.

The TAZARA Railway (or Uhuru Railway), connecting the East African countries of Tanzania and Zambia, was funded by China, constructed by Chinese and African workers, and completed in 1975.

Reading the UN and academic literature on development is depressing. The conversation is trapped by the strictures of the intractable and permanent debt crisis. Whether the issue of debt is highlighted or ignored, its existence forecloses the possibility of any genuine advance for the world’s peoples. Conclusions of reports often end with a moral call – this is what should happen – rather than an assessment of the situation based on the facts of the neocolonial structure of the world economy: developing countries, with rich holdings of resources, are unable to earn just prices for their exports, which means that they do not accumulate sufficient wealth to industrialise with their own population’s well-being in mind, nor can they finance the social goods required for their population. Due to this suffocation from debt, and due to the impoverishment of academic development theory, no effective general theoretical orientation has been provided to guide realistic and holistic development agendas, and no outlines seem readily available for an exit from the permanent debt-austerity cycle.

Collage of the Aswan High Dam (Egypt), Bhilai Steel Plant (India), and the Eisenhüttenstadt high-rise housing project (German Democratic Republic).

At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we are eager to open a discussion about the need for a new socialist development theory – one that is built from the projects being pursued by peoples’ movements and progressive governments. As part of that discussion, we offer our latest dossier, The World Needs a New Socialist Development Theory, which surveys the terrain of development theory from 1945 to the present and offers a few gestures towards a new paradigm. As we note in the dossier:

Starting with the facts would require an acknowledgement of the problems of debt and deindustrialisation, the reliance upon primary product exports, the reality of transfer pricing and other instruments employed by multinational corporations to squeeze the royalties from the exporting states, the difficulties of implementing new and comprehensive industrial strategies, and the need to build the technological, scientific, and bureaucratic capacities of populations in most of the world. These facts have been hard to overcome by governments in the Global South, although now – with the emergence of the new South-South institutions and China’s global initiatives – these governments have more choices than in decades past and are no longer as dependent on the Western-controlled financial and trade institutions. These new realities demand the formulation of new development theories, new assessments of the possibilities of and pathways to transcending the obstinate facts of social despair. In other words, what has been put back on the table is the necessity for national planning and regional cooperation as well as the fight to produce a better external environment for finance and trade.

Anshan Iron and Steel Company was renovated and expanded as one of the 156 construction projects in China that was supported by the Soviet Union in the 1950s.

A recent conversation in Berlin with our partners at International Research Centre DDR (IF DDR) led to the realisation that this dossier failed to engage with the debates and discussions around the development that took place in the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic (DDR), Yugoslavia, and the broader international communist movement. As early as the Second Congress of the Communist International, held in Moscow in 1920, communists began to formulate a theory of ‘non-capitalist development’ (NCD) for societies that had been colonised and integrated into the capitalist world economy while still retaining pre-capitalist forms of production and social hierarchy. The general understanding of NCD was that post-colonial societies could circumvent capitalism and advance through a national-democratic process to socialism. NCD theory, which was developed at international conferences of communist and workers’ parties and elaborated upon by Soviet scholars such as Rostislav A. Ulyanovsky and Sergei Tiulpanov in journals like the World Marxist Review, was centred on three transformations:

• Agrarian reform, to lift the peasantry out of its condition of destitution and to break the power of landlords.
• The nationalisation of key economic sectors, such as industry and trade, to restrict the power of foreign monopolies.
• The democratisation of political structures, education, and healthcare to lay the socio-political foundations for socialism.

Unlike the import-substitution industrialisation policy advanced by institutions such as the UN Economic Commission for Latin America, NCD theory had a much firmer understanding of the need to democratise society rather than to merely turn around the terms of trade. IF DDR’s ‘Friendship’ series features a powerful recounting of the practical application of NCD theory in Mali during the 1960s in an article written by Matthew Read. IF DDR and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research will be working on a comprehensive study of NCD theory.

Page from Usul al-‘Adl li-Wullat al-Umur wa-Ahl al-Fadl wa-al-Salatin (‘The Administration of Justice for Governors, Princes, and the Meritorious Rulers’), c. late 1700s.

Prior to colonialism, African and Arab scholars in West Africa had already begun to work out the elements of a development theory. For example, ʿUthman ibn Muhammad ibn ʿUthman ibn Fodyo (1754–1817), the Fulani sheikh who founded the Sokoto Caliphate (1804–1903), wrote Usul al-‘Adl li-Wullat al-Umur wa-Ahl al-Fadl wa-al-Salatin (‘The Administration of Justice for Governors, Princes, and the Meritorious Rulers’) to guide himself and his followers on a path to lift up his people. The text is interesting for the principles it outlines, but – given the level of social production at the time – the caliphate relied on a system of low technical productivity and enslaved labour. Before the people of West Africa could wrest power from the caliphate and drive their own society forward, the last caliph was killed by the British, who – along with the Germans and French – seized the land and subordinated its history to that of Europe. Five decades later, Modibo Keïta, a communist militant, led Mali’s independence movement, seeking to reverse the subordination of African lands through the NCD project. Keïta did not explicitly draw a direct line back to ibn Fodyo – whose influence could be seen across West Africa – but we might imagine the hidden itineraries, the remarkable continuities between those old ideas (despite their saturation in the wretched social hierarchies of their time) and the new ideas that were put forward by Third World intellectuals.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/15/the-world-needs-a-new-development-theory-that-does-not-trap-the-poor-in-poverty/feed/ 0 412067 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/15/the-federal-debt-trap-issues-and-possible-solutions/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/15/the-federal-debt-trap-issues-and-possible-solutions/#respond Sat, 15 Jul 2023 05:45:16 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=142125

“Rather than collecting taxes from the wealthy,” wrote the New York Times Editorial Board in a July 7 opinion piece, “the government is paying the wealthy to borrow their money.”

Titled “America Is Living on Borrowed Money,” the editorial observes that over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), annual federal budget deficits will average around $2 trillion per year. By 2029, just the interest on the debt is projected to exceed the national defense budget, which currently eats up over half of the federal discretionary budget. In 2029, net interest on the debt is projected to total $1.07 trillion, while defense spending is projected at $1.04 trillion. By 2033, says the CBO, interest payments will reach a sum equal to 3.6 percent of the nation’s economic output.

The debt ceiling compromise did little to alleviate that situation. Before the deal, the CBO projected the federal debt would reach roughly $46.7 trillion in 2033. After the deal, it projected the total at $45.2 trillion, only slightly less – and still equal to 115% of the nation’s annual economic output, the highest level on record.

Acknowledging that the legislation achieved little, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said after the vote that he intended to form a bipartisan commission “so we can find the waste and we can make the real decisions to really take care of this debt.” The NYT Editorial Board concluded:

Any substantive deal will eventually require a combination of increased revenue and reduced spending …. Both parties will have to compromise: Republicans must accept the necessity of collecting what the government is owed and of imposing taxes on the wealthy. Democrats must recognize that changes to Social Security and Medicare, the major drivers of expected federal spending growth, should be on the table. Anything less will prove fiscally unsustainable.

The Elephant in the Room

Omitted was any mention of trimming the defense budget, which currently accounts for more than half of the federal government’s discretionary spending and nearly two-thirds of its contract spending. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), who cast the sole dissenting vote on the recent $886 billion defense budget in the House Armed Services Committee, has detailed some of the Pentagon’s excesses. For decades, he writes, legacy military contractors have charged the federal government exorbitant sums for everything from fighter jets to basic hardware. Lockheed Martin, for example, has used its monopoly on F-35 fighter jets to profit from maintenance that only they can provide, with the work needed to support and upgrade existing jets projected to cost taxpayers over $1.3 trillion. TransDigm, another contractor responsible for supplying spare parts for the military, was found to be charging the Pentagon more than four times the market price for their products.

Rep. Khanna concludes, “Keeping America strong starts at home. It means ensuring access to quality, affordable healthcare and education, strengthening our economy with good-paying jobs, and giving Americans the tools they need to pursue the American Dream.… Bloated military spending is not the answer.… We can’t continue to sign a blank check to price-gouging defense contractors while Americans struggle here at home.”

In an address to the UN Security Council on Ukraine aid on June 29, 2023, Max Blumenthal added fuel to those allegations. He said:

Just June 28th, as emergency crews work to clean up yet another toxic train derailment in the United States, this time on the Montana River, further exposing our nation’s chronically underfunded infrastructure and its threats to our health, the Pentagon announced plans to send an additional $500 million worth of military aid to Ukraine….

This policy, … which sees Washington prioritize unrestrained funding for a proxy war with a nuclear power in a foreign land … while our domestic infrastructure falls apart before our eyes, exposes a disturbing dynamic at the heart of the Ukraine conflict – an international Ponzi scheme that enables Western elites to seize hard-earned wealth from the hands of average U.S citizens and funnel it into the coffers of a foreign government that even Transparency International ranks as consistently one of the most corrupt in Europe.

The U.S. government has yet to conduct an official audit of its funding for Ukraine. The American public has no idea where their tax dollars are going. And that’s why this week we at the Grayzone published an independent audit of U.S. tax dollar allocations to Ukraine throughout the fiscal years 2022 and ’23.

Among other dubious payments they found were $4.5 million from the U.S. Social Security Administration to the Kiev government, and $4.5 billion from USAID to pay off Ukraine’s sovereign debt, “much of which is owned by the global investment firm BlackRock. That amounts to $30 taken from every U.S citizen at a time when 4 in 10 Americans cannot afford a $400 emergency.”

The Black Hole of the Pentagon Budget

The Pentagon failed its fifth budget audit in 2022 and was unable to account for more than half of its assets, or more than $3 trillion. According to a CBS News report, defense contractors overcharged the Defense Department by nearly 40-50%; and according to the Office of the Inspector General for the Defense Department, overcharging sometimes reached more than 4,000%. The $886 billion budget request for FY2024 is the highest ever sought.

Following repeated concerns about fraud, waste and abuse in the Pentagon, in June 2023 a bipartisan group of senators introduced legislation to ensure the Defense Department passes a clean audit next year. The Audit the Pentagon Act of 2023 would require the Defense Department to pass a full, independent audit in fiscal 2024. Any agency within the Pentagon failing to pass a clean audit would be forced to return 1% of its budget for deficit reduction.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) observed that the Pentagon “and the military industrial complex have been plagued by a massive amount of waste, fraud, and financial mismanagement for decades.… [W]e have got to end the absurdity of the Pentagon being the only agency in the federal government that has never passed an independent audit.”

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said the Pentagon “should have to meet the same annual auditing standards as every other agency…. From buying $14,000 toilet seats to losing track of warehouses full of spare parts, the Department of Defense has been plagued by wasteful spending for decades. … Every dollar the Pentagon squanders is a dollar not used to support service members, bolster national security or strengthen military readiness.”

But defense audits have been promised before and have not been completed. In 2017, Michigan State University Prof. Mark Skidmore, working with graduate students and with Catherine Austin Fitts, former assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development, found $21 trillion in unauthorized spending in the departments of Defense and Housing and Urban Development for the years 1998-2015. As reported in MSUToday, Skidmore got involved when he heard Fitts refer to a report indicating the Army had $6.5 trillion in unsupported adjustments (or spending) in fiscal 2015. Since the Army’s budget was then only $122 billion, that meant unsupported adjustments were 54 times the spending authorized by Congress. Thinking Fitts must have made a mistake, Skidmore investigated and found that unsupported adjustments were indeed $6.5 trillion.

Four days after Skidmore discussed his team’s findings on a USAWatchdog podcast, the Department of Defense announced it would conduct its first-ever department-wide independent financial audit. But it evidently failed in that endeavor. As Bernie Sanders observes, the Pentagon has never passed an independent audit. It failed its fifth audit in 2022. Whether it will pass this sixth one, or whether the audit will lead to budget cuts, remains to be seen. The Pentagon budget seems to be untouchable.

Tackling the Other Elephant: The Interest Monster

If the sacrosanct military budget cannot be trimmed, what about that other massive budget item, interest on the federal debt? Promising proposals for clipping both the interest and the debt itself were made in conjunction with earlier debt ceiling crises. In November 2010, Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, wrote:

There is no reason that the Fed can’t just buy this debt (as it is largely doing) and hold it indefinitely. If the Fed holds the debt, there is no interest burden for future taxpayers. The Fed refunds its interest earnings to the Treasury every year. Last year the Fed refunded almost $80 billion in interest to the Treasury, nearly 40 percent of the country’s net interest burden. And the Fed has other tools to ensure that the expansion of the monetary base required to purchase the debt does not lead to inflation.

In 2011, Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul proposed dealing with the debt ceiling by simply voiding out the $1.7 trillion in federal securities then held by the Fed. As Stephen Gandel explained Paul’s solution in Time Magazine, the Treasury pays interest on the securities to the Fed, which returns 90% of these payments to the Treasury. Despite this shell game of payments, the $1.7 trillion in US bonds owned by the Fed is still counted toward the debt ceiling. Paul’s plan:

Get the Fed and the Treasury to rip up that debt. It’s fake debt anyway. And the Fed is legally allowed to return the debt to the Treasury to be destroyed.

Congressman Alan Grayson, a Democrat, also endorsed this proposal.

Taxing the Bubble Economy

In a July 8, 2023 article on Naked Capitalism titled “The United States’ Financial Quandary: ZIRP’s Only Exit Path Is a Crash,” economist Michael Hudson points to the speculative bubbles blown by the Fed’s Zero Interest Rate Policy, dating back to the Great Recession of 2008-09. The result is a Ponzi scheme, says Hudson, and there is no way out but to write down the debt or let the economy crash.

According to Fed insider Danielle DiMartino Booth, it is those speculative bubbles that Fed Chair Jerome Powell has attempted to pop with the drastic interest rate hikes of the last year, eliminating the “Fed Put,” the presumption that the Fed will always come to the rescue of the speculative market. That tack actually seems to be working; but the approach has resulted in serious collateral damage to mainstream businesses and the productive economic base. (See my earlier article here.)

Another way to trim the fat from the “financialized” economy is a small financial transactions tax. That solution was also discussed in an earlier article (here), drawing on a 2023 book titled A Tale of Two Economies: A New Financial Operating System for the American Economy by Wall Street veteran Scott Smith. He argues that we are taxing the wrong things – income and physical sales. We actually have two economies – the material economy in which goods and services are bought and sold, and the monetary economy involving the trading of financial assets (stocks, bonds, currencies, etc.) – basically “money making money” without producing new goods or services.

Drawing on data from the Bank for International Settlements and the Federal Reserve, Smith shows that the monetary economy is hundreds of times larger than the physical economy. The budget gap could be closed by imposing a tax of a mere 0.1% on financial transactions, while eliminating not just income taxes but every other tax we pay today. For a financial transactions tax (FTT) of 0.25%, we could fund benefits we cannot afford today that would stimulate growth in the real economy, including not just infrastructure and development but free college, a universal basic income, and free healthcare for all. Smith contends we could even pay off the national debt in ten years or less with a 0.25% FTT.

Funding Infrastructure through a National Infrastructure Bank

Another way to fund critical infrastructure without tapping the federal budget is through a 1930s-style work-around on the model of Roosevelt’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation. HR 4052, a proposal for a national infrastructure bank on that model, is currently before Congress and has widespread support. The proposed bank is designed to be a true depository bank, which can leverage its funds as all banks are allowed to do: with a 10% capital requirement, it can leverage $1 in capital into $10 in loans.

For capitalization, the bill proposes to follow the lead of Alexander Hamilton’s First U.S. Bank: shares in the bank will be swapped for existing U.S. bonds. The shares will earn a 2% dividend and are non-voting. Control of the bank and its operations will remain with the public, an independent board of directors, and a panel of carefully selected non-partisan experts, precluding manipulation for political ends.

America achieved its greatest-ever infrastructure campaign in the midst of the Great Depression. We can do that again today, and we can do it with the same machinery: off-budget financing through a government-owned national financial institution.

Granted, these proposals are not likely to be implemented until we are actually facing another Great Depression, or at least a Great Recession; but Michael Hudson and other pundits are predicting that outcome in the not-too-distant future. It is good to have some viable alternatives on the table for consideration when, as in the 1930s, politicians are compelled to seek them out.

• First published on ScheerPost.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ellen Brown.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/07/15/the-federal-debt-trap-issues-and-possible-solutions/feed/ 0 412020 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/29/bhagwa-love-trap-an-elaborate-conspiracy-theory-in-response-to-the-love-jihad-narrative/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/29/bhagwa-love-trap-an-elaborate-conspiracy-theory-in-response-to-the-love-jihad-narrative/#respond Thu, 29 Jun 2023 13:40:51 +0000 https://www.altnews.in/?p=158557 A video surfaced on social media on April 7, 2023, featuring a man addressing a crowd outside a mosque in Farooq Nagar, Nagpur. Facing the gathering that emerges from the...

The post ‘Bhagwa Love Trap’: An elaborate conspiracy theory in response to the ‘Love Jihad’ narrative appeared first on Alt News.

]]> A video surfaced on social media on April 7, 2023, featuring a man addressing a crowd outside a mosque in Farooq Nagar, Nagpur. Facing the gathering that emerges from the mosque, he talks about the ‘Bhagwa Love Trap’. Flanking him on both sides are men holding banners, one of which says, ‘Save daughters, make them study their faith. Our girls are getting converted because they are going astray from the path of their faith’.

‘Bhagwa Love Trap’ (BLT), a conspiracy theory that has gained popularity in certain Muslim groups, revolves around the notion that Hindu men enter relationships with Muslim women with the alleged aim of enticing them away from Islam and persuading them to embrace the Sanatan Dharam. It is a counter-conspiracy theory to the much talked about ‘Love Jihad’ narrative, which holds that Muslim men seduce Hindu women in order to coerce them into converting to Islam. Though the Union government and the National Commission for Women have said that they have no data on ‘Love Jihad’, several BJP-ruled states have given their stamp on the theory by enacting anti-conversion laws and taking other measures.

The BLT theory, on the other hand, has received sustained support through on-ground outreach programmes, speeches by religious leaders, social media campaigns with videos, and news reports churned out by influencers. Asked about his take on the theory, AIMIM leader Asaduddin Owaisi, however, told Alt News, “Mohabbat ke mamle main kisi ko taang adane ki zaroorat nahi.” (No one should interfere in matters of love).

What the man in the Nagpur video says gives us a fair idea about how the BLT conspiracy theory is gaining ground. He says,

“I appeal to all the brothers, the banners that you see here are not here just for the sake of it, they are here to wake you up from your neglectful sleep. We are all aware that our daughters are getting apostate (murtad), it is our responsibility to protect our daughters. We should counsel them, protect their faith and make them aware of how many girls are getting apostate. There are strategies in their ‘Bhagwa Love Trap’ on how to approach our daughters, trap them and make them leave our faith. It is your, mine and everyone’s responsibility to protect our daughters and to do this we have to wake up from our stupor…”

Payment, Job, Property as Reward: Maulana Sajjad Nomani

One of the popular videos circulating on social media features Maulana Sajjad Nomani, an executive committee member of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board. In this 7-minute clip, the cleric asserts that around 8 lakh Muslim women have renounced their faith and ran away with Hindu individuals, labelling these women as murtad (apostates). He further claims that the RSS has formed a large team aimed at training Hindu youth for three to six months, equipping them with Urdu language skills and other etiquette, so that they can lure Muslim women. According to his statements, these Hindu men are incentivized with a sum of Rs 2.5 lakh if they succeed in persuading a Muslim girl to abandon Islam. Additionally, they are offered various benefits such as property and employment. The cleric suggests that millions of Hindu youths have now joined this campaign. The remarks were made by Maulana Sajjad Nomani on 31 December 2021 and the speech is available on his YouTube channel.

It appears that Maulana Sajjad Nomani’s sermon draws inspiration from a fabricated letter attributed to the RSS, which has been circulating for some time. This false letter outlines 12 specific strategies for ‘entrapping’ Muslim women, claiming that the RSS would provide a 15-day training program on converting these women and assimilating them into the folds of “Sanatan Dharma”. This letter was recently debunked by Alt News when it was trending with the hashtag #BhagwaLoveTrap or #Bhagwa_Love_Trap. Furthermore, the figure that a grant of Rs 2.5 lakh would be offered to support these couples in establishing their new households, appears to have been taken from an offer made by the members of Akhil Bharat Hindu Yuva Morcha in 2018.

Another religious leader, Maulana Tauqeer Raza, during an interview with ABP Ganga in early March, echoed a similar claim about Muslim women being ‘entrapped’ by Hindu men. According to him, organizations like Bajrang Dal and Vishwa Hindu Parishad have allegedly offered rewards, including a sum of Rs 2 lakh and other benefits, to Hindu men who succeed in trapping Muslim women. He says that according to a survey, 10 lakh Muslim women have been either seduced, trapped, or kidnapped by Hindu men. Neither Maulana Sajjad Nomani nor Maulana Tauqeer Raza provides the source of these data in their statements. In an interview with Millat Times in April end, Maulana Sajjad Nomani made a clarification regarding his earlier statement. He expressed retracting his previous statement as he was told by an acquaintance that the figure he mentioned in his sermons was wrong. But he expressed that the Muslim community should be concerned even if one girl was being converted, as these allegations should not be taken lightly.

In addition to the aforementioned statements, numerous videos on YouTube have gained thousands of views by discussing the ‘Bhagwa Love Trap’. These videos are typically presented by individuals who engage in lengthy monologues accompanied by dramatic music.

Secular Miya Bhai (SMB)

This YouTube channel boasts of 1.5 million subscribers and has produced multiple videos focusing on ‘Bhagwa Love Trap’. One of the earliest videos found on this subject was uploaded in September 2021, titled “Musalman Sixth Generation Ki Jung Har Rahe Part 1 | Love Trap se Bache,” which garnered over 2 Lakh views.

In this video, the creator asserts that Muslims are losing in the realm of sixth-generation warfare, a psychological battle where the goal is not to capture lands but minds. The video contains a voice-over that launches into a diatribe about the deceptive nature of this warfare, without providing concrete data or evidence. It discusses the concept of “false empowerment” facilitated by social media and highlights instances of non-Muslim men approaching Muslim women under the pretext of learning about Islam, only to gradually manipulate their thoughts.

Within the same month, the uploader shared two additional videos on the same topic. Similar to the first video, the second one lacks substantial content and primarily stirs fear related to the said psychological warfare. The third video in the series presents a nine-step plan aimed at safeguarding the community against the ‘love trap’, which includes suggestions like forming a vigilante team to monitor and address such cases within their respective areas. Between September 2021 and May 2023, this channel produced approximately 36 videos on the subject, with the highest number of uploads occurring in May 2023.

The chart below illustrates the monthly distribution of uploaded videos on the subject.

Haque Media

On May 3, 2023, the channel Haque Media shared a video titled ‘Bhagwa Love Trap Conspiracy Or Myth?‘ The host, Faizul Bari, introduces the programme as a presentation to viewers based on ‘extensive research’. During the broadcast, the anchor discusses numerous cases where Muslim women allegedly eloped with Hindu men, converted to Hinduism, and subsequently faced abandonment or even death at the hands of their spouses after a few months. The anchor highlights the alarming nature of these incidents and raises the question if there is a concerted narrative behind them. To elaborate on this, the anchor presents various statements given by Hindu leaders over the years.

This specific video is of particular importance in the context of this report because it provides an overview of the cases and speeches that are being utilized to promote and substantiate the ‘Bhagwa Love Trap’ theory. It emphasizes a minimum of 19 instances where Muslim women involved in interfaith relationships have experienced deception, murder, or abandonment by their partners. Additionally, it sheds light on at least 17 occurrences where Hindu leaders or Hindu youth have made derogatory comments about Muslim women or have announced reward programs for Hindu youths who manage to marry Muslim women. Furthermore, it touches upon notable online incidents such as the ‘Bulli bai’ and ‘Sulli deals’ GitHub applications, which garnered significant media coverage. Interestingly, the host also mentions the figures mentioned by Maulana Sajjad Nomani and Maulana Tauqeer Raza. The video portrays these events as the inception of an ongoing campaign, highlighting the need for a defence mechanism for Muslim women against such occurrences.

In the latter half of the video, the host says that Muslim women from all walks of life are becoming victims of this campaign. He claims that Muslim women from strict households are being trapped through mobile games that have inbuilt chat features.

Speaking to Scroll about ‘Bhagwa Love Trap’, Faizul Bari said that he saw it as his duty to warn people “about the repercussions of such a relationship. I see it from a religious point of view. It is my religious duty to stop people from indulging in sin.” He added, “We should also speak against interfaith relationships between Muslim men and Hindu women because it causes a feeling of anxiety in Hindu society.”

Raza Graphy

This channel uploaded a video on May 23, 2023, titled, “सरकारी भगवा लव ट्रैप, पूरी प्लानिंग और षड्यंत्र के साथ मुसलमान लड़कियों को फसाया जा रहा जाल में!”. This video, too, contains long monologues with graphics presented in between. In the introductory segment of the video, the host, Muhammed Raza, introduces the term ‘Sarkari Bhagwa Love Trap’.

He begins by narrating an incident from Bareilly where a railway staffer, Ashish, was ‘caught’ with a Muslim woman at a guest house. He says that it was allegedly found that Ashish had explicit photos of multiple women in his phone. According to media reports, members of a Muslim organization received a ‘tip-off’ about the couple and, upon investigating, found the information to be credible. The host uses this example to show what he calls the ‘sarkari’ dimension of the conspiracy. He says that films like ‘The Kerala Story,’ which received endorsement from the Prime Minister and the home minister, are utilized to propagate the concept of ‘reverse Love Jihad’. According to his explanation, it is reverse ‘Love Jihad’ because first the conspiracy theory of ‘Love Jihad’ is established and then the Hindu youth are being encouraged to avenge it.

Reflecting on the Barielly incident, the host asserts that the Hindu community brazenly engages in such actions. He attributes the responsibility for these incidents to the Muslim girls and their parents. According to the host, these girls are fully aware of the faith of their partners, yet they distance themselves from their own community. He further emphasizes that the fault also lies with the girls’ parents, stating that granting them freedom is not inherently wrong, however, some girls take advantage of this freedom and education. The host suggests that if these girls feel tempted, they should simply request their parents to arrange their marriages.

Muslim girls who wear jeans end up in a room with Hindu boys

The host also makes the observation that these girls possess commendable academic achievements, which leads their parents to be lenient and not object to their abandoning the burqa. He says he has personally witnessed numerous cases in his own vicinity where parents would disapprove of their son wearing jeans. However, now the same parents allow their daughters to wear hijabs and jeans, engage in dancing, and share their performances on social media. The host says that daughters of these parents eventually discover their own children in private rooms (he names a popular hotel room aggregator platform) with men from the Hindu community.

The host then proceeds to discuss how law enforcement works in different ways based on the religion of the perpetrator during the Modi regime. He asserts that if a Muslim man is caught with a Hindu woman, he is immediately subjected to mob violence, whereas if a Muslim woman is caught with a Hindu man, society tends to portray it as the Muslim community harassing the girl, leading to complaints being filed against members of the Muslim community. The host highlights an incident that apparently occurred in Moradabad, Uttar Pradesh, and expresses his view that these girls are shameless, as they confront the mob and file cases against them. (We could not find any news report on this said incident; just an unverified video uploaded on Twitter.)

He also talks about another case where a Muslim girl stood up for herself, and continues to put the blame on these girls and other influencers with Muslim names, suggesting that these influencers serve as their source of inspiration. Towards the end, the host brings attention to a tragic incident where a Muslim girl involved in a live-in relationship with her Hindu partner in Noida was murdered by him.

In a telephonic conversation with Alt News, Mr Raza summarized his perspective on ‘Bhagwa Love Trap’. “BLT is an organised effort because Hindutva leaders over the years have publicly announced reward programmes and other incentives for Hindu youth if they marry Muslim women. There are multiple Telegram chats of Hindu youth that have gone viral where they are seen making disgusting remarks towards Muslim women. This systematic promotion occurs due to the authorities’ tendency to swiftly initiate ‘investigation’ when a Muslim man marries a Hindu woman, while no action is taken against those individuals who announce such reward programs,” said Raza.

Raza also expressed his opposition to moral policing and emphasized the importance of adhering to legal and constitutional processes. “I am on the side of the Constitution and I believe no one should be harassed,” he added.

Twitter and Instagram Campaigners

A noticeable and coordinated effort to amplify the ‘Bhagwa Love Trap’ theory is evident on social media platforms. It involves prominent users who amplify news reports of interfaith couples being targeted by mobs, as well as participate in harassing female voices that raise objections to these moral policing activities. Additionally, certain users engage in doxxing and contribute to the perpetuation of this narrative through repetitive amplification. They share graphics depicting the perceived ‘fate’ of Muslim women in interfaith relationships or distribute religious sermons that ‘warn’ the community about perceived ‘forces’ responsible for luring Muslim girls away.

For instance, a user with 44,000 followers shared a tweet about ‘Bhagwa Love Trap’, which garnered close to 1.5 lakh views on the platform. It is worth noting that this same user had previously disseminated a fabricated letter attributed to the RSS, which outlined various strategies for Hindu men to Muslim women and even mentioned monetary rewards for these couples. In the same month, this user tweeted news reports about interfaith relationships where Muslim women were either deceived or murdered. He has also tweeted a two-year-old video of Hindutva youth leader Sukhdev Sahdev who talked about strategically targeting Muslim women.

Click to view slideshow.

As of June 7, there is an account that has gained over 2,000 followers despite having only 70 tweets. This account frequently shares information about interfaith couples, sometimes even revealing their social media profiles or residential addresses. It is important to note that this is not an isolated case, as there are several other accounts engaging in similar activities. Furthermore, these accounts relentlessly target and harass anyone who criticizes their campaign, using social media hashtags to direct their attacks towards these individuals. Below is a collage of some of the tweets made by these accounts:

On Instagram, a search for hashtags such as #Bhagwa_Love_Trap, #BhagwaLoveTrap, or #भगवा_लव_ट्रैप reveals a significant number of posts. Among these posts are various content types, including details about interfaith couples, infographics highlighting the risks associated with ‘Bhagwa Love Trap’, and other related material. It’s worth noting that some of these posts date back to December 2021, indicating the longevity and prevalence of this type of content on the platform. In the past, News Meter had published a story regarding an Instagram page named ‘Jhamunda_official._’. This account was known for collecting information about Muslim women seen in public places with men of different faith, and subsequently sharing these details online.

Below is a collage of some of the posts that can be found on Instagram using these hashtags.

Click to view slideshow.

 

On-ground Campaigns, Moral Policing and Arrests

On April 7 and April 14, two videos filmed in Nagpur surfaced on Facebook, featuring individuals holding banners outside a mosque and delivering speeches. In one of the videos, a man expresses concern about daughters having phones protected with passwords. He suggests that worldly education should only be imparted if the safety of one’s child is ensured. He also urges the youth to be vigilant of such development and provide counselling to girls who stray away from the community.

On 24 May, in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, media outlets reported that the police registered FIR against 10 unidentified individuals under section 153-A (promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). The charges were related to the distribution of pamphlets containing objectionable content targeting the RSS and the Bajrang Dal on the night of May 20. Subsequently, on May 26, it was reported that five individuals involved in the incident had been identified and arrested. According to police, the pamphlets contained statements alleging that “attempts are being made to turn 10 lakh Muslim girls into Kafirs (non-believers)” and that 800 Muslim girls in Amravati city of Maharashtra were subjected to conversion.

As of June 5, Alt News has documented 31 cases of moral policing perpetrated by Muslim men across different regions of the country. The highest number of incidents occurred in Uttar Pradesh, with 12 cases, followed by Telangana with 4 cases and Madhya Pradesh with 3 cases. The exact locations of four instances remain unverified. It’s important to note that this data has been manually collected by monitoring accounts associated with the propagation of the ‘Bhagwa Love Trap’ conspiracy, and the actual numbers may vary.

In addition to the five arrests made in Indore, there were reports on May 27 about six individuals being apprehended for harassing a man who was out for dinner with his female Muslim friend. Similarly, on the same day, two Muslim youths, both aged 20, were arrested for harassing a Hindu man who was accompanied by his female Muslim friend at an eatery in Karnataka. In Moradabad, Uttar Pradesh, a shop owner was arrested following a complaint filed by a Muslim woman who was allegedly harassed and threatened by a group of individuals while she was at a market place with a male Hindu friend. According to a report by The Quint, six individuals were apprehended in Meerut for their involvement in the harassment and intimidation of a Hindu man on May 13. The incident occurred while he was riding a bike with a Muslim woman. Similarly, in Muzzafarnagar, four men were arrested for harassing a Hindu man who was accompanied by his female Muslim friend.

The Anxiety of the Muslim Community and the Agency of Muslim Women

Undoubtedly, in recent years, Muslim women have unquestionably become targets of Hindutva groups through various means such as speeches, video skits, reward programs, anti-Hijab campaigns, digital auctions such as ‘Bulli bai’ and ‘Sulli deals’, and unchecked sexual violence on social media. It is these incidents that are used to justify the Bhagwa Love Trap conspiracy.

For example, as mentioned at the beginning of the article, a video addressing the ‘Bhagwa Love Trap’ highlights 17 instances where Hindu leaders or youth have made derogatory remarks about Muslim women or have openly declared reward programs for Hindu youth who successfully marry Muslim women. Such statements and announcements have been made in public settings and are of grave concern to society at large. These incidents have instilled a sense of panic within the Muslim community, and the reactions to these events are evident for all to see. In fact, a prominent social activist Khalida Parveen, with extensive experience in grassroots-level work, recently took to Twitter to validate the existence of the ‘Bhagwa Love Trap’ conspiracy, while labelling its counterpart, ‘Love Jihad,’ as mere propaganda.

We reached out to Ms. Khalida Parveen to understand the motivation behind her tweet. According to her, the legitimacy of the ‘Bhagwa Love Trap’ narrative stems from ‘the persistent urging of Hindu youth by influential Hindutva figures to ensnare Muslim girls’. These figures openly declare reward programs and utilize various strategies to amplify their message.

“See, interfaith relationships have been happening for ages, I am least bothered about it. My concern is teenage girls getting trapped. Recently, in my own professional capacity, I have been actively involved in counselling teenage Muslim girls who find themselves entangled in relationships with Hindu boys, only to be subsequently abandoned under the pretext of mere ‘time pass’”, said Ms. Parveen. She added, “These households often have their own internal challenges, which push these girls to seek alternative paths, leading them into these precarious situations. In some instances, these girls even get coerced into substance abuse.”

It is unclear how these teenage relationships prove the existence of ‘Bhagwa Love Trap’, as it is not new for teenagers to get into relationships against the will of their parents, then break up or in extreme cases, get into substance abuse through various means.

When we inquired about the cases of moral policing occurring across the country, she said consenting adults should not be subjected to harassment. “At best, these men should offer counselling to these adult women and can inform their families about their daughter. I believe the families should also keep their doors open and not abandon these women when they realise that their life is going to be miserable. This way, they have a reliable support system to fall back on in case of any adversities within their relationship,” said Ms. Parveen.

Furthermore, she recommended that men who encounter such situations should refrain from recording videos and circulating them on social media, instead, they should engage in direct conversations with the families without resorting to physical harassment and intimidation which do not yield any positive result. Above all, she stressed one should not interfere in adult women’s choices and leave them free. “After all it’s their life and they are accountable for their deeds in front of Allah,” said Ms. Parveen.

We tried to reach out to Maulana Sajjad Nomani, but his son convyeed to Alt News that interviewing the MAulana was not feasible.

It’s not that all clerics are on the same page on the BLT issue. In an interview with The Hindu, Maulana Khalid Saifullah Rahmani, the president of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) said, “This kind of propaganda is being done by the Sangh Parivar. Some of our emotional orators spice up their speeches with this, which is harmful for Muslims. If something like this does happen, then it is due to co-education and workplaces where there are both men and women working, and this has happened in the past too.”

‘Moral Policing Must be Unconditionally Condemned’

In a telephonic conversation with Alt News, Ghazala Wahab, the editor of FORCE Magazine and the author of the book ‘Born a Muslim: Some Truths about Islam in India’, said that there is no justification for moral policing.

“I object to the term moral policing because it provides a cover of morality to criminal activity. All these acts of vigilantism against women in public places must be regarded as sexual harassment or molestation. No one has any right to heckle and photograph any woman. This harassment in the name of moral policing must be unconditionally condemned. It is important to note that this issue is not limited to Muslim women alone. Over the past 15-20 years, Hindu vigilante groups have been harassing young individuals on the Valentine’s Day. This behaviour has persisted because law enforcement agencies do not take serious action against these criminals. They should be booked under sexual harassment laws and made examples of so that no one gets tempted to become the custodian of a woman’s morality,” said Wahab.

“When a woman, regardless of her religious background, chooses to go out with a man, she is already in a vulnerable position due to the fear of retribution from their parents, neighbours, and extended family. This vulnerability stems from the conservative nature of our society, which is quick to put a woman’s character under the microscope at the first opportunity. Instead of fostering an inclusive and secure environment for young individuals to socialize, we are inadvertently putting their lives at risk by endorsing such vigilantism. It is important to understand that such public naming and shaming can traumatize individuals to the point of self-harm or compel them to flee from home due to the fear instilled by their parents or extended family.”

“Parents also have a role to play. They should perceive these incidents as direct attacks on their children and stand up for them, instead of blaming their children for bringing shame to the family,” she added.

The post ‘Bhagwa Love Trap’: An elaborate conspiracy theory in response to the ‘Love Jihad’ narrative appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Kalim Ahmed.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/29/bhagwa-love-trap-an-elaborate-conspiracy-theory-in-response-to-the-love-jihad-narrative/feed/ 0 408132 https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/22/ukrainian-army-says-russians-walked-into-bakhmut-trap/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/22/ukrainian-army-says-russians-walked-into-bakhmut-trap/#respond Mon, 22 May 2023 15:15:12 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=28ef17970d1091732965b1f1d6d77f85
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/22/ukrainian-army-says-russians-walked-into-bakhmut-trap/feed/ 0 396733 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/10/12/putins-nuclear-war-tourist-trap/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/10/12/putins-nuclear-war-tourist-trap/#respond Wed, 12 Oct 2022 03:55:00 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=2afa0b3a10aec5a1cbdd21b5b88066db according to a stunning admission by Chancellor Scholz. While our bonus episode looks at Putin’s little helper – Elon Musk – we provide a peace plan of our own: get Ukraine what it needs to end the war quickly, because the Munich Agreement – giving Hitler land in exchange for peace – didn’t work in 1938, and the Minsk I and II negotiations with Russia promising essentially the same thing in recent years hasn’t worked either. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is not just a war; it’s ethnic cleansing. And it’s impossible to negotiate with a fascist state that doesn’t think you should exist.   The Gaslit Nation Early Show returns! This week, we open with our reaction to the unsurprising news that Elon Musk, the world's richest sh*tposter, was allegedly communicating with Putin before pushing Russian propaganda on Twitter in a so-called "peace deal" proposal (a.k.a. helping Russia re-group given that it's losing, badly, to Ukraine). Musk denies talking to Putin, but what about a Kremlin proxy, like maybe his financial backers from Russian ally Saudi Arabia in the Twitter deal? We discuss all that and more, answering questions from our listeners at the Democracy Defender level and higher, including what to do about movement in-fighting, what did Saudi Arabia get out of Jared Kushner so far, and where the hell is our justice for January 6th? We'll be back with an all new Gaslit Nation Q&A so keep your questions coming!

This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation with Andrea Chalupa and Sarah Kendzior and was authored by Andrea Chalupa & Sarah Kendzior.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/10/12/putins-nuclear-war-tourist-trap/feed/ 0 340870 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/17/you-are-not-chapo-trap-house/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/17/you-are-not-chapo-trap-house/#respond Wed, 17 Aug 2022 05:58:51 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=252328 I love Chapo Trap House. However, I don’t get much from most of the left media that followed them. The only other leftist podcaster I listen to regularly anymore is Derick Varn, who preceded the Chapo wave and also used to be a kind of conservative. I’m not sure if either of these things is More

The post You Are Not Chapo Trap House appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nick Pemberton.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/17/you-are-not-chapo-trap-house/feed/ 0 324192 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/08/how-to-resist-the-empires-neoliberal-debt-trap/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/08/how-to-resist-the-empires-neoliberal-debt-trap/#respond Mon, 08 Aug 2022 06:05:07 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=251518

Photograph Source: Jonas Bengtsson – CC BY 2.0

Michael Hudson has become famous in recent years. The Financial Times credited him with forecasting the 2008 financial crash and its aftermath. His “magnum opus,” Super Imperialism, now in its third edition, was the first explanation of how going off the gold standard in 1972 allowed the US to force other nations to pay for its wars, while becoming indebted to US banks and financial institutions.

Now, in The Destiny of Civilization: Finance Capitalism, Industrial Capitalism or Socialism, Hudson provides a series of lectures on neoliberalism to Chinese economic planners, meant as a contribution to ongoing Chinese debates about the direction of the super-successful Chinese economy. (This level of trust is shared by few other US economists, notably Jeffrey Sachs and Joseph Stiglitz.) Hudson explains how Washington’s aggressive neoliberalism, bolstered by military force, is backfiring. In one of his many articles in recent months, Hudson says:

 The US/NATO confrontation with Russia in Ukraine is achieving just the opposite of America’s aim of preventing China, Russia and their allies from acting independently of U.S. control over their trade and investment policy. Naming China as America’s main long-term adversary, the Biden Administration’s plan was to split Russia away from China and then cripple China’s own military and economic viability. But the effect of American diplomacy has been to drive Russia and China together, joining with Iran, India and other allies. For the first time since the Bandung Conference of Non-Aligned Nations in 1955, a critical mass is able to be mutually self-sufficient to start the process of achieving independence from Dollar Diplomacy.

Neoliberalism itself is fairly simple: “the government that governs least governs best,” as Ronald Reagan said. The Reagan Revolution slashed taxes for the rich, deregulated basic industry and the banks, gutted environmental, consumer and workplace safety rules, cut back social welfare programs, privatized or contracted out public functions, and emphasized globalization. Free trade agreements led to factory jobs disappearing overseas. In its wake, the Reagan Revolution left a rust belt of abandoned factories, millions of “discouraged workers” no longer counted in unemployment figures, skyrocketing household debt, and an explosion of homelessness.

Chile was the Latin American laboratory for neoliberalism, after General Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup, orchestrated by Nixon and Kissinger, which overthrew the socialist government of President Salvador Allende. Pinochet crushed Allende’s popular economic policies, privatized most public services, slashed the work force, and brought in the “Chicago Boys,” led by economist Milton Friedman, to implement an economic strategy in tune with US mining corporations and banks.

Hudson identifies Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom as Friedman’s inspiration. Hayek warned of “the danger of tyranny that inevitably results from government control of economic decision-making through central planning.” He scorned progressive taxation and pushed for “a race to the bottom” for wages and public spending. He got an echo from Margaret Thatcher, the UK Prime Minister during Reagan’s time, who famously quipped “there is no such thing as society, there is only the market.” Hudson shows how this philosophy and the scorched earth policies it inspired have been the true road to serfdom in the west and everywhere else – at least everywhere Washington can impose the debt regime that strangles prosperity, with military force to back it up.

The FIRE sector – finance, insurance and real estate – has displaced industrialism as driver of the US economy in recent decades, Hudson explains. That sector’s business plan is to “roll back the 20th century’s democratic reforms and lead economies down the road to serfdom and debt peonage… Neoliberal policy sees democratic laws as intruding on liberty if they oblige business to take the common weal into account, e.g., by holding corporations liable for damages that they cause.”

US-style ‘democracy’

The concept of democracy has been twisted: “Democracy as managed by the Donor Class is a set of patronage relationships governed by wealth at the top.” So “what is euphemized as US-style ‘democracy’ is a financial oligarchy privatizing basic infrastructure, health and education. The alternative is what President Biden calls ‘autocracy,’ a hostile label for governments strong enough to block a global rent-seeking oligarchy from taking control. China is deemed autocratic for providing basic needs at subsidized prices instead of charging whatever the market can bear… US and other Western officials define military coups as democratic if they are sponsored by the United States in the hope of promoting neoliberal policies.”

In the case of Venezuela, Hudson comments on Trump’s pirate-like 2018 confiscation of Venezuela’s gold reserves held in London, and placing them at the disposal of the puppet Juan Guaidó. “This was defined as being democratic,” Hudson says, “because the regime change promised to introduce the neoliberal ‘free market’ that is deemed to be the essence of America’s definition of democracy for today’s world.”

The Carter administration staged a similar theft in November 1979, when it “paralyzed Iran’s bank deposits in New York after the Shah was overthrown…. That was viewed as an exceptional one-time action as far as all other financial markets were concerned. But now that the United States is the self-proclaimed ‘exceptional nation,’ such confiscations are becoming a new norm in US diplomacy. Nobody yet knows what happened to Libya’s gold reserves that Muammar Gadafi had intended to be used to back an African alternative to the dollar. And Afghanistan’s gold and other reserves were simply taken by Washington as payment for the cost of ‘freeing’ that country…

“But when the Biden Administration and its NATO allies made a march larger asset grab of some $300 billion of Russia’s foreign bank reserves and currency holdings in March 2022, it made official a radical new epoch in Dollar Diplomacy.” Now “the US confiscations have accelerated the end of the US Treasury-bill standard that has governed world finance since the United States went off gold in 1971.”

In the case of western Europe, Hudson explains how the US used its post-WW2 dominant financial position to impose dependency on its former allies. After the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, the US leant enormous sums to the UK and France, as well as Italy and West Germany. “Neither the World Bank’s reconstruction loans nor the IMF’s balance-of-payments stabilization loans were sufficient to meet the financial needs of European recovery. France lost 60 percent of its gold and foreign exchange reserves during 1946-47… The effect was to concentrate in US Government hands most of the major decisions as to how much, to which countries and on what conditions international loans would be extended.”

The price of ‘friendship’

“Chronic austerity is now also being imposed on Eurozone members, making the euro a satellite currency of the dollar.” Hudson says “this year’s proxy war in Ukraine and imposition of anti-Russian sanctions is a perfect illustration of Henry Kissinger’s quip: ‘It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal’.”

In the current conflict, “Now that NATO and the Eurozone have expanded eastward to include the Baltic states and Poland, the result has been to block the EU politicians in Brussels from following policies at odds with US plans, particularly in relation to Russia, China and other countries the United states treats as adversaries or potential rivals… Countries that do not approve of the combination of US military policies and US takeover of their economic assets face a dilemma: If they do not recycle their dollar inflows in US capital markets, their currencies will rise, threatening to price their exports out of world markets.”

This intense pressure to conform to “Dollar Diplomacy” has a new and special blowback: “the path of least resistance taken by Russia, China and some other payments-surplus nations is to de-dollarize.” Enter gold, of which China, Russia, and their BRICS allies are among the world’s largest producers. Hudson says “gold’s use to settle payments deficits is likely to be the smoothest route in any transition to an alternative currency bloc.” Such a transition is considered an “existential threat” in Washington. So far, however, its efforts to break up Russia, or to roll back China’s revolution, have shown bleak prospects.

A depression is coming

Hudson warns a “long depression” is coming, as inflation in western Europe and the US accelerates. “To Wall Street and its backers,” Hudson says, “the solution to any price inflation is to reduce wages and public social spending,” that is, “to push the economy into recession in order to reduce hiring. Rising unemployment will oblige labor to compete for jobs that pay less and less as the economy slows.” He adds that “public discussion of today’s inflation is framed in a way that avoids blaming [it] on the Biden Administration’s New Cold War sanctions on Russian oil, gas and agriculture, or on oil companies and other sectors using these sanctions as an excuse to charge monopoly prices…

“The entire blame for inflation is placed on wage earners,” Hudson says, “and the response is to make them the victims of the coming austerity, as if their wages are responsible for bidding up oil prices, food prices and other prices resulting from the crisis. The reality is that they are too debt-strapped to be spendthrifts.”

The global effects of the crisis are even more serious. Hudson notes that JP Morgan Chase head Jamie Dimon recently warned Wall Street investors that the sanctions will cause a global “economic hurricane.” And the IMF’s Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva warned that, “To put it simply, we are facing a crisis on top of a crisis.” The Covid pandemic has been capped by inflation, with the war in Ukraine making matters “much worse, and threatening to increase inequality,” adding that “the economic consequences from the war” are “hitting the world’s most vulnerable people…”

Hudson raises a shocking question: “when it comes to global famine, was a more covert and even larger strategy at work? It is now looking like the major aim of the U.S. war in Ukraine all along was merely to serve as a catalyst, an excuse to impose sanctions that would disrupt the world’s food and energy trade, and to manage this crisis in a way that would afford US diplomats an opportunity to not only lock in Western Europe but to confront Global South countries with the choice ‘Your loyalty and neoliberal dependency or your life’ – and, in the process, to ‘thin out’ the world’s non-white populations…” Basic survival hangs in the balance for more than half the world’s people.

An implicit Russian and Chinese counterplan

“What is needed for the world’s non-US/NATO population to survive is a new world trade and financial system,” Hudson says. “More people will die of the Western sanctions than will have died on the Ukrainian battlefield. Financial and trade sanctions are as destructive as military attack.” So Global South countries “need to reject the sanctions and reorient trade to Russia, China, India, Iran and their fellow members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.” A debt moratorium – really a debt repudiation – must be declared. And the World Bank and IMF must be replaced with “a genuine Bank for Economic Acceleration” and “a replacement for the IMF that is free of austerity junk economics and does not subsidize US client oligarchies or currency raids of countries resisting US privatization and financialization takeovers.” Hudson adds that Global South countries should join “a military alliance as an alternative to NATO, to avoid being turned into another Afghanistan, another Libya, another Iraq or Syria or Ukraine.”

Hudson’s book derived from lectures to people involved in China’s economic strategy circles, who invited him largely to hear his opinions about neoliberalism and its risks, and how to avoid them. His basic thesis was that “The tensions between the wealthy and the rest of society have always been mediated by governments… All economies are mixed economies, and the key to understanding any economy, and to designing any national income accounting format, needs to begin with the government’s relation to the private sector… Public policy invariably backs either the wealthy layer at the top or the economy at large. Any pretense by a government to be steering a ‘middle course’ is rarely anything other than a cover for public policies perpetuating a status quo favoring the wealthy, who always have used their wealth to influence and control governments and public policy.”

In a clear comment on Western capitalist countries, Hudson says “political democracies have not shown themselves to be very effective in resisting the tendency to turn into financialized oligarchies. Avoiding that fate requires a strong central power not captured by the propertied financial classes. Throughout history, that was achieved only by palace rulers (in the Bronze Age Near East) or today in socialist economies.”

As if to eliminate any doubt about his central message, Hudson stipulates that “keeping the money and credit system in government hands is China’s great advantage over Western financialized economies.” He adds a four-point set of keys China has used to “avoid the American financial disease”:

+ Instead of privatizing natural monopolies and key infrastructure, China has kept its “commanding heights” in the public domain, headed by banking as the most important public utility.

+ China has pursued an “Economy of High Wages policy by providing high-quality education and health standards to make its labor more productive.”

+ As a socialist economy, China uses government regulation strong enough to prevent an independent financial oligarchy from emerging. (Still to be achieved is a progressive tax policy falling mainly on rentier income, headed by land rent.)

+ China and Russia are creating an alternative international payments system to avoid using the US dollar and SWIFT bank-payments system. The policy of de-dollarizing their monetary systems, foreign trade and investment includes securing their own self-sufficiency in food production, technology and other basic needs.

“US diplomats and politicians accuse nations that put in place public restrictions against monopoly and related rent-seeking of being autocratic and authoritarian if they defend their economies against privatization and the associated American attempt at financial takeover,” Hudson observes. He cites US Secretary of State Blinken saying “The Chinese and Russian governments, among others, are making the argument in public and in private that the United States is in decline so it’s better to cast your lot with their authoritarian visions of the world than our democratic one.”

Chinese President Xi Jinping expressed his view on this issue: “At present, income inequality is a prominent issue around the globe. The rich and the poor in some countries are polarized with the collapse of the middle class. This has led to social disintegration, political polarization, and rampant populism… Our country must resolutely guard against polarization, drive common prosperity, and maintain social harmony and stability.”

Hudson also quotes Russian President Vladimir Putin, who said “this is basically a crisis of approaches and principles that determine the very existence of humans on Earth,” and despite claims in recent decades “that the role of the state was outdated and outgoing,” only strong nation-states can resist the economic carve-up and immiseration of the planet.”

Hudson concludes by saying “America’s response to its declining industrial and economic power at home has been to tighten its control over Europe and other client economies by military force and political sanctions. The result is a new Iron Curtain aiming to block these allies from expanding their trade and investment with the Russian and Chinese economies in the rising Eurasian core. Forcing nations to choose which geopolitical block they will belong to is driving many out of the dollarized trade and investment orbit with remarkable speed.”

It is likely that an end to Dollar Dominance in the world foreshadows a general disintegration of capitalism’s last great empire. The question of how to avoid a turn to fascism at home is not addressed, except to observe that the efforts of Bernie Sanders et al have been blocked, suggesting that stronger medicine is needed.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dee Knight.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/08/how-to-resist-the-empires-neoliberal-debt-trap/feed/ 0 321549 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/06/24/the-g7-prepares-a-divide-and-conquer-trap-as-brics-countries-try-to-reconstitute/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/06/24/the-g7-prepares-a-divide-and-conquer-trap-as-brics-countries-try-to-reconstitute/#respond Fri, 24 Jun 2022 08:58:56 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=247268

Image by Christian Lue.

On Friday June 24, a hasty one-day virtual summit of the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa will occur, hosted by Xi Jinping. The date is important because on Monday June 26, two of the three intrinsically pro-Western leaders from the bloc – Narendra Modi from New Delhi and Cyril Ramaphosa from Pretoria – travel in person to Germany, to be hosted at the G7 summit by Olaf Scholz.

Xi announced the meeting at the end of May, just after German Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited Pretoria. The earlier ambition was to have a post-Covid in-person BRICS summit, which logically would have been in September. That was the case in 2017, in Xiamen, the last time the BRICS met in China.

But in recent weeks, a sense of panic must have arisen in Beijing – and perhaps Moscow – as the realization dawned that two BRICS could well be wheeled and dealed by the G7. The two could thus continue “spalling”; the construction-industry terminology refers to a process (spalling) in which – mainly due to the freezing-thawing cycle – a wall’s masonry and bricks crack, crumble, flake, and even pop out of the wall.

After all, a sleazy deal with the West was struck in Geneva on June 17, when imperialist powers at the World Trade Organization wrecked a vision expressed rhetorically by both Modi and Ramaphosa that waivers would be allowed on Intellectual Property for Covid-19 medicines. But the unity of imperialist states whose leaders have been captured by Big Pharma – openly led by the British, Germans, Swiss and Norwegian and behind the scenes supported by the U.S., French, Canadians and Japanese – mean the subimperial Indians and South Africans could be brought back within the fold.

So on June 24, the BRICS’ line of march may be established, after a period of drift, division and decay within the group. The third western-wayward BRICS capital is Brasilia, thanks to Brazil’s highly unreliable, Trumpian president Jair Bolsonaro, though he should be replaced by former president Lula da Silva (2003-10) if current polls hold firm until the October 2 election.

The stakes are highest for Putin, who on June 22 complained to the (virtual) BRICS Business Forum, “Businessmen of our countries are forced to develop their business under difficult conditions where Western partners neglect the basic principles of market economy, free trade, as well as the inviolability of private property.”

Note his complaint that imperialism has gone rogue, which is also reflected in the way more than $300 billion of Russian state assets kept in Western banks were frozen. (If Russia is doing weekly physical damage of $4.5 billion to Ukraine, those frozen funds would obviously be useful for reparations – but then Putin will have yet more weaponry to accuse the West of hypocrisy when applying sanctions, and after all, with soaring energy prices his oil and gas export revenues are at record highs.)

As a result, said Putin, Russia is “actively redirecting its trade flows and external economic contacts towards reliable international partners, above all the BRICS countries.” And beyond trade, there are monetary opportunities to de-dollarize: “Together with BRICS partners, we are developing reliable alternative mechanisms for international settlements. We are exploring the possibility of creating an international reserve currency based on the basket of BRICS currencies.”

Cynics would quickly point out that over the past eight years, two other international financial initiatives – the never-used “Contingent Reserve Arrangement” supposedly providing $100 billion in the five countries’ hard currency stocks as an alternative lender to the IMF, and a BRICS credit ratings agency – were merely hot air.

The “talk left, walk right” of BRICS’ role in global finance is seen not only in its vigorous financial support for the International Monetary Fund during the 2010s, but more recently in the decision by the BRICS New Development Bank – supposedly an alternative to the World Bank – to declare a freeze on its Russian portfolio in early March, since otherwise it would not have retained its Western credit rating of AA+.

Within that status, however, Fitch soon downgraded the bank’s prospects, reporting, “The Negative Outlook on NDB’s rating is primarily driven by the risk that in the context of the Russia-Ukraine war, the presence and role of Russia as a large shareholder in NDB (19% of capital as of end-2021) leads to a downward revision… [and] in addition, NDB’s country exposure to Russia (13% of loans as of end-2021, 70% of which is to the sovereign) poses downside risks to the bank’s credit risk profile and solvency.

Ironically, Putin succeeded in abiding by international financial rules, aside from shifting contract terms for payment of Russian exports of oil and gas (which he insisted be made in roubles, to raise the Russian currency’s value). That aside, while acting as a rogue subimperialist when it came to the savage invasion of (West-leaning) Ukraine, Putin (unlike his predecessor Boris Yeltsin) has always been a loyal subimperialist when respecting Russia’s foreign debt repayment obligations.

BRICS expansion and global implosion?

The BRICS have been spalling and indeed falling, when compared with high expectations expressed for the bloc a decade ago. If they attempt to reconstitute on June 24 or in subsequent weeks, how might that take shape?

Assume a revived, coherent project of Putin protection or a restated multipolarity is not possible given the inexcusability of Russia’ blatant militarism (when the BRICS have always postured about peaceful resolution of conflict), there is an alternative to rebuilding the wall: expansion. Given the chaos in the bloc, a curious fluidity exists in ideological adherence, such that Beijing announced two potential new BRICS members: centre-left (but IMF-occupied and protest-rich) Argentina and Saudi Arabia, led by the notorious Mohammed Bin Salmon, whose family has for decades been a close ally of Washington – thus giving us BRICSASA?

And if Joe Biden’s U-turn on Saudi Arabia pulls MBS back to the West, then waiting in the wings, according to Chinese officials, are Egypt, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Nigeria, Senegal and Thailand. In 2021, the BRICS Bank already approved new members UAE, Bangladesh, Egypt and Uruguay – no matter how unlikely the combination. So the discussion of expansion could result in an ideological and functional member-mishmash beyond any logical comprehension.

Last month at the BRICS foreign ministers’ meeting, Xi made the main opening speech, and he didn’t mention Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. With that sort of top-down signalling, plus no mention whatsoever of Ukraine in a “BRICS Think Tank” conference in late April (true to form), the ministers offered this milquetoast statement on the main topic of immediate concern to the world:

“The Ministers recalled their national positions concerning the situation in Ukraine as expressed at the appropriate fora, namely the UNSC and UNGA. They supported talks between Russia and Ukraine. They also discussed their concerns over the humanitarian situation in and around Ukraine and expressed their support to efforts of the UN Secretary-General, UN Agencies and ICRC to provide humanitarian aid in accordance with UN General Assembly resolution 46/182.”

As Washington, London, Berlin and other Western regimes wave around more billions of dollars worth of sophisticated armaments headed for use to defend eastern Ukraine from further Russian annexation, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov announced, “the situation has deteriorated to the point where there is a real and serious threat” of escalation into a nuclear holocaust, which would kill 90 million people in a few hours – reminds Scientific American – through the use of tactical nukes by either Putin or wannabe-muscular NATO leaders. One is Boris Johnson, who still may desperately need to avoid eviction from 10 Downing Street in coming months by appearing tough on Ukraine. But another is Biden who off-the-cuff last month in an Asian summit press conference radically changed Washington’s long-standing “strategic ambiguity” policy on One China so as to commit to a U.S. military defense of Taiwan against Beijing’s ongoing threats (though such rhetorical moves are often dismissed as gaffes).

But that’s one of just two potential ways the West+BRICS might well push the human race to extinction, with the other being a climate holocaust, given that Putin’s main Cape Town-based exploration ship last November discovered what it claims are 500 billion barrels of oil and gas offshore Antarctica. So if the Russians really do explore, extract and combust those fossil fuels against new international treaty talks hosted and led by Germany, which we can anticipate Putin will hold in low regard, such a large “carbon bomb” would mean extinction for most life on Planet Earth within coming decades. What better way to advance that agenda than Russia bringing the other four BICS into a new fossil-energy alliance – yet another of Putin’s desperation search for economic allies during this era of intense sanctions.

Imperial Germany visits subimperial South Africa

But a different energy relationship is also in play, at least in South Africa, as Europe tries to seduce South Africa. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz met President Cyril Ramaphosa in Pretoria in late May – mainly to lobby for a pro-West stance on the Russia-Ukraine conflict – following brief stopovers in Dakar, Senegal and Abuja, Nigeria. West Africa possesses major fossil fuel deposits which Scholz wants, since he needs to halt methane gas imports from Russia’s Nordstream pipeline as soon as possible.

Berlin’s vulnerability to Moscow gyrations worsened dramatically once Western sanctions started to bite. Scholz’s predecessor Angela Merkel had profoundly misjudged Putin, encouraging more trade, investment and finance hoping not only for gas supplies, but a tighter Russia-European alliance. It was a vain, naïve fantasy, given not only the easily-triggered Putin’s expansionary ambitions – backed by nuclear weapons – but also his fury over a blatantly-broken promise made to Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin in the early 1990s by her predecessor Helmut Kohl and U.S. leaders George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton: that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization would not expand east of Germany.

Now, due to Berlin’s increasingly urgent need for replacement gas sources, industrial Germany’s fossil addiction will result in massive infrastructure capital costs to accommodate new demand. This will, in turn, benefit mainly Western oil companies operating in West Africa, especially France’s Total and UK-Dutch firm Shell. But it will leave the continent with “stranded assets” that could later in the 2020s result in “Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism” climate sanctions (as South Africa, especially, faces from Europe).

There is no major German oil firm, but to illustrate pressures imposed on Africa to expand self-destructive fossil infrastructure, Frankfurt-based HMS Bergbau last year bought a majority stake in Botswana coal company Maatla. Its CEO Jacques Badenhorst then lobbied Transnet CEO Portia Derby to complete a major coal rail-line extension to the Botswana border. Originally, the cost of rehabilitating the tracks was a whopping $50 billion, when it was the first Strategic Integrated Project priority of the Presidential Infrastructure Coordinating Commission (PICC) in the 2012 National Development Plan. Transnet tried purchasing 1040 locomotives to pull the three-kilometre long coal trains.

But the notorious Gupta brothers’ corruption of the transport parastatal included ill-advised vendor China South Rail (chosen by Derby’s predecessors Siyabonga Gama and Brian Molefe). Reversing the unjustified mark-up – costing tens of billions of rands – is now, Derby says, “the most critical underestimation” she made in arresting her firm’s decline. The PICC #1 project appeared derailed, not because climate-change considerations prevailed, but instead due to Transnet’s operational troubles and cable theft. So rather than 80 million tonnes of coal exported from Richards Bay annually, as projected, the current level is below 60 million.

HMS Bergbau’s interest remains for Botswana to export its coal – an estimated 220 billion tonnes (five times South Africa’s reserves and a so-called “carbon bomb” in the making) – including, now, to Germany. Currently only a few thousand tonnes make their way weekly from Botswana to the Maputo port over a creaky 1400km route via Zimbabwe, instead of the more logical 850km to Richards Bay.

This is where Scholz remains a pernicious ally, for as he explained during the press briefing to Ramaphosa (himself formerly a coal tycoon), the West’s anti-Russian sanctions – strenuously opposed by Pretoria – will prevent Europe’s import of Putin’s coal starting in September: “This will work because there are a lot of suppliers all over the globe that are willing and ready to sell their coal to those countries that have got them so far from Russia and obviously there are some as South Africa for instance where we will do so.” (Scholz and Ramaphosa smiled gratefully to each other.)

For the sake of future generations’ very survival and continental solidarity, Ramaphosa should now be closing South Africa’s coal mines and offering workers and communities “Just Transition” compensation. After all, Germany is supposedly financing such a strategy via an $8.5 billion (concessional, below-market) loan to decarbonize Eskom. But, as cynics point out, Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter plans to use 44% of such funding for new infrastructure based on importing so-called Mozambican “Blood Methane,” even though that would release CH4 emissions (via leakage) that over the next twenty years will be 85 times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2 from burning coal.

Scholz’s closest European colleague, French President Emmanuel Macron, visited Ramaphosa a year ago to persuade him that Total’s methane-gas processing plant in Cabo Delgado required thousands of South African (and Rwandan) troops for protection against further Islamic guerrilla attacks. Then the world’s fourth-largest methane-gas field might soon supply the Eskom grid. But the Climate Justice Charter Movement now calls for a European reversal of the Eskom deal, and NGOs groundWork and the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance are fighting De Ruyter’s proposed 3000MW Richards Bay methane-gas power plant in the courts.

Cynics also remind that on April 14, Ramaphosa visited Durban after flooding killed 500 people. He sounded genuinely ready to U-turn South Africa’s own fossil addiction: “This disaster is part of climate change. It is telling us that climate change is serious, it is here. We no longer can postpone what we need to do, and the measures we need to take to deal with climate change.” In effect, though, Scholz is fighting that logic. To win Ramaphosa over, he invited him to join the G7 annual summit, at a former Nazi-linked castle in Germany’s Bavarian Alps on June 26-28.

There, Scholz and Johnson will continue refusing requests by Ramaphosa and Modi for a waiver of Intellectual Property on Covid-19 vaccines and treatment. The G7 will continue stalling on vitally-necessary greenhouse gas emissions cuts. The West’s role in the war against Ukraine will intensify, leading to yet higher fossil fuel prices, gifting Big Oil even higher profits.

The underlying imperial-subimperial tension

This conjuncture, especially in relation to BRICS’ tug-of-war between rogue and loyal subimperialists, reminds of Brazilian dependencia analyst Ruy Mauro Marini. During the 1960s–1970s, he described the “antagonistic cooperation” of Brazilian elites in relation to the United States, as a subimperial-imperial division of labor. Brasilia was the region’s deputy sheriff, protecting both globalizing and home-based corporations. For Africa’s leading political economist (prior to his 2018 death), Samir Amin, Marini’s theory “addresses a very real problem raised here: that of inequality in peripheral development.”

But as noted above, the BRICS’ mortar is obviously crumbling, e.g. in bizarre Sino-Indian Himalayan border battles since 2017. Xi’s 2015 speech at the BRICS summit in Ufa, Russia, included promises to boost “the centripetal force of BRICS nations, tap their respective advantages and potentials and carry out cooperation in innovation and production capacity.” But the centrifugal forces of the world economy took over, as the spinning globe left the bloc ever less connected. Even the hallmark of BRICS economics – rising intra-BRICS and international trade as a share of GDP – suddenly reversed from the 2008 peak, falling steadily before the 2020 crash.

Recall, too, that Indian and Brazilian elections in 2014 – won by rightwing Hindu nationalist Modi – and 2018 – by the far-right “Trump of the Tropics” Bolsonaro – contributed to the spalling. In 2019, the latter’s foreign minister even suggested to his BRICS counterparts that they should engage in punitive sanctions against Venezuela. Another reflection of the unseemly descent into political incoherence was also evident in Brasilia in 2022, where just as Russia began the Ukraine invasion, the country’s vice president (military leader Hamilton Mourão) appealed for a counter-invasion: “If the West simply lets Ukraine fall, Moldova will be next, then the Baltic states, just like Hitler’s Germany did in the late 1930s.” Bolsonaro scolded him, because the week before during a Moscow visit, he expressed his government’s solidarity with Putin.

Meanwhile in South Africa, the presidency of the classically-populist (talk-left walk-right) Jacob Zuma ended in early 2018. He had repeatedly claimed Pretoria’s ascent to BRICS membership in 2010 was the reason the West arranged to have him replaced by his deputy president, Cyril Ramaphosa (even by poisoning, he regularly claimed). The switch – a palace coup within the ruling party – occurred five months before South Africa hosted the BRICS leadership. One sign of residual hopes there, was the summit promise that a BRICS Vaccine Center would be set up in Johannesburg (possessing a high-functioning pharmaceutical industry and extensive generic-drugs production capacity). As Covid-19 hit, no such facility had been established, through China and Russia were extremely quick to market their own vaccines – but not willing to share Intellectual Property with Brazil, India or South Africa, or to join the WTO lobby.

Indeed if the BRICS were meant to genuinely challenge Western domination of multilateralism, how was it that during the 2010s, everything they tried failed? In 2011–2012, an even more neoliberal leader was imposed by the European Union at the International Monetary Fund (Christine Lagarde replacing Dominique Strauss-Kahn) and at the World Bank, the United States replaced a notorious neocon (Robert Zoellick) with a jejune neolib (Jim Yong Kim) – in both cases, without a unified BRICS posing alternative candidates. In 2015 the IMF’s recapitalization did indeed give the BRICS a much greater share of the vote, just short of the 15 percent required to veto the institution’s policies and loans (a share held traditionally only by the United States). But when China’s IMF voting share increased by 37 percent, Brazil’s by 23 percent, India’s by 11 percent, and Russia’s by eight percent, this was not mainly at the West’s expense. Those countries that lost vast shares included Nigeria and Venezuela (41 percent each) and even South Africa (21 percent).

Were there not meant to be alternative institutions, especially to challenge Western domination of financial multilaterals and credit rating systems? From the BRICS Fortaleza meeting in 2014, the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) would have provided short-term emergency funding, but it turned out, first, that it gave the IMF even more leverage (because only 30% of the borrower’s CRA quota could be accessed before getting an IMF structural adjustment package). Second, in the hour of greatest need, mid-2020 when South Africa’s leaders felt compelled to take a $4.3 billion IMF loan in spite of hard-wired austerity conditionality that reversed the fiscal stimulus, there was no sign of the CRA.

One BRICS institution did emerge (with Western credit rating agency approval): the NDB. It was initiated to finance infrastructure with greater potential environmental sensibilities, but never achieved the lofty goals of becoming a green bank set by two early consultants who had both been World Bank chief economists, Joseph Stiglitz and Nicholas Stern. In its South African portfolio, indeed, there was not a single NDB loan in the period 2016-22 that could be considered free from corruption.

Most importantly, there was no ideological deviation from predatory, neoliberal financial capitalism when BRICS’ delegations entered the Bretton Woods Institutions. As Xi himself explained his own country’s approach at the World Economic Forum in 2017, “Any attempt to cut off the flow of capital, technologies, products, industries and people between economies, and channel the waters in the ocean back into isolated lakes and creeks is simply not possible… We must remain committed to developing global free trade and investment, promote trade and investment liberalization.”

Pushing the flow of capital back into the lakes and creeks?

The subimperial BRICS’ extremely contradictory modes of antagonistic cooperation within global capitalism, as witnessed in the run-up to the 2022 explosion, certainly do not excuse the impulses of the imperialist powers to establish NATO military capacity on Russia’s immediate borders. But the dynamics of such geopolitics do correlate to the uneven development of the global system as a whole.

An overarching problem for the likes of Putin, is his own capitalist class reaching limits to the accumulation of capital, as typically happens in a semi-peripheral economy based on export of raw materials suffering highly-volatile prices. Marx’s general theory of uneven development, updated especially by City University of New York scholar David Harvey, accounts for geopolitical tensions during a ‘devaluation’ process in which excess capital exposed to global capital flows must either be defended – or left to collapse due to uncompetitiveness.

In his book The Limits to Capital, Harvey explained, “Under threat of devaluation, each regional alliance seeks to use others as a means to alleviate its internal problems. The struggle over devaluation takes a regional turn. But the regional differentiations are rendered unstable thereby.” The core problem for leaders, then, is that “Regional alliances founder on the rock of international competition and the impulsion to equalize the rate of profit.”

The semi-periphery becomes the layer of the global power structure which first takes these problems on the chin. Again, Harvey described how not only would northern rust-belt deindustrialization suffer from recessions and broader downturns, so too would emerging economies with more instability. This was especially in the wake of 1990s-era Washington Consensus liberalizations: “The opening up of global markets in both commodities and capital created openings for other states to insert themselves into the global economy, first as absorbers but then as producers of surplus capitals.”

Russia’s rise up the commodity super-cycle from 2002-14 – before the 2015 oil and minerals price crash – reflected a shift from 1990s-era capital flight by oligarchs, to Russia’s hosting fully-fledged overaccumulated capital. It was at that point in the 2010s, predicted Harvey back in 2003, that such economies “then became competitors on the world stage,” albeit in the form of “what might be called ‘subimperialisms’… [in which] each developing centre of capital accumulation sought out systematic spatio-temporal fixes for its own surplus capital by defining territorial spheres of influence.”

To deal with economic crisis at home, it’s logical then that Putin seeks more active territorial expansion options. The last time (2021) the IMF published a review of the overaccumulation of Russian capital – which is termed the “output gap,” reflecting “excess capacity” – its economists were blunt:

“Assessing the amount of spare capacity in the economy is critical for economic policymaking, particularly in a crisis where there is an urgent need for supportive macroeconomic policies. Spare capacity, as measured by the gap between actual and potential output (the output gap), gives policymakers an indication of the extent to which fiscal policy can used to stimulate the economy… The ‘lockdown’ supply shock is estimated to have reduced potential GDP by nearly 2¾% in 2020. In 2021 potential real GDP rebounds as the lockdown is lifted but is weighed down the impact of the decline in investment during the crisis on the productive capital stock. Sensitivity analysis suggests the finding of a large and persistent output gap… The results suggest that the (negative) output gap in 2020 is likely to be in the range of 2–3 percent, and is likely to be as large, if not larger, in 2021.”

Making it clear that such excess capacity and resulting devaluation in the Ukraine is on his mind, Putin himself remarked on the Kiev economy in his invasion announcement speech. He included choice words about devalued capital, especially since the 2014 coup:

“Sectors including machine building, instrument engineering, electronics, ship and aircraft building have been undermined or destroyed altogether. There was a time, however, when not only Ukraine, but the entire Soviet Union took pride in these companies. In 2021, the Black Sea Shipyard in Nikolayev went out of business. Its first docks date back to Catherine the Great. Antonov, the famous manufacturer, has not made a single commercial aircraft since 2016, while Yuzhmash, a factory specializing in missile and space equipment, is nearly bankrupt. The Kremenchug Steel Plant is in a similar situation. This sad list goes on and on.”

Neither the BRICS nor the G7 offer an alternative to a system where, driven by overaccumulation of capital (mostly derived from China’s extremely productive east-coast factories), territorial tensions to accept or reject such devaluation only worsen.

A wide variety of historical and political features are typically cited to ‘explain’ why Russia’s trajectory of regional expansion represents a major threat. But those won’t be complete with contemplating the dynamics of uneven development, especially because they aren’t a matter, just, of Putin’s rogue subimperial stance. They are hard-wired into the world-system, and the BRICS and other semi-peripheral sites are just some of the more extreme cases.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Patrick Bond.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/06/24/the-g7-prepares-a-divide-and-conquer-trap-as-brics-countries-try-to-reconstitute/feed/ 0 309618 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/06/07/climate-killer-how-to-get-out-of-the-fossil-fuel-trap/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/06/07/climate-killer-how-to-get-out-of-the-fossil-fuel-trap/#respond Tue, 07 Jun 2022 16:51:37 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/node/337425

Let's be brutally honest here, fossil gas is a climate killer. But that's not its only problem. Gas is also fuelling the Russian war on Ukraine, it's expensive, causing millions of Europeans to worry about heating up their homes, and it's dangerous for our health. So why does the European Union want to label it 'green' and funnel billions of public money into it? 

Gas: the war enabler

Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, EU member states have paid over 60 billion euros for Russian fossil fuels. Gas is a large part of this package, with  EU member states paying some 200-300 million euros per day for Russian gas alone. In contrast to the EU embargoes on coal and oil imports from Russia, a similar embargo on gas is nowhere to be seen. The humanitarian crisis and the atrocities of war in Ukraine are tangible, soul-wrenching evidence that a policy of reliance on Russian fossil fuels was bound for failure.

Gas, the climate killer

36% of greenhouse gas emissions in Europe comes from fossil gas, making it the largest source of greenhouse gases on the continent, even before oil. A large part of these emissions are related to methane, the main constituent of fossil gas, which is 80 times more potent than CO2 in contributing to planetary warming. 

The recent scandal unveiled by Greenpeace Croatia is a perfect example of the attitude fossil fuel companies have when it comes to their environmental responsibility. In December 2020 Croatian INA (controlled by Hungarian MOL) literally 'lost' a 65-metre high gas rig in the Adriatic Sea. It turned out that the rig was washed away by a storm and lies at the bottom of the sea, forgotten by its owner. In June 2022, one and a half years after the mysterious disappearance, Greenpeace Croatia unveiled that the sunken gas rig not only has not been cleared from the bottom of the Adriatic, but that there is deeply harmful methane still  leaking from the wreck.

Gas, the poverty enhancer 

Our dependence on gas is also a major factor of increasing energy poverty in Europe. Many Europeans rely on gas to heat their homes, and struggle to pay their energy bills. In 2019 an estimated 50 million households in the European Union lived in energy poverty and experienced inadequate levels of essential energy services. Between December 2020 and December 2021, consumer energy prices in the euro area for electricity, gas and other fuels increased by 25%. Since the start of the war in Ukraine the energy crisis in the EU has further intensified. As heating is the largest part of our energy bills, this leaves many living in fear for the coming winter.

Gas, the health hazard

Buildings are the biggest consumer of fossil gas in Europe. What we often don't realise when using gas in our homes is that it is actually a major health hazard. Gas appliances are a source of air pollutants, which can cause asthma and other respiratory diseases. Gas heating can also be deadly: In Italy, the second largest consumer of fossil gas in Europe, gas caused 153 accidents, killing 23 and injuring 308 in 2019 alone.

Gas, the great greenwasher 

Despite this overwhelming evidence, European politicians are still falling for the fossil fuel industry's greenwashing, calling gas the 'bridging fuel' that will eventually lead to clean energy. The EU still hasn't introduced an embargo against Russian fossil gas imports in response to the Ukrainian war. Meanwhile, the EU Commission has proposed the RePowerEU package, a collection of measures which aims at 'reducing Europe's reliance on Russian gas by diversifying supply, energy savings and a faster rollout of renewables'.  

The problem is that all these measures will achieve is to substitute Russian gas with gas from other sources: Europe will still rely on this climate killer. This is evident from the EU's proposal to assign gas a 'green label' in the EU taxonomy. A green label for fossil gas will translate into streamlined investment into further gas infrastructure in Europe. Investing more public money into fossil gas will create a lock-in effect. Instead of building a lasting energy security through renewables and energy efficiency, we will spend billions of euros on gas pipelines, gas power plants and gas terminals. 

EU, wake up!

EU leaders must keep in mind that every cubic metre of fossil gas used is fueling the climate crisis and posing a threat to our health and energy security, regardless of where it originates. It will always pose a threat to our health and energy security. Luckily, clean solutions like solar, wind, heat pumps, and home insulation or electrification are now mature and can be used across Europe to reduce demand for fossil gas. If we want to stay on track for 1.5 degrees and secure a liveable climate for all, we need to phase out gas in the EU by 2035 at the latest. It is within our reach and the only thing between us and ending gas is political will. Political leaders must finally realise that we will never be safe in a world fuelled with fossil fuels.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Eszter Matyas, Laura De Rosa, Marek Józefiak.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/06/07/climate-killer-how-to-get-out-of-the-fossil-fuel-trap/feed/ 0 304847 https://www.rfa.org/english/news/laos/cambodia-debt-05272022110503.html https://www.rfa.org/english/news/laos/cambodia-debt-05272022110503.html#respond Fri, 27 May 2022 16:20:00 +0000 https://www.rfa.org/english/news/laos/cambodia-debt-05272022110503.html UPDATED at 1:10 p.m. EDT on 2022-05-27

Leaders of two of the least developed countries in Southeast Asia, Laos and Cambodia, denied Friday they have fallen into a Chinese debt trap despite owing billions of dollars to their giant neighbor.

Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Sen and Laos President Thongloun Sisoulith both spoke at the 27th Future of Asia conference in Tokyo on Friday via video link.

Hun Sen, who has been ruling Cambodia for almost four decades, claimed that Cambodia's borrowing rate was at 23 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP), well below its legislated ceiling of 40 percent. He said, “we don't just borrow without looking at our situation."

Cambodia’s external public debt stood at around US$8.8 billion in 2020, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Bilateral debt continues to account for 69 percent of total external debt, with more than half of it owed to China, the IMF said.

The prime minister told the conference that Cambodia borrows from a number of countries including Japan and South Korea, as well as international institutions such as the Asian Development Bank and World Bank.

The loans are needed for infrastructure development, he said, adding: “We don't put ourselves into anybody's trap."

"If we don't have investment from China, what source of electricity can we have?" Hun Sen said, repeating the question he asked at the 26th Future of Asia conference last year.  

The annual conference is organized by Nikkei Inc. and provides a forum for Asian political leaders and academics to discuss regional issues.

One year ago, Hun Sen told the conference: "If I don't rely on China, who will I rely on? If I don't ask China, who am I to ask?" 

Landlocked economy

Cambodia’s neighbor Laos also said China is not the only source of loans.

“Relying on only one country’s resources is not enough. We have connected with different countries and international organizations for help with our infrastructure development,” said President Thongloun, who served as Lao prime minister between 2016-2021.

“We’re engaged in discussions and negotiations not only with China but also Vietnam, Japan, Asia Development Bank, World Bank and other countries that offer loans and support the Lao People’s Democratic Republic,” he said.

Laos is a landlocked country with no access to the sea, the president said, and it desperately needs to develop connectivity with other countries around it.

“We’re trying to repay our debts according to our ability and system and the need of our current situation.”

“I would say that we’re not in a debt trap at the moment,” Thongloun said.

The World Bank reported in August 2021 that Laos’ public debt has climbed to U.S. $13.3 billion, or 72 percent of its GDP. Most of the debt was incurred by the energy sector – as Laos builds dozens of hydropower dams in a push to become the ‘battery of Asia’. 

International credit rating agency Fitch said in an August 2021 report that almost half of Laos’ external debt over the next few years must be paid to China – which has also built a $6 billion dollar, high-speed railway, which opened late last year.

The government will have to pay $414 million a year in interest alone, according to Lao Finance Minister Bounchom Oubonpaseuth.

Cambodia’s leadership succession 

Also at the Future of Asia conference, Prime Minister Hun Sen rejected criticism about his plans to pass power to his eldest son, Hun Manet, who is currently the commander of the Royal Cambodian Army.

The ruling Cambodian People's Party (CPP) at its Congress in December voted unanimously for 44-year-old Hun Manet, the oldest of Hun Sen’s six children, to succeed his father.

The CPP holds every seat in the nation’s parliament.

When asked about it at the conference, Hun Sen declined to talk about a transition plan but said that all his three sons “are capable of becoming prime minister.”

Cambodia is set to hold commune elections on June 5 – a prelude to general elections in July 2023 to elect members of the National Assembly, or the lower house of the Parliament.

"If people continue to vote for the CPP with Hun Sen as the prime minister candidate and Hun Manet as the future candidate for prime minister, that means the people are in agreement with the CPP continuing to lead the country, led by Hun Sen and then by Hun Manet after that," Hun Sen said.

This story has been updated to edit the quote below the headline.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Staff.

]]> https://www.rfa.org/english/news/laos/cambodia-debt-05272022110503.html/feed/ 0 302435 https://www.radiofree.org/2022/05/13/roaming-charges-caught-in-a-classic-trap/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/05/13/roaming-charges-caught-in-a-classic-trap/#respond Fri, 13 May 2022 08:59:26 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=242763

Tiger wall mural behind concertina wire, warehouse district, Portland, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Governments who manipulate population growth have two choices: making maternity pleasant, or making it inescapable.

– Kate Millett, Sexual Politics

+ The US running out of infant formula at the same time the Domestic Infant Supply is about to increase sets up the next GOP bodily mandate: compulsory breast-feeding (though not in public).

+ According to the Washington Post, Republicans are getting more and more confident that the overturning of Roe v. Wade will not seriously harm their chances of regaining House and Senate majorities come November. This seems to me  like a pretty solid bet for the GOP. How stupid do you have to be to vote for the same people who said they’d defend abortion rights and didn’t, expecting them to reinstate the very rights that were lost on their watch.

+ There have been 11 murders of abortion clinic workers since 1990 and 41 bombings and 173 arsons at abortion clinics since 1977.

+ Eric Rudolph, the Centennial Park (Atlanta Olympics) bomber, was an anti-abortion zealot and member of the Army of God, who conducted a series of terrorist attacks across the American South from 1996-98 that injured and maimed more than 100 people.

+ Sen Dick Durbin on protests outside Alito and Kavanaugh’s houses: “I think it’s reprehensible. Stay away from the homes and families of elected officials and members of the court.”

+ Tom Cotton wants to go even further. He’s demanding that Biden invoke

+ The Supreme Court has conducted a no-knock raid into our bedrooms, but we can’t stand on the sidewalk in front of their houses…

+ Andrew Lawrence: “The Right will defend Rittenhouse and 1/6 and pass laws that you can use your car to run over protesters and Democrats will condemn their own voters for chanting loudly outside someone’s house.”

+ In the 90s, the Supreme Court held in Madsen v. Women’s Health Center that protesting outside people’s “private homes” was protected by the First Amendment–the private homes of people who work at abortion clinics.

+ Justice Harry Blackmun faced constant harassment after the release of his opinion in Roe, including thousands of death threats, many very graphic. Blackmun said he’d been called “Butcher of Dachau, murderer, Pontius Pilate, King Herod, you name it.” In 1983, someone fired a shot into the Blackmun’s townhouse in DC. Blackmun had just walked out of the room, but the 9 mm round put a baseball size hole in the window and showered glass on Mrs. Blackmun who was sitting in the room, when the bullet struck a nearby chair.

+ Q: “Are you comfortable with the protests that we saw outside the homes of Supreme Court justices over the weekend?”

Sen. Chuck Schumer: “If protests are peaceful; yes. My house, there’s protests 3-4 times a week outside my house.”

+ You know how off-the-rails (including the third) politics has gotten in the US when Schumer starts to make sense…?

+ The Right smells blood, the Democrats smell a fundraising gimmick…

+ Who needs a filibuster, when you’ve got Joe Manchin running interference for you?

+ They couldn’t even muster a simple majority, never mind the 60 votes they needed…

+ Louisiana’s abortion ban bill says the state can disregard any federal court order curtailing the law and that state judges who declare the law unconstitutional or stay enforcement will be impeached…

+ In Texas, some pharmacists  are already refusing to fill prescriptions to treat miscarriages or ectopic pregnancies because the drugs and procedures used to treat them are also used for abortions.

+ Adam Serwer: “One problem with the idea that Democrats will benefit from a backlash to Roe being overturned is that the party leadership don’t seem to like the idea of there being a backlash to Roe being overturned.”

+ The Democrats seem much more concerned about access to the internet than an abortion…

.@VP Kamala Harris: "In the 21st century, access to the Internet is essential for success. Every person in our nation, no matter how much they earn, should be able to afford high-speed Internet and a high-speed Internet plan." https://t.co/KpeAWxhDOV pic.twitter.com/ZJ2D1D1qQM

— The Hill (@thehill) May 10, 2022

+++

+ Biden wanted another $33 billion for aid to Ukraine. Congress upped it to $40 and all the Democrats, including AOC and Omar, voted for it.

+ With another $40 billion Ukraine aid package galloping through Congress, Biden has finally found his bipartisan project and he’s willing to risk a recession, refueling the pandemic and nuclear war to get it…

+ “Slow down?” Rand’s dad used to vote “No, in thunder”–except, of course, for the most consequential vote of all, on the original AUMF, where Barbara Lee stood alone…

+ It’s triage at home, blank checks to Ukraine…

+ When Tom Friedman gets to your left on Ukraine perhaps it’s time for a course correction….

+ So Putin’s war to keep NATO from expanding to its border has resulted in a nation (Finland) on Russia’s border, a stone’s throw from Putin’s hometown, applying to join NATO. NATO, which had pretty much been left for dead in Europe after the Yugoslavian wars, suddenly has been resurrected, flush with weapons, money and a re-branded raison d’être. Putin now has the permanent threat on Russia’s border that he can use to justify a tightened grip on power and a build-up of weapons Russia can’t afford. The Ukraine war benefits all the players, except of course average Ukrainians and the ethnic national conscripts in the Russian Army who have been pushed forward as Javelin missile fodder on the frontlines of the fighting.

+ This is the charitable interpretation, along the lines of Walter Karp’s Indispensable Enemies. That is: Superpowers need Super Enemies to justify their “super” existence and super-sized military spending. An uncharitable one is that Putin is not nearly as smart as many of fans on the Left believe him to be and that his snap-invasion of Ukraine played right into NATO’s hand, ranking as the biggest strategic blunder since April Glaspie enticed Saddam into claiming Kuwait as the 19th province of Iraq…

+ The people who instigate Doomsday will be its only survivors–flying the smoking ruins of the planet in their Doomsday jetliners. Putin has his own & it didn’t make an expected appearance at Victory Day, which may be a sign it’s being gassed for the main event

+ No Shit Newswire…Herbert Diess, CEO of Volkswagen, during a virtual interview for the Financial Times’ Future of the Car summit: “I think we should do the utmost to really stop this war (in Ukraine) and get back to negotiations.”

+ Dolphin deaths are mounting in the Black Sea as a consequence of use of sonars and constant underwater noise caused by military activities in the Ukraine war…

+ A commentary on Tsargrad.tv, the Russian television network owned by Putin pal Konstantin Malofeev and designed by former Fox News producer Jack Hanick: “Our opponents in the West are a satanic sect of sodomites and paedophiles. We should have no illusions about what kind of people lead the collective West, which is preparing to use all its might to destroy Russia, because we’re not like them.”

+ It should be noted that one of the greatest Russians, Leo Tolstoy, was almost certainly bi-sexual.

+ Who will pay (and who will get paid) to put Ukraine back together again?

+ The share of Greek tankers shipping oil out of Russian ports is up from 37% before the war to 55% since the invasion.

+ Given the advance hype, much of it generated by the war-hungry Western press, I was expecting more from Putin’s Victory Day speech. Yet it proved to be something of a let-down. There wasn’t a declaration of victory and now it’s time to pack up and go home. Contrarily, there was no announcement of expanding the war to claim Odessa or topple Kyiv. He didn’t call for a plebiscite on annexation of the Donbas or call up Russia’s military reserves. On the whole, it was a curious speech: sober and fairly dull. Putin talked a lot about Nazis controlling the Zelensky government, but even he didn’t seem to take the rhetoric too seriously. If Ukraine is full of Nazis, it would, of course, call into question the meaning of the great triumph of 1946 that Victory Day is meant to celebrate. How could the Red Army have smashed the Nazis, if there are still so many of them around on Russia’s own doorstep? Putin’s bland, rather aimless speech is probably the best indication of the long, bloody summer of mutual destruction to come, where each side is locked in a cycle of attack, massacre, advance, counter-attack, massacre and retreat.

+ If you want an idea of what the war in Ukraine looks like on the ground, and who is paying the price, I suggest digging into this report documenting Russian airstrikes on apartment buildings prepared by Amnesty International after an investigation by human rights lawyer (and occasional CounterPunch contributor) Joanne Mariner.

+ How many wars do the neocons want at once? Why not just combine them all into One Big Blast!

"It's time for the US to move to the next option, which is the military option to eliminate Iran's various nuclear sites. The US certainly has the capability to do so," and can do it faster and easier than Israel, former @StateDept official @elliecohanim told @IranIntl_En. pic.twitter.com/pHATZVj7r2

— Iran International English (@IranIntl_En) May 12, 2022

+ “Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks.”

+++

+ Thomas Merton: “When I criticize a system, they think I criticize them – and that is of course because they fully accept the system and identify themselves with it.

+ Hours after the IDF shot a Palestinian-American journalist in the head and tried to blame it on non-existent “Palestinian gunmen”, we get this rancid posturing from the Senator from Florida seeking to prohibit federal funding to an organization that’s never gotten any…

+ Laila Al-Arian: “Saying Israel has ‘no reason or interest’ to kill a Palestinian journalist ignores the racism and dehumanization of Palestinians that has not only allowed crimes against them for decades but is the basis for the establishment of a system of laws and policies called apartheid.”

+ Post-Traumatic Torturer Syndrome: “Shortly after he left Guantánamo…Mr X started drinking…He toyed with the idea of killing himself. A doctor diagnosed him with severe PTSD—the kind of trauma one would expect to find in his victim.”

+ A new National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) paper finds immigrants are 80% more likely to become founders of businesses than US-born citizens. The study reports that “Immigrants act more as ‘job creators’ than ‘job takers’… non-US born founders play outsized roles in US high-growth entrepreneurship.” Immigrants make up 25% of all founders in the US, despite being only 15% of the population. Almost 40% of founding teams include one immigrant.  Who will tell, Tucker?

+ Why we can’t have nice things…

Top 10 Lobby Groups of 2021

US Chamber of Commerce: $66.4 million
National Association of Realtors: $44 M
PhRMA: $30.4 M
Business Roundtable: $29.1 M
Blue Cross: $25.2 M
American Hospital Associationn: $25.1 M
Meta/Facebook: $20.1 M
American Medical Association: $19.5 M
Amazon: $19.3 M
American Chemical Council: $16.6 M

(Source: Open Secrets)

+ The Biden administration is predicting 100 million COVID cases this winter. The COVID fatality rate has remained pretty steady at 1% during past waves, which means we’re likely to see a million extra deaths this winter. Heckuva time to put COVID funding on hold in order to provide missiles to Ukraine and 24/7 security for Supreme Court justices.

+ When the Alito Court shreds the last remnants of ObamaCare, nearly the entire country, including most of its kids, will have been infected by COVID and thus have a pre-existing condition, giving insurance companies the right to reject coverage or jack up premiums.

+ Dr. Jeffrey Kahn, chief of the Division of Pediatric Infectious Disease at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas: “It’s startling how many of these children present and have a range of symptoms that we haven’t fully appreciated. Some are coming in with heart failure after asymptomatic Covid infections.”

+ According to new modeling from scientists in China and the US, China risks experiencing more than 1.5 million COVID deaths if it relaxes its zero-COVID policy without any additional safeguards such as acceleration vaccination rates (especially of the elderly).

+ 4 million: the number of Syrian refugees in Turkey.

+ Pelosi and Biden are nostalgic for the Republican Party of Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, Bob Dornan and Newt Gingrich, people they could have lunch with at Le Diplomat…

.@SpeakerPelosi: "I want the Republican Party to take back the party to where you were when you cared about a woman's right to choose, you cared about the environment. Here I am, Nancy Pelosi, saying this country needs a strong Republican Party. Not a cult." pic.twitter.com/h12SSFQKdk

— The Hill (@thehill) May 9, 2022

+ Pelosi’s about to see just how strong the current “cult” of Republicans is…

+ Biden would have invited Justice Roger Taney for a beer summit after his Dred Scott opinion was published…

+ A third of American adults now believe in the Great Replacement Theory, the idea that there’s a plan to replace native-born Americans with new immigrants for electoral purposes.

+ Don’t know about you, but I’m more than ready to be replaced for electoral–or almost any other–purpose. Come and get it, what there is of it…

+ Real wages in the US have been falling over the last year and are now at or below pre-pandemic levels.

+ Bill Maher: “Student loan forgiveness is a loser issue for the party that wants to win back the working class.”

+ Tuition cost when Bill Maher went to Cornell: $3,000 per year.

+ Actual Tuition cost to Cornell today: $59,000 per year.

+ This week in Eric Adams: defending NYPD cops who handcuffed a woman for selling mangoes in the subway: “Next day its propane tanks in the subway. The next day it’s barbecuing.”

+ To the extent the Democratic Party has a future, it’s probably going to be a lot like Eric Adams, pompous, mean-spirited and tough on every one who is too weak to fight back..

+ Here’s an alternate fact for you, Brent: Trump was banned from Twitter on January 9, 2021, three days after his rent-a-riot on Capitol Hill.

+ According to a new report commissioned by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, more than 500 missing Indigenous children reported dead after being taken from their homes by the US government and forced into 19 boarding schools run largely by the Catholic Church. The real death toll is probably in the thousands. Can’t wait to see how this is revolting chapter of US history gets translated in the Patriotic Textbooks of Texas and Florida…

“Under U.S. military control, surviving Apache children were forcibly removed from their families and shipped by train to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School…Some some Apache children never returned- comprising one-fourth of Carlisle gravesites.”

+ Corporate crime in America has achieved herd immunity.

+ Arizona prison officials struggled for more than 25 minutes to insert IV lines into Clarence Dixon before his execution on Wednesday morning. Finally, they sliced into his groin area and had to “wipe up a fair amount of blood” before they could kill him. Nothing cruel or unusual here, alas. This is the way almost all executions in the US take place these days.

+ A state audit found that police departments across California engage in bigoted and racist behavior, including social media posts and conversations between officers that mocked transgender people, women, Latinos, Black people and immigrants.

+ San Francisco police are now using driverless cars for mobile surveillance. The cars “record their surroundings continuously” and transmit the data to police.

+ Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez’s office is “looking into” reports that dead and unwitting people have been appointed to positions in the borough’s Democratic Party. (The “unwitting” part at least proves they’re Democrats.)

+ Help is on the way! Soon the US will have a surplus in the Domestic Infant Supply which we can lend-lease-or-sell to Japan in its moment of demographic crisis. Bound to help balance the trade deficit, too.

+ Speaking of Trump, his administration worked in concert with executives from the meatpacking industry to cultivate unfounded fears of a meat shortage during the pandemic in order to justify forcing workers to work in unsafe conditions. A meatpacking industry official actually wrote the Defense Production Act order to keep the plants open. At least, 269 meatpacking workers have died of COVID.

+ Gibbon: “Of the various forms of government which have prevailed in the world, an hereditary monarchy seems to present the fairest scope for ridicule.”

Prince Charles announces the government's top priority is to "help ease the cost-of-living for families," with a promise to "level up opportunity in all parts of the country" https://t.co/ptiAKKkwe8 pic.twitter.com/wUydQMvAvu

— Bloomberg UK (@BloombergUK) May 10, 2022

+++

+ It’s now a near certainty that the Earth will surpass 1.5C of warming between 2022 and 2026 and that one of those years will be the hottest on record. In 2015, the chances of world temperatures temporarily exceeding 1.5C over the next five years were close to zero.

+ For a 50% chance of 1.5° C avoidance U.S. coal production must fall by 50% within five years and end by 2030, according to a new study from the University of Manchester. Meanwhile, oil and gas production must fall by 74% by 2030 and end entirely by 2035. For a 67% chance of 1.5° C avoidance, U.S. oil and gas production must end by 2031.

+ Planned drilling projects across US land and waters will release 140 billion metric tons of planet-heating gases if fully implemented, according to an analysis published by Energy Policy Journal.

+ Energy Policy’s study identifies the 425 biggest fossil fuel extraction projects  in the world, ‘carbon bombs, whose combined potential emissions will exceed the global 1.5 °C budget by a factor of two.

+ Most of the top-performing companies on the S&P are oil or energy firms…

+ In September 2020 Zoom’s market cap surpassed Exxon’s. Now Exxon’s market cap is 13 times the size of Zoom’s.

+ Thousands of birds are literally falling out of the sky every day as a result of India’s heat wave.

+ The ecological loss of these birds deaths is incalculable. But it might be possible to put a pricetage on the die-offs. An article in Ecological Economics estimates that being around 14 or more bird species was the equivalent to the participants earning an extra $190 a month, based on a monthly income of $1,837.

+ A new paper in Nature says that episodes of “extreme heat” (based on 1950-1980 definition) are now 90 times more common than it was 50 years ago.

+ Vehicle use declined sharply during the pandemic. Even so, according to the EPA, the national average concentration of Particulate Matter 2.5 was 8 percent higher in 2020 than it was in 2019.

+ An oil tanker with 1.1 million barrels of crude on board, has been moored off the Yemeni port of Hodeida since 2015, without being serviced. The tanker is at risk of breaking up at any moment. The UN says the cost of the clean-up will be at least $20 billion. But as we know from the Exxon Valdez, you can spend billions “cleaning it up” and never even begin to repair the damage…

+ The 16.5 million acre Tongass National Forest in Southeast Alaska stores nearly 20% of the carbon in the entire national forests system.

+ In Idaho, the Forest Service’s own records show that the agency has authorized or actively considered 86,000 acres of logging inside inventoried roadless areas.

+ The Forest Service’s Grazing Statistical Summary for 2020 (the most recent available) discloses that 1,017,108 cattle and 790,650 sheep grazed on national forest land. The agency, unlike the BLM, doesn’t disclose the environmental condition of the lands grazed upon, but much, if not most, of it is degraded.

+ When the Chamber of Commerce praises your Trump-like plan to exempt infrastructure projects from environmental and health and safety reviews, you know you’ve achieved something your segregationists pals would have been proud of…

+ Gone with the tide…

Cape Hatteras National Seashore (Seashore) has confirmed that an unoccupied house at 24265 Ocean Drive, Rodanthe, N.C. collapsed this afternoon. This is the second unoccupied house collapse of the day at the Seashore. Read more: https://t.co/ZPUiklQAWA pic.twitter.com/OMoPNCpbzk

— Cape Hatteras National Seashore (@CapeHatterasNPS) May 10, 2022

+ 91% of the Great Barrier Reef suffered coral bleaching in the last 12 months.

+ In West Africa, crop yields are projected to fall by 20 to 40 percent, and possibly more, as a consequence of climate change….

+++

+ Now that it looks like the Marcos family will be running the Philippines again, let’s revisit the Beatles’ narrow escape from Manila…

I don't think we won't be even getting a lot of big acts performing here in the Philippines if Marcos wins. Remember what happened to The Beatles when they came to Manila. They were badly mistreated just because they didn't fulfill the family's wish.pic.twitter.com/yGas4lK5g3

— Penny (@BMOnumba2) May 9, 2022

+ The bi-annual excavation of my office is usually a thankless and unrewarding task, involving digging through unsolicited review copies of Who Killed JFK books, hate mail, FOIA rejections, and notebooks whose pages are sealed together by a mysterious orange fungus. But this year I struck gold in re-locating a book that I used to read nearly every day, back when film seemed like the last vital cultural medium: Andrew Sarris’ Interviews with Film Directors. I turned to the interview with Luis Buñuel, where he’s talking about Un Chien Andalou: “The film was made 32 years ago and I don’t remember much about our collaboration. What I know about Dali and me is that we now belong to totally different realms. For Dali has gone to a world of men who make money.”

+ Yuri Knorozov, the Russian linguist who deciphered the Maya script, listed his cat Asya as a co-author on his work but the editors always removed her credit.

+ What Baudelaire lived on in the winter of 1866: “opium, digitalis, belladonna and brandy.” And he still outlived Jim Morrison by 13 years.

+ Sagittarius-A*–the black hole gnawing away at the center of the Milky Way–has an entropy value of ~10^90, which is more entropy than exists in the known universe (outside of black holes). Over to you, Thomas Pynchon, wherever you are…

+ Werner Herzog on James Cameron’s Avatar: “I admire the achievements, the technical achievements, but the film is an abomination because of its New Age schlock and bullshit. When I see them sitting in some sort of collective meditation or yoga or collective yoga class, it just makes me cringe. I want to be somewhere else, far away from the cinema.”

+ My theory is this country went into the crapper after Waylon Jennings died and now all the faux-outlaws are driving around in pickup trucks they took out loans to buy only because they needed someplace to plant their blue lives matter flags. Prove me wrong…

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

Memories of Starobielsk: Essays Between Art and History
Józef Czapski
Trans. Alissa Valles
(NYRB)

Chasing the Ghost Bear: On the Trail of America’s Lost Super Beast
Mike Stark
(Bison Books)

The Politics of Immunity: Security and the Policing of Bodies
Mark Neocleous
(Verso)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Opening
Tord Gustavson Trio
(ECM)

Citizen Kane Jr Blues, 1974: Live at the Bottom Line
Neil Young
(Reprise)

Sincere
Hater
(Fire Records)

The Classic Trap

“The classic trap for any revolutionary is always, “What’s your alternative?” But even if you could provide the interrogator with a blueprint, this does not mean he would use it: in most cases he is not sincere in wanting to know. In fact this is a common offensive, a technique to reflect revolutionary anger and turn it against itself. Moreover, the oppressed have no job to convince all people. All they need know is that the present system is destroying them.”

– Shulamith Firestone

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey St. Clair.

Whether or not Roe v. Wade is overturned, it will be headed the way of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

The Supreme Court decision establishing a broad decriminalization of abortion throughout the United States has been unusually resilient for such a contentious subject. For nearly half a century, the verdict seemed as settled as any could be in American politics, with those favoring greater restrictions content to limit access de facto, rather than risk pushback against drastic changes to what is allowed de jure.

Yet the legal status of such a controversial topic remaining stable for such a period of time was the exception, not the rule.  Beneath the long detente lay decades “of compromising, and dickering, and trying to keep what was as it was, and to hand sops to both sides when new conditions demanded that something be done, or be pretended to be done” — words written more than half a century before Roe, about the issue of slavery.

Essayist Voltairine de Cleyre noted that political compromise set the stage for clashes between opposing camps, regardless of what the laws were on paper. Abolitionists pressed not only against slave owners, but those who thought that slavery  “was probably a mistake” but “were in no great ferment of anxiety to have it abolished.”

It’s particularly ironic that advocates of family planning have forgotten de Cleyre’s reminder of how things can get done by individuals or groups in voluntary association “without going to external authorities to please do the thing for them.”

Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger got the idea from de Cleyre’s anarchist comrade Emma Goldman. Yet as Goldman biographer Richard Drinnon observed, Sanger “guided the movement into respectably conservative channels by emphasizing the need for legislation which would give doctors, and doctors only, the right to impart contraceptive information.”

Sanger had joined with de Cleyre and Goldman not only in promoting personal autonomy for women, but for children between birth and adulthood in Modern Schools.  Yet Sanger ceded to the state the very power over reproductive health she had wrested from private patriarchs, viewing “the personal liberty of the individual” in that realm as “unrestricted and irresponsible.”  Her successors have insisted that organizations like Planned Parenthood can only function with government subsidies — while minimizing the fraction of funds going directly to abortion!

Once again,  as de Cleyre put it, “the direct actionists on both sides” will “fight it out” in contested territory, which this time spans the entire country.  The collapse of consensus will unleash plenty of acrimony, but “pro-choice” and “pro-life” partisans may as well drop the pretense that the government is either.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Joel Schlosberg.

The post The Hegelian Dialectic is a Mental Trap That Only Leads to Self-annihilation appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Paul Fitzgerald - Elizabeth Gould.

The post Russia Has Been Baited into a Repeat of the Afghan Trap: First Time as Tragedy, Second Time as Sickening Farce appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dan Glazebrook.

9 February 1990 — US secretary-of-state James Baker promised USSR president Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would “not [move] one inch eastward” in exchange for allowing German unification.

1999 — Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland join NATO and move several inches nearer the dissolved USSR.

2004 — Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia join NATO.

2009 — Albania and Croatia join NATO.

February 2014 — A US-backed coup in Ukraine results in a Nazi-friendly government coming to power.

March 2014 — Crimeans vote overwhelmingly in a referendum to secede from Ukraine and become part of Russia.

September 2014 — The Minsk I Agreement is signed by Ukraine, Russia, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) calling for an immediate ceasefire, withdrawal of heavy weapons, and prisoner exchanges.

February 2015 — The Minsk II Agreement calls again for a ceasefire, the withdrawal of weapons, ceasefire monitoring by the OSCE, and the holding of local elections in the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics on their future status in Ukraine. Differing interpretations have led to major disagreements over Minsk II.

2017 — Montenegro joins NATO.

2020 — North Macedonia joins NATO. It is apparent that there is an increasing eastward crawl, and Ukraine is also seeking membership.

18 November 2021 — Russia reiterates its red lines.

17 December 2021 — Russia presents its concerns about security in proposals to the US.

16 January 2022 — Putin identifies Ukraine’s membership in NATO as a red line in Russia-NATO relations that impinge upon Russian security. US secretary-of-state Antony Blinken dismissed Russian security concerns: “I can’t be more clear — NATO’s door is open, remains open, and that is our commitment.”

26 January 2022 — Russia received a written response from the US to its security proposals. Russia would not be pleased.

16 February 2022 — According to national-security adviser Jake Sullivan, based on credible US intelligence, this was the date that Russia would invade Ukraine. The date came and went without any invasion.

17 February 2022 — Russia responds to US and NATO proposals about Ukraine and European security.

There have been many provocations leading up to the Russian recognition of the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. Among them are NATO expansion, not taking Russian security concerns seriously, the arming of Ukraine, and demonizing Russia via the western monopoly media. The final nail was the shelling from Ukraine into Donbass causing the evacuation of its civilians into Russia.

It appears to be a foolhardy act by Ukraine. If Ukraine had adhered to the Minsk Agreements, Donetsk and Luhansk would still be a part of Ukraine, autonomous though they may be. Autonomy is not uncommon within countries. Guangxi, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Tibet, Xinjiang are autonomous provinces in China. Russia also has one autonomous region and 10 autonomous areas. Nonetheless, the lure of war and playing with fire has caused Ukraine to shrink a little bit more.

Russia, for its part, did not take the bait and invade Ukraine. It has instead sent peacekeepers into Donbass. It would seem highly unlikely that Ukraine would attack the powerful state-of-the-art Russian military.

So Joe Biden does not get his Russian invasion. Biden’s planners have been foiled again. Biden made the right call to withdraw the US forces from Afghanistan, but that withdrawal was badly botched, recalling memories of the tail-between-the-legs escape from rooftops in Viet Nam by US troops. Then to compound the fiasco of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, Biden had the shamelessness and heartlessness to steal the poor Afghan peoples’ monies. He follows in the footsteps of his predecessor Donald Trump who openly stole Syrian oil — a theft that continues under Biden.

Meanwhile, the situation in and around Ukraine and the breakaway republics will continue to evolve. It is hoped that saner heads will deescalate the tensions and avoid war.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.