TBR News July 5, 2017

Jul 05 2017

The Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C., July 5, 2017:”I spent the holiday digging into old records donated to me by a friend, now deceased, who was a deputy director of that organization. Some of the background on the Second World War is interesting in that it conflicts with current historical opinion. As most published writers on historical matters are paid hacks, their opinions are not worth much.

There is no question whatsoever that during the Roosevelt administration, many radical leftists joined his New Deal and their ill-conceived and abrasive activities infuriated many Americans.

In a democracy, such behavior can usually be curbed if it becomes too prevalent. However, during the Roosevelt era, the President was battling the Great Depression, which suddenly flared up again in 1938, and his skillful presentation of right-wing dictatorships in Germany, Italy and Japan were viewed as potential threats to America.

These two factors, economic and ideological, helped keep Roosevelt in office. Although, after his own dictatorial attempt to control the Supreme Court failed in Congress in 1936, his popularity in the polls was steadily shrinking.

After Roosevelt actively aided and abetted the United States’ entry in the war, his tenure in the White House was secure until the war was over. Those historians who praise Roosevelt as a great man, claim that he, indeed, schemed to involve America in global war but did so because Germany and Japan were planning to invade the continental United States. However, post-war searches of captured German and Japanese state archives have not produced a shred of evidence in support of this invasion theory.

Throughout his entire life, Roosevelt was dominated by his mother who was possessed of exceptionally strong personal prejudices. She ran her only child like a Swiss railroad. On her annual European trips, Mrs. Roosevelt preferred to mingle with correct British society and found her hotel stays in Germany abhorrent. Mrs. Roosevelt was anti-Semitic and her deep hatred of Germans was instilled in her son from an early age. She constantly referred to black Americans as “niggers,” and so her prejudice became his prejudice, also.

The flowering of leftist views in Washington left many Americans furious but because of the President’s general popularity, America was powerless to vote him out of office. This continuing frustration produced a flood of savage anti-Roosevelt commentary and a heightened detestation of the shrill importunings of the extreme left governmental appointees.

When Roosevelt died suddenly in 1945, his successor Harry Truman was viewed as an unknown entity.

Truman, who was no fan of Stalin or his ideology, acted cautiously to remove the New Deal activists from power.

This earned Truman unpopularity with some factions of the media and especially the American motion picture industry, which was a strong supporter of left-wing causes.”

 

Table of Contents

  • North Korea says its ICBM can carry nuclear warhead; U.S. calls for global action
  • In North Korea, ‘Surgical Strike’ Could Spin Into ‘Worst Kind of Fighting’
  • Anti-Interventionist Voters Elected Trump
  • The Fraud of the White Helmets
  • SECRECY NEWS
  • ‘Amid worsening US-German relations, Berlin may reorient itself to Russia’
  • The G-20 in an Unjust World: Only Radical Thinking and Action Can Tame Globalization

North Korea says its ICBM can carry nuclear warhead; U.S. calls for global action

by Jack Kim and Christine Kim

Reuters

SEOUL-North Korea said on Wednesday its newly developed intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) can carry a large nuclear warhead, triggering a call by Washington for global action to hold it accountable for pursuing nuclear weapons.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Defense Department said it had concluded that North Korea test-launched an ICBM on Tuesday, which some experts now believe had the range to reach the U.S. state of Alaska as well as parts of the mainland United States.

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the test, on the eve of the U.S. Independence Day holiday, represented “a new escalation of the threat” to the United States and its allies, and vowed to take stronger measures.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said the test completed his country’s strategic weapons capability that includes atomic and hydrogen bombs and ICBMs, the state KCNA news agency said.

Pyongyang would not negotiate with the United States to give up those weapons until Washington abandons its hostile policy against the North, KCNA quoted Kim as saying.

“He, with a broad smile on his face, told officials, scientists and technicians that the U.S. would be displeased … as it was given a ‘package of gifts’ on its ‘Independence Day’,” KCNA said.

Kim ordered them to “frequently send big and small ‘gift packages’ to the Yankees,” it added.

The launch came days before leaders from the Group of 20 nations are due to discuss steps to rein in North Korea’s weapons program, which it has pursued in defiance of United Nations Security Council sanctions.

The test successfully verified the technical requirements of the newly developed ICBM in stage separation, the atmospheric re-entry of the warhead and the late-stage control of the warhead, KCNA said.

Tillerson warned that any country that hosts North Korean workers, provides economic or military aid to Pyongyang, or fails to implement U.N. sanctions “is aiding and abetting a dangerous regime”.

“All nations should publicly demonstrate to North Korea that there are consequences to their pursuit of nuclear weapons,” Tillerson said in a statement.

DIPLOMATIC PRESSURE

U.S. President Donald Trump has been urging China, North Korea’s main trading partner and only big ally, to press Pyongyang to give up its nuclear program.

The U.N. Security Council, currently chaired by China, will hold an emergency meeting on the matter at 3 p.m. EDT (1900 GMT) on Wednesday, following a request by the United States, Japan and South Korea.

Diplomats say Beijing has not been fully enforcing existing international sanctions on its neighbor, and has resisted tougher measures, such as an oil embargo, bans on the North Korean airline and guest workers, and measures against Chinese banks and other firms doing business with the North.

A 2015 U.N. document estimated that more than 50,000 North Korean workers were overseas earning currencies for the regime, with the vast majority in China and Russia.

North Korea appeared to have used a Chinese truck, originally sold for hauling timber, but later converted for military use, to transport and erect the missile on Tuesday.

Trump has indicated he is running out of patience with Beijing’s efforts to rein in North Korea. His administration has said all options are on the table, military included, but suggested those would be a last resort and that sanctions and diplomatic pressure were its preferred course.

Trump is due to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin during the G20 meeting in Germany this week.

Russia and China joined diplomatic forces on Tuesday and called for North Korea to suspend its ballistic missile program in return for a moratorium on large-scale military exercises by the United States and South Korea.

In Beijing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said the joint statement showed the international community wanted dialogue and not antagonistic voices, as he also urged North Korea not to violate U.N. Security Council resolutions.

“We hope relevant counties can maintain calm and restraint, and not take steps that might worsen tensions on the peninsula,” Geng told a daily briefing.

The U.S. and South Korean militaries conducted a ballistic missile test early on Wednesday in a show of force on the east coast of the Korean peninsula. The South said the drill aimed to showcase the ability to strike at the North’s leadership if necessary.

“It’s discouraging that the Chinese (and Russians) are still calling for ‘restraint by all sides’, despite the fact that their client state, North Korea, has cast aside all restraint and is sprinting for the finish line in demonstrating a nuclear-armed ICBM capability,” said Daniel Russel, formerly Washington’s top East Asia diplomat, now a diplomat in residence at the Asia Society Policy Institute.

LONG-RANGE MISSILE

The North’s state media said the missile, Hwasong-14, flew 933 km (580 miles), reaching an altitude of 2,802 km (1,741 miles) in its 39 minutes of flight.

Some analysts said the flight details suggested the new missile had a range of more than 8,000 km (4,970 miles), which would put significant parts of the U.S. mainland in range, a major advance in the North’s program.

The launch was both earlier and “far more successful than expected”, said U.S.-based missile expert John Schilling, a contributor to the Washington-based North Korea monitoring project, 38 North.

It would now probably only be a year or two before a North Korean ICBM achieved “minimal operational capability,” he added.

Experts say a reliable nuclear-tipped ICBM would require a small warhead to fit a long-range missile, technology to protect against intense heat as it re-enters the atmosphere, separate the warhead and guide it to its target.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who ordered Wednesday’s drill, said, “The situation was no longer sufficient to respond to the North’s provocation by making statements,” according to his office.

Tuesday’s test poses fresh challenges for Moon, who took office in May with a pledge to engage the North in dialogue while keeping up pressure and sanctions to impede its weapons programs.

His defense minister, Han Min-koo, told parliament on Wednesday there was a high possibility of a sixth nuclear test by the North, but there were no specific indications.

(Additional reporting by Lesley Wroughton, David Brunnstrom and Phil Stewart in Washington, and Michelle Nichols in New York and Christian Shepherd in Beijing; Editing by Soyoung Kim and Clarence Fernandez)

 

In North Korea, ‘Surgical Strike’ Could Spin Into ‘Worst Kind of Fighting’

July 5, 2017

by Motoko Rich

The New York Times

SEOUL, South Korea — The standoff over North Korea’s nuclear program has long been shaped by the view that the United States has no viable military option to destroy it. Any attempt to do so, many say, would provoke a brutal counterattack against South Korea too bloody and damaging to risk.

That remains a major constraint on the Trump administration’s response even as North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, approaches his goal of a nuclear arsenal capable of striking the United States. On Tuesday, the North appeared to cross a new threshold, testing a weapon that it described as an intercontinental ballistic missile and that analysts said could potentially hit Alaska.

Over the years, as it does for potential crises around the world, the Pentagon has drafted and refined multiple war plans, including an enormous retaliatory invasion and limited pre-emptive attacks, and it holds annual military exercises with South Korean forces based on them.

But the military options are more grim than ever.

Even the most limited strike risks staggering casualties, because North Korea could retaliate with the thousands of artillery pieces it has positioned along its border with the South. Though the arsenal is of limited range and could be destroyed in days, the United States defense secretary, Jim Mattis, recently warned that if North Korea used it, it “would be probably the worst kind of fighting in most people’s lifetimes.”

Beyond that, there is no historical precedent for a military attack aimed at destroying a country’s nuclear arsenal.

The last time the United States is known to have seriously considered attacking the North was in 1994, more than a decade before its first nuclear test. The defense secretary at the time, William J. Perry, asked the Pentagon to prepare plans for a “surgical strike” on a nuclear reactor, but he backed off after concluding it would set off warfare that could leave hundreds of thousands dead.

The stakes are even higher now. American officials believe North Korea has built as many as a dozen nuclear bombs — perhaps many more — and can mount them on missiles capable of hitting much of Japan and South Korea.

Earlier in his term, Mr. Trump tried to change the dynamics of the crisis by forcing the North and its main economic benefactor, China, to reconsider Washington’s willingness to start a war. He spoke bluntly about the possibility of a “major, major conflict” on the Korean Peninsula, ordered warships into nearby waters and vowed to “solve” the nuclear problem.

But Mr. Trump has backed off considerably in recent weeks, emphasizing efforts to pressure China to rein in Mr. Kim with sanctions instead.

After all, a pre-emptive American attack would very likely fail to wipe out North Korea’s arsenal, because some of the North’s facilities are deep in mountain caves or underground and many of its missiles are hidden on mobile launchers.

The North has warned that it would immediately retaliate by launching nuclear missiles. But predicting how Mr. Kim would actually respond to a limited attack is an exercise in strategic game theory, with many analysts arguing that he would refrain from immediately going nuclear or using his stockpile of chemical and biological weapons to avoid provoking a nuclear response from the United States.

Assuming Mr. Kim is rational and his primary goal is the preservation of his regime, he would only turn to such weapons if he needed to repel a full-scale invasion or felt a nuclear attack or other attempt on his life was imminent, these analysts say.

But anticipating what the North might do with its conventional weapons in the opening hours and days after an American attack is like trying to describe a “very complex game of three-dimensional chess in terms of tic-tac-toe,” said Anthony H. Cordesman, a national security analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

The problem, Mr. Cordesman said, is that there are many ways and reasons for each side to escalate the fighting once it begins.

Stopping it would be much more difficult.

Opening Salvos

North and South Korea, separated by the world’s most heavily armed border, have had more than half a century to prepare for a resumption of the war that was suspended in 1953. While the North’s weaponry is less advanced, the South suffers a distinct geographical disadvantage: Nearly half its population lives within 50 miles of the Demilitarized Zone, including the 10 million people in Seoul, its capital.

“You have this massive agglomeration of everything that is important in South Korea — government, business and the huge population — and all of it is in this gigantic megalopolis that starts 30 miles from the border and ends 70 miles from the border,” said Robert E. Kelly, a professor of political science at Pusan National University in South Korea. “In terms of national security, it’s just nuts.”

North Korea has positioned as many as 8,000 artillery cannons and rocket launchers on its side of the Demilitarized Zone, analysts say, an arsenal capable of raining up to 300,000 rounds on the South in the first hour of a counterattack. That means it can inflict tremendous damage without resorting to weapons of mass destruction.

Mr. Kim could order a limited response, by hitting a base near the Demilitarized Zone, for example, and then pausing before doing more. But most analysts expect the North would escalate quickly if attacked, to inflict as much damage as possible in case the United States and South Korea were preparing an invasion.

“North Korea knows it is the end game and will not go down without a fight,” said Jeffrey W. Hornung of the RAND Corporation, adding: “I think it is going to be a barrage.”

The North has often threatened to turn Seoul into a “sea of fire,” but the vast majority of its artillery has a range of three to six miles and cannot reach the city, analysts say.

The North has deployed at least three systems, though, that can reach the Seoul metropolitan area: Koksan 170 millimeter guns and 240 millimeter multiple-rocket launchers capable of hitting the northern suburbs and parts of the city, and 300 millimeter multiple-rocket launchers, which may be able to hit targets beyond Seoul.

There are perhaps 1,000 such weapons near the Demilitarized Zone, many hidden in caves, tunnels and bunkers. But under a traditional artillery strategy, the North would not fire them all at once. Instead, it would hold some in reserve to avoid giving their positions away and to conserve munitions.

How much damage an initial attack would inflict depends on how many are used and on how much of the ordnance explodes. In 2010, North Korean forces fired about 170 shells at an island in the South, killing two civilians and two soldiers. Analysts later concluded that about 25 percent of the North’s shells failed to detonate.

A study published by the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability in 2012 accounting for these and other factors such as population density concluded that the initial hours of an artillery barrage by the North focused on military targets would result in nearly 3,000 fatalities, while one targeting civilians would kill nearly 30,000 people.

The North could compound the damage by also firing ballistic missiles at Seoul. But Joseph S. Bermudez Jr., a North Korea expert at AllSource Analysis, a defense intelligence consultancy, said it was more likely to use missiles to target military installations, including American bases in Japan.

The Defense

United States and South Korean forces could be put on alert and bracing for retaliation before any attempt to knock out North Korea’s nuclear program. But there is little they can do to defend Seoul against a barrage of artillery.

The South can intercept some ballistic missiles, with the recently installed Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, as well as Patriot and Hawk systems. But it does not have anything like Israel’s Iron Dome that can destroy incoming artillery shells and rockets, which fly at lower altitudes.

Instead, South Korean and American troops would employ traditional “counterbattery” tactics — using radar and other techniques to determine the location of the North’s guns when they are moved out of their bunkers and fired, and then using rockets and airstrikes to knock them out.

David Maxwell, associate director for the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University and a veteran of five tours in South Korea with the United States Army, said the Pentagon was constantly upgrading its counterbattery capabilities. But he added, “There is no silver bullet solution that can defeat North Korean fire before they inflict significant damage on Seoul and South Korea.”

Based on counterbattery efforts in the Iraq war, the Nautilus Institute study estimates that North Korea might lose about 1 percent of its artillery every hour to American and South Korean counterbattery fire, or more than a fifth of its arsenal after a day of fighting.

What makes the situation so dangerous is how easy it would be for either side to take action that leads the other to conclude an all-out war is imminent and escalate the battle. The United States and South Korea could hit targets besides artillery, including supply lines and communication facilities, for example. The North could send tanks and troops across the border and drop special forces into the South’s ports.

Especially perilous would be any hint that the United States and South Korea were preparing a “decapitation” strike against the North Korean leadership, which could lead a desperate Mr. Kim to turn to nuclear or biochemical weapons.

Civilian Preparation

All things considered, analysts say, it could take American and South Korean forces three to four days to overwhelm North Korea’s artillery.

How much damage North Korea inflicts in that time depends in part on South Korea’s ability to get people to safety quickly. As more of the North’s guns are destroyed and people take cover, the casualty rate would fall with each hour.

The Nautilus Institute study projects 60,000 fatalities in the first full day of a surprise artillery attack on military targets around Seoul, the majority in the first three hours. Casualty estimates for an attack on the civilian population are much higher, with some studies projecting more than 300,000 dead in the opening days.

The Seoul metropolitan government says there are nearly 3,300 bomb shelters in the city, enough to accommodate all 10 million of its residents. In Gyeonggi Province, which surrounds the capital like a doughnut, the provincial government counts about 3,700 shelters. Many train stations in the region double as shelters, and most large buildings have underground parking garages where people fleeing artillery attacks can seek cover.

But critics say that the local authorities are unprepared for the chaos an artillery attack would cause and that the public is nonchalant about the prospect of war.

The South Korean government conducts emergency drills only five times a year, and they are fairly desultory affairs that last about 20 minutes, with people hunkering in buildings or stopping in their cars on the roads after sirens go off. Many residents have no idea where their nearest shelter is.

Few people keep stockpiles of food and water, for example, and while the government has indicated it may buy about 1.8 million gas masks for use in the event of a chemical attack, that would not be nearly enough to protect the population.

“For the first 72 hours,” said Nam Kyung-pil, governor of Gyeonggi Province, “each individual will have to save their own lives or be prepared by themselves.”

Su-hyun Lee contributed reporting.

Anti-Interventionist Voters Elected Trump

Yet he seems not to know it

July 5, 2017

by Justin Raimondo

AntiWar

How did Donald Trump defy all the pollsters, the pundits, and the Twitterverse “experts” and take the White House? According to the Democrats, it was all a Russian plot – Kremlin-directed Twitter “bots” spread “misinformation” and “fake news,” Russian hackers stole the DNC’s emails, and this deprived Hillary Clinton of her rightful place as President of these United States. If we listen to the Bernie Sanders wing of the party, it was all because their man Bernie failed to win the nomination due to corporate influence and the flawed election strategy of the Clinton campaign. And the Republicans tell us it was because – well, they don’t have any coherent theory, but, hey, they’ll take it regardless of why or how it happened.

What hasn’t emerged from the shock and horror of the elites, however, is a reasonably convincing explanation for the Trump victory: the storied “deplorables,” as Mrs. Clinton described them, rose up in rebellion against the coastal elites and delivered them a blow from which they are still reeling. Disdained, forgotten, and left behind, these rural not-college-educated near-the-poverty-line voters, who had traditionally voted Democratic, deserted the party – but why?

No real explanation has been forthcoming. Hillary tells us it was due, in part, to “sexism,” and the rest was a dark conspiracy by Vladimir Putin and James Comey. More objective observers attribute the switch to the relentless emphasis by the Democrats on identity politics, which seems convincing until one examines the actual statistics down to the county level in those key states – Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania – that gave the party of Trump the keys to the White House.

Francis Shen, a professor of law professor at the University of Minnesota, and Douglas Kriner, who teaches political science at Boston University, have done just that, and their conclusion is stunning – and vitally important to those of us who want to understand what the current relation of political forces means for the anti-interventionist movement. They write:

“With so much post-election analysis, it is surprising that no one has pointed to the possibility that inequalities in wartime sacrifice might have tipped the election. Put simply: perhaps the small slice of America that is fighting and dying for the nation’s security is tired of its political leaders ignoring this disproportionate burden. To investigate this possibility, we conducted an analysis of the 2016 Presidential election returns. In previous research, we’ve shown that communities with higher casualty rates are also communities from more rural, less wealthy, and less educated parts of the country. In both 2004 and 2006, voters in these communities became more likely to vote against politicians perceived as orchestrating the conflicts in which their friends and neighbors died.

“The data analysis presented in this working paper finds that in the 2016 election Trump spoke to this part of America. Even controlling in a statistical model for many other alternative explanations, we find that there is a significant and meaningful relationship between a community’s rate of military sacrifice and its support for Trump. Indeed, our results suggest that if three states key to Trump’s victory – Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin – had suffered even a modestly lower casualty rate, all three could have flipped from red to blue and sent Hillary Clinton to the White House.”

While the Trump campaign’s foreign policy pronouncements often veered into bombastic belligerence – “We’re going to bomb the hell out of ISIS!” – the candidate also ventured into territory previously alien to GOP presidential nominees. He denounced the Iraq war – “They lied. There were no weapons of mass destruction and they knew there were none” – and forswore the “regime change” foreign policy that produced the bloody disasters in Libya and Syria well as Iraq. His “America First” theme evoked the “isolationist” sentiment that is anathema to the Washington elites – and is the default position of the average American. And yet he did not take the reflexively anti-military position so beloved by peaceniks of the left: he praised our veterans at every opportunity and railed against their neglect by a government that used and abused them.

In an election that gave Trump a razor-thin victory in three key states, this is what gave him the margin of victory.

The Shen-Kriner analysis takes us deep into the weeds, with a county-by-county survey of voter patterns that correlates casualty rates with election results, comparing the interventionist Mitt Romney’s results with Trump’s. This Romney-Trump dichotomy is vitally important in understanding what happened in the 2016 presidential election. As Shen and Kriner point out, while the casualty rate in most areas of the country is low, certain sections – rural, relatively poorer, in the heartland – bear the brunt, and these voters had been abandoning the GOP (or never even considered them) in recent years:

“[M]ore than a quarter of counties had experienced a casualty rate more than 3.5 times greater, and 10% of counties had suffered casualty rates of more than 7 deaths per 100,000 residents. Voters in such communities increasingly abandoned Republican candidates in a series of elections in the 2000s.”

Shen-Kriner go deeper than the economics-fixated analysts, who simply point to the poor rural voters who flocked to Trump’s banner, by focusing in on those areas of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania where casualty rates are higher, running a comparative analysis, and concluding that Trump’s anti-interventionist (albeit pro-military) pronouncements made the crucial difference and put him over the top:

“In each state, our analysis predicts that Trump would have lost between 1.4% and 1.6% of the vote if the state had suffered a lower casualty rate. As illustrated in Figure 2, such margins would have easily flipped all three states into the Democratic column.”

Trump won by a very narrow margin, triumphing in the Electoral College but losing the popular vote: Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania made the difference. The Shen-Kriner analysis shows that “if there had been a lower casualty rate in each state – Trump would have lost all three.”

We’re constantly told that Americans don’t care about foreign policy, and that it’s all about “bread-and-butter” issues: a full stomach is the key to victory for the political Establishment, while economic distress is the fulcrum of insurgency. This may be true in a general sense, but in this era of sharp partisan divides and close elections it isn’t enough of an explanation for why Trump won – and why he may or may not win in 2020. As Shen and Kriner put it:

“The significant inroads that Trump made among constituencies exhausted by fifteen years of war – coupled with his razor thin electoral margin (which approached negative three million votes in the national popular tally) – should make Trump even more cautious in pursuing ground wars.

“Trump, of course, has already proven in his first 100 days that conventional wisdom (and conventional political theory) may not apply to his administration. However, Trump has plainly demonstrated keen electoral instincts and may well think twice before taking actions that risk alienating an important part of his base.”

Trump has clearly not thought twice, if at all, about the course he is taking us on abroad and its relation to his future political career. Since taking office, he has bombed Syria, allied with Saudi Arabia in bombing Yemen, implied that war with North Korea is within the realm of the possible, and gone out of his way to confront Iran. The “America First’ rhetoric of the campaign has gone by the wayside, as the combative truculence of his personal style is transferred from the domestic political scene to the international stage. A prime example of this is his reaction to an alleged chemical weapons attack by the Syrian government against rebel Islamist forces – an attack that US intelligence told him never occurred. As Seymour Hersh reported in Der Spiegel:

“Trump issued the order despite having been warned by the U.S. intelligence community that it had found no evidence that the Syrians had used a chemical weapon.

“The available intelligence made clear that the Syrians had targeted a jihadist meeting site on April 4 using a Russian-supplied guided bomb equipped with conventional explosives. Details of the attack, including information on its so-called high-value targets, had been provided by the Russians days in advance to American and allied military officials in Doha, whose mission is to coordinate all US, allied, Syrian and Russian Air Force operations in the region.

“Some American military and intelligence officials were especially distressed by the president’s determination to ignore the evidence. ‘None of this makes any sense,’ one officer told colleagues upon learning of the decision to bomb. ‘We KNOW that there was no chemical attack … the Russians are furious. Claiming we have the real intel and know the truth … I guess it didn’t matter whether we elected Clinton or Trump.’”

The intelligence was clear: the idea that Bashar al-Assad had ordered a chemical attack was a “fairy tale,” as one officer put it. Yet the media and the pundits were all over this, and Ivanka Trump was telling her father that he had to do something. Trump didn’t care about the evidence:

“The intelligence made clear that a Syrian Air Force SU-24 fighter bomber had used a conventional weapon to hit its target: There had been no chemical warhead. And yet it was impossible for the experts to persuade the president of this once he had made up his mind. ‘The president saw the photographs of poisoned little girls and said it was an Assad atrocity,’ the senior adviser said. ‘It’s typical of human nature. You jump to the conclusion you want. Intelligence analysts do not argue with a president. They’re not going to tell the president, ‘if you interpret the data this way, I quit.’”

“You jump to the conclusion you want” – that’s Donald J. Trump in a nutshell. And that is his fatal flaw: a complete indifference to facts. That and the presence of several advisors who clearly want a confrontation with Iran in Syria sealed the deal: the US struck at Syria, and he even threatened to do it again when the administration claimed Assad was preparing to launch yet another chemical attack – an act of unparalleled stupidity that would likely bring the US into a war that would destroy the Syrian Ba’athist regime and end Assad’s rule.

You’ll notice that Trump keeps reiterating the night of the election: in his speeches on the stump – yes, he’s still on the stump – he lovingly recalls how the media said he didn’t have a chance, how the pollsters were dead wrong, and how he triumphed in the end. He takes us state-by-state, as the returns came in, reveling in how wrong everybody was and how he overcame seemingly impossible odds to take the prize. I think the reason for this seemingly endless reiteration is that no one was more surprised by his victory than him – and, to this day, he has no idea why he won. He’s still scratching his head, wondering how in the heck it happened: when he wakes up in the White House each morning, I’ll bet his first thought is: Where am I?

His cluelessness will prove his ultimate downfall. Surrounded by warhawks in the foreign policy realm, and reveling in the accolades his outbursts of aggression have won him in the media, he doesn’t understand the key role his anti-interventionist rhetoric played in propelling him to victory. The people around him, for the most part, have assiduously ignored – or sought to neutralize – that aspect of the 2016 campaign, and are unlikely to bring the Shen-Kriner analysis of the election to his attention. The “keen electoral instincts” those two analysts think Trump possesses are, in my view, a simplistic faith in his own charisma and a semi-mystical belief in his destiny as the savior of a country in decline. Facts, evidence, analysis, hard intelligence – none of it means a damned thing to a man who operates by instinct. And that instinct is ruled by range-of-the-moment considerations: the opinions of his daughter, the opinions of the pundits, and what he sees on television.

Personal character matters – and it is a life-and-death matter in a President. That Trump is lacking in the character department has been made all too obvious in the first months of his presidency. A commander-in-chief ruled by his “gut feelings” is a danger, in any case: in Trump’s case, it could well prove catastrophic.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that, while Trump himself is proving to be a huge disappointment to those anti-interventionists – such as myself – who took his rhetoric at face value, Trump’s supporters are a different matter entirely. That’s because they, too, took his “America First” no-regime-change pronouncements seriously, and many of them voted for him on that basis – enough, as Shen and Kriner show, to put him in the White House. As the Democratic party and its left-wing hangers-on rail against Russia and embrace a neoconservative foreign policy, Trump’s core supporters, the America Firsters, are the future of the anti-interventionist movement.

I’m currently rereading Rose Wilder Lane’s novel of pioneer life, Free Land, and a recurrent theme expressed by the hard-pressed characters is “There’s no loss without some gain.” Plagued by blizzards, swarms of locusts, horse thieves, and worse, the men and women who settled the West were a sturdy bunch, not easily discouraged by adversity. We anti-interventionists, if we are to win our battle, must emulate their example, and seek our best advantage even in the face of reversals and betrayal.

 

The Fraud of the White Helmets

Hollywood buys into yet another lie

July 4, 2017

by Philip Giraldi

The Unz Review

I actually forced myself to watch the documentary The White Helmets, which is available on Netflix. It is 40 minutes long, is of high quality cinematographically speaking, and tells a very convincing tale that was promoted as “the story of real-life heroes and impossible hope.” It is overall a very impressive piece of propaganda, so much so that it has won numerous awards including the Oscar for Best Documentary Short this year and the White Helmets themselves were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. More to the point, however, is the undeniable fact that the documentary has helped shape the public understanding of what is going on in Syria, delivering a Manichean tale that depicts the “rebels” as always good and Bashar al-Assad and his government as un-redeemably evil.

It has been reliably reported that celebrities like George Clooney, Justin Timberlake and Hillary Clinton really like the White Helmets documentary and have promoted it with the understanding that it represents the truth about Syria, but it is, of course, not the whole story. The film, which was made by the White Helmets themselves without any external verification of what it depicts, portrays the group as “heroic,” an “impartial, life-saving rescue organization” of first responders. Excluded from the scenes of heroism under fire is the White Helmets’ relationship with the al-Qaeda affiliated group Jabhat al-Nusra and its participation in the torture and execution of “rebel” opponents. Indeed, the White Helmets only operate in rebel held territory, which enables them to shape the narrative both regarding who they are and what is occurring on the ground. Because of increasing awareness of the back story, there is now a growing movement to petition the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to revoke the Oscar based on the complete and deliberate misrepresentation of what the White Helmets are all about.

Exploiting their access to the western media, the White Helmets have de facto become a major source of “eyewitness” news regarding what has been going on in those many parts of Syria where European and American journalists are quite rightly afraid to go. It is all part of a broader largely successful “rebel” effort to manufacture fake news that depicts the Damascus government as engaging in war crimes directed against civilians.

The White Helmets have certainly saved some lives under dangerous circumstances but they have also exaggerated their humanitarian role as they travel to bombing sites with their film crews trailing behind them. Once at the sites, with no independent observers, they are able to arrange or even stage what is filmed to conform to their selected narrative. They have consistently promoted tales of government atrocities against civilians to encourage outside military intervention in Syria and bring about regime change in Damascus. The White Helmets were, for example, the propagators of the totally false but propagandistically effective claims regarding the government use of so-called “barrel bombs” against civilians.

The White Helmets  were a largely foreign creation that came into prominence in the aftermath of the unrest in Syria that developed as a result of the Arab Spring in 2012. They are currently largely funded by a number of non-government organizations (NGOs) as well as governments, including Britain and some European Union member states. The United States has directly provided $23 million through the USAID (US Agency for International Development) as of 2016 and almost certainly considerably more indirectly. Max Blumenthal has explored in some detail the various funding resources and relationships that the organization draws on, mostly in Europe and the United States.

Former weapons inspector Scott Ritter has described how the White Helmets are not actually trained to do the complicated rescue work that they depict in their self-made videos, which have established their reputation by ostensibly showing them in action inside Syria, rescuing civilians from bombed out structures, and providing life-saving emergency medical care. As an expert in Hazardous Materials handling with New York Task Force 2 USAR team, Ritter reports that “these videos represent de facto evidence of dangerous incompetence or, worse, fraud… The bread and butter of the White Helmet’s self-made reputation is the rescue of a victim—usually a small child—from beneath a pile of rubble, usually heavy reinforced concrete… The techniques used by the White Helmets are not only technically wrong, but dangerous to anyone who might actually be trapped… In my opinion, the videos are pure theater, either staged to impress an unwitting audience, or actually conducted with total disregard for the wellbeing of any real victims.”

Ritter also cites the lack of training in hazardous chemicals, best observed in the videos provided by the White Helmets regarding their activity at Khan Sheikhun on April 4th. He notes “As was the case with their ‘rescues’ of victims in collapsed structures, I believe the rescue efforts of the White Helmets at Khan Sheikhun were a theatrical performance designed to impress the ignorant and ill-informed… Through their actions…the White Helmets were able to breathe life into the overall narrative of a chemical weapons attack, distracting from the fact that no actual weapon existed….”

But perhaps the most serious charge against the White Helmets consists of the evidence that they actively participated in the atrocities, to include torture and murder, carried out by their al-Nusra hosts. There have been numerous photos of the White Helmets operating directly with armed terrorists and also celebrating over the bodies of execution victims and murdered Iraqi soldiers. The group has an excellent working relationship with a number of jihadi affiliates and is regarded by them as fellow “mujahideen” and “soldiers of the revolution.”

So by all means let’s organize to revoke the White Helmets’ Oscar due to misrepresentation and fraud. It might even serve as a wake-up call to George Clooney and his fellow Hollywood snowflakes. But the bigger take-away from the tale of the White Helmets would appear to be how it is an unfortunate repeat of the bumbling by a gullible U.S. government that has wrecked the Middle East while making Americans poorer and less safe. A group of “moderates,” in this case their propagandists, is supported with weapons and money to overthrow a government with which Washington has no real quarrel but it turns out the moderates are really extremists. If they succeed in changing regime in Damascusthat is when the real nightmare will begin for minorities within Syria and for the entire region, including both Israel and Saudi Arabia, both of which seem intent on bringing Bashar al-Assad down. And the truly unfortunate fact is that the Israelis and Saudis apparently have convinced an ignorant Donald Trump that that is the way to go so the situation in Syria will only get worse and, unless there is a course correction, Washington will again richly deserve most of the blame.

 

SECRECY NEWS

From the FAS Project on Government Secrecy

Volume 2017, Issue No. 51

July 5, 2017

ARMY ISSUES NEW COUNTER-WMD DOCTRINE

Countering weapons of mass destruction is “an enduring mission of the U.S. Armed forces,” the US Army said last week in a new doctrinal publication.

Counter-WMD operations are defined as actions taken “against actors of concern to curtail the research, development, possession, proliferation, use, and effects of WMD, related expertise, materials, technologies, and means of delivery.”

See Combined Arms Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction, ATP 3-90.40, June 29, 2017.

The Army document does not refer to any specific countries such as North Korea.

Instead, it says generally that “Conventional forces and SOF [special operations forces] capabilities may be necessary to stop the movement of CBRN materials, WMD components and means of delivery, WMD-related personnel, or functional weapons into or out of specified areas or nations. Such actions may require boarding vessels and using search and detection capabilities to secure and seize shipments.”

Counter-WMD activities are directed not only at the weapons themselves but at the networks that produce, sponsor, fund and utilize them.

“Interacting with and engaging networks requires the use of lethal and nonlethal means to support, influence, or neutralize network members, cells, or an entire network. As part of this effort, commanders select, prioritize, and match effective means of interacting with friendly networks, influencing the neutral network, and neutralizing threat networks,” the new Army publication said.

“Commanders and staff utilize the targeting process to identify targets, determine the desired effects on those targets, predict secondary and tertiary effects, and plan lethal and nonlethal effects. This process enables the prosecution of targets to capitalize on and exploit targets of opportunity.”

STILL NO CLASSIFIED TRUMP PRESIDENTIAL DIRECTIVES

After nearly six months in office, President Trump has not yet issued a classified presidential directive on national security.

On June 16, Trump issued an unclassified National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM) on US policy towards Cuba, reversing or limiting some of the steps towards normalization of relations with that country that were undertaken by the Obama Administration.

The version of the Memorandum that was published on the White House website was unnumbered, but a White House official said last week that it is formally designated as NSPM-5.

Since the first four Trump NSPMs are also unclassified public documents, this means that at least as of June 16 there were still no classified or unreleased presidential directives on national security.

That is unexpected, and it is a departure from past practice in previous Administrations.

The explanation for the lack of classified NSPMs is unclear.

It is possible that President Trump is using some other instrument for issuing policy directives on classified national security matters (though that would be at odds with the definition and purpose of NSPMs). Alternatively, he may have delegated certain aspects of national security decision making elsewhere, as with the authorization for the Secretary of Defense to determine troop levels in Afghanistan.

Or it could be that there just are no other Trump national security directives because there is no other Trump national security policy to speak of. The Administration may still be so understaffed that it is incapable of launching significant new policy initiatives.

The June 16 NSPM-5 directed the Secretary of State to publish it in the Federal Register. But three weeks later, even that simple task has still not been carried out.

 

‘Amid worsening US-German relations, Berlin may reorient itself to Russia’

July 4, 2017

RT

The administration of Donald Trump has made it clear the US has its own national interests, Rainer Rothfuss, geopolitical analyst and consultant, told RT. Werner Patzelt, professor at the Technical University of Dresden, joins the discussion.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s relationship with Donald Trump seems to be worse than she had with his predecessor Barack Obama.

In comparison in 2013 when Merkel published her election program, she referred to the US as “Germany’s most important friend.” However, in the latest version published ahead of this September’s vote she merely referred to the US as a “partner.”

RT:  Some critics say Merkel is not tough enough on Trump. Why have there been different attitudes to the two US administrations of Barack Obama and now Donald Trump?

Rainer Rothfuss: First of all, we have to take into consideration that Angela Merkel is campaigning at the moment. So she has to look after the voters’ attitudes, and with an anti-Trump policy program, you can rather win votes than overemphasizing friendship and partnership with the US. This is the first and most important point, and I would say it should also lead us to the consideration that it is not a policy shift that may last very long. But on the other side, it is also a considerable shift in foreign policy terms, because the US has, through their policy changes, brought along through the administration of Donald Trump, made clear that they have their own national interests also in the field of economic policies. Germany is one of the main targets of these policy changes. So the export surplus of about €250 billion that Germany has toward the US shall be reduced. This will hurt Germany. So Germany has to reorient itself toward other partners – maybe also Russia in the future.

RT:  Does this change in terminology in Merkel’s election program represent a policy shift toward the US?

RR: Obviously. The change in terminology has just taken place in the election program of the CDU, the governing party. So this means that it is a policy shift, which is aiming at winning the elections on September 24, first of all, and then only afterwards we will see if the policy changes are implemented on the ground. If Germany really seeks a leadership role of a group of Western countries rivaling with the Trump administration as leader of the Western world. But I would say that Germany would be on a rather risky path, if the country thinks it could lead the Western world instead of the US. If we look at the military power of Germany in comparison to the US, Germany is negligible and is always dependent on the US, and will also be quite vulnerable in the future to any attacks of the US against German companies around the globe. We should not think, as Germans, that we could take over a great part of the leading role of the US anytime soon in the Western world. This would be a total deception and will not be successful at all.

RT:  Many consider Germany to be the leader in the EU. Do you think there is a possibility that it can become independent from US politics and unite all the EU countries?

RR: … Be it in the Southern sphere through the euro crisis, or in Eastern Europe through the refugee crisis – Germany is seen as rather a threat than a partner within the EU. This is not something Germany should be deceived about or be able to rely on really heavily. The European partners can at any time break away and rather partner with the US, for example, when it comes to security issues; or when it comes to the euro crisis, the debt crisis of Greece, Spain, and also Italy. Europe is a divided continent. Therefore, it is a quite risky path if Germany thinks that it can unite all of Europe behind its own interests and then be a severe competitor of the US.

‘Europe will get its own defense initiative’

Werner Patzelt – professor of the Technical University of Dresden

RT:  Do you feel there is a change in Merkel’s tone toward Washington?

Werner Patzelt: The basic issue again is that the tone, the accent, in the German-American relations has changed. Gone are the times when the German Chancellor was a very close friend of American presidents, like George Bush, the father; or Bill Clinton, because Trump is behaving quite in a different way. Leaders of states, politicians, come and go, nations and their relations remain. Therefore, this is nothing to be taken too seriously. The only exception would be Trump being reelected and really change the basic outline of American foreign policy…

Germany is the most important country in the center of Europe and is in charge of holding together the EU and contributing significantly to the European part of NATO.

This development, without any doubt, has been accelerated by the fact that Donald Trump insisted the Europeans have to pay for all military services rendered by the US. That if Europeans didn’t pay the two percent share of the GDP for military equipment, they would have to pay to NATO, or to the US, whatever. This was a reaction to this decision of the American leadership – no longer to take guarantees, so to speak – unconditional guarantees for European security. This brought a development underway at the end of which Europe will have its own defensive identity, but nevertheless still remaining close ties with the US in the framework of NATO.

 

The G-20 in an Unjust World: Only Radical Thinking and Action Can Tame Globalization

In Hamburg this week, thousands are preparing to launch protests against the exploitation of labor, the degredation of the environment and the extremes of capitalism. To solve the world’s problems, a radically new approach is necessary.

July 5, 2017

by Alexander Jung

Spiegel

There are injustices that have become so familiar that few are even bothered by them anymore. A brief reminder: Every 10 seconds, a child dies of starvation somewhere in the world, despite there being enough food on the planet to feed between 10 and 12 billion people — and the global population is just 7.5 billion. Almost 800 million people in the world live in extreme poverty, despite there being more money in the world than ever before. Fully 81 percent of the energy produced in the world is the product of burning fossil fuels, even though this practice warms the climate and alternatives such as wind and solar are available.

When G-20 leaders gather in Hamburg later this week, they will have an opportunity to at least mitigate some of the most blatant contradictions facing our world. After all, they are largely responsible for the existence of such contradictions in the first place.

The G-20 nations represent two-thirds of the global population, just over three-quarters of its economic output and four-fifths of its greenhouse gas emissions — and they are the prime target of anti-globalization activists. “The G-20 are part of the problem, not the solution,” says Werner Rätz, co-founder of the German chapter of the network Attac, which is critical of globalization. It is that conviction that has driven Rätz to coordinate protests planned for Hamburg this week. He has plenty of experience doing so.

Rätz, 65, has a white beard, shoulder-length hair and is a longtime veteran of the leftist scene. He was once active in the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party, before moving on to the Greens and then the Left Party. But he ultimately realized that party politics wasn’t really his thing. Instead, Rätz prefers the extra-parliamentary opposition. In summer 1982, he registered a peace demonstration in Bonn in parallel with a NATO summit. An estimated 450,000 people showed up, but it only got 16 seconds on the nightly news. “It’s hard to imagine such a thing today,” he says.

Thirty-five years later, he doesn’t need to worry much about media attention. He’s more concerned about the Hamburg government, a coalition pairing the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens. Hamburg Mayor Olaf Scholz wants to prevent demonstrators from camping out in city parks, which is something for which Rätz has no understanding at all. He knows Scholz from when the mayor was an official with the SPD’s youth wing — and now he is rubbing shoulders with the big-wigs against whom Rätz is mobilizing.

‘The Global System Is in Trouble’

Indeed, police on Sunday evening cleared out a protest camp in a park on the Entenwerder Peninsula just southeast of the Hamburg city center. Protesters had thought they would be allowed to set up tents and spend the night there, but a court ruled against the camp on Sunday evening and police immediately stepped in to prevent the pitching of tents there, deploying pepper spray and arresting one person. On Tuesday, the city-state’s interior minister, Andy Grote, once again emphasized that the police will be following a zero-tolerance strategy when it comes to allowing demonstrators to spend the night in the protest camps.

Rätz, for his part, is convinced that he is on the right side of the barricades. “The global system is in trouble everywhere,” he says. “It’s an opportunity for the alternative movement.”

Globalization critics have been receiving an unexpected amount of support in recent months. Last September, 170,000 people demonstrated across Germany against the free trade agreements TTIP and CETA, with the United States and Canada respectively. Now, the masses of critics are heading for Hamburg to stand in the way of world leaders. A broad alliance is behind the protest movement: church groups, environmental organizations, trade unions, refugee councils and peace movements. They are united in their belief in the good of humanity and in the malignance of the system.

They all believe that free trade and the market economy do not produce prosperity for all and merely make the rich richer. They are convinced that the intertwined global economy, digital advance and untamed financial markets only serve a small elite and that the masses become the losers. The majority, they believe, are excluded from prosperity.

According to 2016 calculations made by the aid organization Oxfam, just eight men control a fortune worth $426 billion, with Microsoft founder Bill Gates, textile magnate Amancio Ortega (who owns clothing retailer Zara) and investor Warren Buffet at the top of the list. Together, those eight men possess more wealth than the poorest half of the global population. The few profit handsomely while the vast majority lose a little: It is this state of affairs that galvanizes critics far beyond the leftist political spectrum.

Nothing Is Perfect

Two weeks ago, German Chancellor Angela Merkel surprised participants at a meeting of non-governmental organizations in Hamburg called the Civil20 Summit, or C-20 for short. During a panel discussion at the summit, Merkel conceded that economic policy should not focus “simply on growth,” but also on “sustainable, inclusive growth.” She said that market freedoms were beneficial, but added: “Nothing about globalization is perfect.”

It would seem, in other words, that criticisms of globalization have got through to the establishment. The political center has become concerned about how the world is currently developing. When Pope Francis — to the degree one can view him as belonging to this center — writes in his “Laudato Si” encyclical on the environment and human ecology that the earth “groans in travail,” it sounds like one of the fundamental criticisms that environmentalists have been levelling at capitalism for years. Meanwhile, Dennis Snower, president of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, once a hotbed of market liberalism, is now addressing the question as to whether societal cohesion is eroding. “Social developments are no longer proceeding hand-in-hand with economic advances,” he fears.

There is also plenty of anti-globalization coming from the right, though the focus is a different one. The authoritarian-minded populists aren’t seeking to increase the fairness of global trade, they reject it entirely. They want to protect domestic economies from foreign competition and have nothing but disdain for multinational corporations. It is a position that is attractive to many — to those who see themselves as globalization’s losers.

It almost looks as though the left has begun attracting support from the wrong side — as though an odd alliance is developing between right-wing nationalists and leftist TTIP opponents. But is it? Attac rejects the idea out of hand, insisting that they aren’t protectionists. They merely want to see more equitability.

Others, though, aren’t so sure. Thomas Ebermann, one of the co-founders of Germany’s Green Party, warned not long ago in the magazine konkret that some from the leftist camp are in favor of a return to European nation-statism and “lexit,” a leftist withdrawal from the euro. Ebermann sees such positions as “the core crystallization of a far-right development.”

Changing Perspectives

Many perspectives have been shifting in recent months, including views on globalization. The U.S. — once hailed as the “leader of the free world” — is pursuing strict isolationism. China is presenting itself as a champion of the new international division of labor, a term which refers to the shifting sites of worldwide production as a consequence of globalization. And both forces are fighting for influence in Europe. The new divide is no longer between the political right and left, but between those who are in favor of open societies and those who would prefer to seal themselves off from global developments.

This week in Hamburg, visions for how countries should deal with globalization and its consequences are now colliding with one another: how to deal with poverty; how to protect the environment; and how to tame the excesses of the financial industry. They are questions that should concern everyone with a sense of moral responsibility: politicians, business leaders and normal citizens. And sometimes they

In quiet moments, lawmakers consider whether the law currently up for a vote will, in fact, serve the population at large — rather than just his or her own re-election campaign. Every executive surely reflects on whether their responsibility to their employees is of greater importance than their own wealth. And consumers likewise wonder occasionally if they really need all the things they buy — or whether consuming less might be a better way to go.

If we answer such questions honestly, we are gripped by a bad conscience, for a moment at least — before suppression once again takes hold. It is something of a paradox: Everyone knows in principle what is right, but we don’t always act on that knowledge.

It is this paradox that the new critics of globalization are targeting. They are demanding that politicians, business leaders and the rest of us take a close look at our actions. And to then examine what the consequences are — and ask ourselves: How radically must things change for the problems facing our world to be solved?

THE PROBLEM

The diagnosis arrived at by Munich-based sociologist Stephan Lessenich is radical indeed. He says that people in the North are living at the expense of people in the South, having simply outsourced the dirty and polluting elements of production. On our behalf, “resources are being exploited, toxic substances released, refuse stored, swaths of land devastated, communities destroyed and people killed,” he says. “Our abundance is robbing others of the foundations for survival.”

Lessenich, a slender man in his 50s, studies social inequality. The academic took over the Sociology Department at the University of Munich from Ulrich Beck, the doyen of German sociology, after he died unexpectedly two-and-a-half years ago. Both were interested in the fault lines dividing global society in the age of capitalism, but Lessenich is more uncompromising.

Germany’s economic success, he says, depends on the exploitation of people and the environment in other parts of the world. “We aren’t living beyond our means,” Lessenich says. “We are living beyond the means of others.” The professor declines to support his diagnosis of an “externalization society” with empirical environmental data. His proof is more anecdotally based.

Take coffee capsules, for example: In 2016, Germans used around 5,000 tons of them. Making such capsules requires aluminum, the production of which not only requires huge amounts of energy, but also bauxite — and large swaths of rain forest in Brazil are clear-cut to make way for bauxite mines. “We have specialized in winning and damned others to losing,” Lessenich says.

It is a rather black-and-white view and Lessenich admits that, as an academic, such an uncompromising approach makes him uncomfortable as well. But he wants to make a point that everyone can understand, he says, which is why he adopts such a polemic tone.

By doing so, however, he opens himself up to attack. It is possible, after all, to see the world in a completely different light — as a more hopeful place with significant opportunity. Despite, or even because of, globalization.

Vast Improvement

According to the World Bank, extreme poverty — defined as an income of less than $1.90 per day — has dropped significantly in recent decades. In 1990, 34.8 percent of the global population, fully 1.84 billion people, lived in extreme poverty. By 2013, that number had plunged to 766 million for a share of 10.7 percent of the world’s population.

China, in particular, has seen vast improvement, a function of the country having become an important part of the global economy. A quarter-century ago, 756 million people in China lived in extreme poverty, more than half of the country. Today, the number is just 25 million people, a mere 2 percent of the Chinese population. Meanwhile, industrial wages in China stand at the equivalent of $3.60 per hour, not much lower than the $4.50 earned by workers in Portugal. In many regions of the world, with the notable exception of Central Africa, the battle against poverty and hunger has been producing measurable and observable improvements.

There are also surprising success stories when it comes to the environment. China, the world’s largest emitter of CO2, has significantly cut back on the construction of new coal-fired power plants and India also recently put a halt to several projects. The goal of limiting global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius might be unrealistic, but Nicholas Stern, the former chief economist at the World Bank, nonetheless sees a number of things that give him hope.

Ten years ago, Stern wrote a widely read report that focused global attention on the potential consequences of global warming. Since then, he says, a lot of progress has been made. Solar has become an energy source that can now compete with fossil fuels and the automobile industry is making significant investments in electric and alternative-fuel vehicles. Stern says he never would have expected such a thing.

Furthermore, many companies have now identified sustainability as a goal, both for ethical reasons and, primarily, to protect their bottom lines. They are interested in attracting prosperous customers, many of whom want to buy products that are produced and traded fairly. Sustainability bolsters their image.

An Age-Old Contradiction

It used to be that fair trade was a niche for the Birkenstock-wearing crowd, but today, discount supermarkets offer organic eggs and fair trade chocolate as if it were the most normal thing in the world. These days, German supermarket chains like Lidl, Aldi and Edeka sell more organic products than all organic supermarkets put together. And they have also begun selling more locally produced products.

A new awareness is even growing in parts of the financial industry. Banks, insurance companies and investment firms are examining their portfolios and some are divesting themselves of companies that earn their money with oil, natural gas and coal. Here, too, the primary motivation is economic in nature: Investors are concerned that the “carbon bubble” could burst — that fossil fuel-based industries might have to undertake significant write-downs because the global demand for oil, natural gas and coal is sinking. The influence of investors in the so-called “divestment movement” is significant: Together, they manage assets worth $5 trillion.

Companies, governments, consumers: Changes in behavior can be found everywhere — but sociologist Lessenich isn’t particularly impressed. He considers concepts such as green capitalism and intelligent growth to be little more than “terms of collective self-deception,” he says. They don’t, he says, offer a way out of the fundamental dilemma: The realization of unsustainable behavior on the one hand, and the practice of simply continuing on as before on the other.

It is the age-old contradiction between dispositional ethics and the ethics of responsibility within which everyone is trapped: the companies that produce never-ending sustainability reports, yet — when push comes to shove — ultimately shoot for growth and high profits; governments that have made progress in the battle against poverty but which are too weak or divided to improve equality; and consumers who buy water from the initiative Viva con Agua, which helps finance aid projects, but then drink it out of plastic cups. People, in short, who think and talk about environmental responsibility, but who then act differently when it comes to consumption — at the expense of workers in Burmese textile factories, for example.

THE CONSUMERS

Winnie Byanyima knows such women. From Uganda, Byanyima has led a life that makes the rest of us look boring by comparison. She was born in 1959, when her country was still a protectorate of the British Empire. The daughter of a teacher, she grew up under the tyranny of President Idi Amin before fleeing to England and training as an aeronautical engineer. She then returned to Uganda and joined the rebels, spending time in the bush. Later, she became Uganda’s ambassador to France.

Today, she is the first African to lead Oxfam, an international confederation of development organizations with representation around the world. Two weeks ago, she shared the stage at the C-20 summit with Angela Merkel and reported about the daily lives of women in Burma.

Women there, she said, work more than 14 hours a day, but earn no more than $4 for their toils. That may be above the international poverty line, but it isn’t even close to enough to feed a family, she explained, adding that the women have no social net whatsoever and are immediately fired if they become pregnant.

She then turned to the chancellor and said: “These women are making the clothes you and I wear.” Merkel listened intently and nodded. The audience also applauded Byanyima’s comments, perhaps feeling caught out themselves.

Most Germans, after all, don’t much care where their shirts, their shoes or their chocolate bars come from. Hardly anyone thinks much about the conditions under which such products are produced. It is only thanks to NGOs like Oxfam or the Südwind Institute in Bonn that we have learned more about where the things we buy come from.

But it doesn’t help much. In 2014, German consumers spent around 1.5 trillion euros on consumer products, but just 50 billion euros of that total was spent on environmentally friendly products, according to the German Environment Agency — a share of just 3 percent. Even the oh-so- environmentally correct Germans enjoy a lifestyle that exceeds the natural limits of our planet. If everyone on earth were to consume as much as a single citizen of Germany, 2.6 planets would be necessary to meet their needs.

Buying More than Necessary

We humans are planting more crops than the depleted soil can bear. We are using wood faster than it can grow in our forests. We are producing more greenhouse gases than our atmosphere is able to absorb. And we buy more shoes than a single person needs: Germans buy an average of five pairs per year; in the U.S. it is eight.

Industry produces more products than their customers need, but that only works because consumers have become used to buying more than necessary. German mail order magnate Michael Otto has been celebrated for his pledge to use only sustainably produced cotton in clothes produced under its house brand and licensed brands by 2020. It is a move that demands respect. But does it go far enough?

His business model, after all, depends on selling as many clothes as possible. And it works because Germans today buy 11 times as many articles of clothing per year as they did just 30 years ago — a total of 6 billion items of clothing per year. Often, shoes, T-shirts or pants end up in the garbage or a clothes collection bin after just one year, even though most of it is in perfect condition and could still be worn. Not a few clothing items end up unworn in the wardrobe after purchase. Clothes are simply too cheap for people to truly value them. And the smallest portion of the purchase price ends up in the hands of the Burmese women who sew them.

The situation described by Oxfam head Byanyima reflects a fundamental problem with the international division of labor. Retailers such as Primark and Zara rake in the vast majority of the profits while the people who actually make the products get very little. The chancellor, who otherwise is happy to represent the interests of German retailers, took the side of the people on the other end of the production chain while on the C-20 stage two weeks ago. The profits, she said, are often only gathered at the very end of the production chain and not at the beginning.

Such disparities aren’t unique to the textile industry. In the Ivory Coast, the world’s largest exporter of cocoa beans, farmers often only earn half a dollar per day for their work. Using machetes, they chop the pods from the branches and open them up to remove the beans. It is estimated that more than 1 million children work on cocoa plantations in the country, and many of them don’t go to school as a result. A rule of thumb holds that the lower cocoa prices fall, the more likely it is that children will be used as a cheap labor force. Currently, cocoa prices are near a 10-year low.

The situation is similarly appalling in the shoe industry. A chromium solution is often used during the leather tanning process, which results both in environmental pollution and health problems among workers, such as rashes and difficulty breathing. The shoes are often sewn by workers in their own homes. It takes about one hour to produce a single pair, with around 360 steps necessary from cutting out the leather to the final stitch.

In Indonesia, it is primarily women who stitch shoes together and according to Südwind, they receive the equivalent of 22 euro cents per pair they produce. If their employer finds a quality problem, the women are often fined and the money comes directly out of their wages.

None of this is a secret; consumers just have to make the effort to inform themselves. And it isn’t even that difficult: Seals such as Fairtrade, Gots or Gepa guarantee clean production or fair trade. But whether the higher prices drive people away or they just can’t be bothered, only a minority of consumers actually seek out sustainably produced products.

THE CORPORATIONS

It’s even harder for corporations to make the world a better and fairer place. Publicly traded companies submit themselves to the rules of a financial capitalism, whose standards have spun out of control. Just four technology companies on the stock markets — Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Google — have a combined market capitalization of just under $2.4 trillion, a sum that exceeds India’s gross domestic product. Central banks are flooding the markets with money and those profiting from the development are building up wealth of almost unimaginable magnitude — while the connection to the real economy is eroding.

It’s not that things were much better in the past. The economy has been driven by the shareholder value mindset for three decades. What’s new today is that the financial sector essentially points CEOs in what direction their companies must go. Economists refer to the phenomenon as the financialization of the economy. “Our biggest and brightest companies have started to act like banks,” American columnist Rana Foroohar recently wrote.

Today, airlines often earn more money through hedging on oil prices than they do selling seats to passengers. And companies buy back their own shares rather than invest their money. Between 2004 and 2014, American firms used over half of their profits to do so, spending close to $7 trillion in stock buyback programs. Meanwhile, financial institutions move the prices of corn or wheat through commodities speculation, leading to a situation in which prices are no longer determined by the quantity of the harvest. Indeed, prices are no longer determined by supply and demand.

Companies are getting further and further away from their original reason for going into business: providing good products that people like, earning decent money and paying their employees well. A hundred years ago, German engineering giant Siemens was building housing settlements for its employees, an idea that seems unfathomable today, despite housing shortages. These days, the main focus of companies is the effort to deliver a larger profit than that of the previous year.

People serve companies, but actually it should be the other way around, argues Christian Felber, who sometimes does handstands when he gives speeches. What Felber is trying to show is that the way we conduct business has been turned on its head. On this particular morning in Berlin, the moderator says time is short, so Felber skips this part of his show. Felber is sitting on a panel at the T-20 summit — T for Thinktank. Like the C-20, it’s also a preparatory meeting — and one that is attended by some pretty high-level people, including Nobel laureates, CEOs and German government ministers. Sitting between them is Felber, with his strawberry blond beard, rolled-up shirt sleeves and green backpack on his shoulder. Even without doing his signature handstand, he stands out from all the others in their suits. So, too, do his ideas.

Ideas from the 13th Century

Felber, born in 1972 in Vienna, is one of the co-founders of the Austrian chapter of Attac. He’s also one of the new stars of the alternative scene and gets invited to events so frequently that he could probably make daily appearances, but he tries to limit himself to 100 a year. Felber’s fundamental thesis is captivating — he’s calling for a new economic order that he calls the economy for the common good, one that serves to help people live better lives rather than just increase profits.

Felber himself admits that there’s nothing new about his thesis and that many of the ideas can be found in the work of the 13th century philosopher Thomas Von Aquin. Felber says he just updated those notions to fit with the times. In an economy for the common good, it isn’t the financial result that is placed at the center of all economies, but rather five central values: fairness, human dignity, solidarity, democracy and sustainability. Felber and his fellow campaigners are also developing a common good balance sheet that can be used to measure whether systemic changes have been successful.

In it, they try, for example, to review how a company treats its suppliers or employees, whether it’s business practices are climate-neutral, whether it discloses money it gives to lobbyists and if it is a company that promotes women. A few companies have already allowed their common good aptitude to be tested, including German outdoor sports equipment-maker Vaude and even one financial institution, Munich’s Sparda bank.

The bank has made the decision to ensure that no part of its employees’ salaries is performance based nor does it pay commissions on business acquired. The bank wants to ensure that money doesn’t get in the way of providing clients with reputable service and advice. The shift in values at the company goes so deep internally that the bank has removed Nestlé water coolers from its office and offers its employees fair trade coffee. The company’s tea towels are produced in factories that employee blind or otherwise disabled workers.

A broad spectrum of organizations are adhering to such common good ideas, including Protestant church organizations and activists with the environmentalist group Greenpeace. Around 200 companies have already been reviewed to determine their common good balance sheets. Felber says he even presented his system to Germany’s postal service, Deutsche Post, although the resonance was limited.

At the T-20 panel in Berlin, Felber sat across from Deutsche Post CEO Frank Appel. The executive waxed philosophical about the questions facing mankind, the importance of love, meaning and hope, but also about Deutsche Post’s responsibility to society. “We have done a lot,” he said, adding that Post could provide an example for other companies. At that point, the panel moderator asked him why Deutsche Post had decided against the economy of common good concept?

The ‘Golden Straightjacket’

Appel admitted that he couldn’t recall the exact reasons. He said many alternative models exist, but they lack the kinds of standards used in classical accounting. If a global standard were established, the executive assured, Deutsche Post would also be open to participation. Felber smiled. It was exactly the kind of answer he had expected.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman once invented the image of the “golden straightjacket” to describe the situation governments and executives find themselves in. They are trapped in a system of global competition, borderless free trade and the ruthless grabbing for profits. It was then-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher who first tailored that jacket at the beginning of the 1980s, when she placed the United Kingdom on a strict liberal economic course. Even today, nobody seems to have truly been able to escape it — assuming any of them actually even want to get out in the first place.

In 2005, a CEO of a company on Germany’s blue chip DAX stock index earned 42 times that of a normal employee. In 2014, it had risen to a factor of 57 times a normal salary. Post CEO Appel earned a total of 9.9 million euros last year, compared to around 34,000 euros for a postal carrier. This means that Appel gets more on a single workday than a postal carrier gets over an entire year. And now he wants to talk about love, meaning and hope?

Globally, the income disparities have reached their highest levels in 50 years, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The places with the greatest social inequality are not to be found in the United States, Asia or Europe or even in New York, Shanghai or London, as one might expect. Almost all are in Africa.

Four countries in Africa are home to the greatest social disparity. In Angola, around 40 percent of the populace lives under the poverty level, but its capital city Luanda has been determined to be the world’s most expensive city for expats. Well-paid foreign professionals, mostly working in the oil industry, have driven up prices.

THE POLITICIANS

In Africa, the economic conflict lines are to some extent two-dimensional. The gap between the industrialized nations is widening, but at the same time, the chasms within African countries are also growing dramatically. But what’s causing this? *** “First and foremost, Africa’s elites themselves,” says Oxfam coordinator Byanyima. “The governments need to create economies that help many and not just a few.” *** TRANSLATED QUOTE

Africa is globalization’s perpetual loser and it has been since colonial times. The international community has spent entire generations ignoring the suffering in sub-Saharan Africa and it took the escalation of the refugee crisis two years ago before people once again became politically aware of the continent’s fate — at least that’s the case for many Europeans.

But now, suddenly, Africa is gaining importance in another area: It’s demographic development will almost certainly have an impact far beyond the continent. By 2050, Africa is expected be home to more than one-quarter of the global population. It is predicted that the population will double to 2.5 billion, with half of that figure under the age of 25. The German government has placed issues pertaining to Africa at the center of its G-20 presidency.

The German Finance Ministry has christened its new initiative the Compact with Africa. Initially, the plan is for the program to include five pilot countries — Ivory Coast, Morocco, Rwanda, Senegal and Tunisia — with each receiving 300 million euros in additional aid money from Germany. The aim of the pact is to attract private investment to Africa. But Oxfam International Executive Director Byanyima is critical of the initiative. *** “I’m sorry,” she says, “but it’s going in the wrong direction.” ***

As an adolescent, Byanyima experienced in Uganda firsthand what despotic rule is like. People could be detained by the military at any time, an experience that has shaped her political understanding. Byanyima believes the government should play a central role in combating poverty — in the form of a predictable, policy-oriented state that supports small businesses at the local level. Byanyima warns that private investors pursue ulterior motives — namely their own interests. “They play with the countries,” she says.

She recalls how Rwanda’s former finance minister once told her how a company CEO had flown to the capital city of Kigali in a private jet to negotiate his tax rate. The man then climbed back into his jet and flew to Uganda, where he planned to do the same thing. The problem with that kind of behavior is that African governments will lose billions if they allow themselves to engage in a downward competition to offer the lowest corporate tax rates. This has already resulted in Kenya losing $1 billion a year in tax revenues — twice the amount the country spends annually on health care. Poor countries suffer disproportionately from tax avoidance schemes because they often have few revenue streams other than trade in raw materials.

These countries lack the ability to conduct good governance — the ability to take assertive government action through reliable institutions or maintain the principles of rule of law — regulations that protect property and prosecute corruption. Markets alone can’t eliminate poverty; often they exacerbate it. To do so, you need an active state that sets the ground rules and creates a better balance between society’s winners and losers.

THE WAY OUT

That’s the good news. There are ways of making the world a fairer place while at the same time protecting the environment. For that to happen, though, the people, the business community and the politicians need to be honest with themselves. They need to do more than just say the right thing — they must to have the trust in themselves necessary to take decisive action. They need to muster the courage and resolve for radical change. Implementation begins on a small scale at the municipal administrative level.

This year, the city of Portland, Oregon, wants to impose a 10-percent surcharge on the corporate tax if a CEO earns more than 100 times more than a normal worker. If that level exceeds 250 times the salary of average normal employees, an additional levy of 25 percent would be charged. The regulation is a response to the fact that within a period of just five years, the average annual salary of the 200 highest-paid CEOs in the U.S. has doubled and now stands at $19.3 million.

The leadership in Beijing has also shown some imagination. Residents of the city are only able to obtain a license to purchase a car with a combustion engine through a lottery, with chances of winning minimal, at a level of under 5 percent. The calculation is that more people will buy electric cars in the smog-choked city.

Arrangements like that provide an example of how politicians can effect change at the local level. They illustrate a level of courage, imagination and also a bit of radicalness. But the issues addressed at the G-20 summit in Hamburg will be even bigger — it will be about the issues humanity faces and the world’s problems.

It will be about fair taxation, given that international agreements are necessary to standardize minimum tax rates, to eliminate tax havens and to prevent corporations from funneling their money to these havens in perfectly legal ways to avoid paying taxes, thus circumventing the contribution they should be making to the common good. It’s hoped that the so-called BEPS Project can be used to make life more difficult for the kind of tax avoidance schemes used by well-known tricksters like Amazon or Starbucks. But the treaty still needs to be ratified and it is not believed that it has support from the U.S. at this time.

Pressing Issues

Another priority is to prohibit the acquisition of raw materials of dubious origin. The U.S. used to be a leader in this push — at least until Donald Trump repealed the relevant passage from the Dodd-Frank Act this year. Until that move, publicly traded corporations had been required to disclose whether their products contained conflict minerals sourced from the Democratic Republic of Congo, including coltan, tin, gold and tungsten. Rebel groups finance their torture and rape through sales of the minerals. The European Union has a similar regulation in place, but it doesn’t cover cobalt — and over 50 percent of the world’s supply of cobalt comes from Congo.

Very clearly, another pressing issue at the summit will be climate protection — namely that of creating a price that is applied globally for the right to pollute the atmosphere with CO2. Europe’s own system of trading CO2 certificates hasn’t been successful, with a ton of emissions now costing only five euros, a sum far too low to actually have a significant deterrent effect. Economist Stern believes that figure will have to go up to at least $40 to $80 for it to have any effect.

A more consistent and effective way of protecting the climate would be to issue similar certificates to individuals. Climate researchers believe the acceptable figure would be 2 tons of CO2 emissions per person per year. That would force the U.S. to massively limit its emissions. Currently, the average American emits 16.1 tons of CO2 per year, compared to 9.5 tons emitted by the average German. Brazilians, on the other hand, are only slightly over that limit. At the G-8 summit 10 years ago in Heiligendamm, Germany, that system found a prominent advocate in Chancellor Merkel, who expressed her support for it at the time.

Those would be the perfect issues for the Hamburg summit. But it’s difficult to imagine they will be discussed seriously when democrats meet with autocrats this week and those seeking climate protection meet with leaders who doubt climate change even exists and when those supporting human rights meet with oppressors. Never before have expectations been so low for a summit. The evening before the summit, the Sherpas will meet until late in the night and hone every last sentence of the G-20 closing statement. This time, some are even questioning whether there will even be a closing statement. I have to admit, Columbia University economics professor Jeffrey Sachs recently told a panel, “I just become more and more nervous.”

Sachs is something of a popstar among global economists. During the early 1990s, he advised the new governments in Eastern Europe and later he devised a plan for eliminating poverty around the world. Now 62, he has gray hair, but he still exudes an almost Kennedy-like charisma. The speech he gave at the T-20 summit was a brilliant appeal — angry, almost despairing, but also passionate. “We are living in a quite dangerous world right now,” he said near the beginning of his speech. “Our institutions are not working, and our governments are not working, mine first and foremost.” The United States, he said, is “in a massive political crisis — the likes of which we have not seen, perhaps since the Civil War — and I do not think I am speaking hyperbolically.” The president, he said, is “incapable of this job,” and “behind him is a broken political system.”

Then Sachs turned to what he described as the other “prima donnas,” who are betraying the interests of their people by ignoring existential problems like species loss, the flooding of coastal areas and hunger in the world. How can we prevent, Sachs asked the audience, 5.9 million children under the age of five from dying this year? If questions like that aren’t addressed at the G-20 summit in Hamburg, he demanded, then where else can they be?

If the G-20 leaders won’t listen, he continued, then voters will “bring in the next ones, honestly, because this is too important to be left to 20 people. This is for 7.5 billion people and their children and their grandchildren.”

 

 

 

 

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