Earning enough to pay the rent or mortgage, cover utility bills and travel costs, buy food and have the occasional coffee is difficult, impossible for many.
But it’s not hard for everyone, is it? There are a small number of people living among us who don’t have to worry about the bills, are not troubled when food prices increase or rents balloon.
They are the rich and the obscenely rich. On the surface they look like the rest of us, but they live in a completely different world to the one most of us inhabit. A pristine space of privilege and political influence.
The statistics around wealth and income inequality are manifold and horrifying. There are, according to Forbes, more billionaires in the world than ever before; 2,781 individuals with fortunes in excess of $1Bn (up 141 on 2023), of which 14 are “centi-billionaires”; i.e., fortunes over $100 Bn. Mostly the super rich are men. Oxfam records that, “Globally, men own US $105 trillion more wealth than women.”
During the last ten years, (which saw the 2008 financial crash, Covid and the Ukraine/Russia war) the collective wealth of this tiny shiny gang has increased by 120%. As Forbes puts it, “Even during times of financial uncertainty for many, the super-rich continue to thrive.” At the same time, on the same planet, as the hyper rich drown in money and stuff, around five billion people around the world are poorer now than they were in 2019.
The poorest everywhere are women, people of colour (“in the USA, the wealth of a typical Black household is just 15.8% of that of a typical white household”) and marginalised groups; the same sections of society coincidentally that were most severely impacted by Covid.
Remember all the talk during the pandemic of a socio-economic reset, of tackling social injustices, creating fairer, more integrated ways of working and living etc, blah, blah blah. Well, Oxfam reveals that in subsequent years while “average real wages of nearly 800 million workers have fallen” across 52 countries, the worlds billionaires are $3.3Tn richer than they were pre pandemic……and their wealth has grown three times faster than the rate of inflation.”
Unimaginable wealth for a tiny number of individuals while the majority of humanity live in varying levels of poverty or economic hardship. “The wealth of the world’s five richest billionaires has more than doubled since the start of this decade, while 60% of humanity has grown poorer.” Can anyone really still believe in ‘Trickle down economics’ (“gush up” as Arundhati Roy rightly describes it)?
In parallel to unprecedented concentrations of wealth, the corporations that many of these individuals lead or own have also been making unprecedented profits. Oxfam: “148 of the world’s biggest corporations together raked in $1.8 trillion…in total net profits in the year to June 2023, a 52 per cent jump compared to average net profits in 2018-2021.”
Record profits as the majority struggle to feed themselves, are in many cases falling into debt and destitution, whilst being told to ‘tighten their belts’, by obnoxious, often wealthy, politicians beholden to corporate leaders.
Virtually all profits are dished out to shareholders, with companies refusing to pay their staff properly; less than 0.5% of over 1,600 of the world’s largest companies “pay their workers a living wage.” Corporate greed knows no limits it seems, nor the level of worker exploitation.
Corporate political power fuels inequality not just by shareholder payouts, but by keeping wages low, avoiding paying taxes, absorbing and running public services and feeding climate change.
Multiple inequalities
There are various forms of inequality that flow from the underlying cause, financial inequality: climate change, political influence, housing, access to the arts and internet, good health care and stimulating education among others.
In addition to growing inequality within countries, the gap between the Global north and the Global south is also increasing, and as the impacts of climate change escalate this disparity will only increase. Under the socio-economic system of the day all is dependent on money. Financial hardship/poverty places individuals and nations in a position of disadvantage, making it impossible, for example, to live in a comfortable home, eat a balanced healthy diet, attend a good school, visit art galleries and the theatre, access the internet; travel, have a voice that is listened to by the political class.
The systemic cause of this madness is, of course, the inherent injustice/s sewn into the DNA of the pervasive socio-economic model. The more extreme, the more fundamental the form of capitalism becomes, concentrations of wealth intensify and narrow, inequality increases, democracy flounders, social divisions and anger grow.
Since the 1990s, thanks largely to that fanatical duo, Thatcher and Reagan, and intensifying year on year, the socio-economic paradigm has moved from twilight to utter darkness. Neo-Liberalism or Market Fundamentalism, has expanded its reach, until it now dominates virtually all areas of life, in almost every corner of the world.
The Paradigm of Greed and Destruction champions excess while dismissing sufficiency, simplicity and moderation. Everything is seen as a commodity, including health care, education, and people, to be monetised, exploited to the last drop and profited from. Everyone is regarded as a consumer, every nation, city or village analysed as a potential marketplace.
It is a deeply materialistic, extremely crude, albeit complex way of organising society, that humanity is enthralled to and entrapped by. Obsession with objects and sensory experiences has resulted in mankind being divorced from him/herself, from the natural world and that underlying reality, which we call god. It is choking the life out of humanity, poisoning the planet and driving climate change.
Yes, the underlying cause of climate change and ecological vandalism is consumerism, therefore greed. Not consumerism within poor developing nations (including China) of course, but relentless irresponsible consumerism in rich western nations (US leads the pack by some margin), particularly the richest members within these societies. “The richest 1% globally emit as much carbon pollution as the poorest two-thirds of humanity [roughly 5.4billion].”
It doesn’t have to be like this
Keeping the masses poor, physically exhausted and emotionally drained, whilst concentrating wealth into the pockets of the already rich is not a new game, of course. As Priya Sahni-Nicholas of the Equality Trust explains, “The super-rich have spent centuries diverting wealth into their hands, making our democracy less responsive to people’s needs and damaging our communities. The result is we [society/nations] are poorer, sicker, less productive, unhappier, more polarised, and less trusting.”
The values of the market are destroying communities and literally making people ill – physically and psychologically (and, of course, the two are inter-twinned). These insidious tools of control create the conditions for all kinds of conflict, individually and collectively. They fuel tribalism, deny/pervert democracy, encourage corruption, and make peace impossible. All of which is by design; the last thing the ruling elites want is a contented happy, and well informed populace.
Despite the dogmatic rhetoric from politicians of all colours this is not the only way to live, the only option. We can change this, and if we are to prosper, we must change this.
At the heart of any re-imagining must be the inculcation of that simple attitude and spontaneous action that parents routinely encourage in their children – Sharing. We need to learn to share; fundamentally to share the essentials required to live – water, food, shelter; share the knowledge, information, and technology. Ensure everyone, irrespective of income has access to good quality health care and stimulating education, and begin to create a just world where trust can blossom, differences dissolve and relationships form.
Sharing is the first step of such a shift. If introduced as a guiding principle, it would have a profound impact, not just in the way basic needs are met, but in the collective consciousness. It would facilitate a kinder, fairer, society and allow a space to open up in which stress could gradually dissolve. The mechanisms for building sharing into the machine could easily be designed and introduced, if — and, of course, it’s a colossal if — the political will was there.
In parallel with structural simplification, purpose needs to be rediscovered and actions cleansed. Humanity must – or potentially face extinction – move away from the relentless pursuit of material, sensory pleasure, which demands constant stimulation through consumption, and therefore, ensures perpetual discontent and environmental catastrophe, to a quieter, simpler mode of living.
This may sound ridiculously ambitious, and given the determination by corporations, the exceedingly rich and weak politicians with vested interests, it may well be. But unless purpose is re-imagined, and unless ‘root and branch’ economic ‘reform’ takes place, the social-economic-political divisions will not just continue, they will intensify, and the unbelievable extremes will become normalised, baked into everyday life and everyday politics.
Everything is in a state of collapse; all the forms, all the systems and, in societies throughout the world, particularly the West, many of the people are falling apart. This is the time for such a move; if not now, when?
The post 2024: People Starve as the Rich Get Richer first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
By looking at right-wing politics around the world, we can better understand conservatives’ abiding preoccupations and priorities, and how they might be thwarted.
Introducing our Spring 2024 issue, “The Global Right.”
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
The virtues of left unity are still obvious, but the grounds for compromise are harder to see.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
The long-simmering crisis over Israel’s genocide of Palestinians has reached a breaking point. Campus protests in solidarity with Gaza have erupted across North America, spanning at least 45 U.S. states, Canada and Mexico. Similar demonstrations have surged across Europe, including in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the United…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The food transition, the energy transition, net-zero ideology, programmable central bank digital currencies, the censorship of free speech and clampdowns on protest. What’s it all about? To understand these processes, we need to first locate what is essentially a social and economic reset within the context of a collapsing financial system.
Writer Ted Reece notes that the general rate of profit has trended downwards from an estimated 43% in the 1870s to 17% in the 2000s. By late 2019, many companies could not generate enough profit. Falling turnover, squeezed margins, limited cash flows and highly leveraged balance sheets were prevalent.
Professor Fabio Vighi of Cardiff University has described how closing down the global economy in early 2020 under the guise of fighting a supposedly new and novel pathogen allowed the US Federal Reserve to flood collapsing financial markets (COVID relief) with freshly printed money without causing hyperinflation. Lockdowns curtailed economic activity, thereby removing demand for the newly printed money (credit) in the physical economy and preventing ‘contagion’.
According to investigative journalist Michael Byrant, €1.5 trillion was needed to deal with the crisis in Europe alone. The financial collapse staring European central bankers in the face came to a head in 2019. The appearance of a ‘novel virus’ provided a convenient cover story.
The European Central Bank agreed to a €1.31 trillion bailout of banks followed by the EU agreeing to a €750 billion recovery fund for European states and corporations. This package of long-term, ultra-cheap credit to hundreds of banks was sold to the public as a necessary programme to cushion the impact of the pandemic on businesses and workers.
In response to a collapsing neoliberalism, we are now seeing the rollout of an authoritarian great reset — an agenda that intends to reshape the economy and change how we live.
Shift to authoritarianism
The new economy is to be dominated by a handful of tech giants, global conglomerates and e-commerce platforms, and new markets will also be created through the financialisation of nature, which is to be colonised, commodified and traded under the notion of protecting the environment.
In recent years, we have witnessed an overaccumulation of capital, and the creation of such markets will provide fresh investment opportunities (including dodgy carbon offsetting Ponzi schemes) for the super-rich to park their wealth and prosper.
This great reset envisages a transformation of Western societies, resulting in permanent restrictions on fundamental liberties and mass surveillance. Being rolled out under the benign term of a ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, the World Economic Forum (WEF) says the public will eventually ‘rent’ everything they require (remember the WEF video ‘you will own nothing and be happy’?): stripping the right of ownership under the guise of a ‘green economy’ and underpinned by the rhetoric of ‘sustainable consumption’ and ‘climate emergency’.
Climate alarmism and the mantra of sustainability are about promoting money-making schemes. But they also serve another purpose: social control.
Neoliberalism has run its course, resulting in the impoverishment of large sections of the population. But to dampen dissent and lower expectations, the levels of personal freedom we have been used to will not be tolerated. This means that the wider population will be subjected to the discipline of an emerging surveillance state.
To push back against any dissent, ordinary people are being told that they must sacrifice personal liberty in order to protect public health, societal security (those terrible Russians, Islamic extremists or that Sunak-designated bogeyman George Galloway) or the climate. Unlike in the old normal of neoliberalism, an ideological shift is occurring whereby personal freedoms are increasingly depicted as being dangerous because they run counter to the collective good.
The real reason for this ideological shift is to ensure that the masses get used to lower living standards and accept them. Consider, for instance, the Bank of England’s chief economist Huw Pill saying that people should ‘accept’ being poorer. And then there is Rob Kapito of the world’s biggest asset management firm BlackRock, who says that a “very entitled” generation must deal with scarcity for the first time in their lives.
At the same time, to muddy the waters, the message is that lower living standards are the result of the conflict in Ukraine and supply shocks that both the war and ‘the virus’ have caused.
The net-zero carbon emissions agenda will help legitimise lower living standards (reducing your carbon footprint) while reinforcing the notion that our rights must be sacrificed for the greater good. You will own nothing, not because the rich and their neoliberal agenda made you poor but because you will be instructed to stop being irresponsible and must act to protect the planet.
Net-zero agenda
But what of this shift towards net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and the plan to slash our carbon footprints? Is it even feasible or necessary?
Gordon Hughes, a former World Bank economist and current professor of economics at the University of Edinburgh, says in a new report that current UK and European net-zero policies will likely lead to further economic ruin.
Apparently, the only viable way to raise the cash for sufficient new capital expenditure (on wind and solar infrastructure) would be a two decades-long reduction in private consumption of up to 10 per cent. Such a shock has never occurred in the last century outside war; even then, never for more than a decade.
But this agenda will also cause serious environmental degradation. So says Andrew Nikiforuk in the article The Rising Chorus of Renewable Energy Skeptics, which outlines how the green techno-dream is vastly destructive.
He lists the devastating environmental impacts of an even more mineral-intensive system based on renewables and warns:
The whole process of replacing a declining system with a more complex mining-based enterprise is now supposed to take place with a fragile banking system, dysfunctional democracies, broken supply chains, critical mineral shortages and hostile geopolitics.
All of this assumes that global warming is real and anthropogenic. Not everyone agrees. In the article Global warming and the confrontation between the West and the rest of the world, journalist Thierry Meyssan argues that net zero is based on political ideology rather than science. But to state such things has become heresy in the Western countries and shouted down with accusations of ‘climate science denial’.
Regardless of such concerns, the march towards net zero continues, and key to this is the United Nations Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development Goals.
Today, almost every business or corporate report, website or brochure includes a multitude of references to ‘carbon footprints’, ‘sustainability’, ‘net zero’ or ‘climate neutrality’ and how a company or organisation intends to achieve its sustainability targets. Green profiling, green bonds and green investments go hand in hand with displaying ‘green’ credentials and ambitions wherever and whenever possible.
It seems anyone and everyone in business is planting their corporate flag on the summit of sustainability. Take Sainsbury’s, for instance. It is one of the ‘big six’ food retail supermarkets in the UK and has a vision for the future of food that it published in 2019.
Here’s a quote from it:
Personalised Optimisation is a trend that could see people chipped and connected like never before. A significant step on from wearable tech used today, the advent of personal microchips and neural laces has the potential to see all of our genetic, health and situational data recorded, stored and analysed by algorithms which could work out exactly what we need to support us at a particular time in our life. Retailers, such as Sainsbury’s could play a critical role to support this, arranging delivery of the needed food within thirty minutes — perhaps by drone.
Tracked, traced and chipped — for your own benefit. Corporations accessing all of our personal data, right down to our DNA. The report is littered with references to sustainability and the climate or environment, and it is difficult not to get the impression that it is written so as to leave the reader awestruck by the technological possibilities.
However, the promotion of a brave new world of technological innovation that has nothing to say about power — who determines policies that have led to massive inequalities, poverty, malnutrition, food insecurity and hunger and who is responsible for the degradation of the environment in the first place — is nothing new.
The essence of power is conveniently glossed over, not least because those behind the prevailing food regime are also shaping the techno-utopian fairytale where everyone lives happily ever after eating bugs and synthetic food while living in a digital panopticon.
Fake green
The type of ‘green’ agenda being pushed is a multi-trillion market opportunity for lining the pockets of rich investors and subsidy-sucking green infrastructure firms and also part of a strategy required to secure compliance required for the ‘new normal’.
It is, furthermore, a type of green that plans to cover much of the countryside with wind farms and solar panels with most farmers no longer farming. A recipe for food insecurity.
Those investing in the ‘green’ agenda care first and foremost about profit. The supremely influential BlackRock invests in the current food system that is responsible for polluted waterways, degraded soils, the displacement of smallholder farmers, a spiralling public health crisis, malnutrition and much more.
It also invests in healthcare — an industry that thrives on the illnesses and conditions created by eating the substandard food that the current system produces. Did Larry Fink, the top man at BlackRock, suddenly develop a conscience and become an environmentalist who cares about the planet and ordinary people? Of course not.
Any serious deliberations on the future of food would surely consider issues like food sovereignty, the role of agroecology and the strengthening of family farms — the backbone of current global food production.
The aforementioned article by Andrew Nikiforuk concludes that, if we are really serious about our impacts on the environment, we must scale back our needs and simplify society.
In terms of food, the solution rests on a low-input approach that strengthens rural communities and local markets and prioritises smallholder farms and small independent enterprises and retailers, localised democratic food systems and a concept of food sovereignty based on self-sufficiency, agroecological principles and regenerative agriculture.
It would involve facilitating the right to culturally appropriate food that is nutritionally dense due to diverse cropping patterns and free from toxic chemicals while ensuring local ownership and stewardship of common resources like land, water, soil and seeds.
That’s where genuine environmentalism and the future of food begins.
• The author writes on food, agriculture and development. For further insight into the issues discussed above, you can access his two free books on the food system at Academia.edu or the e-book section on the Centre for Research on Globalization homepage.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The food transition, the energy transition, net-zero ideology, programmable central bank digital currencies, the censorship of free speech and clampdowns on protest. What’s it all about? To understand these processes, we need to first locate what is essentially a social and economic reset within the context of a collapsing financial system.
Writer Ted Reece notes that the general rate of profit has trended downwards from an estimated 43% in the 1870s to 17% in the 2000s. By late 2019, many companies could not generate enough profit. Falling turnover, squeezed margins, limited cash flows and highly leveraged balance sheets were prevalent.
Professor Fabio Vighi of Cardiff University has described how closing down the global economy in early 2020 under the guise of fighting a supposedly new and novel pathogen allowed the US Federal Reserve to flood collapsing financial markets (COVID relief) with freshly printed money without causing hyperinflation. Lockdowns curtailed economic activity, thereby removing demand for the newly printed money (credit) in the physical economy and preventing ‘contagion’.
According to investigative journalist Michael Byrant, €1.5 trillion was needed to deal with the crisis in Europe alone. The financial collapse staring European central bankers in the face came to a head in 2019. The appearance of a ‘novel virus’ provided a convenient cover story.
The European Central Bank agreed to a €1.31 trillion bailout of banks followed by the EU agreeing to a €750 billion recovery fund for European states and corporations. This package of long-term, ultra-cheap credit to hundreds of banks was sold to the public as a necessary programme to cushion the impact of the pandemic on businesses and workers.
In response to a collapsing neoliberalism, we are now seeing the rollout of an authoritarian great reset — an agenda that intends to reshape the economy and change how we live.
Shift to authoritarianism
The new economy is to be dominated by a handful of tech giants, global conglomerates and e-commerce platforms, and new markets will also be created through the financialisation of nature, which is to be colonised, commodified and traded under the notion of protecting the environment.
In recent years, we have witnessed an overaccumulation of capital, and the creation of such markets will provide fresh investment opportunities (including dodgy carbon offsetting Ponzi schemes) for the super-rich to park their wealth and prosper.
This great reset envisages a transformation of Western societies, resulting in permanent restrictions on fundamental liberties and mass surveillance. Being rolled out under the benign term of a ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, the World Economic Forum (WEF) says the public will eventually ‘rent’ everything they require (remember the WEF video ‘you will own nothing and be happy’?): stripping the right of ownership under the guise of a ‘green economy’ and underpinned by the rhetoric of ‘sustainable consumption’ and ‘climate emergency’.
Climate alarmism and the mantra of sustainability are about promoting money-making schemes. But they also serve another purpose: social control.
Neoliberalism has run its course, resulting in the impoverishment of large sections of the population. But to dampen dissent and lower expectations, the levels of personal freedom we have been used to will not be tolerated. This means that the wider population will be subjected to the discipline of an emerging surveillance state.
To push back against any dissent, ordinary people are being told that they must sacrifice personal liberty in order to protect public health, societal security (those terrible Russians, Islamic extremists or that Sunak-designated bogeyman George Galloway) or the climate. Unlike in the old normal of neoliberalism, an ideological shift is occurring whereby personal freedoms are increasingly depicted as being dangerous because they run counter to the collective good.
The real reason for this ideological shift is to ensure that the masses get used to lower living standards and accept them. Consider, for instance, the Bank of England’s chief economist Huw Pill saying that people should ‘accept’ being poorer. And then there is Rob Kapito of the world’s biggest asset management firm BlackRock, who says that a “very entitled” generation must deal with scarcity for the first time in their lives.
At the same time, to muddy the waters, the message is that lower living standards are the result of the conflict in Ukraine and supply shocks that both the war and ‘the virus’ have caused.
The net-zero carbon emissions agenda will help legitimise lower living standards (reducing your carbon footprint) while reinforcing the notion that our rights must be sacrificed for the greater good. You will own nothing, not because the rich and their neoliberal agenda made you poor but because you will be instructed to stop being irresponsible and must act to protect the planet.
Net-zero agenda
But what of this shift towards net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and the plan to slash our carbon footprints? Is it even feasible or necessary?
Gordon Hughes, a former World Bank economist and current professor of economics at the University of Edinburgh, says in a new report that current UK and European net-zero policies will likely lead to further economic ruin.
Apparently, the only viable way to raise the cash for sufficient new capital expenditure (on wind and solar infrastructure) would be a two decades-long reduction in private consumption of up to 10 per cent. Such a shock has never occurred in the last century outside war; even then, never for more than a decade.
But this agenda will also cause serious environmental degradation. So says Andrew Nikiforuk in the article The Rising Chorus of Renewable Energy Skeptics, which outlines how the green techno-dream is vastly destructive.
He lists the devastating environmental impacts of an even more mineral-intensive system based on renewables and warns:
The whole process of replacing a declining system with a more complex mining-based enterprise is now supposed to take place with a fragile banking system, dysfunctional democracies, broken supply chains, critical mineral shortages and hostile geopolitics.
All of this assumes that global warming is real and anthropogenic. Not everyone agrees. In the article Global warming and the confrontation between the West and the rest of the world, journalist Thierry Meyssan argues that net zero is based on political ideology rather than science. But to state such things has become heresy in the Western countries and shouted down with accusations of ‘climate science denial’.
Regardless of such concerns, the march towards net zero continues, and key to this is the United Nations Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development Goals.
Today, almost every business or corporate report, website or brochure includes a multitude of references to ‘carbon footprints’, ‘sustainability’, ‘net zero’ or ‘climate neutrality’ and how a company or organisation intends to achieve its sustainability targets. Green profiling, green bonds and green investments go hand in hand with displaying ‘green’ credentials and ambitions wherever and whenever possible.
It seems anyone and everyone in business is planting their corporate flag on the summit of sustainability. Take Sainsbury’s, for instance. It is one of the ‘big six’ food retail supermarkets in the UK and has a vision for the future of food that it published in 2019.
Here’s a quote from it:
Personalised Optimisation is a trend that could see people chipped and connected like never before. A significant step on from wearable tech used today, the advent of personal microchips and neural laces has the potential to see all of our genetic, health and situational data recorded, stored and analysed by algorithms which could work out exactly what we need to support us at a particular time in our life. Retailers, such as Sainsbury’s could play a critical role to support this, arranging delivery of the needed food within thirty minutes — perhaps by drone.
Tracked, traced and chipped — for your own benefit. Corporations accessing all of our personal data, right down to our DNA. The report is littered with references to sustainability and the climate or environment, and it is difficult not to get the impression that it is written so as to leave the reader awestruck by the technological possibilities.
However, the promotion of a brave new world of technological innovation that has nothing to say about power — who determines policies that have led to massive inequalities, poverty, malnutrition, food insecurity and hunger and who is responsible for the degradation of the environment in the first place — is nothing new.
The essence of power is conveniently glossed over, not least because those behind the prevailing food regime are also shaping the techno-utopian fairytale where everyone lives happily ever after eating bugs and synthetic food while living in a digital panopticon.
Fake green
The type of ‘green’ agenda being pushed is a multi-trillion market opportunity for lining the pockets of rich investors and subsidy-sucking green infrastructure firms and also part of a strategy required to secure compliance required for the ‘new normal’.
It is, furthermore, a type of green that plans to cover much of the countryside with wind farms and solar panels with most farmers no longer farming. A recipe for food insecurity.
Those investing in the ‘green’ agenda care first and foremost about profit. The supremely influential BlackRock invests in the current food system that is responsible for polluted waterways, degraded soils, the displacement of smallholder farmers, a spiralling public health crisis, malnutrition and much more.
It also invests in healthcare — an industry that thrives on the illnesses and conditions created by eating the substandard food that the current system produces. Did Larry Fink, the top man at BlackRock, suddenly develop a conscience and become an environmentalist who cares about the planet and ordinary people? Of course not.
Any serious deliberations on the future of food would surely consider issues like food sovereignty, the role of agroecology and the strengthening of family farms — the backbone of current global food production.
The aforementioned article by Andrew Nikiforuk concludes that, if we are really serious about our impacts on the environment, we must scale back our needs and simplify society.
In terms of food, the solution rests on a low-input approach that strengthens rural communities and local markets and prioritises smallholder farms and small independent enterprises and retailers, localised democratic food systems and a concept of food sovereignty based on self-sufficiency, agroecological principles and regenerative agriculture.
It would involve facilitating the right to culturally appropriate food that is nutritionally dense due to diverse cropping patterns and free from toxic chemicals while ensuring local ownership and stewardship of common resources like land, water, soil and seeds.
That’s where genuine environmentalism and the future of food begins.
• The author writes on food, agriculture and development. For further insight into the issues discussed above, you can access his two free books on the food system at Academia.edu or the e-book section on the Centre for Research on Globalization homepage.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
This article begins with a short video based on an interview with researcher Sandi Adams, who describes the plans for agriculture in the rural county of Somerset in south-west England and the UK in general. It’s an important clip because what she describes appears to be part of a wider United Nations agenda handed down by an extremely wealthy unaccountable, unelected elite.
This elite thinks it can do a better job than nature by changing the essence of food and the genetic core of the food supply (via synthetic biology and genetic engineering). The plan also involves removing farmers from the land (AI-driven farmerless farms) and filling much of the countryside with wind farms and solar panels. Although the food system has problems that need addressing, this misguided agenda is a recipe for food insecurity that no one voted for.
Farming Crisis KEY POINTS from Sandi Adams interview (youtube.com)
Throughout the world, from the Netherlands to India, farmers are protesting. The protests might appear to have little in common. But they do. Farmers are increasingly finding it difficult to make a living, whether, for instance, because of neoliberal trade policies that lead to the import of produce that undermines domestic production and undercuts prices, the withdrawal of state support or the implementation of net-zero emissions policies that set unrealistic targets.
The common thread is that, by one way or another, farming is deliberately being made impossible or financially non-viable. The aim is to drive most farmers off the land and ram through an agenda that by its very nature seems likely to produce shortages and undermine food security.
A ‘one world agriculture’ global agenda is being promoted by the likes of the Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum. It involves a vision of food and farming that sees companies such as Bayer, Corteva, Syngenta and Cargill working with Microsoft, Google and the big-tech giants to facilitate AI-driven farmerless farms, laboratory engineered ‘food’ and retail dominated by the likes of Amazon and Walmart. A cartel of data owners, proprietary input suppliers and e-commerce platforms at the commanding heights of the economy.
The agenda is the brainchild of a digital-corporate-financial complex that wants to transform and control all aspects of life and human behaviour. This complex forms part of an authoritarian global elite that has the ability to coordinate its agenda globally via the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other supranational organisations, including influential think tanks and foundations (Gates, Rockefeller etc).
Its agenda for food and farming is euphemistically called a ‘food transition’. Big agribusiness and ‘philanthropic’ foundations position themselves as the saviours of humanity due to their much-promoted plans to ‘feed the world’ with high-tech ‘precision’ farming’, ‘data-driven’ agriculture and ‘green’ (net-zero) production – with ‘sustainability’ being the mantra.
Integral to this ‘food transition’ is the ‘climate emergency’ narrative, a commentary that has been carefully constructed and promoted (see the work of investigative journalist Cory Morningstar), and net-zero ideology tied to carbon farming and carbon trading.
The ‘food transition’ involves locking farmers (at least those farmers who will remain in farming) further into a corporate-controlled agriculture that extracts wealth and serves the market needs of global corporations, carbon trading Ponzi schemes and institutional investors and speculators with no connection to farming who regard agriculture, food commodities and agricultural land as mere financial assets. These farmers will be reduced to corporate profit-extracting agents who bear all of the risks.
This predatory commercialisation of the countryside uses flawed premises and climate alarmism to legitimise the roll-out of technologies to supposedly deliver us all from climate breakdown and Malthusian catastrophe.
In society in general, we also see the questioning of official narratives discouraged, censored and marginalised. We saw this with the policies and the ‘science’ that were used to legitimise COVID-related state actions. A wealthy elite increasingly funds science, determines what should be studied, how it should be studied and how the findings are disseminated and how the technology produced is to be used.
This elite has the power to shut down genuine debate and to smear and censor others who question the dominant narrative. The prevailing thinking is that the problems humanity face are all to be solved through technical innovation determined by plutocrats and centralised power.
This haughty mindset (or outright arrogance) leads to, and is symptomatic of, an authoritarianism that seeks to impose a range of technologies on humanity with no democratic oversight. This includes self-transmitting vaccines, the genetic engineering of plants and humans, synthetic food, geoengineering and transhumanism.
What we see is a misguided eco-modernist paradigm that concentrates power and privileges techno-scientific expertise (a form of technocratic exceptionalism). At the same time, historical power relations (often rooted in agriculture and colonialism) and their legacies within and between societies across the world are conveniently ignored and depoliticised. Technology is not the cure-all for the destructive impacts of poverty, inequality, dispossession, imperialism or class exploitation.
When it comes to the technologies and policies being rolled out in the agriculture sector, these phenomena will be reinforced and further entrenched – and that includes illness and poor health, which have markedly increased as a result of the modern food we eat and the agrochemicals and practices already used by the corporations pushing for the ‘food transition’. However, that then opens up other money-spinning techno-fix opportunities in the life sciences sector for investors like BlackRock that invest in both agriculture and pharmaceuticals.
But in a neoliberal privatised economy that has often facilitated the rise of members of the controlling wealthy elite, it is reasonable to assume that its members possess certain assumptions of how the world works and should continue to work: a world based on deregulation with limited oversight and the hegemony of private capital and a world led by private individuals like Bill Gates who think they know best.
Whether through, for instance, the patenting of life forms, carbon trading, entrenching market (corporate) dependency or land investments, their eco-modern policies serve as cover for generating and amassing further wealth and for cementing their control.
So, it should come as little surprise that powerful people who have contempt for democratic principles (and by implication, ordinary people) believe they have some divine right to undermine food security, close down debate, enrich themselves further courtesy of their technologies and policies and gamble with humanity’s future.
The author writes on food, agriculture and development. For further insight into the issues discussed above, you can access his two free books on the food system at Academia.edu or the e-book section on the Centre for Research on Globalization homepage.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The defeat of hardline national-Catholic rule was welcomed with euphoria by the big-tent opposition. The outcome for the Polish left is more ambiguous.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
This week’s revelation that Donald Trump is already plotting new ways to try to put himself permanently above the law is just the latest reminder of the looming threat of lawless and emboldened right-wing forces in the United States. Trump’s new scheme to expand a Nixon-era policy memo to prohibit the Justice Department from prosecuting presidents, even after they leave office, is just a tiny hint…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
In the 1990s, neoliberalism was a kind of utopian program. What remains after the crises of the twenty-first century?
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
Matt and Sam interview historian Jennifer Burns about her new biography of Nobel Prize–winning economist and libertarian intellectual Milton Friedman.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
Emilio Pettoruti (Argentina), Arlequín (‘Harlequin’), 1928.
Before he won Argentina’s presidential election on 19 November, Javier Milei circulated a video of himself in front of a series of white boards. Pasted on one board were the names of various state institutions, such as the ministries of health, education, women and gender diversities, public works, and culture, all recognised as typical elements of any modern state project. Walking along the board, Milei ripped off the names of these and other ministries while crying afuera! (‘out!’) and declaring that if elected president, he would abolish them. Milei vowed not only to shrink the state but to ‘blow up’ the system, often appearing at campaign events with a chainsaw in hand.
The reaction to Milei’s viral video and other such stunts was as polarised as the Argentinian electorate. Half of the population thought that Milei’s agenda was madness, the sign of a far right out of touch with reality and rationality. The other half thought that Milei displayed precisely the kind of boldness required to transform a country mired in poverty and skyrocketing inflation. Milei did not just win the election; he won it handily, defeating the outgoing government’s finance minister, Sergio Massa, whose stale, centrist promises of stability did not sit well with a population that has lived with instability for decades.
Milei’s proposals to solve the downward spiral of the Argentinian economy are not unique, nor are they practical. Dollarisating the economy, privatisating state functions, and suppressing workers’ organisations are pillars of the neoliberal austerity agenda that has plagued the world for the past several decades. To debate Milei on this or that policy misses the point behind the ascendancy of the far right across the world. It is not what they say they will do to solve the world’s actual problems that matters so much as how they say it. In other words, for politicians like Milei (or Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and former US President Donald Trump), it is not their policy proposals that are attractive, but their style – the style of the far right. People like Milei promise to take the country’s institutions by the throat and make them cough up solutions. Their boldness sends a frisson through society, a jolt that masquerades as a plan for the future.
Fátima Pecci Carou (Argentina), Evita Ninja, 2020.
There was a time when the general mood of the international middle class centred on guaranteeing convenience: they hated the inconvenience of being stuck in traffic jams and queues, of being unable to get their children into the school of their choice, and of being unable to buy – even if by credit – the consumption goods that made them feel culturally superior to each other and to the working class. If the middle class was not inconvenienced, then that class – which shapes the electorate of most liberal democracies – would be content with promises of stability. But when the entire system convulses with inconveniences of one kind or another – such as inflation, the rate of which was 142.7% in Argentina at the start of the elections in October – then the assurance of stability holds little weight. The political forces of the centre, such as of Milei’s opponent, are trapped in a habit of speaking about stability while their country burns. They promise little more than incremental destruction. In this context, timidity is not always attractive to the middle class, let alone to workers and peasants, who require a bold vision rather than a fixation on mild cost-of-living increases alongside taxation holidays for big businesses.
This timidity is not merely about the character of the political force that seizes the moment. If that were the case, then merely shouting louder should win the centre-left and left votes. Rather, it reflects the increasing timidity of the centre-left and its political platform, deflated by the immense stresses and strains that have damaged society at the neurological level. The precariousness of employment, the state’s retreat from providing care for its people, the privatisation of leisure, the individualisation of education, and other strains have, together, produced overwhelming social problems (not to mention the impact of the climate catastrophe and brutal wars). The political horizon of large sections of the centre-left has been reduced to merely managing this decaying civilisation (as our latest dossier, What Can We Expect from the New Progressive Wave in Latin America?, points out). The persistent failure of governments to solve the problems of society has made politics itself foreign to large sections of the public.
Two generations of people have been raised in the world of austerity, sold falsehoods by technocratic experts who promise to improve their social condition through neoliberal economic growth. Why should they believe any expert who now cautions against the economic cannibalism promoted by the far right? Besides, the erosion of education systems and the reduction of the mass media into a gladiatorial contest have meant that there are few avenues for serious public discussion about the troubles facing our societies and the solutions needed to address them. Anything can be promised, anything can be implemented, and even when neoliberal agendas create catastrophic outcomes – as with Modi’s demonetisation scheme in India – they are touted as successes and their leaders are celebrated.
Neoliberalism has increased not only the precariousness of the global majority, but also sentiments of anti-intellectualism (the death of the expert and expertise) and anti-democratisation (the death of serious, democratic public education and discussion). In this context, Milei’s triumph is less about him than it is a product of a broader social process, one that is not exclusive to Argentina but holds true around the world.
Raquel Forner (Argentina), Mujeres del Mundo (‘Women of the World’), 1938.
Pillars of neoliberalism such as the privatisation and commodification of state functions created the social conditions for the rise of twin problems: corruption and crime. The deregulation of private enterprise and the privatisation of state functions have deepened the nexus between the political class and the capitalist class. Granting state contracts to private enterprises and cutting back on regulations, for instance, has provided immense avenues for bribes, kickbacks, and transfer payments to proliferate. Simultaneously, the increased precarity of life and the evisceration of social welfare increased the volume of petty crime, including through the drug trade (as demonstrated by a Tricontinental research project on the war on drugs and imperialism’s addictions, which will bear fruit soon).
The far right has fixated on these problems not in an effort to address the roots of the problem, but to achieve two results:
The far right’s misleading representation and weaponisation of corruption and crime has placed the left at a deep disadvantage. On these issues, the far right has an intimate relationship with old social democracy and traditional liberalism, who generally accept the content of the far-right agenda, objecting only to their brash approach. This leaves the left with few political allies when it comes to these core battles, forcing it to defend the state form despite the corruption that has become endemic to it through neoliberal policy. Meanwhile, the left must continue to defend working-class communities from state repression, despite the real problems of crime and insecurity that confront the working class due to the collapse of employment and social welfare. The dominant debate is framed around the surface-level realities of corruption and crime and is not permitted to probe deeper into the neoliberal roots of these problems.
Diana Dowek (Argentina), Las madres (‘The Mothers’), 1983.
When the election results came in from Argentina, I asked our colleagues in Buenos Aires and La Plata to send me some songs that capture the current mood. Meanwhile, I buried myself in Argentinian poetry of loss and defeat, mostly the work of Juana Bignozzi (1937–2015). However, this was not the mood they wanted to put forward in this newsletter. They wanted something robust, something that reflects the boldness with which the left must respond to our current moment. This mood is captured by the rapper Trueno (b. 2002) and the singer Víctor Heredia (b. 1947), crossing generations and genres to produce the moving song Tierra Zanta (‘Sacred Earth’) and an equally moving video. And so, from Argentina:
I came into the world to defend my land.
I am the peaceful saviour in this war.
I will die fighting, firm as a Venezuelan.
I am Atacama, Guaraní, Coya, Barí, and Tucáno.
If they want to throw the country at me, we’ll lift it up.
We Indians built empires with our hands.
Do you hate the future? I come with my brothers and sisters
from different parents, but we don’t stay apart.
I am the fire of the Caribbean and a Peruvian warrior.
I thank Brazil for the air that we breathe.
Sometimes I lose, sometimes I win.
But it is not in vain to die for the land that I love.
And if outsiders ask what my name is,
my name is ‘Latin’ and my surname is ‘America’.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The rain has been almost constant these early months of 1996. Great storms from the US have arrived even to here, the Caribbean coast of Honduras, thousands of kilometers to the south. At times in Tela, the run-off courses thigh-deep.
And every day, it seems, some piece of news about those Northern-owned Fruit Companies has flooded the papers. A banana war has begun between them and the European Community. Accusations and denials gust through the pages of El Tiempo and La Prensa.
In February, I read in La Prensa of some campesinos who have taken over lands of the Tela RR Co. The Company official’s words echo through my mind: “I’m glad the military used no force. I’m glad the government respects private property rights.” I’d like to hear those campesinos’ stories. Tacamiche. I can’t find this village on any maps.1
Another gust flutters the pages of the dailies in my hands. The Honduran government has said no to any attempt by the Tela RR Co. to decrease train service. The poor need an inexpensive means to travel, argue the politicians. I pull out the maps again.
The Ferrocarril Nacional owns the lines from Puerto Cortés to Baracoa, and beyond to San Pedro Sula. The Company, the one from Baracoa to Tela—as well as others running deep into the fincas. There are really three Chiquita trains: one that makes a trip through those plantations between El Progreso and La Lima; The Machangay, a weekly service from that Port to the emerald hearts of their lands, carrying merchandise to the Company stores; and, in part, from Puerto Cortés to Tela.
If I can’t find Tacamiche, I can surely find a railroad.
The weather, for the first time in weeks, is sunny—and muggy. But I won’t be prepared for the storm that will cast me in a whirlwind for the next thirty-six hours.
*****
In the cracking dawn, I gather with many others for a train to Baracoa, then on to Tela. Opposite this Portón Nº 7, is the shell of a building. Its brick and concrete crumble under today’s dry sky. The metal date is still intact: 1922. Its former name is a faint shadow: Hyller Ralston and Son.
A thin-limbed ladino wobbles from one person to another, showing off his pride. From his front pocket, he pulls out an ancient, long-barreled revolver.
The train arrives. The rush is on. Quickly the cushioned seats in the lone first-class car are taken. I opt for a wooden one in second. There are three of these wagons, as well as four fruteros converted to passenger use, two baggage cars, and the locomotive.
Our journey begins, clattering through the awakening city, over a bridge spanning a laguna. Shanties built upon stilts above the marshy ground. In the window of one, a woman washes dishes. The sink hangs off the sill. Soiled water drains to the swamp below.
Though it is still early, the swelter grows. I tuck my journal into my back pocket, leaving the scenes of small rustic settlements and molded Company towns that slip by my window.
Through the fruteros, stepping over people’s legs stretched out to the center bench. Perdone … con permiso … To the first baggage car to buy a soda. But the entrance is jammed with passengers and bundles of firewood. I return to my seat, stepping over legs, defeated.
“What’s the matter?” The words cut through my self-pity. I hadn’t noticed someone’s eyes were watching me on my unsuccessful quest. An Afro-Honduran man studies me with deep brown eyes.
“Oh, I thought of getting a gaseosa. But the way is blocked.” I shrug and begin turning towards my car.
“What flavor would you like?” He gets up from his place.
“Oh, no,” I shake my head, single braid wagging. “It’s all right, señor.”
“No, I insist. Sit down, please.” He offers the bench with an open hand. “What kind would you like?”
“Grape would be fine, please.”
Within minutes, he returns. One chocolate-colored hand embraces the bottle.
“How much do I owe you?” I reach into my pocket after taking the lukewarm soda.
He smiles. “Nothing. It’s my treat.” He sits next to me.
This is Eduardo, going home to San Juan, a Garífuna village near Tela. He farms some land there, in the mountains. For more money, he fishes a few months at a time, out of Puerto Cortés.
Flashes of sunlight through the slats of this frutero dance within the car. We talk about the railroads here, and their owners. Our conversation flows to the banana companies: who they are and where they rule.
West of Tela is Chiquita-land with bananas and citrus. It used to be United Fruit. East of Tela—La Ceiba, Trujillo—belongs to Standard Fruit, or Dole. It mainly grows bananas and pineapples. Nueva Tela and Lancetilla were United’s territory.
“And there are others, too. A new one, also from the United States. … No, it’s independent from the other two.” Eduardo blows the smoke of his cigarette. It swirls in the sunlight slipping in. “There was some old company, Italian.” He shakes his just-beginning-to-grey head. “I don’t remember the name any more. It, too, used to be on the coats. But it got bought up years ago.”
I take a swig of my grape gaseosa, listening to his melodic voice.
He wrinkles his brow, eyes squinted in thought. “And there was another—Cuyamel. It worked west of Puerto Cortés. It got bought up, too. There aren’t any fincas that way any longer.”
I wipe my mouth. “Why’s that, don Eduardo?”
He shrugs. “I suppose because the soil’s not as good. Lots of small plantations there, though. Some are collectives, others private. They grow bananas, sugar cane, yucca and the like.” His flicked ash falls through a hole rotted in the wooden floor.
I place the bottle between my feet. “Just on the other side of the river there, in Guatemala, the Company has many large fincas.”
“Oh, yeh.” His smile is bright. “They’ve got some very good land there.”
“You know, don Eduardo,” I look him in the eyes, “it’s good to meet someone who knows so much about the bananeras. So many Hondurans have told me differing things. Like Tela had belonged to Estandard Fruit.”
He laughs quietly. “Well, I know some, because I’ve travelled so much around the country.” He falls serious. “Plus, if I don’t know something, I say I don’t know, instead of pretending I do and misinforming.”
I nod, picking up my soda. I sip the last of it.
“And I used to work for the Company many years ago.”
I glance at him. His eyes are gazing at something in that past. “When was that?”
“Oh, ’51 to ’66.” He drags his cigarette.
“Wasn’t there some sort of big strike back then? In ’53 or ’54?”
“Fifty-four.” His head moves plaintively up and down. “You had to conform.”
“And how was it?”
Eduardo turns to me. “Low pay. Had to conform. Step out of line, and you were out.” He tromps his bud. “I decided to get out of that. Went to work in other agriculture and fishing. I devote myself to that now.”
I hold the empty bottle up. “Well, I guess I should go return this.”
On my pass back through, Eduardo nods towards the landscape. “We’re already coming into Tela.”
I peer out between the slats. We’re entering the railyard. This train clatters by the old Tela RR Co. building and decaying frutero cars.
“Don Eduardo, thanks for the soda—and the lessons.”
He nods de nada with a smile.
I go to my second-class seat to retrieve my knapsack. I watch our approach through the open window. We have pulled onto the fractured pier, and now backing along a spur line. Beneath a bridge, the river swirls black-green and tan-grey. We arrive at the Old Tela station.
I lose sight of Eduardo in the crowd on the road leading past the cheap-dive hotels and market. The mud is crusting into ruts. The late-morning sun is strong.
I have no interest in spending even a night here. The five weeks I’d spent in February, going into March, was enough. I head straight for the bus terminal. I’ll go to La Ceiba, the cradle of Standard Fruit. Then on to Trujillo.
*****
A thin wind whirls dust and litter around my feet. I step through the rear door of this school bus. It is dim inside. Most seats are already taken.
A young ladino, perhaps mid-20s, offers the one next to him, in the back here. As soon as I sit down, he says with a big smile, “So, are you from the United States?”
Oh, boy, this is going to be a long ride. “I’m from Alaska,” I respond flatly.
“Oh.” Disappointment washes over his bony face. “I thought …”
A heavy silence drifts between us.
I look away. I feel a hollowness in the pit of my stomach.
“Well, I work at Estandard Fruit.” He pulls out his worn leather wallet and hands me his identification card. “In a packing plant. Four years now.”
Bewilderment washes over my face. “That’s strange. On the train from Puerto Cortés just now, I met a man who used to work for the Company. He said wages were low and one had to conform.”
This young man nods enthusiastically. “Oh, yeh.”
He leans over the back of the seat, pulling off his ball cap. He fans a banana box in the cargo hold behind us.
“What you got there?”
“Oh,” he sits back down with a clunk. “A hen, a rooster—and five chicks. I have my own piece of land now and setting up livestock on it.”
“Once you get it established, are you going to leave the Company?”
The cock crows.
The man’s head bobs with a slight grin. His eyes twinkle.
“So, how much do you earn?”
“Oh, 25 lempiras a day. Per month, 750.”
About minimum wage here. At the present exchange rate, that would be about $70US per month.
“I saw in the newspapers that the minimum wage will be increasing soon.”
He shakes his head. The sunlight shimmers on his black hair. “I’m not so certain.”
“Why’s that?”
“Lawyers of the big companies are fighting it.”
I’d read that, too.
He reaches back to fan his chickens again. “I have to keep my investment cool,” he says with a laugh.
I smile at him.
That sunbeam is so warm. This has already been a long day. I begin nodding off….
I awaken, my shirt damp with sweat. It’s hellaciously hot. I reach for my water bottle.
My seatmate is cooling his chickens once more. He grins fincas are fading into miles of pineapple groves along either side of the highway. We are nearing La Ceiba.
*****
Once settled into this city, I wander through the central park. Caimans and turtles are keeping cool in their tank beneath the massive rubber tree. And I wander across the Avenue to the railroad park in the Company town. Under an ancient mango tree, a couple trysts. A slight breeze rustles its lance-shaped leaves. A mosaic of leaf-shadow and sunlight dances on the brick path.
I’m reading the sign by the old San José locomotive. A man walks up behind me. He watches me write, I see from out of the corner of my eye, and the holstered pistol he wears.
Many times during my journeys, I have found my fascination for trains intermeshing with the history of the banananeras.
I turn around to face him. “Excuse me, sir. Do you work here?”
“Sí, senora.” This ladino studies me: long hair in a single braid, blue jeans, tennis shoes. His face is official. “I work vigilance in this park.”
“Pues, perhaps you can help me. I am writing a book on train journeys. I understand there might be cargo service to La Ceiba. Is that true?” I’ve long wanted to travel these lines around here. But a previous visit to Sambo Creek proved it couldn’t run very far east.
“No, Estandard Fruit doesn’t ship by train any longer. It uses trucks. All the lines now belong to the government. There is, however, a special tourist train every day.”
“What hours does it run, señor?”
“From seven in the morning until about six in the evening. Every hour and a half or so.” His arms are crossed. He watches me jot this down.
“And where does it go to?”
“To a pineapple plantation about a kilometer from here.”
Hmmm, this could be a fun ride. “How much does it cost, sir?”
“Seventy centavos each way.” He turns to a taller, stockier man who just walked up to us. He also wears a pistol.
“The railroad station here in the park. Is it the original passenger station?”
The first man shakes his head. “No, it’s out in a neighborhood …”
“Quite a distance from town,” his co-worker interjects.
“It’s now in bad disrepair,” the skinnier one finishes.
“Was this, then, the station for the Company town and headquarters?”
They shrug.
The brusquer one responds, “The main Company headquarters has always been elsewhere.”
I raise an eyebrow. That’s different. “Where is that, señor?”
“I don’t remember the name of the place. But this,” he nods his head towards the white cookie-cutter buildings, “was a local branch, until two years ago. These offices now handle tourism for this park, and for Cuero y Salado.” Cuero y Salado is a natural reserve about 30 kilometers west of La Ceiba—as the vulture flies.
I look at him questioningly, “Why did it move?”
“Well, with the change of president two years ago, the Company pulled out majorly from the area. The previous administration had been funding a new port for Estandard Fruit east of here. But with the change, Estandard said no. So, now the new government has had to abandon the port. It’s not completely built.”
“Pues, why did the Company decide to pull out of the project?”
“Oh, the new government only cares about,” his broad face scrunches, “its ‘moral revolution.’” His stubby fingers quote those last two words. “It doesn’t care about the country itself. Just look at the condition of the roads along this coast.” He spits on the ground.
“When did Standard stop using La Ceiba as a port?”
The first man looks at his partner before responding, “1986.”
“You’d said Estandard had majorly pulled out. In what ways?”
The second ladino wipes his mouth. “Sí, it’s dropped more and more operations. This port …”
“… the railroad,” adds the other.
“The port project.”
“Oh, and it closed down big pineapple fincas to the west.”
“And those African palm plantations outside of town. To whom do they belong?”
The two men look at each other. The larger one answers, “They’re mostly Honduran companies.”
“Well, we should be getting back to work.” The thin man elbows his co-worker.
“Sí, we have to make sure no-one steps on the grass or anything. Adiós, señora.”
I stroll across the park, to the Avenida, down to the old pier. This is a quieter Sunday than two years ago. No boats await to go to the Bay Islands. A few families sit on the edge, dangling and swinging their legs. A man pulls up his hand-held line. A silver fish flips on the hook. Until dusk, I lean against a mooring, listening to the music of languages around me—Spanish, English, Garífuna. The sunset colors sparkle the blue-green water.
A few clouds speckle this new morning. The sun is already an hour or so old. It plays through the leaves, swaying in a now-and-again breeze.
I sit under the arbor. That finca train should come some time. I must have missed the first one. The time passes. I write. Three women catch their ride to work. I light a cigarette.
A man comes up to me. His Quimipro ball cap casts his serious eyes in shadow. “Excuse me. May I have a cigarette, please?” He sits next to me, blowing the smoke slowly. “Are you waiting for someone?”
“The tourist train. And you?”
“Oh, a lift to Estandard Fruit.”
“Do you work for it?” My flicked ash scurries across the path.
He shakes his head. The scattered sunlight catches on his high cheekbones. His skin is pale. “No, for Blanquita. I used to work for it, though.”
I put my journal under my thigh. “Really?”
“Sí.” He drags his cigarette. “I began there when I was 8. I trained as a locomotive mechanic. I worked ten years for the railroad—two under Estandard, the rest with the government, until it closed down operation of the lines. From there, I went to work for Blanquita, as a processing assessor.”
“And Blanquita. Who does own it?”
“Pues, it’s Honduran-owned and independent. But the real owner is Estandard Fruit. It’s just another arm of it.” He gazes at his hands, then takes another puff. ·The African palm plantations mostly belong to Blanquita. Some, though, are independent farmers who sell the fruits to it.”
“Are the Standard offices here in La Ceiba?” I step on my butt.
“Sí. Those buildings over there.” He points to the large white ones across from the railroad park. “It also has other offices. Out on the fincas, in Puerto Cortés, and Puerto Castilla.”
“Why doesn’t it use the port here anymore?”
With his long, bony fingers, he flicks his remnant into the grass. “It’s obsolete. Can’t handle the big cargo container ships. Now it’s only used to send produce out to the Islands.”
“I heard the government had been building a new port for Estandard. But the project had to be abandoned because the Company pulled out.”
His features become sharper. “It’s a lie.” He glances out to the parking lot. Nothing yet.
And I watch the railroad shed on that other side. Nothing yet, either.
I lean forward, arms on thighs. “Why doesn’t Standard use the railroad any longer?”
One hand rubs a knee of his black pants. “Because of the irresponsibility of the workers.” He looks up. “The Company would hire people to unload boxes from the train when it arrived at the pier.” He nods down towards the seafront. “The workers would stack the boxes four or five high. Many bananas got damaged—more easily done the riper they get. Pues, there were many complaints from the US and Europe. The Company was losing lots of money. So it had to end.”
A silence blows between us. We both study that lot.
His eyes fall to his work-worn hands. “Plus, the workers were mañoso.2”
I wrinkle my brow. “Mañoso? What does that mean?”
“Pues, for example. There’s a pineapple finca to the west of here,” he turns and points that way. “Montecristo Piñales. It’s very large. Has permanent employees. Well, they’d report in in the morning, then request to see a doctor. They had a pain here,” he points to his side, “a pain there,” to the head, “everywhere. The doctor would write up a one-week excuse, and Estandard would pay wages for that week.” He looks at me. “It wasn’t just one worker who did that, but many. It cost the Company a lot of money.” He straightens up, his gaze fixed out there. “The plantation is still operating, but with different workers. All of them were replaced. Con permiso.”
He walks off to the parking lot, to a pick-up truck pulled in. I watch him greet a man. They drive away.
I wait for my train a while longer, passing the time scribbling notes in a small red notebook. The leaf-mosaic waltzes over the page, over my hand.
It is now almost 10 a.m. Still no train. I decide to pack it in and go to Trujillo.
*****
During this bus trip, no conversation interrupts my contemplation of the countryside. West of Savá is a kilometers-long banana plantation. White plastic wraps the racimos. Arrow-straight dirt roads lead into its depths. Workers bow under the already-heavy heat of this day. A yellow-red sun warns not to collect fruit.
I pick up today’s La Prensa from my lap. An article catches my eye, about the Port of Cabotaje.3 This is the one we’d talked about in La Ceiba. Yes, it was built by the previous government. There’s a lack of funding from this new administration to do the necessary dredging of channels to keep it clear.
My pen jolts with the rhythm of the bus. My usual chicken scratch is now almost indecipherable. I glance out. We have now left Savá. Fincas of African palm patch the roadside. I turn my attention back to the story: “… and with the pull-out of Standard Fruit Company, this port lost its importance in the country.”
But there is no mention of why the Company pulled out.
I fold the paper, giving it back to its owner, and stuff the little notebook in my pocket. We are now near Tocoa. “The Cradle of Agrarian Reform,” proclaims a faded sign. Citrus groves blanket the countryside.
*****
Over the next few weeks, those northern storms once more arrive to this coast. The rains muddy the streets of Trujillo. Many days, gusts of wind flutter the pages of the newspapers.
Tela RR Co. executive Fernando Sánchez (formerly the US consul to this country) makes an offer to the government. The Company will invest $100 million US in finca infrastructure and increase previously fallen banana production by 40%. However … Honduras must decrease taxes by 50 US cents per exported box.4
More accusations in the Banana War. This in relation to the Stalinsky case. A two-page letter-ad runs, written by a former Chiquita employee. It details the dirty work he claims the Company asked him to do.5
And Standard Fruit will be returning to Nicaragua, after having left in 1982 (… during the Sandinista Revolution, which instituted an agrarian reform and new labor laws …).
The drizzle of conversations, too, continues. From public library to the clutter of a museum. From dim market to café. On street corners …
My little book becomes drenched with the rains….
ENDNOTES
1 Four months later, The New York Times (22 July 1996) would publish an article on this.
2 Mañoso – crafty, cunning, tricky, sneaky
3 18 March 1996 edition.
4 El Tiempo, 19 March 1996.
5 La Prensa, 20 March 1996.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Increasing global repudiation of United States complicity with Israel’s genocidal slaughter of civilians in Gaza underlines the stakes for the Biden administration as it prepares to host 21 heads of state and leading CEOs at the annual summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in San Francisco November 12-18. This will be the first global summit since the Gaza war began…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
For all the friendly feelings toward organized labor in the United States today, a new workers’ movement remains incipient.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
From 9 to 15 October, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank held their annual joint meeting in Marrakech (Morocco). The last time that these two Bretton Woods institutions met on African soil was in 1973, when the IMF-World Bank meeting was held in Nairobi (Kenya). Kenya’s then President Jomo Kenyatta (1897–1978) urged those gathered to find ‘an early cure to the monetary sickness of inflation and instability that has afflicted the world’. Kenyatta, who became Kenya’s first president in 1964, noted that, ‘[o]ver the last fifteen years, many developing countries have been losing, every year, a significant proportion of their annual income through deterioration of their terms of trade’. Developing countries could not overcome the negative terms of trade in a situation where they sold raw materials or barely processed goods on the world market while being reliant on the import of expensive finished commodities and energy, even if they raised their volumes of export. ‘Recently’, Kenyatta added, ‘inflation in the industrial countries has led to further and important losses to the developing countries’.
‘The whole world is watching’, Kenyatta said. ‘This is not because many people understand the details of what you are discussing, but because the world looks to you to find urgent solutions to problems affecting their daily lives’. Kenyatta’s warnings went unheeded. Six decades after the meeting in Nairobi, the loss of national income to debt and inflation remains a serious problem for developing countries. But, in our time, the whole world is not watching. Most people do not even know that the IMF and World Bank met in Morocco, and few expect them to solve the world’s problems. That is because, across the globe, people know that these institutions are, in fact, the authors of pain and are simply not capable of solving the problems that they have created and exacerbated.
Ahead of the meeting in Morocco, Oxfam issued a statement that strongly criticised the IMF and World Bank for ‘returning to Africa for the first time in decades with the same old failed message: cut your spending, sack public service workers, and pay your debts despite the huge human costs’. Oxfam highlighted the economic crisis facing the Global South, pointing out that ‘more than half (57 percent) of the world’s poorest countries, home to 2.4 billion people, are having to cut public spending by a combined $229 billion over the next five years’. On top of this, they showed that ‘low- and low-middle income countries will be forced to pay nearly half a billion dollars every day in interest and debt repayments between now and 2029’. Though the IMF has said that it plans to create ‘social spending floors’ to prevent cuts in government spending on public services, Oxfam’s analysis of 27 IMF loan programmes found that ‘these floors are a smokescreen for more austerity: for every $1 the IMF encouraged governments to spend on public services, it has told them to cut six times more than that through austerity measures’. The fallacy of ‘social spending floors’ has also been demonstrated by Human Rights Watch in its recent report, Bandage on a Bullet Wound: IMF Social Spending Floors and the COVID-19 Pandemic.
At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we continue to monitor the IMF’s impact on developing economies, including in our new dossier, How the International Monetary Fund Is Squeezing Pakistan (October 2023). Written and researched by Taimur Rahman and his colleagues at the Research and Publications Centre (Lahore, Pakistan), the dossier lays out the structural problems facing Pakistan’s economy, such as low productivity in its export-oriented industry and the high costs of imported luxury goods. Because of the lack of investment in industry, Pakistan’s labour productivity is low, and so its exports are priced out by other countries (as is the case with the textile industry in Bangladesh, China, and Vietnam). Meanwhile, the import of luxury goods would be far more devastating for the economy if not for the dollars earned by remittances from hard-working but ignored Pakistani workers, mainly in the Gulf states. Pakistan’s ballooning deficit, the dossier explains, is ‘driven by the fact that Pakistan is no longer competitive in the international market and has continued to import goods and services at a rate that it simply cannot afford’. Furthermore, ‘IMF-imposed conditions have further dried up the investment that Pakistan sorely needs to upgrade its infrastructure and accelerate industrialisation’. Not only does the IMF prevent investment for industrialisation, but it enforces cuts on public services (importantly, for health and education).
In July, the IMF approved a $3 billion stand-by agreement with Pakistan that it claimed would create ‘the space for social and development spending to help the people of Pakistan’. However, the IMF is simply feeding Pakistan the same tired neoliberal package, calling for ‘greater fiscal discipline, a market-determined exchange rate to absorb external pressures, and further progress on reforms related to the energy sector, climate resilience, and the business climate’ – all measures that will exacerbate the crisis. To ensure the permanency of these policies, the IMF spoke not only with the government of Caretaker Prime Minister Anwaar-ul-Haq Kakar, but also with former Prime Minister Imran Khan (who was removed from office in 2022 in a move that was encouraged by the United States due to his neutrality on the war in Ukraine). As if this were not enough, through its role facilitating the agreement, the US government pressured the Pakistani government to supply weapons to Ukraine in secret through the disreputable arms dealer Global Ordnance. This makes an already bad deal even worse.
Similar deals have been made with countries such as Argentina, Sri Lanka, and Zambia. In the case of Sri Lanka, for instance, the institution’s senior mission chief for the country, Peter Breuer, described the IMF agreement as a ‘brutal experiment’. The social consequences of this experiment will, of course, be borne by the Sri Lankan people, whose frustrations have been stifled by the police and military forces.
This dynamic was also on display in February in Suriname, where large numbers of people who took to the streets to protest against the IMF-imposed austerity regime were met with tear gas and rubber bullets. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Suriname has defaulted three times on its foreign debt, which is largely owed to wealthy bondholders in the West, and in December 2021 the government of President Chan Santokhi told the IMF that it would cut subsidies for energy. We zijn Moe (‘We Are Tired’), a movement against austerity, protested for years but could not move an agenda against the IMF-imposed starvation politics. ‘A hungry mob is an angry mob’, Maggie Schmeitz wrote of the protests.
These protests – from Suriname to Sri Lanka – are the latest cycle in a long history of IMF riots, such as those that began in Lima (Peru) in 1976 and sprung up in Jamaica, Bolivia, Indonesia, and Venezuela in the years that followed. When the IMF riots unfolded Indonesia in 1985, long-time CEO of the Bank of America Tom Clausen was presiding over the World Bank (1981–1986). In remarks that he made five years prior, Clausen encapsulated the attitude of the Bretton Woods institutions towards such popular uprisings, stating that ‘When people are desperate, you have revolutions. It’s in our own evident self-interest to see that they are not forced into that. You must keep the patient alive, because otherwise you can’t effect the cure’.
Clausen’s ‘cure’ – privatisation, commodification, and liberalisation – is no longer credible. Popular protests, such as those in Suriname, reflect the broad awareness of the failures of the neoliberal agenda. New agendas are needed that will build upon the following ideas, such as:
This list is not comprehensive. If you have other ideas for a credible ‘cure’, do write to me.
The photographs featured in this newsletter and the dossier are by Ali Abbas (‘Nad E Ali’), a visual artist based in Lahore, Pakistan, whose work explores themes of alienation, belonging, and the in-between spaces that exist in all cultures. The photographs are from his series ‘Hauntology of Lahore’ (2017–present), borrowing the term from philosopher Jacques Derrida. In Abbas’s words, ‘within the very landscape of Lahore, amidst its bustling streets, ancient structures, and vibrant communities lies a reservoir of untapped futures and unrealised potential’.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The core analytic framework for economists on the left has not changed in nearly a century. We need a new paradigm to make sense of the world we inhabit.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
Twenty years of grassroots organizing by Black and Latinx community organizations, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), and the broad Left propelled CTU organizer Brandon Johnson to victory in the April 2023 Chicago mayoral race. Similarly, across the country, progressive and left organizations are focusing on electoral politics as a central arena of struggle. These campaigns are part of a larger…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This post was originally published on Real Progressives.
The past never truly stays where it belongs. Even when the truth is carefully scrubbed from our understanding of history, its spores disperse through time to seep into the firmament like a persistent black mold poisoning the air we breathe. We are familiar with its effects, but none the wiser as to its causes. It is in the assumptions of media figures and pundits as to which policies are “practical” and which candidates are “electable.” It is in all of the trite and shallow excuse-making by the powerful as to why better things aren’t possible, and why straightforward solutions to basic problems of governance are out of the question. It is in the refusal of elected progressives to use the very tools of power and leverage that their corporatist and right-wing rivals wield with impunity. It is in the insistence that making demands is impertinent, and that the solution is to continue doing the things that didn’t work before, but with more feeling. Be civil, be congenial, play by the rules, vote harder. These patterns are not new; they were old when Ralph Nader complained of them in the 1960s. They are not mere accidents of fate, nor are they some natural evolutionary outcome of rigorous public debate and discourse. As with all social constructs, the heavy hand of intention is evident for those who know where to look for it. There is a story of how it got there, and that story’s erasure from the public discourse is a critical part of it. The true details were omitted from accounts of our history to promote a false consciousness among the public as to what this country is and how it got to be this way.
While the full story may never be entirely uncovered, we now have access to enough of it to establish the pattern thanks to the resourceful original research conducted by University of Iowa history professor Landon Storrs in her book The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left. Storrs profiles dozens of cases of the best and the brightest young professionals who responded to the call to public service in the darkest hours of the Great Depression. These people were non-communist leftists who reflected the popular consensus of the time that unfettered capitalism and “free enterprise” had led the world to the brink of ruination, and that the future would necessarily include some form of democratic socialism. They understood that, as FDR framed it in his 1944 State of the Union address, “necessitous men are not free men,” and that true democracy required economic security for all. These were the architects of the greatest of the New Deal programs that saved the country from economic collapse in the 30s, achieved unthinkable levels of productivity during World War II, instituted modern labor laws, and brought underdeveloped portions of the country into the modern world. These heroes and heroines were rewarded for their service with a 20th century version of the Spanish Inquisition, a cynically manufactured pretext weaponized by the right-wing forces of the existing capital order to thwart economic democracy and purge the very idea from the public consciousness. Many were hounded out of government and pursued in private life by federal agents who sabotaged their employment prospects using the stigma of the allegations. Still others survived the purges by abandoning their visionary policy agendas and social priorities, forced instead to live a lie. The work of people like Isidore Falk on national single payer healthcare, Arthur “Tex” Goldschmidt on public power utilities, and Catherine Bauer Wurster on Austrian style public housing was derailed and purged from the discourse by toxic associations with “subversive” tendencies. Many others were persecuted for their work on the right’s most hated policies including Social Security, consumer rights, labor rights, minimum wage, and the Marshall Plan in post-war Europe. Their legacy, and that of their oppressors, echoes through time to the present day like an invisible assassin of hope and possibility.
In a period dominated by the circus-like antics of Martin Dies’s House Un-American Activities Committee, which had a travelling roadshow and numerous state-level spinoffs, it is easy for the far less public Federal Employee Loyalty Boards to slip under the narrative radar. These secretive closed-door proceedings were more action-oriented and less performative than the better-known red scare institutions of the period. Storrs describes a heavy-handed process that, once begun, never truly ended. There were no due process rights or protections against double jeopardy; a closed case could be reopened at any time and for any reason. Rumor and innuendo were sufficient; there were neither rules of evidence nor a right to face one’s accuser. As a condition of employment, subjects were required to submit to exhaustive investigations of their personal lives by investigators who had little training and an excess of zeal in the hunt for subversive tendencies and “thought crimes.” Short of the dreaded “full field investigation” by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, they could be forced to submit extensive written answers to “interrogatories” at any time and for any reason. They could expect to be interrogated as to friendships, affiliations, and social interactions going back decades, as well as those of their spouses and other relatives. Even the defense attorneys retained by these civil servants faced ostracism and intimidation. These incredibly invasive procedures were weaponized by the right-wing coalition behind the established order to de-rail the New Deal agenda and to punish its champions.
The stakes were high, and the consequences of failing a Federal Employee Loyalty Board investigation were dire. A federal employee did not merely face dismissal from their job and a ban on government employment. They also faced a broader unofficial employment blacklist, a social and economic ostracism that would follow them wherever they went. With that in mind, the attorneys for these civil servants advised them to burnish and exaggerate their anti-communist bona fides. They urged them to denounce and distance themselves from friends and family members who were seen as liabilities, whether they had affiliations with the Communist Party or merely causes that could be labeled as “subversive” or “communistic.” Their legal counsel advised them to construct a false identity and repudiate many of their core beliefs. Because of the never-ending nature of these loyalty proceedings, any perceived inconsistency could trigger a renewed cycle of career jeopardy and harassment. These defendants thus were forced to live the lie of those false identities, and to abandon their ambitious and visionary agendas. They were forced to either reinvent themselves as fiercely anti-communist cold war liberals, or to leave the government and policy arena entirely.
In an era when the mere accusation of disloyalty could ruin lives, those who survived this inquisitorial gauntlet took great pains to hide their trauma and keep their past a secret. They acquired reputations as forceful reactionaries who repudiated those of younger generations who strayed too far to the left in their politics. In many of the cases examined by Storrs, the defendants’ own children were unaware of what happened to them until after their deaths. Between the trauma-conditioned desperation of loyalty defendants to keep their secrets, and the destruction of many of the records on the government end, Storrs was forced to engage in an odyssey of creative detective work to uncover the details of the cases discussed in the book. As a credentialed academic historian, Storrs acknowledges that she cannot prove the Loyalty Board persecutions were the reason for these drastic political transformations, but readers are free to use their intuition and draw the obvious conclusion. The real problem, as Storrs points out, is that neither their contemporaries nor the historians who chronicled the life and times of these people are aware that this happened at all. The terror of these survivors became quietly institutionalized. It became part of the political culture of the Beltway, instilled in subsequent generations of civil servants and elected officials with no explanations as to why. Soon enough, people stopped asking and started assuming. Thus, this new consensus became “just the way it is,” with no acknowledgement of the way it was before these dystopian inquisitorial purges took place.
Antonio Gramsci, in the notebooks he penned from a prison cell in Mussolini’s fascist Italy, refers to this consensus as the “common sense.” He describes it as working in service of “cultural hegemony,” the process by which the consensus view of the powerful becomes accepted as the inevitable status quo, or “just the way it is.” With the use of this draconian process, in tandem with many other persecutorial institutions of the period, the power elite in the US reasserted their hegemony by purging the old common sense and replacing it with a new one. They secured its acceptance as cultural norm by suppressing knowledge of how it got there, and by silencing discussion of what came before until it was largely forgotten.
Modern progressives periodically rediscover the old writings of these legends of the New Deal era, with no knowledge of what happened to them. They engage in a naïve kind of solutionism, believing that if they just adopt this forgotten bit of wisdom from the past, the current system will work the way it was always meant to. They fail to realize that the system is working the way it was meant to; that the fate of those Institutionalists like Leon and Mary Keyserling, Katherine Bauer Wurster, Tex Goldschmidt, Elizabeth Wickenden and many others who espoused those views was persecution and repudiation. Missing from their understanding is the knowledge of the kind of brutal countermeasures that the powerful can mobilize should advocates of such policies get too close to success.
Generations of politicians, pundits, and regular people raised in the milieu of this new cultural hegemony regurgitate the inane assumptions of this ossified “common sense” from every major media platform like a catechism or statement of religious faith. In a recent interview, former MSNBC host Chris Matthews recited the pedestrian understandings of his time, things “everyone knows” that just aren’t so. Particularly illustrative is his discussion of the 1972 candidacy of George McGovern as proof that the Democratic Party will suffer ignominious defeat if they go “too far left.” This conventional wisdom, so ubiquitous amongst Matthews’s generation, is ridiculous on its face. McGovern was a milquetoast moderate with a pragmatic stance against the war in Vietnam. His crime was to win the nomination with grassroots support against DNC favorites like Edmund Muskie. Deriving Matthews’s conclusion requires ignoring the degree of treachery from within the establishment of the DNC leadership, many of whom openly campaigned for Republican Richard Nixon. The terror of “drifting too far to the left,” a product of this cultural hegemony, is conditioned into his generational cohort to the degree that he readily accepts this flimsy narrative without evidence and without question. In doing so he misses the real lesson of the 1972 campaign: the savagery with which the forces of the power elite will respond to perceived threats to their cultural hegemony.
In his ignorance, Matthews became an agent of that agenda. Like many others in the so-called “liberal” media space, he was determined to police the left boundaries of acceptable discourse with no insight into why. In his career ending move, his comically exaggerated alarm at seeing those boundaries breached led him to compare the Sanders primary win in Nevada to Germany’s invasion of France in 1940, on the heels of his ludicrous speculation that a Sanders victory would lead to guillotine executions in Central Park. In that irrational panic we see echoes of Leon Keyserling and thousands of other victims of the Federal Employee Loyalty Boards, whose learned phobia associated with that perceived red line was institutionalized while its origins were hushed up. That fear and the new common sense built around it are the legacy of the second red scare.
The lessons of this history and its ripple effects through time reveal broader truths. The boundaries of establishment consensus discourse and what Gramsci calls the “common sense” were not handed down from the heavens etched on stone tablets. They were put there by people, usually in service of an elite agenda to defend and maintain the arrangements that suit them. The things we assume without question can obscure important truths with the potential to alter everything we think we know. They can also be used to manipulate people who perceive some benefit from the status quo arrangement into acting as agents of its perpetuation. Awareness of what they are doing is not necessary or even particularly common. The distinction makes little difference in practice. Lawmakers are responding to institutional imperatives that have far more power over their policy decisions than majority opinion or democracy. This is maintained by the soft power of elite cultural hegemony, which is reinforced every time a pundit or politician gaslights the public about what’s practical, possible, or realistic. Less often explicitly articulated is a conditioned existential dread of the ill-defined consequences of challenging these norms from the left, and only from the left. Whether it is cynical dissembling or is legitimately believed, this primal fear is the justification for progressive lawmakers’ refusal to wield the same tools of power their right-wing counterparts exercise so freely. By failing to interrogate the legitimacy of those boundaries and how they got there in the first place, they help to perpetuate the scam of “pragmatism” and the demoralization of their base. As psychologist Stephanie Preston pointed out in a recent Macro N Cheese episode, those who seek to manipulate public opinion understand one thing very well: without access to contravening facts, people can be induced to accept all manner of transparently false assumptions that benefit the existing order.
History teaches us that there is nothing inevitable about “the way it is,” and there is nothing “pragmatic” about accepting the inevitability of the status quo. Like any social construct, it was put there by interested parties and could be taken down. Questioning the legitimacy of such assumptions and how they got there is a fine place to start. But the more important inquiry is cui bono – who benefits from this arrangement. When the façade finally falls, we can expect those beneficiaries to be waiting on the other side with knives out. Like those who came before them, the heirs of the legacy of the red scare are not known for accepting defeat with equanimity. Breaking free of false consciousness is the beginning of the fight for a better future, not the end.
This post was originally published on Real Progressives.
On 3 October, the homes and offices of over one hundred journalists and researchers across India were raided by the Delhi Police, which is under the jurisdiction of the country’s Ministry of Home Affairs. During this ‘act of sheer harassment and intimidation’, as the Committee to Protect Journalists called it, the Delhi Police raided and interrogated the Tricontinental Research Services (TRS) team. Based in Delhi, TRS is contracted by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research to produce materials on the great processes of our time as they play out in the world’s most populous country, including the struggles of workers and farmers, the women’s movement, and the movement for Dalit emancipation from caste oppression. It would be a dereliction of duty for TRS researchers to ignore these important developments that affect the lives of hundreds of millions of Indians, and yet it is this very focus on issues of national importance that has earned them the ire of the government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Is it possible to live in the world as a person of conscience and ignore the daily struggles of the people?
At the end of the day, the Delhi Police arrested Prabir Purkayastha and Amit Chakravarty, both of the media project NewsClick.
During the raid of the TRS office, the Delhi Police seized computers, phones, and hard drives. I very much hope that the Delhi Police investigators will read all of the materials that the TRS team has produced with great care and interest. So that the Delhi Police does not miss any of the important texts that TRS has produced for Tricontinental, here is a reading list for them:
1. The Story of Solapur, India, Where Housing Cooperatives Are Building a Workers’ City (dossier no. 6, July 2018). Balamani Ambaiah Mergu, a maker of beedis (cigarettes), told TRS researchers that she used to ‘stay in a small hut in a slum in Shastri Nagar, Solapur city. When it rained the hut used to leak, and there wouldn’t be a single dry patch inside’. Since 1992, the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) has campaigned to secure dignified housing for workers in this town in the state of Maharashtra. Since 2001, CITU has been able secure government funds for this purpose and build tens of thousands of houses, a process led by the workers themselves through cooperative housing societies. The workers built ‘a city of the working class alone’, CITU leader Narasayya Adam told TRS.
2. How Kerala Fought the Heaviest Deluge in Nearly a Century (dossier no. 9, October 2018). In the summer of 2018, rain, and subsequent flooding, swept through the southern coastal state of Kerala, impacting 5.4 million of the state’s 35 million residents. TRS researchers documented the flood’s rage, the rescue and relief work of organised volunteers (largely from left formations), and the rehabilitation of both the Left Democratic Front government and various social organisations.
3. India’s Communists and the Election of 2019: Only an Alternative Can Defeat the Right Wing (dossier no. 12, January 2019). To understand the political situation in India in the lead-up to the 2019 parliamentary elections, the TRS team spoke with Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Brinda Karat. Rather than confine her analysis to the electoral or political sphere, Karat discussed the challenges facing the country at a sociological level: ‘Cultures promoted by capitalism and the market promote and glorify individualism and promote individualistic solutions. All these add to the depoliticisation of a whole generation of young people. This is certainly a challenge: how to find the most effective ways of taking our message to the youth’.
4. The Only Answer Is to Mobilise the Workers (dossier no. 18, July 2019). In April–May 2019, the National Democratic Alliance, led by the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, prevailed in India’s parliamentary elections. In the aftermath of the elections, the TRS team met with CITU President K. Hemalata to talk about the periodic massive strikes that had been taking place in the country, including an annual general strike of nearly 300 million workers. Whereas working-class movements in other countries seemed to be weakened by the breakdown of formal employment and the increasingly precarious nature of work, unions in India displayed resilience. Hemalata explained that ‘the contract workers are very militant’ and that CITU does not distinguish between the demands of contract workers and permanent workers. One of the best examples of this, she said, is the anganwadi (childcare) workers, who – along with Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHA) workers – have been on the forefront of many of the major agitations. Both of these sectors – childcare and health care – are dominated by women. ‘Organising working-class women is part of organising the working class’, Hemalata told TRS.
5. The Neoliberal Attack on Rural India (dossier no. 21, October 2019). P. Sainath, one of the most important journalists reporting on rural India and a senior fellow at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, traced the impact of the crises of neoliberal policies and climate catastrophe that are simultaneously imposed on India’s farmers. He documents the work of Kudumbashree, a cooperative made up of 4.5 million women farmers in Kerala, which he calls ‘the greatest gender justice and poverty reduction programme in the world’ (and about whom we will publish a longer study in the coming months compiled by TRS).
6. People’s Polyclinics: The Initiative of the Telugu Communist Movement (dossier no. 25, February 2020). In the Telugu-speaking parts of India (which encompass over 84 million people), doctors affiliated with the communist movement have set up clinics and hospitals – notably the Nellore People’s Polyclinic – to provide medical care to the working class and peasantry. The polyclinics have not only provided care but have also trained medical workers to address public health concerns in rural hinterlands and small towns. This dossier offers a window into the work of left-wing medical personnel whose efforts take place outside the limelight and into the experiments in public health care that seek to undercut the privatisation agenda.
7. One Hundred Years of the Communist Movement in India (dossier no. 32, September 2020). Not long after the October Revolution brought the Tsarist Empire to its knees in 1917, a liberal newspaper in Bombay noted, ‘The fact is Bolshevism is not the invention of Lenin or any man. It is the inexorable product of the economic system which dooms the millions to a life of ill-requited toil in order that a few thousand may revel in luxury’. In other words, the communist movement is the product of the limitations and failures of capitalism. On 17 October 1920, the Communist Party of India was formed alongside scattered communist groups that were emerging in different parts of India. In this brief text, the TRS team documents the role of the communist movement in India over the past century.
8. The Farmers’ Revolt in India(dossier no. 41, June 2021). Between 1995 and 2014, almost 300,000 farmers committed suicide in India – roughly one farmer every 30 minutes. This is largely because of the high prices of inputs and the low prices of their crops, a reality that has been exacerbated by neoliberal agricultural policies since 1991 and their amplification of other crises (including the climate catastrophe). Over the past decade, however, farmers have fought back with major mobilisations across the country led by a range of organisations such as left-wing farmers’ and agricultural workers’ unions. When the government put forward three bills in 2020 to deepen the privatisation of rural India, farmers, agricultural workers, and their families began a massive protest. This dossier is one of the finest summaries of the issues that lie at the heart of these protests.
9. Indian Women on an Arduous Road to Equality (dossier no. 45, October 2021). Patriarchy, with its deep roots in the economy and culture, cannot be defeated by decree. In the face of this reality, this dossier offers a glimpse of the Indian women’s movement for equality and maps the range of struggles pursued by working women across the country to defend democracy, maintain secularism, fight for women’s economic rights, and defeat violence. The dossier closes with the following assessment: ‘The ongoing Indian farmers’ movement, which started before the pandemic and continues to stay strong, offers the opportunity to steer the national discourse towards such an agenda. The tremendous participation of rural women, who travelled from different states to take turns sitting at the borders of the national capital for days, is a historic phenomenon. Their presence in the farmers’ movement provides hope for the women’s movement in a post-pandemic future’.
10. The People’s Steel Plant and the Fight Against Privatisation in Visakhapatnam (dossier no. 55, August 2022). One of my favourite texts produced by the TRS team, this dossier tells the story of the workers of Rashtriya Ispat Nigam Limited, who have fought against the government’s attempts to privatise this public steel company. Not much is written about this struggle led by brave steel workers who are mostly forgotten or, if remembered, then maligned. They stand beside the furnaces, rolling the steel out and tempering it, driven by a desire to build better canals for the farmers, to build beams for schools and hospitals, and to build the infrastructure so that their communities can transcend the dilemmas of humanity. If you try to privatise the factory, they sing, ‘Visakha city will turn into a steel furnace, North Andhra into a battlefield… We will defend our steel with our lives’.
11. Activist Research: How the All-India Democratic Women’s Association Builds Knowledge to Change the World (dossier no. 58, November 2022). The dossier on Visakha Steel was built in conversation with steel workers and reflected the evolving methodology of TRS. To sharpen this method, the team met with R. Chandra to discuss how the All-India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA) has used ‘activist research’ in the state of Tamil Nadu. Chandra shows how AIDWA designed surveys, trained local activists to conduct them among local populations, and taught the activists how to assess the results. ‘AIDWA’s members no longer need a professor to help them’, she told TRS. ‘They formulate their own questions and conduct their own field studies when they take up an issue. Since they know the value of the studies, these women have become a key part of AIDWA’s local work, bringing this research into the organisation’s campaigns, discussing the findings in our various committees, and presenting it at our different conferences’. This activist research not only produces knowledge of the particularities of hierarchies that operate in a given place; it also trains the activists to become ‘new intellectuals’ of their struggles and leaders in their communities.
12. The Condition of the Indian Working Class (dossier no. 64, May 2023). In the early days of the pandemic, the Indian government told millions of workers to go back to their homes, mostly in rural areas. Many of them walked thousands of kilometres under the burning hot sun, terrible stories of death and despair following their caravan. This dossier emerged out of a long-term interest in cataloguing the situation of India’s workers, whose precariousness was revealed in the early days of the pandemic. The last section of the dossier reflects on their struggles: ‘Class struggle is not the invention of unions or of workers. It is a fact of life for labour in the capitalist system. … In August 1992, textile workers in Bombay took to the streets in their undergarments, declaring that the new order would leave them in abject poverty. Their symbolic gesture continues to reflect the current reality of Indian workers in the twenty-first century: they have not surrendered in the face of the rising power of capital. They remain alive to the class struggle’.
The Delhi Police investigators who took the material from the TRS office have each of these twelve dossiers in hand. I recommend that they print them and share them with the rest of the force, including with Police Commissioner Sanjay Arora. If the Delhi Police is interested, I would be happy to develop a seminar on our materials for them.
Study and struggle shaped the Indian freedom movement. Gandhi, for instance, read voraciously and even translated Plato’s The Apology into Gujarati, rooted in the belief that reading and study sharpened his sense not only of how to struggle but how to build a better world.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
What would it look like if we subordinated finance to the public interest?
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
When considering the recent performances at the General Assembly of the United Nations this year, the echoes of “peace” resound through the plenary hall. Why should anyone want peace in the Ukraine more than any other place the Empire is waging war? My suspicion is that many of these calls are really for Russia to withdraw to its pre-2014 borders. They believe that would make the US regime happy and be a great relief to the minor and little league oligarchs who long for return to business as usual. Calm and intelligent people could be forgiven for doubting the sincerity of many peace petitioners.
After all, don’t the continuing wars in Africa, the still pending “United Nations” war against the DPRK (where there is only a 70-year-old armistice since 1953), and the innumerable economic wars being waged in places and ways we do not even know, deserve to end too?
Like the war in the Ukraine, one will hear how complicated these wars are. They cannot be simply ended. Yet they are all simple in one material way: without the US and its NATO cut-outs—often the principal aggressor in violation of the Kellogg-Briand Treaty—many of these wars would never have started or would have long ago been resolved. So why not demand that the US stop waging wars and why not apply sanctions to the US for its belligerence and violations of the law of nations? How can the United Nations end wars when it cannot even end the one it started in 1951? Could it be that too many of the parties among those who convene to call for peace, really need and want just a piece of the action?
The two military veterans probably best known for criticising US policy in Ukraine, Colonel Douglas MacGregor USA and Major Scott Ritter USMC, have said loud and clear that at least from a military standpoint the Ukrainian armed forces have lost the war against Russia. There have been numerous voices calling for an end to the conflict, not least because the more than USD 46 billion and counting in military aid alone, has yet to produce any of the results announced as aims of what has finally been admitted is a war against Russia.i If Mr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine’s government in Kiev, is to be taken at face value, then the hostilities can only end when Crimea and the Donbas regions are fully under Kiev’s control and Vladimir Putin has been removed from office as president of the Russian Federation. To date no commentator has adequately explained how those war aims are to be attained. This applies especially after the conservatively estimated 400,000 deaths and uncounted casualties in the ranks of Kiev’s forces since the beginning of the Russian special military operation in February 2022.
Before considering the political and economic issues it is important to reiterate a few military facts, especially for those armchair soldiers who derive their military acumen from TV and Hollywood films. As MacGregor and Ritter, both of whom have intimate practical knowledge of warfare, have said: Armies on the ground need supplies, i.e. food, weapons, ammunition, medical care for wounded, etc. These supplies have to be delivered from somewhere. In ancient times, armies could live off the land. Essentially this was through looting and plunder—stealing their food from the local population as they marched. To prevent the local population from becoming the enemy in the rear and avoid early exhaustion of local supply, generals started paying for what was requisitioned. Defending forces would often withdraw the civilian population and destroy what could not be taken to avoid supplying their enemies. In fact, this kind of rough warfare against civilians still occurs although it has been forbidden under the Law of Land Warfare.ii Naturally the soldier in the field can no longer make weaponry. Even less can they be plundered from the local inhabitants—unless one comes across some tribe the US has armed with Stingers. All the weapons the Ukrainian armed forces deploy have to be imported from countries with manufacturing capacity. As the two retired officers, among others, have said, such capacity is unavailable to the Ukraine. Obviously it would also be unavailable to NATO forces were they to deploy in Ukraine in any numbers. It is illusory to believe that a NATO army can do what the Wehrmacht could not some eighty years ago with three million men under arms and the most modern army of its day. This was so obvious from the beginning that one has to wonder why this war ever started. Is it possible that wars are started without any intention of winning them? If winning the war is not the objective, then what is?
Forgery and force: Explicit and implicit or latent and expressed foreign policy
Historical documents are essential elements in any attempt to understand the past and the present. However, this is not because they are necessarily true or accurate. Forgeries and outright lies are also important parts of the historical record. Perhaps the most notorious forgery in Western history is the so-called Donation of Constantine. This document was used to legitimate papal supremacy and the primacy of the Latin over the Greek Church. Although it did not take long for the forgery to be discovered, the objective was accomplished. Even today most people in the West have learned that the part of the Christian Church called Orthodoxy is schismatic when the reverse is true, namely the Latin Church arose from a coup d’état against Constantinople.
There is now no shortage of evidence that the British Empire forced the German Empire into the Great War and with US help justified the slaughter of some four million men, ostensibly to expel German forces from Belgium. There is systematically suppressed testimony by commanders in the field and others in a position to know that the Japanese attack on the US colonial base at Pearl Harbor was not only no surprise but a carefully crafted event exploited to justify US designs on Japan and China. Yet to this day the myth of surprise attack against a neutral country prevails over the historical facts. Even though there is almost popular acceptance that the US invasion of Iraq was based on entirely fabricated evidence and innuendo, the destruction of the country was not stopped and continues as of this writing.
What does that tell us about historical record and official statements of policy? Former POTUS and CIA director, George H.W. Bush expressed the principle that government lies did not matter because the lie appears on page one and the retraction or correction on page 28. In short, it is the front page that matters. That is what catches and keeps the public’s attention. Truth and accuracy are immaterial.
Let us consider for a moment one of the most durable wonders of published state policy—the Balfour Declaration. This brief letter signed by one Arthur Balfour on 2 November 1917 was addressed to the Lord Rothschild, in his capacity as some kind of conduit for the Zionist Federation. Carroll Quigley in his The Anglo-American Establishment strongly suggests that Lord Rothschild, also in his capacity as a sponsor of the Milner Round Table group, presented the letter for Mr Balfour to sign. As Quigley also convincingly argues the academic and media network created by the Round Table has successfully dominated the writing of British imperial history making it as suspicious as the Vatican’s history of the Latin Church.
This “private” letter to the British representative of the West’s leading banking dynasty is then adopted as the working principle for the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine awarded to the British Empire. From this private letter an international law mandate was created, continued under the UN Charter, to convert a part of the conquered Ottoman Empire into a state entity for people organized in Europe who imagined that some thousand(s) of years ago some ancestors once inhabited the area.iii The incongruence of this act ought to have been obvious—and in fact it was. The explicit policy with which the British Empire had sought to undermine Germany and Austria-Hungary was that of ethnic/linguistic self-determination of peoples. So by right—even if the fiction of a population in diaspora were accepted—this could not pre-empt the right of ethnic/linguistic self-determination in Palestine where Arabic was the dominant language and even those who adhered to the Jewish religion were not Europeans.
As argued elsewhere there has been a century of propaganda and brute force applied to render the dubious origins and the legitimation for the settler conquest that was declared the State of Israel in 1948 acceptable no matter how implausible. Like the Donation of Constantine, the Balfour Declaration served its purpose. No amount of rebuttal can reverse the events that followed.
Motors and motives
However, the question remains what is then the policy driving such acts? What is the motive for such seemingly senseless aggression against ordinary people? Why does an institution supposedly based on national self-determination deny it so effectively to majorities everywhere whose only fault appears to be living on land others covet? By the time the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples was finally adopted in 1960, there was no question of reversing the de facto colonisation practiced by the mandatory powers under the League. Moreover the Declaration was only an act of the UN General Assembly, a body wholly dominated by the three permanent imperial members of the Security Council, each with their veto powers.
To understand that and perhaps to better illuminate the principal subject—Ukraine—it is helpful to recall that of the five permanent members of the Security Council, the two most powerful are not nation-states at all. The United Kingdom is a colonial confederation as is the United States.
Russia, France, and China are all states derived from historical ethnic-linguistic determination. Beyond doubt they were formed into such unitary states through wars and revolutions. As de Gaulle famously said, “France was made with the sword”. However, there is no question that these three countries are based explicitly on ethnic-linguistic and cultural congruity within continental boundaries, in the sense articulated by the explicit text of the Covenant and the Charter. On the contrary, Great Britain and the United States are commercial enterprises organised on the basis of piracy and colonial conquest. There is not a square centimetre of the United States that was not seized by the most brutal force of arms from its indigenous inhabitants. “Ethnic-linguistic” among the English-speaking peoples is a commodity characteristic. It is a way to define a market segment.
Great Britain gave the world “free trade” and liberalism and the US added to that the “open door”. Nothing could be more inimical to the self-determination of peoples than either policy.iv How can a people be independent and self-determined when they are denied the right to say “no”? The Great War and its sequel, the war against the Soviet Union and Communism, aka World War 2, were first and foremost wars to establish markets dominated by the Anglo-American free trade – open door doctrine. One will not find this explicitly stated in any of the history books or the celebratory speeches on Remembrance Day (Memorial Day in the US) or the anniversary of D-Day, to which properly the Soviet Union and Russia ought not to be invited. After all D-Day was the beginning of the official war by Anglo-America against the Soviet Union after Hitler failed. More of Italian, French and German industrial and domestic infrastructure was destroyed by aerial bombardment from the West than by anything the Wehrmacht did—since its job was to destroy Soviet industry. This will not be reported in schoolbooks and very few official papers will verify this open secret. That is because like the Donation much of what counts as history was simply “written to the file”. The facts, however, speak for themselves. When the German High Command signed the terms of unconditional surrender in Berlin-Karlshorst, the domestic industry of the West, except the US, had been virtually destroyed leaving it a practical monopoly not only in finance but manufacturing that would last well into the late 1960s.v Only the excess demand of the war against Korea accelerated German industrial recovery. No one can say for sure how much of German, French, Italian, Belgian, or Netherlands capital was absorbed by Anglo-American holding companies. Hence those that wonder today about the self-destruction of the German economy have to ask who owns Germany in fact. To do that one will have to hunt through the minefield of secrecy jurisdictions behind which beneficial ownership of much of the West is concealed.
It is necessary to return to the conditions at the beginning of the Great War to understand what is happening now in Ukraine. One has to scratch the paint off the house called “interests” and recall some geography. F. William Engdahl performed this task well in his A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (2011). It would do well to summarise a few of his points before going further.
Geography and aggrandizement
Continental nation-states need secure land routes. Pirate states need secure sea-lanes. Britain succeeded in seizing control ruling the waves after defeating the Spanish and Portuguese fleets. It reached a commercial entente with the Netherlands, which helped until the Royal Navy was paramount. The control of the seas meant that Britain could dominate shipping as well as maritime insurance needed to cover the risk of sea transport. So it was no accident that Lloyds of London came to control the financing of maritime traffic. Geography dictated that the alternative for continental nation-states was the railroad. Germany was building a railroad from Berlin to Baghdad which would not only have delivered oil to its industry but allowed it to bypass the Anglo-French Suez Canal and the British controlled Cape route. Centuries before the predecessors to the City of London financed crusades to control the trade routes through the Middle East, propagandistically labelled the Holy Land, whereby this was wholly for commercial reasons. The Anglo-American led NATO captured Kosovo not out of any special loyalty to Albanians but because of geography. Camp Bondsteel lies at the end of the easiest route to build pipelines between Central Asia and the Mediterranean. In short there is not a single war for “self-determination” waged by the Anglo-American special relationship that was not driven by piratical motives, for which ethnic-linguistic commodities are expendable.
In 1917, the “interests”, for whom Lord Rothschild spoke and no doubt provided financial support, coincided with the pre-emptive control over real estate that had been desired by the banking-commercial cult at least since the establishment of the Latin Church. It is no accident that serious investigations have established that the state created from the British Mandate in Palestine was a commercial venture like all other British undertakings. Moreover it has been able to use its most insidious cover story to veil itself in victimhood and thus immunity for those criminal enterprises, both private and state, that use it as a conduit: money laundering, drug and arms trafficking, training of repressive forces for other countries on contract, etc. all documented and protected by atomic weapons. Moreover this enterprise has been the greatest per capita recipient of US foreign aid for decades. Its citizens are able to use dual citizenship to hold high office in the sovereign state that funds it, too. Any attempt to criticize or oppose this relationship or its moral justification by a public official or personality with anything to lose can lead to the gravest of consequences. Its official lobby in the US, AIPAC, is only one instrument by which any act that could interfere with the smooth flow of cash or influence between Washington and Tel Aviv can be prevented or punished. It draws on an international organisation that does not even have to be organised. The status of ultimate victimhood combined with mass media at all levels committed to protecting “victims” can summon crowds just as Gene Sharp predicted in his works.vi
A business too innocent to fail
Now we come to the issues with which this essay began. What is the aim of the war in Ukraine? Will it end when the military operations have failed?
In April 2022, i.e. just over a month after the Russian intervention, Volodymyr Zelenskyy described “the future for his country”. He used the terms “a big Israel”. In Haaretz it was reported that Zelenskyy wanted Ukraine to become “a big Israel, with its own face”. Writing for the NATO lobby, the Atlantic Council, Daniel Shapiro elaborated what Zelenskyy might mean: the main points are security first, the whole population plays a role, self-defence is the only way, but maintain active defence partnerships, intelligence dominance, technology as key, build an innovation ecosystem, maintain democratic institutions.vii The stories depict this stance for better or worse as the creation of a state under permanent military control, always giving priority to existential threats—presumably from the East.
But is that really what Zelenskyy meant? Or perhaps that is what he was just supposed to say. What about those who have directed nearly all of NATO armament and so many billions through the hands of the Kiev regime—one notorious even before 2022 as the most corrupt in Europe, if not anywhere? Maybe another construction is to be applied. Perhaps Zelenskyy is talking, like some latter day Balfour, on behalf of his sponsors whose Holocaust piety never prevented them from subjecting nearly entire populations to forced medical experiments starting in 2020. Perhaps he is talking about the extensive participation in all sorts of international trafficking, either as agent or protection for the principals. Perhaps he is talking about the permanent and undebatable foreign aid contributions from the US and the extortion from other countries, e.g. as Norman Finkelstein documented.viii There is no doubt that Ukraine has become a major hub for human trafficking, arms smuggling, and biological-chemical testing. They have atomic reactors and have asked for warheads.ix
Add to this the potential of a large and potentially self-righteous diaspora spread throughout the West, heavily subsidised and already equipped with influence in high places. A “Ukraine Lobby” was already in preparation in 1947 when the British shipped some eight thousand POWs of the SS Galizia Division (a Ukrainian force) from Italy to Britain without a single war crimes investigation.x From there they were able to spread throughout the Empire as Canada amply indicates.
Much of the debate about the Ukraine war remains confused because of the successful obfuscation around the term “Nazi”. Essentially a Hollywood story has been substituted for analysis of the historic development of the ideology and government that prevailed in Germany between 1933 and 1945.xi Nazism is treated as sui generis based on criteria that are not unique at all. For example, great attention is given to uniforms and insignia. In fact, after the Great War all the major political factions and parties, e.g. the SPD and DKP, had uniformed paramilitary organisations formed mainly of front veterans. When the NSDAP was able to ban all opponents those uniforms also disappeared. Contemporary fascism also uses current fashion and language. Only the nostalgic retain antiquated uniform and language styles. However repulsive the ideology may be these so-called neo-Nazis are equivalent to the historical re-enactment units found throughout the US for example.
After WW2 much of Europe was a wasteland, especially the East. Refugees understandably fled as far west as they could because getting to North or South America meant living in territories unscathed by war. The British and US secret services deliberately exploited these refugee waves to cover the removal into safety of the residue of their fascist allies. There they were to prepare for the continuation of war against the Soviet Union by other means. These formations often hid behind ethnic front groups, as the fascists did in occupied West Germany. Hence when an embarrassing discovery was made—usually some low or middle grade Nazi veteran—then he could be disgraced, tried or deported while leaving the bulk of the clandestine organisation in tact. These Nazis were obviously the result of careless immigration oversight but by no means a reflection of state policy.
Together, historical re-enactment Nazism and “exposed” single Nazi veterans distracted from the large scale programs supporting and expanding anti-communist forces both domestically and for expeditionary deployment. Much more seriously, these two “shows” and the deliberate suppression of meaningful debate about fascist policies and practices—always reduced to anti-Jewish attitudes and actions alone—have successfully prevented any coherent analysis and debate about the relationship between Anglo-American monopoly capital and the cartels that backed the NSDAP regime or the relationship between US/ NATO policy and its consistent support of fascist regimes in Spain, Portugal and throughout the world. It has prevented coherent debate about the long forgotten but documented participation of reconstructed Nazis in the government of the Federal Republic of Germany and their active participation in the Ukrainian war against the Soviet Union after 1945.
Zelenskyy and his fellow travellers cannot be blamed for their self-confident fascism. It is not an anomaly but a historical product of decades of Anglo-American/ NATO business plans—including the distraction of “Nazi” from the substance of those plans. Given how successful Lord Rothschild’s model for Israel has been, one can scarcely blame a patriot like Volodymyr Zelenskyy for seizing the opportunity to apply it to his own country. The model has been so successful that no one in public dare oppose it. Why not establish another such parasitic machine? Russians just like Arabs provide the permanent enemies with which to sell the permanent victim status at the expense of millions of displaced Ukrainians.
In other words, there is a very successful business model to be implemented wholly consistent with free trade and the open door and all those other slogans, which have anointed plunder and pillage by the occasionally alpine commercial cult in their campaign to assure that all of us own nothing and they will be happy.
Endnotes
i Jonathan Masters and Will Merrow, “How Much as the US Sent to Ukraine Here are Six Charts”, Council on Foreign Relations (10 July 2023). Among those declaring this was Foreign Minister of the German Federal Republic, Annalena Baerbock. Angela Merkel, the former chancellor of the Federal Republic is on record having said that the so-called Minsk Accords were intended to stall the Russian reaction in Donbas until Ukraine could be sufficiently armed to fight against the Russian Federation.
ii Principally the Hague (1907) Conventions and subsequent Geneva Conventions
iii More likely the Eastern Europeans in question were descendent from the Khazar kingdom located far closer to what today is Ukraine. The ruling elite was to have converted to Rabbinic Judaism in the 8th century. The Khazar Khaganate was disbursed by the end of the first millennium CE. This would better explain the hostility toward Russia and myth of a national homeland, displaced in 1917 to Palestine based on contemporary political realities.
iv Historian Gerald Horne ascribes “free trade” to the so-called Glorious Revolution, which also abolished the Royal Africa Company, opening “free trade in slaves”; see The Counter-Revolution of 1776 (2014).
v Bombing of German factories conspicuously omitted Ford plant in Cologne and GM’s Opel factory in Russelsheim, although both Ford and GM claimed and received reparations for damage done by Allied bombers.
vi Gene Sharp, From Dictatorship to Democracy (1994)
vii Daniel B. Shapiro, “Zelenskyy wants Ukraine to be ‘a big Israel’. Here’s a road map”, New Atlanticist (6 April 2022) “By adapting their country’s mind-set to mirror aspects of Israel’s approach to security challenges, Ukrainian officials can tackle national security challenges with confidence and build a similarly resilient state”.
viii Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry (2000)
ix This notorious request by Zelenskyy at the Munich Security Conference in 2022 for atomic weapons was another reason President Vladimir Putin gave for a military response to Kiev’s attacks on the Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine that Russia had been forced to recognise as two independent republics and grant protection.
x A documentary produced by Julian Hendy (The SS in Britain) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjj__aya4BA contains interviews, e.g. with civil servants who were told by US authorities that no pre-immigration investigations were to be conducted. This film about the 14th Waffen SS Division Galizia division has been almost scrubbed from the Web. The film, originally to be broadcast by Yorkshire Television (UK) was never shown. Geoffrey Goodman described details after a private viewing in a Guardian article (12 June 2000).
xi A useful source for the historical context and actual description of the NSDAP regime can be found in Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944, a detailed study written originally in English by Franz Neumann. This book comprises two parts: the NS state and the economic system. Very little attention is paid to the section on the economic system although the regime cannot be understood without its legacy economic policies and the bureaucracy responsible for implementing them.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Tyranny, Inc. aims to build a working-class coalition between the left and right. But Ahmari cannot get around the GOP populists’ dismal record on labor.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
The neoliberal order has been exposed as fraudulent, inefficient, and inequitable. Yet it hardly lies in the dustbin of history.
Nothing has replaced neoliberalism as a better descriptor for the political-economic order we inhabit.
Neoliberal ideas and institutions are still with us, but the political order they constituted is not.
Neoliberal ideas and institutions are still with us, but the political order they constituted is not.