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Iran: Saeed Mortazavi And Zahra Kazemi’s Unresolved File

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By Fareshteh Ghazi

There are currently five open cases against Tehran’s Former Prosecutor Saeed Mortazavi; however, after 14 years he has still not been charged for the death of Zahra Kazemi, the Iranian-Canadian photojournalist who died while in custody as a result of his treatment by the prison authorities.

The charges against Mortazavi range from complicity in the death of detainees under torture in Kahrizak Prison during his tenure as Tehran Prosecutor, to corruption charges relating to the time he took over the Social Security Fund office. However, Shirin Ebadi, counsel for the family of Zahra Kazemi explains that the judiciary has refused to proceed against Mortazavi as a party in Zahra Kazemi’s death.

Zahra Kazemi was arrested in 22 June 2003 while she was taking photos of a group of families of prisoners congregating in front of Evin Prison. On 10 July 2002 she was pronounced dead in Tehran’s Azam Hospital. Ten days later, Mohsen Armin, deputy head of the sixth parliament and a member of its National Security and Foreign Policy Commission pointed the finger at Saeed Mortazavi and said: “Judge Mortazavi does not have the discretion to take such actions.”

Armin warned parliament that its silence against such “arbitrary and irresponsible actions” will encourage and promote them” and “destroy all credibility of the system and the Revolution”.

Armin’s warnings fell on deaf ears until Mortazavi resorted to his old ways in the course of the election protests to the controversial victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009.

Issuance of Arrest Warrants for Zahra Kazemi and Kahrizak Detainees

Zahra Kazemi was arrested and beaten in front of Evin Prison while shooting photos. The report read in parliament indicates that Mortazavi goes on to issue her formal arrest warrant. “Two days later for unknown reasons, he [Mortazavi] hands her over to security forces. There she reports that while being interrogated at the prosecutor’s office she was beaten severely, especially in the head.

The same afternoon Kazemi is returned to the prosecutor’s office and after some hours Judge Mortazavi calls on the Ministry of Intelligence to come and collect her. Ministry officials respond that there is no need for her arrest and that she can return to her home and ministry officials will question her at her home later. But Judge Mortazavi insists on a handover.”

Six years after Zahara Kazemi’s murder, a group of election protesters are detained in Tehran after the 2009 election. Prosecutor Mortazavi issues the order for their transfer to Kahrizak Prison. Esmail Ahmadi Moghaddam Head of Security Forces at that time reports that Mortazavi insisted on the transfer despite reminders that Kahrizak was already over capacity.

Ministry of Intelligence reportedly calls for the evacuation of Kahrizak and transfer of its detainees but Mortazavi disregards this order. Another order for the transfer of detainees is issued on the following day from the head of the National Security Council which is once again dismissed. Heeding either of those orders would have prevented the death of the prisoners, one defense lawyer stated in court.

From Zahra Kazemi’s Stroke to Meningitis Afflicting Kahrizak Detainees

On 26 June 26 2003, during interrogation Kazemi says she does not feel well and is transferred to the hospital. Around 6 am the following day her situation becomes critical. She goes into comma due to a brain hemorrhage and becomes brain dead.

The brain hemorrhage is due to a skull fracture. The parliamentary probe reports that Saeed Mortazavi once more steps beyond his jurisdiction, without consultation with the Minister of Culture and Guidance, summons the director general of the ministry’s foreign media department and tells him to sign a media release that after her arrest, Kazemi was sent to hospital because she expressed that she was not feeling well and died at hospital from a stroke.

Mortazavi then reportedly goes on to contact the state’s official news agency IRNA, to relay the media release.

Six years later on 14 July 2009 detainees of the election protests are moved from Kahrizak. From those, Amir Javadifar dies on route while Mohammad Kamrani and Mohsen Ruholamini die later in hospital.

Reports indicate that Saeed Mortazavi told a special parliamentary committee probing into the death that the cause of death was meningitis adding that immediate vaccination of all detainees was underway.

Further probe into the matter revealed that after the attending doctor and his superior refuse to sign off on meningitis as cause of death, Mortazavi dictated a letter to prison officers himself stating the cause of death as meningitis adding that the detainees had died in hospital and had no bruises indicating any form of abuse.

For the death of the Kahrizak detainees, Mortazavi was charged with “complicity in murder, participation in illegal arrests, assistance in filing false official reports”. For the latter two charges he was sentenced to a ban from any post in the judiciary and a five year ban from any public office. He was also sentenced to a fine of 200 thousand toumans. He was acquitted of the murder charge.

In the Zahra Kazemi case, Mortazavi faced no charges. Shirin Ebadi reports that one of the intelligence ministry officers was charged in the matter and he was in finality, acquitted of all charges.

Kazemi who had no siblings, had an elderly mother in Iran. Shirin Ebadi and other Human Rights Defenders Centre lawyers provide Kazemi’s mother with legal representation and manage to make the trial open to public.

At first the proceedings were attended by the Canadian ambassador and other international diplomats. Later the judge bars foreigners from entering court which Ebadi says was in violation of the law. Canadian Ambassador hence leaves the country and diplomatic relation between the two countries sour after that.

The Zahra Kazemi file was never closed however. Public perceptions regard Saeed Mortazavi as the true culprit but Shirin Ebadi says the case was never resolved and the court still owes the public a decision on this matter.


What Europe Can Teach Us About Trump – Analysis

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By John Feffer*

Donald Trump might seem like a uniquely American phenomenon. The shape-shifting billionaire huckster reinvented himself first as a TV personality and then as a maverick populist politician. He rode to power on patriotic slogans – Make America Great Again – and tailored his policy prescriptions to specific American constituencies like West Virginia coal miners and Michigan factory workers. He spoke to very particular American anxieties about immigration, crime, and guns. You can find traces of Trump in American history (Andrew Jackson, Huey Long) and American literature (Elmer Gantry, Lonesome Rhodes).

Donald Trump practically screams America.

And yet, Trump is nothing new. Europeans have been dealing with their own mini-Trumps for decades. Silvio Berlusconi also began his career in real estate before becoming a billionaire media mogul. A womanizer and right-wing populist who promised to create a million jobs, Berlusconi led his Forza Italia party to victory more than 20 years ago in 1994. He would eventually serve as prime minister in four governments. He didn’t follow through on his promise to create a million jobs. In fact, the Italian economy sank deeper into debt and corruption, and Berlusconi became mired in a succession of scandals.

Silvio Berlusconi was, as The Economist put it indelicately, “the man who screwed an entire country.” Those are big shoes for Trump to fill.

Further east in Europe, Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia have all produced their own mini-Trumps over the years. As America braces itself for the landfall of Hurricane Trump, it’s instructive to look at the trajectory of these populist leaders for they hold clues to our future.

Hungary: Political Swingers

Viktor Orban started out his political life as a liberal. He helped found the Alliance of Young Democrats – Fidesz – in Budapest in 1988. As Communism began to crumble in Hungary in 1989, the new movement promised to be “radical, liberal, and alternative.” Fidesz introduced a playful note into the 1990 election. One particularly striking, if heteronormative, campaign poster from that year showed two pictures of a kiss: between two Communist dinosaurs, Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker, and between two young, attractive Hungarians. “Make your choice,” read the inscription. Fidesz captured nearly 9 percent of the vote that year.

Today, Fidesz is no longer liberal or alternative. It’s no longer the party of young people. And it is far from irreverent. After a steady march to the Right, led by current Prime Minister Viktor Orban, it has become the party of orthodoxy.

“It was completely unexpected what happened in Hungary, where an already consolidated liberal democracy went backwards toward an autocratic or hybrid regime,” says Hungarian sociologist Andras Bozoki. “It never before happened in the EU that a country suddenly made a U-turn back from democracy toward some kind of half-democracy. When Austrians elected the Haider party, there was a huge protest in the EU. There was also a marginalization of Berlusconi. But none of these people had a two-thirds majority in the parliament, so they couldn’t change the constitution.”

After winning more than 50 percent of the vote in both 2010 and 2014, Fidesz can pass any legislation it wants. When the country’s constitutional court has overturned key Fidesz laws, the party simply achieved its goal by changing the constitution, which it has done four times — recalling the apocryphal story of the Paris bookseller who, when asked for a copy of the French constitution after World War II, answered that he didn’t traffic in periodical literature.

Orban moved to the right less because of ideological conviction than because of political opportunity. In Hungary, the main liberal party (the Alliance of Free Democrats) and the former Communists (the Socialist Party) teamed up to form a coalition government on two occasions. Orban was furious at what he perceived as a betrayal by his liberal brethren. The liberal-socialist coalition, meanwhile, implemented harsh economic reforms and became notorious for its corruption. The discrediting of the liberal-left on economic grounds presented Orban with the means to regain power in 2010. Fidesz hammered on its populist themes – average people were not benefitting from economic reforms, the elite had partnered with foreign interests against the nation, minorities (Roma, immigrants) were dragging the country down into lawlessness. Sound familiar?

Like Trump, the Fidesz take on the economy is all over the map. It has railed against international banks even as it imposes various neoliberal reforms. Orban is primarily interested in what economists call “state capture.” The ruling party is using the state apparatus to direct benefits – jobs, contracts, payments – to its supporters. If the Hungarian government renationalizes utilities or banks, it’s not because of some fundamental belief that the state benefits from controlling the “commanding heights” of the economy. Rather, Fidesz simply wants more power in its hands and more spoils to distribute.

The Hungarian public is not oblivious to this corruption. Indeed, according to a poll in July, two-thirds of Hungarians believe that Fidesz is “very corrupt.” Even a third of Fidesz supporters feel that way. In October, the government closed down a major opposition newspaper and sponsored an anti-immigrant referendum that failed to attract enough voters to pass. Despite all this – or perhaps because of all this – Fidesz remains very popular. Indeed, its favorability went up in October to 49 percent. The entire opposition – Socialists, Greens, liberals – musters only a little over 30 percent. Fidesz has faced more competition from the far-right party Jobbik. But by moving steadily toward the far right itself, the ruling party has stolen the thunder of Jobbik.

Lesson for the United States: don’t underestimate corrupt opportunists who have no hesitation about courting extremists to stay in power. The liberal-left in Hungary fragmented in the wake of the Fidesz victory, allowing the ruling party to focus on appealing to voters further to the right. Successful resistance requires unity and the broadest possible message.

Poland: Christian Crusade

Last year, the Law and Justice party (PiS) took control of the presidency and the parliament, delivering a decisive blow against both the center-right liberal party and the former Communists. It has moved quickly to implement its pro-Christian, anti-EU policies. The consolidation of power by PiS through the media, the public prosecutor, and the Constitutional Court has challenged democratic norms and even elicited a rebuke from the EU. Last spring, Brussels demanded that the Polish government walk back its authoritarian steps. Warsaw said no.

The EU, it seems, doesn’t seem to have any bite to back up its bark. One senior Polish diplomat said that the recent U.S. elections only strengthen the Polish government’s resolve: “I’m confident President Trump will not want to be involved in this whole discussion. We understand that Trump shares our concept of sovereignty. He doesn’t care about others’ internal issues.”

That leaves the task of resistance to Poles themselves. Women have mobilized against the government’s plans to ban all abortions. Teachers have demonstrated against the government’s efforts to change school curricula to reflect “patriotic values.” A new civic movement, KOD, is attempting to build the broadest possible front against the government. But PiS remains far more popular than the opposition.

Tying together all of the new right-wing populist movements is their trumpeting of Christian values. One of the first changes that Fidesz made to the Hungarian constitution was to insert a phrase that recognizes “the role of Christianity in preserving nationhood.” The Catholic Church is a major backer of PiS in Poland. And the religious community proved a key supporter of Trump.

In a talk that he gave via Skype at a conference at the Vatican in 2014, alt-right guru Steve Bannon identified three civilizational challenges: crony capitalism, creeping secularism, and “jihadist Islamic fascism.” He was hard-pressed to decide which was worse – Islam or secularism – but he was very clear about the stakes:

We’re at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict, of which if the people in this room, the people in the church, do not bind together and really form what I feel is an aspect of the church militant, to really be able to not just stand with our beliefs, but to fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity that’s starting, that will completely eradicate everything that we’ve been bequeathed over the last 2,000, 2,500 years.

Bannon and his co-religionists are imagining nothing short of a new crusade against Muslims and secularists. I described the outlines of this effort in my book Crusade 2.0, but that was when these forces were still on the fringes. They have now moved front and center.

One other key element of the Polish example is the economic populism of PiS. It has targeted its economic programs at those who have not benefited from the country’s accession to the EU or globalization more generally. Writes Remi Adekoya in The Guardian:

While PiS is strongly rightwing on social issues, its economic approach can be described as leftist. It emphasises the need to tackle inequality and propagates strong welfare policies. It introduced unconditional monthly cash payments equivalent to £100 for all parents who have more than one child towards the upkeep of each subsequent child until he or she is 18. So if you have three children, you get £200 per month and so forth. For parents with one child, the payment is conditional on low income.

No previous government ever embarked on such a generous social programme. PiS’s approach puts many Polish leftists in a bind.

Lessons for the United States: Beware the Trump administration’s appeals to “Judeo-Christian values” and think twice about working with the administration on economic programs. Trump will likely try to peel off Democratic Party support for some domestic programs, which will blunt the overall effort to resist the administration’s appeal. It is one thing not to oppose sensible economic programs. It’s quite another to collaborate with the administration on their implementation (are you listening, Tulsi Gabbard?).

Slovakia: Populism Is Dead?

In the 1990s, after splitting with the Czech Republic, Slovakia took a turn away from democracy. Its new leader, Vladimir Meciar was the quintessential populist. He would insert grammatical mistakes into his campaign posters to demonstrate his proximity to “the people.” He openly discriminated against the ethnic Hungarian population, at one point in 1997 even proposing a mass population transfer with Hungary to “solve” the minority issue. He pushed through a campaign to “Slovakicize” culture — for instance, by mandating that 30 percent of all music on the radio be from Slovak composers —and appointed his own people to regulate the media to make sure it echoed his party’s line. He was also incorrigibly corrupt, arranging for his cronies to acquire cheap properties through the privatization process.

“The first years of Meciar’s government were almost worse than under Communism,” writer Martin Simecka recalled. “The regime was not so strong as under Communism, but it was more ugly with these fascistic tendencies and this nationalism. For me, personally, those were pretty bad years. Psychologically, it was very difficult to see the gap get bigger between the Czech Republic and Slovakia, with the Czechs going West and we Slovaks going East or going nowhere at all.”

By 1998, Slovaks had had enough with their illiberal detour. “In the first years of the Meciar government, it really became clear to everyone, not only to the inner circle, that this guy is thinking about a different type of democracy,” activist Rasto Kuzel told me. “It was good for Slovak NGOs and for the Slovak civil society that we had to again unite and fight for these principles. We had to very actively demonstrate that we didn’t want this type of democracy and that we wanted Slovakia to be back on the right track.”

“Thousands of small organizations, initiatives, clubs and volunteer groups have made unique achievements,” Martin Butora, former Slovak ambassador to the United States, recounts. “Despite a complicated heritage of undemocratic conditions, backwardness and discontinuity, civic actors and volunteers managed to engage and motivate a broader public because they offered understandable, acceptable concepts of freedom, solidarity and activism, which were in line with democratic modernization and which broke down the prevailing ethos of civic helplessness, as well as the tendency toward preferring the promotion of individual interests instead of the public good.”

Foreign organizations, including foundations and political parties, provided substantial assistance to Slovak civil society. The anti-Meciar mobilization also relied on the leverage of Europe. Meciar’s undemocratic leanings cost Slovakia its spot in the first round of accession in the European Union that included the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. Liberal activists used the widespread fear of losing out on EU benefits to strengthen their case for Meciar’s ouster.

In 1998, Slovaks used the ballot box to pry Meciar from power. The electoral strategy motivated young people and energized the previously apathetic. The remarkable victory put Slovakia back on course to join the EU in 2004.

The problem, however, is that the anti-Meciar movement focused almost exclusively on politics and didn’t address the underlying economic anxiety that many Slovaks felt about the impact of austerity capitalism and globalization more generally. As a result, another populist came along, Robert Fico, who successfully reached out to the “left behind” constituency by denouncing austerity, scrapping a regressive flat tax, and criticizing privatization. He also won successive elections by embracing a Trumpian social policy. Fico decried the influx of immigrants, calling the more liberal EU policy “ritual suicide.” He has called critics of his party “anti-Slovak,” reviving a Meciar-era tactic. On Roma, he has said that “the best solution would be to take away all their children and put them into boarding schools.”

Lessons for the United States: By all means rouse the anti-Trump base by focusing on his treatment of minorities, immigrants, and women. But make sure to put together an economic program that meets the expectations of America B while skewering Trump for his handouts to the rich, the lobbyists (of the military-industrial complex, for instance), and the biggest businesses.

The Long Haul 

As these European examples demonstrate, America faces a long, difficult period. It takes a while before a populace can see through a populist. Berlusconi was in and out of power for two decades. Orban, too, first became prime minister nearly 20 years ago.

Trump doesn’t have that kind of political career ahead of him. He is 70 years old. He is the oldest president in history to take office. Still, he can do a lot of damage while he’s president. And make no mistake: in many ways Mike Pence is worse (on abortion, LGBT rights, and most foreign policy issues).

The Trump administration might have a shaky mandate – it did, after all, lose the popular vote. But Trump’s favorability rating has already gone up. Many former anti-Trumpers are ready to work with him. Most importantly, he is operating in a favorable international context (Brexit, Putin, Duterte, Le Pen).

Trump might seem like a peculiarly American problem. But he isn’t. To deal with him, we’ll have to act locally. But we’ll have to think and act globally as well.

*John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus. His latest book is the dystopian novel, Splinterlands.

A Piece Of Advice After Malaysia’s Bersih Rally Five – OpEd

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The recent yellow-shirt 60,000 strong-mass rally in Malaysia, urging cleaner elections and the resignation of Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak ended in both warring parties winning – the protesters got their message across for the fifth time and the government got to test-drive the 2012 Special Offences Act (Sosma), its new anti-terrorist law, for the first time.

The leader of Bersih (‘Clean’ in Malay), Maria Chin Abdullah, a long-time human rights activist, is now in solitary confinement, detained like a suspected Islamic State (IS) terrorist while investigations on her alleged links with the American intelligence-gathering-legit-government agency, the CIA, are being carried out. Exactly how she is linked will be a puzzle and a mystery, like those of the world-famous money-laundering and high-profile case of the Malaysian 1MDB.

But the government, as always, is winning. I attribute this perpetual victory to one concept – hegemony. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Antonio Gramsci, two thinkers on Totalitarianism,  have written a lot about this idea of ‘common sense’. The control over Man, machinery, media, and money.

The former prime minister, Dr Mahathir Mohamad, who ruled Malaysia with an iron glove for 22 years mastered this concept. Today he marches with the Bersih protesters, outside of the realm of hegemony he created, and trying to figure out how to play the game of counter-hegemony and feels what it is like to play with authority.

Ironically, the authority he is trying to bring down was a child of his own creation – his Frankenstein. Or rather, culturally speaking, his Badang. It is a tough and complicating act and one which seemingly has no poetic justice in sight.

Recently, in a previous article in Eurasia Review I wrote about the representation of the Malays on the eve of the red-shirt-yellow-shirt confrontation:

“ … Aren’t Malaysians tired of seeing the Malays being represented as buffoons, stupid, amok-prone, close-minded, rempits, kris-kissing fools, Ali Baba forty-thieves, rejects, religious fanatics, red-shirts, whatever shirts… it is a clever production and reproduction of the Malay ruling class, both feudal and wannabe-feudal… so that the Jebat aspect of the Malay – the amuck, the wannabe-sultan, the misogynic, the sex-maniac-royal groper and rapist of ancient Malacca, the royal-jet-setting-good-for-nothing-ancient-kings, the hedonistic, the grotesque epicure, the gangster, the absurd – is pushed forward and propagated to strengthen the Tuah aspect – the fool that followed the foolish orders of the foolish and idiotic Malacca sultan, the womaniser-cum-religious leader – the bad hombre of Malay culture – these are the twin representation of the Malays.

A laughing stock – the Malays are made to become …” Source here.

So – how now brown cow? What are Malaysians to do after yet another rally? After yet another governmental pounding on the protesters with arrests a la Machiavelli?

The way forward

As an educator for peace and an advocate of long-haul bloodless revolutions focusing on changing consciousness through education and self-reflection, through living an ethical, morally-compassed, and intelligible life for the collective-good of society, I would suggest the following as a long-term plan for a radical change:

It is better to focus on raising your children well in adjusting to a changing, globalizing, and very diversifying Malaysian and global society. We must work harder to improve race relations, be stronger to fight corruption and power abuse, and be more intelligent in designing policies that will benefit the poor, the marginalized and the powerless.

We must teach our children to focus on ways to understand others, improving their English language skills, perfecting their moral compass, encouraging them to think well and good about children of other races and religion, to encourage them to make friends with people of other races, to be grateful that schools offer the great opportunity to love and respect teachers of different races.

Teach them to learn about the dangers of generalizing, stereotyping, and projecting hate that would lead to mass deception, to encourage each child to learn about other cultures and religion, and to teach them that all of us in Malaysia are now Malaysians and not this or that group of immigrants.

We all are migrants in time and space and in history and that all of us are human beings with emotions, struggles, challenges, history of joy and despair, memory of pain and pleasure of living, and that all of us are merely of differing skin color tone and born to speak different languages and to believe in different things about salvation and that we are all travelers in this life.

We cannot allow Malaysia to come to a point in which riots such as those race-based against the police to take root. We cannot allow the Malaysian version of #BlackLivesMatter to be the impetus for urban violence.

We are all these and will not need moments of history where we cultivate hate for the bigger picture of oppression we do not understand. We may all be pawns in this great political game of big-time plunderers and multi-ethnic robber-barons skilled at mass deception and distractions. Today, the level of corruption and the growing cases of mass corruption and power abuse that are going unpunished have made Malaysia a critically ill nation.

We should be grateful that we are still alive and breathe daily and that we must think happily and joyfully like Malaysians in order for each and every one of us to prosper in peace. We cannot travel the path of America in which racism is on the rise and of late especially in places such as Texas, Islamophobia is brewing.

Malaysians, we need to come back to our senses. Our strength will still come from diversity and the respect and cultivation of talent. We should rejoice and celebrate the achievements of this nation for that beautiful concept of unity in diversity; not to organise any rally that spews hatred and invoke the horrors of the May 13, 1969 tragedy.

Let us design a safer journey towards a progressive and harmonious Malaysia, beyond for example, the red T-shirt red-river of blood march of some mangled manufactured propaganda of Malay dignity.

My Thanksgiving wish is to see a saner and more peaceful America, as well as Malaysia – two countries I have loved and will continue to love. On that note: Have a blessed Thanksgiving, my fellow Americans!

Where Does The Demonetization Debate Stand In India? – Analysis

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Demonetization has been defined as the act of stripping an old currency unit of its value as legal tender, in order to introduce new units in to the financial system. The Indian government has recently taken the gigantic step of demonitizing its 500 and 1000 rupee notes, a move which has been hogging the limelight since then. The government claims it is a move to stem the tide of black money or an underground and parallel system which has been sapping the growth of economy, along with some other associated benefits in the short and long term.

It is being debated with equal fervor by the opposition parties who seem to have arrived at common ground and hope to make it suitably uncomfortable for the government in order to have an upper hand on other issues.

The said currency notes totaled a whopping 86% of extant currency in India, and the move to demonitize these have made an immense impact on a cash driven economy like India. Most transactions in India are dependent on cash; these include small transactions such as grocery and daily needs shopping, transport, medicare, payment of utility bills such as electricity, gas and water, and larger transactions such as bullion trading, stock market trading, real estate and property. Reasons for the continuation of cash based transactions is the poor penetration of banking services in the hinterland, and urban centers using cash to escape lawful taxation on money heavy activities. Willy-nilly there are enough loopholes perpetrated by the financial system that are sought to be exploited by using underhand methods such as these.

The present government under Prime Minister Modi campaigned on a plank of stringent anti-corruption measures and a promise to unearth the black economy which it alleged was a direct result of illegalities that the earlier dispensations allowed to burgeon during their watch.

In the present move the government ostensibly is living up to these campaign promises. On the face of it, the move to demonitize currency in such a drastic manner seems to do precisely that; force people sitting on large piles of currency to move it in to the banking system or allow it to perish, create conditions to jump start at least the basis of a cashless economy, and initiate measures to use a sledgehammer on illegal transactions. The government promises that it would also ease out inflation in the short term by sucking out the liquidity in the financial system.

However, and with ample reason, the opposition parties seek to corner the government by portraying the move as anti- people, and the fact that such a momentous decision was taken without taking all parties on board and without adequate preparatory steps. It would also reduce the economic growth of the country simply because of the dwindling investment confidence in the financial markets. Couple this with the outflows from emerging markets such as India in the hope of a spike in the US Fed rates, and the opposition has a watertight and sealed debate!

Both sides of the argument seem to hold water, but only in isolation.

While the government took this step seemingly solely on the basis of its commitment to eradicate a flourishing parallel economy, it has been timed to coincide with important forthcoming elections in state legislatures. In addition there are massive allegations that its own minions were aware of this step and managed to convert their piles of currency before the order came in to effect.

Further that the important mega business houses which support the ruling party were warned off in advance thereby allowing them to take corrective measures. Also most of the really colossal sums of black money exist in other forms such as investments in tax havens abroad or bullion or real estate and these are not remotely affected by a domestic move of this nature. And most importantly, that in taking a politically timed step such as this, the government completely overlooked the misery it would cause the common man.

Similarly, the opposition parties are known to be sitting atop massive piles of currency which are used to affect outcomes during elections, these are normally collected against promises to be kept post elections. Naturally a sudden move which chops them at the base would engender protest. Moreover the coalition which was ruling earlier had ample time and opportunity to adopt stringent measures but they failed to do so.

Naturally in the cacophony of political voices the common man is left to fend for himself. In the past two weeks or so, the country has seen a number of deaths which emanate from a person’s inability to get adequate cash for daily life. Similarly other facets of life in India have ground to a halt, but these seem to have no articulation in the public debate. Tourists for example have been left high and dry. Military personnel serving in difficult terrain with virtually no access to banking facilities are finding it extremely hard to maintain their families back home. People in Nepal, a neighbor state that had agreed to honor the Indian currency suddenly find themselves up a gum tree. Nepalese citizens especially the Gurkhas who serve in the Indian Army and are largely dependent on their salary to meet their needs back home are completely asunder as to how to fulfill their commitments back home.

Notwithstanding the ‘fors‘ and ‘againsts‘, the motion that we hear on the media generated hyperbole, what remains clear is that the government has initiated a move without adequate preparation; possibly such a stringent move could have been more carefully balanced out to ensure minimal effect on the economy and the people. The coming months are likely to witness more turmoil. Whether the ruling party garners enough wins in the state legislatures is yet to be seen. Yes, given the enormous Indian penchant for improvisation, needless to say the black economy would find new ways to perpetuate itself.

Searching For A Trump Grand Strategy – Analysis

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By Nikolas K. Gvosdev and Derek S. Reveron*

(FPRI) — During his Presidential campaign, Donald J. Trump continuously emphasized several themes: the United States was on the “losing” end of a number of security and trade deals with other countries, while “free-riders” were both draining U.S. military capacity and threatening to involve America in conflicts that were not of U.S. concern. Trump, under the rubric of “America First,” was critical of military interventions driven by a particular internationalist narrative such as the global war on terrorism or the responsibility to protect rather than interventions to advance traditional notions of national interests.

His critique is historically correct. Since 1945, the United States has employed military force about every four years. In only one instance did the U.S. respond directly to an attack against the homeland.

The cost of this strategy of intervention has increasingly fallen disproportionally on the United States, while the benefits have accrued to “U.S. partners,” or competitors. To quote former Senator and Democratic presidential candidate, Paul Tsongas “the Cold War is over and Japan won.” Today, we can say the U.S. has made the world safer for Chinese investment. This dynamic seemed to resonate among groups who coalesced to become the Trump coalition and enabled him to break Clinton’s “blue wall” to win the Electoral College tally.

As he prepares to take office, Trump, like his immediate predecessors, will remain focused on international terrorism with an eye to preventing another major attack on the U.S. homeland. The President-elect must decide to what extent he wishes to support regimes throughout the world in confronting their internal security challenges so that direct U.S. intervention will not be required. He will have to assess how to respond to other regional powers expanding their borders or spheres of influences. As Trump surveys the world situation, it appears that his initial preference will be to identify and encourage capable partners to take up more of the burden of stabilizing their regions and preserving the current international order. The U.S. will assist by sharing expertise, selling weapons, and conducting security cooperation.[1] But, the non-exclusive nature of U.S. security partners may be coming to an end as Washington will now expect partners to become contributors.

In addition, Trump’s instincts to withdraw and retrench will be shaped by other factors already in play prior to his election. There is frustration with grand nation-building projects in the Middle East and Afghanistan that have failed to deliver on their promises. Fiscal pressures on sustaining the current levels of U.S. expeditionary activities and the panoply of the current American global footprint are mounting. These pressures would have placed restraints even on the ability of a Hillary Clinton administration to sustain an activist foreign policy. At the same time, Trump’s rhetoric about focusing more attention on the “forgotten” parts of the United States can be more easily achieved given new technologies that could reduce American dependency on global markets and thus weaken one of the main arguments in favor of extensive American engagement with the rest of the world.

Trump has already called for restarting domestic and regional energy projects that the Obama administration had put on hold. A greater willingness on the part of a Republican administration to consider protectionist measures—near heresy given the decades-old commitment of the party to promoting free trade—could see domestic energy producers and manufacturers given greater preference. A potential corporate tax holiday could repatriate trillions of dollars from foreign banks stimulating corporate spending in the U.S.

If shale oil enables the United States to achieve energy self-sufficiency, a fundamental shift in U.S. foreign policy could occur. This shift would overturn the Carter Doctrine and the Reagan Corollary, which committed the United States to defend the countries of the Persian Gulf. While oil is a global commodity, a disproportionate share of U.S. military power is in the Middle East to ensure Gulf countries can export oil to China, India, and Japan.

Likewise, there would be little strategic logic for the United States to repeat its past efforts of bringing Eurasian energy to international markets. For the past 20 years, U.S. policy has promoted new transport routes that would get Caspian and Central Asian energy to Western markets by bypassing both Russia and Iran. The United States also has encouraged European consumers to decrease their dependence on Russian energy supplies, with limited success, as the Ukrainian crisis has demonstrated. But, if the United States could export energy to Europe, as well as support the emergence of new sources of Central European shale gas, then the economic rationale for U.S. efforts to intervene in the post-Soviet space diminishes. Such a change would reorient simultaneously the energy supply of key European allies away from Russia, which increasingly is becoming a strategic competitor in favor of strengthening trans-Atlantic ties. Moreover, the United States could rethink its security commitments from those defined by dependency to those defined by prioritized national interests.

Other technological breakthroughs, especially new manufacturing techniques, could decrease U.S. dependence on a globalized “just in time” system of trade—where it is of vital importance that resources and components produced in different parts of the world make their way quickly and efficiently to final assembly points and then to market. There is already a small but noticeable trend by which jobs formerly outsourced to lower-cost venues overseas over the past two decades are being repatriated. At the same time, the United States continues to garner the most foreign direct investment in the world with companies such as Daimler, Volvo, and Toyota building factories around the country. The United States will not withdraw from the international economy, but it may become more cost-effective in the coming years to truly “buy American”—diminishing the country’s interest in patrolling and securing the global commons. The United States is both the world’s largest economy, but also the world’s largest internal market. And if America shifts its orientation away from Europe and Asia toward consolidating a hemisphere-wide market for goods and services, then the United States might redirect its security posture away from Europe and Asia in favor of a Western Hemispheric-centered approach.

A combination of reorienting defense with a more economically self-reliant country will lead to shifts in the existing U.S. global security posture and a redefinition of national interests. Given the unlimited demand for U.S. military presence around the world, putting America first requires discipline to follow national interests. One relatively simple approach to this complex concept is to stratify national interests and connect them to the types of intervention available:

Vital Interests: What are we willing to die for? (e.g., invade Afghanistan with ground forces to destroy al-Qaeda training camps)

Important Interests: What are we willing to kill for? (e.g., participate in air campaign to conduct regime change in Libya)

Peripheral Interests: What are we willing to fund? (e.g., train and equip African Union peacekeepers for stability operations in Somalia)

While burden-sharing through coalition operations is a norm, the United States increasingly identifies more challenges than it—and its partners—can manage. The public is also growing suspicious about expansive views of what constitutes national security and the interventionist strategies that dilute resources and generate distractions from vital interests. The Trump national security team can start to turn off U.S. support of these unending military operations by surging diplomatic efforts or empowering regional surrogates to assume responsibility. Such actions will provide a rationale to increase other countries’ defense spending and enable the U.S. to detach itself from decades-long missions in Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East.

Considering the way military forces are used may lead the Trump administration to consider reviving a form of the Nixon Doctrine. Certainly, the original doctrine, promulgated some 46 years ago, was meant to address a worldwide Soviet threat; yet, while conditions have changed, Nixon’s attempts to reformulate a grand strategy during a time of economic uncertainty makes it relevant today. At the time, Nixon declared

the United States will participate in the defense and development of allies and friends, but America cannot—and will not—conceive all the plans, design all the programs, execute all the decisions and undertake all the defense of the free nations of the world. We will help where it makes a real difference and is considered in our interest.[2]

Under this approach, the United States would focus on meeting its treaty commitments, but would also require its partners, if the threat emanated from their region of the world, to assume primary responsibility for action, including shouldering the costs. The era when U.S. policymakers were willing to see vital interests at stake in every corner of the globe is coming to an end.

It is very true that the emerging powers of the global south and east would seek advantage of a changed U.S. foreign policy. Yet, no other power or group of powers is positioned to produce an alternate global system that can produce the same benefits that they derive from an Americanized international order. Thus, as the first two decades of the twenty-first century fade, the impetus to challenge the U.S.-led order will recede with emphasis instead placed on gaining more influence within it. As this occurs, the new world order will end up looking a lot like the old one where the United States incidentally leads.[3]

*About the authors:
Along with Mackubin Owens, Derek Reveron and Nikolas Gvosdev are co-authors of US Foreign Policy and Defense Strategy: The Evolution of an Incidental Superpower.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Navy, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

Source:
This article was published by FPRI

Notes”
[1] See Derek S. Reveron, Exporting Security: International Engagement, Security Cooperation, and the Changing Face of the US Military, (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2016).

[2] Richard M. Nixon, “First Annual Report to the Congress on United States Foreign Policy for the 1970’s,” Feb. 18, 1970.

[3] Derek S. Reveron, Nikolas K. Gvosdev, and Mackubin T. Owens, U.S. Foreign Policy and Defense Strategy: The Evolution of an Incidental Superpower (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2015).

Eurasia Boosts South-South Cooperation – Analysis

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By Bernhard Schell

The rise of emerging economies in the Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States (ECIS) region has boosted South-South cooperation, according to a new report.

The study by the UN Office for South-South Cooperation and the UN Development Programme (UNDP) is the first of its kind. It explores how mutual support has intensified over the last twenty years, following the region’s fundamental changes in economic, political, and social structures.

The study covers 31 countries and territories, highlighting the wealth of South-South Cooperation (SSC) in the region. It cites many interesting examples of SSC, and provides concrete suggestions to national policy-makers and other relevant stakeholders on how to catalyse SSC to achieve development objectives and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Counters and territories the report covers are: Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Kosovo (UN Security Resolution 1244), Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Republic of Moldova, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, the Russian Federation, Serbia, the Slovakia, Slovenia, Tajikistan, The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.

The draft study titled “South-South Cooperation: Towards Sustainable Human Development in ECIS” was presented early November in a global Expo in Dubai, as part of an open consultation process.

Various UN publications show that in 2013, SSC was estimated to have reached USD 20 billion up from between USD 9.5 billion and USD 12 billion in 2006. A similar trend exists for triangular cooperation.

Introducing the report, Olivier Adam, Deputy Director of UNDP Regional Bureau for Europe and the CIS, highlighted that the remarkable amount of mutual learning and support among developing and transition countries in ECIS often goes unnoticed.

“Several countries in the region have shown leadership in sharing knowledge and expertise, acquired during their own recent transformation process,” he said.

“The Astana Regional Civil Service Hub, for instance, is a flagship initiative of the government of Kazakhstan, supported by UNDP, and is helping share knowledge and expertise on public administration issues with some 35 countries around the world,” he added.

The report presents several examples of centres of excellence or similar mechanisms hosted and funded by new EU member states. Several countries in the region have established centres of excellence, often building on their comparative advantages accruing from their transition experience.

In this way, they make an important contribution to SSC through sharing their knowledge and expertise in a systematic manner, underpinned by mutual learning. Examples include the Public Finance for Development Programme of the Slovak Republic, the Czech-UNDP Trust Fund, the Romania Mobility Fund and a Center of Excellence on EU integration in Croatia.

Adam also highlighted the important dimension of working with the regional organizations and development banks to support SSC, including UNDP”s growing partnership with the Islamic Development Bank and The Cooperation Council of Turkic Speaking States.

South-South cooperation and triangular cooperation have received recognition in key international documents adopted recently, including in the Addis Ababa Action Agenda emerging from the Financing for Development Conference in July 2015 in the Ethiopian capital and the Sustainable Development Agenda 2030 endorsed by the international community in September 2015.

The report also maps the key regional groupings and organizations with members among ECIS countries. According to the authors, South-South cooperation in the region is mainly delivered through peer-to-peer networks, knowledge platforms, centres of excellence and demand-based facilities.

Along with a mapping of South-South cooperation in the region country by country, by themes and corresponding SDGs, the study also lists examples of funding opportunities. A checklist in the study provides the reader with an opportunity to assess country’s capacity assets and challenges with regards to South-South cooperation.

The report highlights that UN can be a vital partner in South-South cooperation and provide tailored support with regards to capacity development, knowledge brokering and facilitation.

The report follows the 19th Session of the High-level Committee on South-South Cooperation in May 2016 to review progress made in implementing the Buenos Aires Plan of Action, the new directions strategy for South-South cooperation and the Nairobi outcome document of the High-level United Nations Conference on South-South Cooperation.

Delegates there considered follow-up actions arising from previous sessions of the High-level Committee on South-South Cooperation, notably at its eighteenth session, in 2014, including actions arising out of the consideration of the note by the Secretary-General on the framework of operational guidelines on United Nations support to South-South and triangular cooperation.

The report of the Secretary-General containing a comprehensive proposal on concrete ways to enhance the role and impact of the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation, as well as the key measures taken to improve the coordination and coherence of United Nations support to South-South cooperation were also deliberated.

The 19th Session featured a thematic discussion on “the contribution of South-South cooperation and triangular cooperation in the context of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”.

Diplomats and development practitioners participated in the thematic discussion, led by prominent panelists representing United Nations organizations and agencies, regional development banks, academia, the private sector and civil society.

The Italian Constitutional Reform And Legislative Efficiency – Analysis

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Italians will vote next month on constitutional reform that aims to abolish perfect bicameralism. The reform would reduce the size of the Senate, and make the Chamber of Deputies the primary legislative body. This column discusses the effects of perfect bicameralism on legislative efficiency and the relationship between executive and legislative power. The reform would see a reduction in decree laws and legislative decrees, and lead to less frequent use of the confidence question. Additionally, it would see important improvements in bureaucratic efficiency.

By Massimo Morelli and Moritz Osnabrügge*

On 4 December, Italians will vote on the constitutional reform in a referendum. The primary goal of the reform is to abolish perfect bicameralism. Currently the first chamber, the Chamber of Deputies, and the second chamber, the Senate, have to agree on a common proposal before ordinary legislation can be adopted. The government depends on the confidence of both chambers. The proposed reform of bicameralism can be summarised as follows:

  1. The Chamber of Deputies becomes the primary legislative body. To adopt ordinary legislation, the approval of the Senate is only necessary in few areas. In most areas the Senate can make amendments, but the Chamber of Deputies can outvote the amendments by absolute majority (Article 70).
  2. The size of the Senate is significantly reduced to 95 Senators plus five members that the President may appoint. The Senator’s term corresponds to the term of “the territorial institutions that elected them” (Article 57).
  3. The government only depends on the confidence of the Chamber of Deputies (Article 94).

In this column, we argue that if this reform passes there will be an improvement not only in the often cited possibility of “more policy change”, but also in the ‘quality’ or ‘type’ of legislation. The number of decree laws and legislative decrees, and hence the delegation to the executive of legislative functions, will be reduced. Furthermore, we highlight that the reform will reduce the number of confidence questions and can under certain conditions improve the bureaucracy.

The standard argument

Existing political science research establishes that a reform moving away from bicameralism will facilitate policy change via ordinary legislation:

  • At the theoretical level, spatial models of legislative choice (Crombez and Hix 2015, Krehbiel 1998, Tsebelis and Money 1997, Tsebelis 2002) analyse decision-making in one- or two-dimensional policy spaces, and assume that political actors aim to achieve a policy outcome that is as close as possible to their ideal policy. The literature shows that bicameralism tends to enlarge the so called ‘gridlock interval’; that is, the set of status quo policies that cannot be changed given the preferences and institutional rules. Related to the spatial models, Diermeier and Myerson (1999) show that bicameral systems tend to have more veto players than unicameral systems.
  • At the empirical level, there is evidence that decision-making with two strong legislative bodies is more difficult and less efficient than decision-making with one primary legislative body. For example, in Germany more proposals fail if the second chamber has a veto right (Diermeier and Vlaicu 2011). Hiroi (2008) uses data on Brazil and concludes that symmetric bicameralism relates to longer decision-making procedures and a higher probability of failure. Bottom et al. (2000) use laboratory experiments to show that bicameralism increases policy stability. More generally, previous research has demonstrated that the involvement of more veto players with different positions tends to decrease the probability of policy change (e.g. Tsebelis 1999). Moreover, in a bicameral system there is clearly greater uncertainty for the agenda setter of any legislative initiative, and greater uncertainty has negative efficiency results (e.g. Boranbay-Akan et al. 2016, who show that more uncertainty over the location of the pivotal actors decreases the probability of adoption in the EU).

The neglected effects

1. Executive decrees

On top of the above arguments, we remark that both the size of the gridlock interval and the level of uncertainty have important implications for the use of decree laws (decreti legge) and legislative decrees (decreti legislative). As the reform reduces the gridlock interval and uncertainty, the political actors will have fewer incentives to use these mechanisms to change the status quo. The government does not need to use decree laws to bypass the parliament because it is more likely to adopt the legislation successfully via the ordinary legislative procedure. On the other hand, the parliament has less incentive to delegate power to the executive because the transaction costs for legislative decision-making are lower.

In the Italian constitution, Article 77 regulates the use of decree laws. The Italian government can adopt a decree law, but the law loses effect after sixty days if the parliament does not agree. The decree laws are a source of political instability because these acts are only valid for sixty days without parliamentary action. In addition, the short-term legislation makes it difficult to implement policy in a good way (see also Della Sala and Kreppel 1998: 190-191). On top of decree laws, following Article 76 the parliament can grant legislative power to the executive to adopt legislative decrees. The Italian political system is characterised by the extensive use of decree laws and legislative decrees. In the period from 1996 to 2012, 43.6% of the legislation was adopted via decree law and legislative decree. Specifically, 16.1% of the legislation were decree laws and 27.5 were legislative decrees (Musella 2012: 465).

We argue that the number of decree laws and legislative decrees is excessive and that the Italian form of bicameralism creates incentives to use decrees. To provide evidence in favour of our argument, we refer to some interesting findings in political science research. First, the detailed analyses of Kreppel (2009) and Della Sala and Kreppel (1998) suggest that the inability of passing legislation via the ordinary procedure was one important motivation for using decree laws and legislative decrees in Italy. Epstein and O’Halloran (1999: 53) show that ‘internal transaction costs’ increase the legislatures’ incentives to delegate power to the executive. These transaction costs increase with bicameral procedures, preference heterogeneity and uncertainty. In a recent paper, Junge et al. (2015) demonstrate that a larger risk of gridlock increases bureaucratic activities. König et al. (2016) provide evidence that both the risk of gridlock and uncertainty increase the incentives of institutions to adopt early agreements in the EU decision-making process. These agreements are typically made in informal meetings between representatives of the European Parliament, the Council and the European Commission.

In sum, the evidence suggests that the number of decree laws and legislative decrees will become smaller. In addition, the process of law-making will become more transparent because more legislation is done by the parliament rather than the bureaucracy.

2. Vote of confidence

The gridlock interval and uncertainty also have implications for the incentives to use the vote of confidence, which “permits the government to attach the vote on a specific policy or program to an up or down vote on the government” (Huber 1996: 269). We argue that the bicameral system increases the incentive to use the vote of confidence because bicameral systems are characterised by more preference heterogeneity and uncertainty. Theoretical work highlights that the confidence vote procedure induces voting cohesion for governmental coalitions on important reforms (Diermeier and Feddersen 1998).

In the Italian constitution, Article 94 establishes that the government depends on the confidence of both chambers. The rules of procedure of the Chamber of Deputies highlight that the government may initiate a question of confidence (Rule 116). The government increasingly uses the question of confidence to convert decree laws into laws to speed up the decision-making process. In the period from 1996 to 2012 this occurred 77 times. This is especially true for important reforms in the field of economics and finance (Musella 2012: 461, 471, 473).

In summary, we expect that the proposed reform will make the question of confidence less frequent.

3. Bureaucracy and political instability

The effect of the reform on the bureaucracy is ambiguous. On the one hand, more policy changes could slow down and complicate the interpretation and implementation tasks of the bureaucracy (e.g. Gratton et al. 2016). On the other hand, the less frequent use of legislative decrees and decree laws could reduce complexity due to different sources and different expected durations of legislation. The reform is likely to increase the accountability of decision-makers because the legislators are elected by the citizens, which is not true for the bureaucracy (Strøm et al. 2003). Lastly, the reform will reduce executive discretion because the legislature will have more possibilities to adopt ordinary legislation (e.g. Junge et al. 2015).

The implications for the bureaucracy depend on several contextual factors such as political instability. In times of political instability voters have more difficulties in identifying good politicians, who make good reforms and facilitate the job of the bureaucracy. This problem occurs because voters cannot observe the outcome of reforms due to frequent government changes (Gratton et al. 2016). Interestingly, Diermeier et al. (2007) suggest that the reform will not have major effects on political instability. The authors investigate the impact of bicameralism on the duration of governments. In line with the Italian constitution, they define bicameralism as a system where the confidence of the government depends on two chambers. Using a theoretical model and structural estimation, they provide evidence that removing bicameralism does not affect government durability, but decreases the coalition sizes.

To sum up, the reform will reduce bureaucratic discretion, but the overall effect on the bureaucracy is likely to depend on contextual factors such as political instability. Hence, we believe that further reforms, such as a reform of the electoral system, could reinforce the positive effects of the constitutional reform on the expected bureaucratic efficiency.

Implications for constitutional reform

The existing research reviewed in this column emphasises some important effects of the constitutional reform that have been neglected in the public debate, namely, the effects on legislative efficiency and reduction of delegation to the executive. The reform may also contribute to improve the bureaucracy.

In contrast with the prevalent conjecture in the public debate, this reform does not necessarily imply that the Italian political system will be characterised by less checks and balances. First, constitutional reforms will continue to require approval of both chambers (Tsebelis 2016).

Second, checks and balances in parliamentary democracies do not relate directly to a proper ‘separation’ of powers, because the defining characteristic of a parliamentary democracy is that the government depends on the confidence of the parliament. The proposed reform simply changes the confidence requirement to one chamber, making it clearer which majority coalition needs to support the executive.

Third, the reform is likely to reduce bureaucratic discretion and allow the parliament to play a more active role in legislative decision-making. The current institutions create gridlock and uncertainty, which make ordinary legislation more difficult.

*About the authors:
Massimo Morelli
, Professor, Department of Policy Analysis and Public Management, Bocconi University

Moritz Osnabrügge, Post-Doctoral Researcher, Bocconi University

References:
Boranbay-Akan, S, T König and M Osnabrügge (2016) “The imperfect agenda-setter: Why do legislative proposals fail in the EU decision-making process?”, European Union Politics, (forthcoming).

Bottom, W P, C L Eavey, G J Miller and J N Victor (2000) “The institutional effect on majority rule instability: Bicameralism in spatial policy decisions”, American Journal of Political Science, 44(3): 523-540.

Crombez C and S Hix (2015) “Legislative activity and gridlock in the European Union”, British Journal of Political Science, 45(3): 477-499.

Della Sala, V and A Kreppel (1998) “Dancing without a lead: Legislative decrees in Italy”, In J M Carey and M S Shugart (eds), Executive Decree Authority, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 175-196.

Diermeier, D and T J Feddersen (1998) “Cohesion in legislatures and the vote of confidence procedure”, American Political Science Review, 92(3): 611-621.

Diermeier, D and R B Myerson (1999) “Bicameralism and its consequences for the internal organization of legislatures”, American Economic Review, 89(5): 1182-1996.

Diermeier, D, H Eraslan and A Merlo (2007) “Bicameralism and government formation”, Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 2(3): 227-252.

Diermeier, D and R Vlaicu (2011) “Executive control and legislative success”, Review of Economic Studies, 78: 846-871.

Epstein, D and S O’Halloran (1999) Delegating powers: A transaction cost politics approach to policy making under separate powers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gratton, G, L Guiso, C Michelacci and M Morelli (2016) “From Weber to Kafka: Political activism and the emergence of an inefficient bureaucracy”, Working Paper.

Hiroi, T (2008) “The dynamics of lawmaking in a bicameral legislature: The case of Brazil”, Comparative Political Studies, 41(12): 1583-1606.

Huber, J D (1996) “The vote of confidence in parliamentary democracies”, American Political Science Review, 90(2): 269-282.

Junge, D, T König and B Luig (2015) “Legislative gridlock and bureaucratic politics in the European Union”, British Journal of Political Science, 45(4): 777-797.

König, T, X Lu and M Osnabrügge (2016) “Why fast-track? Imperfect agenda-setting and informal negotiations in bicameral legislatures”, Working Paper.

Krehbiel, K (1998) Pivotal Politics: A Theory of US Lawmaking, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kreppel, A (2009) “Executive-legislative relations and legislative agenda setting in Italy: From leggine to decreti and deleghe”, Bulletin of Italian Politics, 1(2): 183-209.

Musella, F (2012) “Governare senza il Parlamento? L’uso dei decreti legge nella lunga transizione italiana (1996-2012)”, Rivista italiana di scienza politica, 42(3): 459- 480.

Strøm, K, W C Müller and T Bergman (2003) Delegation and accountability in parliamentary democracies, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tsebelis, G and J Money (1997) Bicameralism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tsebelis, G (1999) “Veto players and law production in parliamentary democracies: An empirical analysis”, American Political Science Review, 93(3): 591-608.

Tsebelis, G (2002) Veto players: How political institutions work, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Tsebelis, G (2016) “Compromesso Astorico: The role of senate after the Italian constitutional reform”, Italian Political Science Review, (forthcoming).

Triumphant Trump And American Foreign Policy – Analysis

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By K. P. Fabian

President Barack Obama, in his last official overseas tour to Greece, Germany, and Peru, reassured Europe that there would be continuity in American foreign policy under President-elect Donald Trump. While Obama tried to convince his interlocutors about continuity in US policy, Trump’s statements during the campaign brought alarm and concern to America’s allies. Obama himself had called Trump as ‘unqualified’ to be President and a peddler of ‘wacky ideas’, while touring Asia in September 2016. Even if a good part of Trump’s rather colorful choice of words was meant to attract voters, his remarks have set off alarm bells in world capitals. What then could be the impact of the Trump victory on US foreign policy?

Relations with Russia

While Obama could have handled President Vladimir Putin better, his persistent demonization of the Russian President and inability to establish a rapport with him painted US policy into a corner. Even if Putin annexed the Crimea in brazen disregard for international law, the US played a key role in creating a situation in Ukraine that justified Putin’s fears about being encircled by NATO. Obama should have taken into account the fact that Russia had a naval base in the Crimea since 1784. In the aftermath of his victory, Trump and Putin have agreed to mend the US-Russia relations.

The Europeans will be relieved if sanctions against Russia are lifted after Putin gives some concessions in Ukraine. Possibility exists of the US and Russia working together in global hotspots like Syria for a cease-fire to be followed by coordinated attacks on the Islamic State. If the Islamic State loses all its territory in Syria and Iraq as a result, Trump might claim his first foreign policy success. Putin’s Russia got closer to China as the Obama-led West ostracized him. Putin would prefer to have good relations with both Beijing and Washington. Such a change will render the Moscow-Beijing relations less unequal.

NATO and US military protection to allies

Trump called NATO ‘obsolete’. Trump might be keen on extracting a price for the protection given by the US military, but he will not alienate the powerful Congress-military-industrial complex that has not only maintained NATO but expanded it. He is likely to increase the US defense budget. NATO therefore may not be in danger of an early death. The Europeans though might have to pay more for their security. The same consideration applies mutatis mutandis to other American allies like Saudi Arabia, Japan, and South Korea.

China

China has reason to be worried. The bilateral trade shows a deficit of $367 billion for US in 2015. Trump has accused China, not incorrectly, of resorting to currency manipulation. Trump as candidate had proposed a 45 per cent tariff on import of goods from China. Imposition of such a tariff might not be feasible but a trade war cannot be ruled out. Another possibility could be that Trump, who views himself to be a master deal maker, might enter into an agreement with Beijing. What could possibly be the elements of such a deal between the current sole superpower and the superpower in waiting? Will Trump concede China’s claims on the South China Sea and the East China Sea and thus dismantle Obama’s ‘pivot’ in the Far East? What will China give in return? Are we going to see a new bipolar world?

Climate Change

While it would be rather difficult for Trump to withdraw from the climate change treaty, he could go slowly with compliance and other countries might be tempted to imitate the US, with negative consequences for the world.

North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and Globalization

NAFTA was signed in 1994. The US-Mexico trade balance changed from $1.7 billion surplus for US in 1993 to $54 billion deficit in 2014. Evidently, many US companies moved to Mexico attracted by the low wages and US lost thousands of jobs. Reports note that the automobile sector alone has lost 350,000 jobs since 1994. Trump will no doubt have to take some remedial action. As regards the threat to build a wall at the border at Mexico’s cost, Trump has already climbed down. His plan to deport under 3 million illegal’s with criminal record is slightly exaggerated as the total of such persons is believed to be less than 200,000. It is worth noting that Obama did deport 2.5 million under due process of law and without undue publicity.

The Brexit vote cheered up and emboldened Trump. Will he able to reverse the huge train of globalization? It is true that globalization needs correction in many respects. Correction is possible, but a reversal is unlikely. The Trans-Pacific Partnership linking US with 11 countries excluding China and the EU-US Trade and Investment Partnership are not going to move ahead. However, Trump himself has benefitted from globalization as there are Trump towers in Pune, Mumbai, Vancouver, Toronto, Rio de Janeiro and elsewhere. Trump has exploited the domestic discontent over globalization, but it does not follow that he is against globalization per se.

Trump and India

Trump knows India only as an entrepreneur. As he has no foreign policy experience, he will take time to develop the ability to see the big strategic picture and fit India in it. He could be vaguely aware that thousands of Indians work in the US and contribute significantly to its economy. He might review the procedure for granting H1B visa and could also possibly reduce the number of such visas granted to Indians.

Trump and Israel

Trump could have a smoother relationship with Israel than did Obama. The influence of the pro-Israeli lobby could increase.

Trump and European Elections

We also have to watch Trump’s impact on the forthcoming European elections. Just as Trump got emboldened with the Brexit vote, the Far Right in Europe has been comforted by Trump’s victory. In December 2016, there will be a referendum in Italy and an election in Austria with the Far Right Freedom Party’s candidate Norbert Hofer standing a good chance to get elected as President. In March 2017, the Netherlands will vote and the Far Right Geert Wilders is a serious rival to the current Prime Minister Mark Rutte. The French will vote in April/May 2017 and Marie Le Pen believes that her chances have improved dramatically. Later in the year, by September/ October, Germany will go the polls. If the Far Right makes significant gains in Italy, Austria, and the Netherlands, we might be witnessing the beginning of the end of the European Union.

Trump and His Advisers

Trump could be characterized as a neo-con without the penchant for going to war as early as possible when confronted with a crisis. Former President George W. Bush was tutored on foreign policy issues by Condoleezza Rice, who subsequently became his National Security Adviser and, later, Secretary of State. It was the George H.W. Bush Bush who arranged for the tuition. Trump needs tutoring though he might not be inclined to be tutored.

Trump’s Secretary of State would play a pivotal role in implementing his foreign policies. If, as some reports suggest, Rudolph Giuliani, the former Mayor of New York, is appointed to that post, US diplomacy might take a turn away from the compromise-seeking Obama-Kerry team. In 1995 for instance, Giuliani sent in policemen to evict Yasser Arafat from the Lincoln Centre where he was enjoying Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Giuliani defended his action by saying that Arafat was a terrorist.

By appointing Steve Bannon as his chief strategic adviser, Trump has sent out a troubling signal. Bannon had in the past made troubling statements, including remarking that there were too many CEOs from South Asia in the US and that it was harmful to ‘civil society’. This appointment does not square with the promise in his victory speech that he would make efforts to heal the divisions within America. While the continuing anti-Trump demonstrations in many American cities cannot change the election result, Trump should be aware of the fact that a little more than half the citizens voted for Hillary Clinton. To govern successfully, he needs to reach out to those who did not vote for him, rather than alienate them.

Views expressed are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the IDSA or of the Government of India. Originally published by Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (www.idsa.in) at http://idsa.in/idsacomments/triumphant-trump-and-american-foreign-policy_kpfabian_221116


Pakistan’s New Army Chief – Analysis

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For once, there seems to be a peaceful transition in the Pakistan Army with General Raheel Sharif relinquishing command on 29th November. (The issue of transition was written in an earlier analysis,  here and here).

Lieutenant General Qamar Javed Bajwa is slated to take over; obviously the media is rife with stories and conjectures as to what propelled the General’s appointment superceding three senior officers. That it is Pakistan we speak of, gives added curry flavor; Pakistan has had a long history of military dictatorships and it is a well known fact that the Chief of Army is potentially more powerful than any civilian government occasionally in power. With the world’s sixth largest standing army in troop strength, Pakistan has been the media’s favorite child, what with impediments to civilian and democratic supremacy, nuclear proliferation, its connivance in Afghanistan and the spread of global terrorism, and its entire history of sucking American funds to use them against its bete-noire, India, making it a widely covered ‘banana republic’.

The facts and what we can make out of them: What do we know of General Bajwa?

The General officer is from the 1980 batch of the Pakistan Military Academy, commissioned in to the Baloch Regiment, which has produced three former Chiefs. His predecessors have been Generals Yahya Khan (Chief, Martial Law Administrator and President), Aslam Beg and Ashfaq Pervez Kayani. Though in itself it may mean little, but the fact of having a Baloch connect may mean something given the problems which have resurfaced in that frontier province of late.

For people familiar with the nuances of ‘qaumi’ (or sectarian, race or culture based) units in the sub-continental armies, it should be self explanatory. For those not familiar with the term, ‘qaumi’ units comprise of troops from a particular sect or clan, usually considered martial in nature. The term can be attributed to the way the British recruited for their armies, and these considerations worked in their favor in order to control clan based ambitions and/or rebellious traits. The system of recruitment continues to flourish even today, and an officer from a ‘qaumi’ unit would have immense say over the opinions of the elders (who would also have served under him) and therefore over the broad view in the community. Whether that is a reason for the rise of General Bajwa is debatable, but quite possibly a substantial reason behind the decision.

Professionally, the General has been put through the paces at the Canadian Forces Command and Staff College, Toronto, at the Naval Post Graduate University, California and at the National Defence University, Islamabad. These are courses at different levels of army hierarchy marking out their proficiency to command troops. The gamut of courses would not be considered top-of-the-line, for instance one of the other contenders is from the Royal College of Defence Studies or RCDS, UK. However they do give him the requisite qualifications for the job and yet, make him slightly more pliable.

The General has served as a Brigade Commander in the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Congo, MONUC/ MONUSCO. He has been the Commandant of the Infantry School at Quetta, a training establishment. He has been the Force Commander of Northern Areas which include the territories of Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK) and Gilgit- Baltistan, illegally annexed by Pakistan from India in 1947. He has commanded the Pakistan 10 Corps, deployed along the Line of Control with India, usually considered most important considering Pakistan’s obsession with the K word. Prior to his appointment as Chief, the General was heading the Training and Evaluation Directorate at General Headquarters Rawalpindi. In all, he seems to have an equitable mix of operational and training commands. Again he may carry a chip on his shoulder which is useful to be exploited to the advantage of the political establishment.

Three officers have been superceded namely Lieutenant General Ishfaq Nadeem who commanded the Multan based 2 (Strike) Corps or the Army Reserve South, Lieutenant General Javed Ramday who commanded the Bahawalpur based 31 Corps and Lieutenant General Zubair Hayat, also a former 31 Corps Commander, Director General of the Strategic Plans Division and lately Chief of General Staff. To the credit of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s political acumen, he has simultaneously announced the appointment of Zubair Hayat as the Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee; the four star General post is considered as the link between the government and the armed forces, but is also a notch lower than the all powerful Army Chief in Pakistan.

General Bajwa seems to be an apolitical officer, which is difficult to believe in the feudal system of Pakistan. He is from the Punjabi Muslim stock which is almost a mandatory requirement to see upper echelons of power in the country. From all accounts, he is a strong proponent of the army not intruding in to civilian space, which is another metaphor for ‘playing safe’. To that end, it makes good political sense for an already embattled Nawaz Sharif to appoint him as a safer option and hopefully a more pliant one.

What prompted the appointment and what we can expect from the new Chief

In the Pakistani narrative, only two tenets remain permanent. First, its ability to keep the US on its right side, and second, its relentless pursuit of Kashmir and India’s downfall. These tenets have formulated both its domestic as well as its foreign policy. It really does not matter whether a civilian or military government rules, what matters is that these two guiding principles are adhered to; without either, the state of Pakistan would succumb to internal dissension or to economic breakdown.

If that be the precursor, the General heading the army would indeed be imprudent to ignore both these facets. In the recent past a number of accusations relating to Pakistan’s nexus with terror outfits have been made, notably in the US. This is threatening to the notion of Pakistan continuing to extract funds based on fallacy and may spell the beginning of its economic breakdown. Hence it was of utmost importance to project to the world that a lawful system based on civilian control was in place and is the basis of any decision. The decision to not grant an extension to General Raheel Sharif, and thereafter appoint an innocuous General as Chief, meets this requirement beautifully. After all, perception management has been taught in the Pakistani military establishment since 1949!

Nawaz Sharif would also have to look in to the internal political dimensions to retain his tenuous hold on power. The Balochi antecedents of the General help him to keep a lid on Baloch insurgency and opinion. The fact that he is a Punjabi Muslim helps. In order to keep the military on board it certainly makes sense to have a pliable Chief of Army.

With all these factors in mind, the appointment of Chief seems to be very well orchestrated. Along with that comes the question of what the General’s own views portend. As mentioned earlier, he has expressed the need to keep army from intruding in to civilian space. As per reports in the Pakistani media, he has also remarked on terror being a greater threat than India. Both these statements are as politically correct as can be. There has been growing clamour for Pakistan to adhere to democracy and institute measures for the supremacy of civilian control over its military establishment. Links to the terror machinery across the globe having been immutably affiliated to Pakistan, it has been stridently demanded that the country take punitive action against the perpetrators of terror operating from its soil. So a Chief of Army making just these two policy oriented acknowledgements might well be too politically correct to be true.

Again reverting to the raison-detre of the Pakistani state, its territorial dispute with India, General Bajwa is not going to make any meaningful departure from the cause. To keep the Indian behemoth bleeding, Pakistan has no alternative but to continue its strategy of ‘a thousand cuts’; hence, export of terror will not change as an instrument of state policy. Add to that the dimension of an increasingly radicalized Islam. Pakistan will continue to protect terror outfits operating from its soil and it will also keep on paying lip service to the ‘war against terror’. It would take an erudite intelligentsia across the globe to recognize intentions and institute rational and cognitive steps to stop that.

And while the General may seem relatively meek at the moment, it would be prudent to remember the appointment of General Pervez Musharraf. History might repeat itself at some time in the near future.

Orphan Europe – OpEd

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After Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential elections (which was, by the way, a surprise only to those indoctrinated, seduced or simply bought), Europe, or to be more precise: the European Union is behaving like an orphan, abandoned by its strong father, whose hand it held and whom he(she) followed wherever he went. Europe does not know. Europe is asking. Europe has to know. Europe is warning. All this is addressed to the new leader who will take over the White House in mid-January next year. When we say “Europe” we think, it should be repeated, on the European Union, although the countries, just a few of them remaining, who are not already members of the EU are equally puzzled, they don’t know what to do and who will give them instructions for their behavior in the future.

This total disorientation and – let us put it frankly – the fear from a situation in which they will have to think for themselves and to take over the responsibility for what they are doing, this is the main characteristic of European countries after Trump’s victory. If we believe him “nothing will be as it was”, but let us be aware of the fact that Europe got accustomed to the role of a US “lackey” from the first days after victory in WW 2 and especially in the days of the cold war and extremely tense relations between East and West. The only exemption was France in the years of President Charles de Gaulle. The general even took his country out of the military structure of NATO, because –as he saw it – the US dominance in the Atlantic Pact did not correspond with the role he wanted his country to play on the international scene. But the rest followed, although the public opinion in these countries would from time to time openly rebel against the American policy (just two examples: demonstrations against the war in Vietnam and against deploying the Pershing missiles in Germany). What is however important, is the fact that, despite these vigorous protests, the ruling elites in Europe accepted the role of followers of the US, without asking any unpleasant questions.

Even in recent years, when it became known that the US National Security Agency is spying world-wide whomever it wants, including leading politicians of the allied countries, not a single one of these allies dared to do, what any country with a sound self-respect would have done: send a protest note, sharply demand the spying to be stopped and recall its ambassador from Washington for consultations for an undefined period. No, the Old continent whose history gives him in many senses the right to think of itself as superior to the US (not economically and militarily, of course) choose to continue playing in the front row in a game it did not either plan or execute.

Such a position could have to a certain point been understood in the times when Europe was divided between the West (democratic) and the East (authoritarian, socialist). At that time “big brother” from the other side of the Atlantic was seen as a necessity in the West – as counterweight to the hegemony that threatened from the East. Although even then it was quite clear to anybody who was willing to see things as they were, that in Europe it is possible to wage a policy aimed in the first place on the benefit of Europe. The most evident proof of this is the period of the West German chancellor Willy Brand. To accept the German (East) – Polish border and to find a common language with the “other” Germany (although Bonn never officially recognized Berlin-Pankow), these were things unthinkable of in the – until then – practiced scenario of cold war. But, they were doable, because at that time Nixon and Kissinger forged in Washington the détente strategy, trying (and they will succeed!) in calming down US – Soviet relations and putting them on the normal track.

“In Europe, the continent of the sharpest ideological divide, with practically two halves militarily confronting each other all over the core sectors of the continent (where Atlantic Europe was behind some of the gravest atrocities of the 20th century, from French Indochina, Falklands/Malvinas, Indonesia, Congo, Rhodesia to Algeria and Egypt), and with its southern flank of Portugal, Spain and Greece (and Turkey sporadically) run by the US-backed murderous military Juntas, Yugoslavia was remarkably mild island of stability, moderation and wisdom.” – accurately notes on irresponsibility of superpowers and its satellites Prof. Anis H. Bajrektarevic.

Indeed, another example of an independent policy in Europe was without any doubt Yugoslavia. And even the movement called “Euro-communism” based on the experience of the Yugoslav independent policy (in regard to Moscow) proved that in Europe there were ideas, there was knowledge and there was courage to emerge on a path that will be nobody’s, but European. And – that there were politicians who were ready to enter this path.

While all this was happening the European project was taking shape. It started as the Coal and Steel community (the first obstacle to possible new wars erected by those who experienced WW2) to become in our days the European union. But, although the Union (at that time still: Community) experienced its first big wave of enlargement after the collapse of socialism and disintegration of the Soviet Union, thus growing into a truly all-European project, it made at the same time a giant step backwards. For the sake of never totally subdued nationalism in the West and a fast emerging new nationalism in the East it abandoned for good, even as a distant goal, the idea of the United States of Europe. Washington did verbally always support the EU, but objectively speaking, for the strategists there a strong European Union was never seen as their interest. What they wanted was a strong NATO, which they transformed from an exclusively European defense alliance into a mighty tool of its own policy on the global scene. This was, among other things, demonstrated by the unwritten rule that every country aspiring to become EU member had to join NATO first. The membership in NATO was thus treated as some sort of preliminary examination (and qualification at the same time) for the membership in the European Union.

After the attacks of 9/11 (2001.) American policy inaugurated the division of the Old continent to the “old” and “new” Europe. From Washington’s point of view countries of “new” Europe were those ready to obey and do what they were told to do from the other side of the Atlantic. This “new Europe” free finally from the Soviet supremacy and so eager to accept a new one from another part of the world, applauded without hesitating for even a moment the so called Arab spring and supported the confrontation policy towards Russia (a renewed form of the “containment” from the cold war days). Nobody even mentioned that what happened in Ukraine would have most probably taken another course without the active involvement of the West, including the US. Today both the old and new Europe have lost the “father” who guided them by the hand and told them what to do, when and how, regardless of what was in question. And there are no new instructions!

One might judge Donald Trump this or that way – as the devil himself, or as a man with some new ideas, some of them encouraging (rejection of the policy of imposing regimes), some – worrying (non-acceptance of the fact of global warming). But, we are not discussing Trump, we are speaking about Europe. And neither this continent, nor the European Union showed that they deserve to be treated as being mature. The Union, not only yesterday, didn’t use the unique chance to become an equal partner to the US, Russia or China, by being unable to formulate its own, common foreign or security policy, yesterday – a tragic lack of orientation in confronting the refugee wave (that would not be as it is now without the US policy, as it was) and it is demonstrating – today – a total lack of orientation in a situation when it is clear that a candidate (now President-elect) who is not the favorite of mighty either financial, or political circles is preparing to enter the White House.

And this is why Europe is standing lost on the global scene – as an orphan.

*Tomislav Jakić (born 1943) is a Croatian journalist (TV and press), specialized in covering the international scene. He served for the most part of his 10 year in office, as foreign policy advisor to the second President of the Republic of Croatia, Stjepan Mesić.

Honor Killing: A Grievous Act That Still Exists – OpEd

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Honour killing is the severe level of Honour Based Violence (HBV). The supposed offender against family ‘honour’ is killed to restore the ‘honour’ which has purportedly been lost through her behaviour. So, to regain the honour of the family an ‘honour’ killing is the most extreme form of violence which may be expressed as a final resort.

Nevertheless, there are other potential sites of conflict between the individual and the family lesser responses. Those are forcing marriage or other forms of violence which may also be articulated through these types of honour killing occurrences.

Qandeel Baloch, original name Fauzia Azeem, a Pakistani social media star was killed by her brother in recent times. Mohammed Azeem, Baloch’s father had filed a case against his son Waseem Azeem. Another brother who works in the army has also been accused. He has seemingly given inducement his sibling to carry out the killing. It is reported charged brother used to live outside of their family and just came to visit them.

On a last Facebook page status of 4th July, Ms Baloch wrote that she wanted to “change the typical orthodox mindset of people who don’t wanna come out of their shells of false beliefs and old practices.” After Baloch’s death by typical honour killing way, Pakistan is facing great outrages by general mass against heinous honour killing.

According to the United Nations Population Fund, in the year of 2000 almost 5000 killings took place in the world. Although these statistics is widely disputed. Because most of the time information of killing do not even come out of the family and localities. Thus the records of ‘honour’ killings as well enactment of Honour Based Violences are presently not identified in exact numbers.

The thought of killing one’s own child appears horrendous in actual sense, no doubt on that. Some people used to define that families may, in fact, be loath to carry out a killing. But they hardened to do such monstrous job under kind of community pressure. Where a family is superficial to have lost ‘honour’ they may suffer harassment and social exclusion. They used to insist on by the extended relatives and community to carry through a murder in order to reinstate their status. Social ties are of great importance in tight-knit communities. Such strain can be ample to force an unwilling parent of killing their girl for the sake of the ‘greater good’ of the family.

While The Middle East and South Asian countries, in general, are known for honour-based violence (HBV); but this has also documented in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. There may be many other countries where such crimes occur, but not yet been identified or quantified. The essential distinction between domestic violence and honour killing is the number of perpetrators and the level of support received from the wider family and community. Whilst a cruel partner in a marriage commits violence as an individual, Honour Based Violence (HBV) is related to the collective familial act in controlling of women’s activities. There used to be a large number of potential perpetrators and the high number of personnel willing to conspire in the honour killing. This exhibits a problem for the law enforcing agencies and the Governments.

There is by and large multiplies potential attackers in various forms; like apart from killer or killers, there used to have the encouragers in various numbers. In the case of the prosecution, there are difficulties in gathering evidence as there are few witnesses to testify.

The fight for women’s rights is a necessary part of true democracy, along with freedom of religion, and freedom of disagreement to others opinion in a good manner. So, the honour killing is precisely one kind of inhumane mechanism that civic people should fight and act according to in every way in this twenty-first century.

*Amity Saha is working as Research Assistant for International Affairs at Bangladesh Institute of Law and International Affairs (BILIA). She can be reached through meetee88@gmail.com.

The Longer Russia Occupies Crimea, The More Likely Russia Will Disintegrate – OpEd

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Yesterday, Georgy Tuka, Ukraine’s deputy minister for the affairs of the occupied territories, said on 112 Ukraina TV that he “considers the return of Crimea in the next three to five years impossible,” a declaration which some are certain to denounce as pessimistic.

However painful it may be, Tuka continued, it is important to face facts and the facts in this case are these: “Crimea will again be [de facto as well as de jure] be part of Ukraine when “centrifugal forces arise again out of the economic crisis” that country is already facing (rbc.ru/politics/26/11/2016/5839f0b69a794785c5f2115b?from=main).

“Now,” Turka said, “this may seem drivel and fantastic, but one should look again at the news tapes of the mid-1990s, at how things developed in Kaliningrad, in Tatarstan and in Bashkortostan … and then Chechnya exploded. We all have seen this with our own eyes” and we should not forget it.

And he continued by asserting that “if the world community does not reduce its pressure on Russia, we will observe all of this in the next five to ten years.”

Tuka’s argument deserves close attention because it calls attention to something that many in Moscow and elsewhere have forgotten about one precedent that many are now invoking about Ukraine’s Crimea – the West’s consistent non-recognition of the Soviet occupation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

Between the time that policy was proclaimed in Washington in 1940 and the recovery of Baltic independence in 1991 passed 51 years, but at various points during that period, some in the Soviet hierarchy worried that the Baltic aspirations for the recovery of their legitimate independence would have an unhealthy influence on the non-Russian republics.

Some even thought, especially in Gorbachev’s time, that it would be better to allow the Baltic countries to go their own way before their ideas spread to Ukraine and elsewhere. That was certainly Academician Sakharov’s position, but it was shot down by Mikhail Gorbachev who wanted to hold everything and as a result lost everything.

A more serious, if less well-known example of fears in Moscow about a Baltic contagion occurred in the late 1940s when Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s notorious secret police chief, quietly explored the idea of allowing the Baltic countries to go their own way as Soviet-controlled “peoples republics” like the East Europeans outside of the USSR.

 

Beria went so far as to have his agents contact Baltic officials to compose lists of who might be the senior officials in such nominally independent countries, and he certainly believed that allowing Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to go their own way in this limited sense would ease East-West tensions sufficiently to undercut American plans for NATO.

Not surprisingly, when Beria was purged, he was condemned for his supposed contacts with foreign intelligence services, almost certainly untrue, and his support of non-Russian nationalists, something that was very much the case in the Baltic states and elsewhere in the Soviet Union.

At least some in Putin’s Moscow today know this record and recognize the dangers involved in holding on to Crimea, although Vladimir Putin may be confident that he can do there what Stalin and his successors in the Baltic countries could not because of the differences in demography and history.

But as conditions deteriorate in the Russian Federation because of Western sanctions over Crime and the Donbass, some in the Russian elites may conclude that they have an additional reason to give back what Putin stole: Not only would that end sanctions and ease their lives but it would put off for a time at least the disintegration of their country.

To see why that is so, they need look no further than to the late 1980s when Gorbachev and the last Soviet government failed to recognize the way in which aspirations for freedom and justice in one part of an empire can spread and prove fatal for that empire as a whole, if not overnight then at least in the fullness of time.

US Electoral College Reps Get Death Threats

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Hillary Clinton’s campaign lawyer announced plans to participate in vote recounts of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan if they take place, drawing a sharp response from Donald Trump’s team that the Democrat is being a “sore loser”

If Green Party candidate Jill Stein initiates recounts in those states as she intends, the Clinton campaign “will participate in order to ensure the process proceeds in a manner that is fair to all sides,” lawyer Marc Elias said Saturday in a post on the blogging website Medium.com. He added that he doesn’t expect the action to overturn Donald Trump’s election as president.

The move prompted a rejoinder from Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, now a senior adviser to the president-elect.

“What a pack of sore losers,” Conway said in a statement to Bloomberg. “After asking Mr. Trump and his team a million times on the trail, ‘Will HE accept the election results?’ it turns out Team Hillary and their new BFF Jill Stein can’t accept reality.”

“Rather than adhere to the tradition of graciously conceding and wishing the winner well, they’ve opted to waste millions of dollars and dismiss the democratic process. The people have spoken. Time to listen up. #YesYourPresident,” Conway said.

Stein says on her website that she’s raised more than $5.7 million for her recount effort so far, with a $7 million goal. The funds raised so far will cover costs in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

No ‘Actionable’ Evidence

The Democrat’s campaign didn’t plan to initiate the recounts on its own because it hasn’t found “any actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter the voting technology,” Elias wrote.

A senior administration official, meanwhile, said in a statement that the government didn’t observe any increased level of malicious cyber activity aimed at disrupting the election on election day and believes the elections were free and fair from a cybersecurity perspective.

Meanwhile, Electoral College reps have been bullied and threathened by Hillary supporters.

One of Michigan’s 16 electors who will be called upon to cast a vote validating the election of Donald Trump in the Electoral College has testified on video that he and others in the state are receiving “dozens and dozens of death threats” from Hillary Clinton supporters urging them to switch their votes to Clinton.

On Dec. 19 the Electoral College will convene to cast their votes for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, with each state’s electors pledged to vote for the candidate elected on Nov. 8 in their state.

But more than a dozen states have no laws making it illegal for the electors to change their vote while others have only a minor penalty such as a fine for doing so. If Clinton’s supporters can get enough of the 163 electors from states where Trump both won and votes can be legally switched on Dec. 19, Hillary Clinton becomes the next president of the United States.

But Clinton supporters have “deluged Banerian and other GOP electors with pleas and nasty emails to reverse course and cast their ballots for Clinton,” the Michigan Republican Party is reporting.

“You have people saying ‘you’re a hateful bigot, I hope you die,’” he told the News in a 6-minute video interview. “I’ve had people talk about shoving a gun in my mouth and blowing my brains out. And I’ve received dozens and dozens of those emails. Even the non-threatening-my-life emails are very aggresive.”

He said that while many of the emails are clearly death threats, others would fall into the category of “death wishes.”

Things like, “do society a favor and throw yourself in front of a bus.”

“I’ve just gotten a lot of ‘you’re a hateful bigot and I hope you die,’ which is kind of ironic,” Banerian said, “that they’re calling me hateful and yet wishing for my death. They don’t even know me.”

The Detroit News verified one message containing a death wish and another containing a death threat, in which the person told Banerian he would “put a bullet” in his mouth. Banerian said he deleted the rest of the emails and messages “because as you can imagine they’re clogging up my email.”

An online petition on Change.org signed by more than 4.3 million people is calling on the nation’s 538 electors to vote for Clinton instead of Trump.

While it is not legal to change one’s electoral vote in Michigan it can be done in other states, such as Georgia.

Toward Meaningful Solidarity With Palestine – OpEd

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The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS) has designated the week, Nov. 25 to Dec. 3, as the “Biggest-Ever Campaign” aimed at boycotting Israeli products and of those companies that contribute to the Israeli military occupation of Palestine.

BDS activities are expected to be staged across at least 18 countries, spanning 6 continents. The sharp increase in the boycott campaign activism is a direct result of Israeli pressure — joined by western governments — to thwart the movement.

Even financial institutions, such as the Bank of Ireland, have joined in on these efforts, shutting solidarity groups’ accounts and simply trying to raise the price tag for those who dare to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

However, it seems that the harder Israel tries to impede BDS, the greater the attention and sympathy the BDS movement garners. In some way, Israel’s frantic reaction has helped BDS spread its influence and expand the parameters of debate on the conflict in Palestine. In such scenarios, it is most likely that civil societies, not government intimidation, will eventually prevail.

It has also become clear that, while solidarity with Palestine has crossed many thresholds and overcome repeated obstacles in recent years, Palestinians themselves are reaching out to other marginalized groups, including African Americans, Native Americans and the Landless Movement in Brazil. This reflects a growing maturity, as the latter are the natural allies of the Palestinian people.

Nov. 25, however, was not chosen randomly, for Nov. 29 is the “International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.”

So what is the Nov. 29 “Day of Solidarity” all about? Interestingly, the history behind that specific date is quite an ominous one.

Palestine was partitioned, unjustly, on Nov. 29, 1947. There was no moral or legal basis for that partition, as communicated in UN resolution 181 (II) into a “Jewish State” and an “Arab State.” Jewish immigrants were granted 55 percent of the total size of historic Palestine and the “Arab State,” which never actualized, was accorded the rest.

Jerusalem was to be given a special legal and political status, known in Latin as “corpus separatum,” and was to be governed through an international regime.

A few months after that unwarranted partition, well-trained Zionist militias moved from several fronts to “secure” the borders of their promised state, only to take over half of what was designated for the future of the Palestinian state, leaving the indigenous Palestinian Arab population of that land with 22 percent of historic Palestine.

In June 1967, the Israeli Army conquered whatever remained of Palestine. As a direct result of both military campaigns, millions of Palestinians became refugees.

The International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People was designated to be a day of solidarity almost exactly 30 years after the partition plan took place.

It was announced in successive resolutions, firstly in December 1977 (Res. 32/40 B) and, secondly, more substance to that resolution was added in December 1979 (Res. 34/65 D).

These resolutions crowned 30 years of unmitigated failure on the part of the international community to aid in the establishment of a Palestinian state, which was even unsuccessful in imposing any form of punishment on the 30-year-old “Jewish State” for repeatedly violating international law and every legal principle upon which it was established.

One cannot deny the role of the numerous friendly nations, mostly from the South, that stood by Palestine’s side at every turn and, at times, faced the wrath of the US and western governments for their unfaltering solidarity. However, the nature and the timing of these resolutions were seen as mere tokens to show solidarity in words only and not action.

According to a UN document, the purpose of Nov. 29 is to provide the “opportunity for the international community to focus its attention on the fact that the question of Palestine remained unresolved and that the Palestinian people are yet to attain their inalienable rights as defined by the General Assembly.”

Yet, little has been done in the last 39 years to implement any one of them, either partially or wholly. No practical mechanism has been set forth.

No legal apparatus has been introduced to aid Palestinians in their efforts at achieving meaningful independence, or reprimand those who deny the Palestinian people their legal rights and political aspirations.

Any such recommendations for meaningful interference on behalf of occupied, oppressed Palestinians were thwarted, repeatedly: Obstructed by US’ vetoes at the UN, hindered in myriad ways by Israel and its western allies. Unfortunately, since the original partition resolution passed in 1947, and to this today, the Palestinian cause has been feeding on symbolism.

This is not meant to undermine the significance of that day. However, to live up to the meaning of its designated title, the day must be repossessed, taken away from guarded diplomats and given back to the people.

In fact, Palestinian solidarity is now a global phenomenon: This is the perfect opportunity to make Nov. 29 a day of strategy and global action, led by civil societies across the world.

Civil society can use the day of solidarity as an opportunity to place pressure on their governments to move beyond symbolic gestures into meaningful action. This effort is most important in western societies, especially in the US, that has served as a shield and benefactor for Israel for too many years.

The United Nations must be persuaded to produce a workable mechanism to bring an end to Israeli occupation and offer Palestinians a true political horizon. Moreover, a day of solidarity that is based upon the political reality of nearly four decades ago and shaped by an understanding of the conflict from nearly seven decades ago, while admirable in principle, would have to be revised. A so-called “two-state solution” is neither just, nor practical or feasible.

A new narrative must take hold, in which the “question of Palestine” is not framed as if a “refugee problem” or a “humanitarian crisis” to be remedied with verbal solidarity and food aid, but as a pressing political crisis in which the injured party must be unconditionally supported.

Any solidarity that deviates from the current aspirations of Palestinians is not true solidarity.

For the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People to be truly meaningful, it must be reclaimed by Palestinians and their friends all across the globe.

Donald Trump On Green Party Recount Request – Statement

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The people have spoken and the election is over, and as Hillary Clinton herself said on election night, in addition to her conceding by congratulating me, ‘We must accept this result and then look to the future.’

It is important to point out that with the help of millions of voters across the country, we won 306 electoral votes on Election Day – the most of any Republican since 1988 – and we carried nine of 13 battleground states, 30 of 50 states, and more than 2,600 counties nationwide – the most since President Ronald Reagan in 1984.

This recount is just a way for Jill Stein, who received less than one percent of the vote overall and wasn’t even on the ballot in many states, to fill her coffers with money, most of which she will never even spend on this ridiculous recount. All three states were won by large numbers of voters, especially Pennsylvania, which was won by more than 70,000 votes.

This is a scam by the Green Party for an election that has already been conceded, and the results of this election should be respected instead of being challenged and abused, which is exactly what Jill Stein is doing.


The Grand Strategy Debate London Is Avoiding – Analysis

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There’s a broad scholarly agreement that British grand strategy, was formed as a geopolitical gift. Britain, as argued in the Stratfor analysis linked above, traditionally was a naval power, but went on to dominate the globe and her peers, in a geopolitical game which was usually dominated by land powers.

Despite early colonial ambitions, Britain was initially in no position to establish hegemony, and her losses in the American colonies made it look more unlikely.

However, after the fall of Napoleon, and with Napoleonic hegemony decimating all the established continental forces, Britain was left challenged by other European power for the next hundred and fifty years. The only two near peer rivals were the United States, which was mostly busy solidifying its own hegemony in the Western hemisphere, and the Russian Empire, which despite her intentions, were economically, demographically and technologically far inferior to the might of the British Empire. The rest is well researched and archived.

It dawned on British leaders that it could maintain this hegemony by tactically balancing opposing forces in continental Europe, even if it meant unwritten mega compromises with former rivals and colonies.

This geo-strategic thinking, documented from Lord Palmerston to Winston Churchill, saw Britain form alliances with former rivals like France, Russia and Soviets as well as former colony United States to twice see off challenges and hegemonic aspirations of another rising continental superpower in Germany. Britain, aware of her radically diminished status after the Second World war and the Suez Crisis, also then subsequently joinedwith United States to balance the Soviet hegemonic ambitions.

Brexit brings this debate into forefront again. Surprisingly this time, amidst the chaos, no one seems to have a clue, about what British Grand Strategy would be. One reason is, as John Kerry once said, it is all very much like 19th century politics, and strategists usually do not openly talk like that in civilised circles anymore.

Liberal consensus in foreign policy and strategic circles also moved from such structural analyses, and talks of amoral balancing and bandwagoning and great power politics are considered old fashioned. Unfortunately the lesson that was etched in the next two years since that speech was that great powers, regardless of whether they are powerful or declining, lash out when their “perceived” national interests and spheres of influence are threatened.

Even when those perceptions might be severely misconstrued, and it might even lead the great power to commit forces beyond it can muster or support, the great power will carry on the course, even at the risk of punishing economic retribution. Kerry and co re-learnt something which Realists talked about for the last quarter century, that there’s no other way other than either a compromise and honourable retreat, or a full on geopolitical confrontation (not necessarily conflict) that are the two ways this challenges can be dealt with. And that nation states, and not values or culture or trade are still the single most powerful determinant in geopolitics.

United Kingdom similarly needs to decide on the number of challenges that it will inevitably face in the coming years. Firstly, assessment needs to be done on the plausibility and effect of market forces deciding geopolitics and how much economic pain are the Britons willing to suffer. Britain cannot survive without European market, or without foreign brains, mostly working in the finance and tech and educational sectors in UK.

Regardless of the cavalier attitude displayed by the Conservative leaders recently, one needs to get facts clear. United Kingdom is not British Empire without the productivity, and market of India, Canada, Australia and New Zealand behind it, and British industry base, like most of the Western countries, has shifted from manufacturing, agrarian and hard industry to a more modern urban, finance and tech centric knowledge based economy. There is no way that is going to be reversed, and Britain simply will not survive a competition when it comes to the labour mobility and comparative advantages of India or China, or other Asian economies for example. Which brings to the more important question, as both United Kingdom and Europe needs each other, what about the European Union and how to deal with it?

The European Union, is a political construct, and as long as it stays, harsh though it may sound, it might tend to look at United Kingdom post Brexit as a rival source of competition. UK has unleashed, or at least inspired a lot of national socialist and populist forces within EU, and the survival of EU depends on dominating and defeating these forces and that cannot be done, unless UK either compromises with EU on single market or capitulates to a more powerful EU.

Already there is extreme friction with regards to an European security force led by none other than Germany, which understandably leaves UK shaken as it leads to a separate division and bureaucratization of European security command alongside NATO, not to mention the nightmarish idea of a potential joint military force across a narrow sea, of which UK is not a part of. With regards to that, what then should therefore be the British strategy? Would she join forces with Russia, another great power (albeit a rogue one) which might feel threatened by the same development? Should Britain then try to persuade United States that a single economic and military union in Europe is actually a hegemonic idea which is not desirable and one that both US and UK should oppose, because frankly no one knows how this union might act in future? Or should it covertly instigate separatist conservative anti-centralisation forces across the continent?

This is not a a fortunate or necessary development, however, nor is it desirable and is being advocated here. It is just a plausible scenario that falls within the realms of statistical possibility and therefore must be taken into account in any such analysis.

The United Kingdom, without a shadow of any doubt, has got more in common with immediate neighbours in Western European nation states than for example Russia or Central-Eastern V4 states, when it comes to culture, political leanings, and values, just as United States has more in common with United Kingdom than other European continental powers. United Kingdom is also heavily dependent on both European brainpower and research funding and the market forces and labour, despite the bravado of her current leaders.

However, Britain, is also a great power, and just like any other power, is shaped and influenced by structural forces around her. And as the literature of alliance formation tells us, if Britain faces too much pressure from the European Union regarding Brexit deals, the spring might just snap, and London might have to look for other partners and a more confrontational grand strategy, not just economically but also geopolitically. A lot is at stake here, and even post EU Referendum, it would be imprudent for both London and Brussels to be uncompromising, just as it would be unwise for Washington to have a completely hands off attitude regarding the future of these negotiations. The entire Atlantic security depends it.

Addendum: “This article was written on October 14th. One of the three primary hypothesis was that Britain, should it face an intransigent EU, might consider tactical alignment with Russia. The author would like to note, that as of 31st October, 15 days after the article was first drafted, while not official policy, that hypothesis is well within official consideration among the ruling Conservative policy circles.”

Originally published in CLAWS Delhi.

Trump’s Economic Plan: This Isn’t Going To Work – OpEd

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Will Donald Trump be good for the US economy?

The American people seem to think so. According to a recent survey taken by Gallup “Americans have relatively high expectations (of) the president-elect… Substantial majorities (upward of 60%) believe the Trump administration will improve the economy and create jobs. A slim majority (52%) say he’ll improve the healthcare system.”

Even more impressive, the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index spiked to a 93.8 -high in November, signaling a significant improvement in overall consumer attitudes about the economy.

Analysts attribute this change in outlook to the recent presidential election which showed a marked-uptick in optimism “across all income and age subgroups across the country.”

“The initial reaction of consumers to Trump’s victory was to express greater optimism about their personal finances as well as improved prospects for the national economy,” said Richard Curtin, the survey’s chief economist.

So, people are not just giving Trump the benefit of the doubt, they genuinely think their economic situation is going to get better under the new president.

The results are particularly significant when we realize that the economy not only topped the list of important issues going into the November elections, but that also (according to a survey conducted by Edison Research) “Three in five voters said the country was seriously on the wrong track and about the same number said the economy was either not good or poor. Two-thirds said their personal financial situation was either worse or the same as it was four years ago. About one in three voters said they expected life to be worse for the next generation.”

In other words, the election was a referendum on Obama’s handling of the economy, in which 60 percent of those surveyed, think was a failure. These results also suggest that, had Obama made any attempt to address wage stagnation, shrinking incomes, student debt, or widespread economic insecurity, Hillary Clinton would probably be president today. As it happens, the victory went to the anti-establishment outsider who promised a fundamental change in direction, Donald Trump.

This is particularly worth thinking about now that protests have broken out in cities across the country and liberals are accusing Trump supporters of voting for a racist. No, the majority of Trump supporters did not vote for a racist (surveys also show that a majority of these people support a way for undocumented immigrants to attain US citizenship) nor do the approve of the white nationalist movement. They voted for someone who they thought would change the economic policies that have been destructive to their interests. Trump won the election because he addressed the issues that matter to ordinary working people and refrained from such foolishness as running around with his hair on fire blaming the Russians for everything under the sky. Hillary Clinton got exactly what she deserved.

Now the question is: Can Trump deliver?

The question is not only important for the American people, but also for the Trump administration that figures its prospects for success depend largely on an economic revival. Steve Bannon, who is Trump’s chief strategist and advisor, knows that he won’t be able to build a strong, divers coalition to support his political revolution without boosting growth and improving conditions for working people. That’s why fixing the economy is Job 1.

Here’s a quote from Bannon:

“The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia. The issue now is about Americans looking to not get f—ed over. If we deliver…”we’ll get 60 percent of the white vote, and 40 percent of the black and Hispanic vote and we’ll govern for 50 years. That’s what the Democrats missed. They were talking to these people with companies with a $9 billion market cap employing nine people. It’s not reality. They lost sight of what the world is about.”…

“It’s everything related to jobs. The conservatives are going to go crazy. I’m the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. With negative interest rates throughout the world, it’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Ship yards, iron works, get them all jacked up. We’re just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution — conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.” (Ringside with Steve Bannon, Hollywood Reporter)

I don’t pretend to know anything more about Steve Bannon than I’ve read in the newspapers and on the Internet. What I do know, however, is that if he is sincere in his desire to defeat the corrupt political establishment and build a coalition that “will govern for 50 years”, he’s going to have to find a way to climb down on his hardline immigration policies in order to implement his economic strategy. That said, I expect Trump will settle on some way to minimize the damage he has done to himself and call on congress to get more involved in the hot-button immigration issue. In other words, he’s going to have to punt if he wants to govern.

Bannon is the main architect of Trump’s economic plan, a plan that has already earned broad public support, but a plan that won’t succeed unless it is drastically changed. Here’s why:

Trump’s economic plan can be broken into three parts: Tax cuts, deregulation and fiscal stimulus.

As far as tax cuts, there are three main subsets:

1–The corporate tax rate, which Trump wants to drop from 35 percent to 15 percent.

2–A tax cut on the so-called “repatriation of funds”– which lowers the rate on roughly $2 trillion of cash that’s currently stashed overseas by uber-rich US businesses that have been evading US corporate taxes for years. Trump wants to give these tax dodgers a one-time “holiday” with a 10% penalty for companies that agree to bring their cash back to the US. Trump believes that the one-time tax break will increase business investment and employment in the US. Critics say the scheme will not work unless the economy strengthens and demand grows.

3–Trump also wants to reduce the top tax rate from 39.6% to 33%, while making modest reductions to the other brackets. Under the Trump plan, “a taxpayer who makes between $48,000 to $83,000 a year would save about $1,000 (while) people in the top 0.01%, making $3.7 million or more in a year, would receive $1 million in annual tax savings.” (USA Today)

Here’s a brief summary from economist Dean Baker:

“According to the analysis of the Tax Policy Center at the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, (Trump’s) tax plan will reduce revenue by more than $9 trillion (close to 4 percent of GDP) over the course of the next decade. This tax cut plan would effectively add close to $800 billion to the annual deficit when it first takes effect, with the amount increasing over time……

“According to the Tax Policy Center, more than half of Trump’s tax cuts will go to the richest one percent of the population. The richest 0.1 percent will get tax cuts that average almost $1.5 million annually. The Trump tax cut is consistent with the fundamental principle of the Republican Party, and unfortunately many Democrats, of putting as much money as possible in the pockets of the rich.” (Republican deficit hawks abandon their religion, Smirking Chimp)

As you can see, most of the benefits from the proposed tax cuts go to the extremely rich. How does that fit with Trump’s campaign promise:

“I am proposing an across-the-board income-tax reduction, especially for middle-income Americans…The tax relief will be concentrated on the working and middle-class taxpayer. They will receive the biggest benefit – it won’t even be close.”

The tax cuts look like a serious betrayal of Trump’s supporters. They also look like a misguided , short-term strategy that will derail Bannon’s plan for broad coalition based on a strong economic growth and rising wages. This latest iteration of “trickle down” economics will not help him achieve that goal.

Unfortunately, the other parts of Trump’s economic plan are equally dismal. For example, Trump is determined to repeal many of the key provisions of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law, the toothless bill that Congress passed in order to prevent another financial meltdown. At present, Texas congressman, Jeb Hensarling — an outspoken critic of Dodd-Frank appears to be the frontrunner in the competition for US Treasury Secretary. Hensarling, who just last week said “Dodd-Frank was a grave mistake”, is pushing his own Wall Street-friendly Financial CHOICE act, which would replace the bill with a “pro-growth, pro-consumer” alternative” that would protect the banks from ‘growth-strangling regulation.” (Housingwire)

Is that what we really need, more laws to protect the banks?? Check out this clip from Fortune Magazine:

“Hensarling wants to put the market in charge. His view is that encouraging banks to hold lots of capital (as Dodd-Frank does) goes far enough by itself to shore up the system, making banks far safer than the law’s dense web of stress tests, complex limits on trading, and banning of mortgages and credit cards deemed “abusive” by regulators. Now that Republicans control Congress and the White House, it’s highly possible that the Hensarling manifesto, or a large part of it, will become law…

“I will not rest until Dodd-Frank is ripped out by its roots and tossed on the trash bin of history,” (Hensarling) declared in a recent speech. The centerpiece of the CHOICE act is a provision that would exempt banks from the more restrictive Dodd-Frank regulations…” (This Congressman Could Turn the Dodd-Frank Financial Reforms Upside Down, Fortune)

The idea that a Congressman can devote all his energy to lifting the ban on “abusive mortgages” — just eight years after abusive, predatory, toxic mortgages blew up the global financial system costing roughly $50 trillion and years of agonizing retrenchment– seems almost treasonous, doesn’t it? And yet, at the very least, Hensarling is likely to become one of Trump’s chief advisors on financial regulations. Go figure?

What, in God’s name, is Trump trying to achieve? On the one hand, he blames the Fed for inflating another gigantic asset bubble and, on the other, he tries to remove the regulatory obstacles to bubble-making. What sense does that make?

Here’s a little more background on Trump’s crusade against regulation. This is from the Wall Street Journal:

“Donald Trump has tapped a longtime critic of heavy regulation to flesh out his new administration’s plans for remaking the financial rule book, including the potential dismantling of much of the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul.

Paul Atkins served as a Republican member of the Securities and Exchange Commission from 2002 to 2008, where he spoke out against big fines for companies, arguing they punish shareholders. Now Mr. Atkins, 58 years old, is the member of the president-elect’s transition team charged with recommending policies on financial regulation, according to current and former regulators briefed on the matter.

Mr. Trump has detailed little about his views on financial regulation beyond his vow to dismantle the 2010 Dodd-Frank law.” (Donald Trump’s Point Man on Financial Regulation: A Former Regulator Who Favors a Light Touch, Wall Street Journal)

Trump also wants to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) which recently imposed a $100 million fine on Wells Fargo for using bank employees to create more than 2 million unauthorized accounts to meet sales quotas. The action was applauded by consumer groups across the board which is why Trump will make every effort to defang the watchdog agency. The president-elect appears to be gearing up to eliminate any rule that impairs Wall Street’s ability to rake in bigger profits, whether it puts the American people at risk or not.

So how does this square with Steve Bannon’s comments about coalition building and desire for a stronger economy?

I can’t figure it out, after all, Bannon sounds like a true believer, a no-nonsense, red-blooded, blue collar working guy who hates the Wall Street, the Republican establishment and the mainstream media. What’s not to like about that?

But how does Bannon’s hardscrabble upbringing, his commitment to tea party uprising, and his take-no-prisoners combativeness, jibe with these flagrant tax giveaways, this anti-worker deregulation, and a fiscal policy that only benefits the uber wealthy? I don’t get it??

In an extremely persuasive interview with Buzzfeed News, Bannon disparages the new strain of “Ayn Rand” capitalism that objectifies people and turns them into commodities. He expands on this idea by giving a brief synopsis of the financial crisis that many will find galvanizing. Here’s a clip:

“The 2008 crisis, … which, by the way, I don’t think we’ve come through — is really driven I believe by the greed, much of it driven by the greed of the investment banks. …
And one of the reasons is that we’ve never really gone and dug down and sorted through the problems of 2008. Particularly the fact — think about it — not one criminal charge has ever been brought to any bank executive associated with 2008 crisis. And in fact, it gets worse. No bonuses and none of their equity was taken. So part of the prime drivers of the wealth that they took in the 15 years leading up to the crisis was not hit at all, and I think that’s one of the fuels of this populist revolt that we’re seeing as the tea party…

The bailouts were absolutely outrageous, and here’s why: It bailed out a group of shareholders and executives who were specifically accountable. …

In fact, one of the committees in Congress said to the Justice Department 35 executives, I believe, that they should have criminal indictments against — not one of those has ever been followed up on. … (and) Middle-class taxpayers, people that are working-class people, right, people making incomes under $50,000 and $60,000, it was the burden of those taxpayers, right, that bailed out the elites. …

It’s all the institutions of the accounting firms, the law firms, the investment banks, the consulting firms, the elite of the elite, the educated elite, they understood what they were getting into, forcibly took all the benefits from it and then look to the government, went hat in hand to the government to be bailed out. And they’ve never been held accountable today. Trust me — they are going to be held accountable.” (This Is How Steve Bannon Sees The Entire World, Buzzfeed News)

Repeat: “They are going to be held accountable.”

Bravo! He wants to lock them up. He wants the bankers to be held accountable and locked up! Who doesn’t want that? Every working slob in America wants that. This is why Bannon has attracted such a loyal following; it’s because his analysis of the financial crisis and its aftermath are “dead on”. The American people know they were ripped off, know that Wall Street is infested with crooks and parasites, and know that the country is governed by a corrupt and unaccountable oligarchy of racketeers.

Bannon has tapped into powerful feelings of frustration and rage, and he’s built a thriving movement on top of them. But where’s the beef? His economic policy just doesn’t deliver the goods. Bannon is talking the talk, but he’s not walking the walk.

The tax cuts don’t deliver for working people and neither does deregulation. So what about the third part of Trump’s economic plan, the fiscal stimulus component?

Bannon says he’s the driving force behind the $1 trillion infrastructure development program. Unfortunately, the program is little more than a scam. Let me explain:

Typically, when people think about fiscal stimulus, they imagine expensive Keynesian “shovel ready” infrastructure projects with lots of well-paid government workers building bridges, roads, rapid transit systems and even schools. That’s not what this is. According to economist Jared Bernstein:

“Instead of just allocating the needed resources as in the traditional approach, they propose to “offer some $137 billion in tax breaks to private investors who want to finance toll roads, toll bridges, or other projects that generate their own revenue streams.”

Since the plan depends on private investors, it can only fund projects that spin off user fees and are profitable. Rural roads, water systems, and public schools don’t fall into that category. Neither does public transit, which fails on the profitable criterion (it depends on public subsidies.” (Trump’s misguided flirtation with Keynesianism, Politico)

This isn’t going to work. It’s completely self defeating. This is just more of the same, more handouts to big business. The whole point of fiscal stimulus is to get money in the hands of the people who will spend it fast, rev up the economy, boost growth, generate more demand and get the economy out of its eight-year-long funk. The rebuilding of infrastructure is secondary, in fact, it doesn’t even matter. What matters is getting money circulating in the perennially-moribund economy. Caspice?

Here’s more on the Trump infrastructure boondoggle from an article in the Washington Post:

“Trump’s plan is not really an infrastructure plan. It’s a tax-cut plan for utility-industry and construction-sector investors, and a massive corporate welfare plan for contractors. The Trump plan doesn’t directly fund new roads, bridges, water systems or airports, as did Hillary Clinton’s 2016 infrastructure proposal. Instead, Trump’s plan provides tax breaks to private-sector investors who back profitable construction projects. … There’s no requirement that the tax breaks be used for … expanded construction efforts; they could all go just to fatten the pockets of investors in previously planned projects…

Second, as a result of the above, Trump’s plan isn’t really a jobs plan, either. Because the plan subsidizes investors, not projects; because it funds tax breaks, not bridges; because there’s no requirement that the projects be otherwise unfunded, there is simply no guarantee that the plan will produce any net new hiring. …

Buried inside the plan will be provisions to weaken prevailing wage protections on construction projects, undermining unions and ultimately eroding workers’ earnings. Environmental rules are almost certain to be gutted in the name of accelerating projects.” (Trump’s big infrastructure plan? It’s a trap. Washington Post)

These so called “public-private partnerships” are just another way for big business to suck money out of the government. They don’t help the economy, not really, and they don’t help workers either. If Bannon is serious about building his coalition on the back of a robust economy, there’s an easier way to do it. First get rid of the corporate ideologues and supply side radicals whose theories never work. Then hire a team of reputable economists who have first-hand experience implementing thorny stimulus programs of this magnitude. (Joseph Stiglitz, James Galbraith, Dean Baker, Michael Hudson, Jack Rasmus)

Then start with the low-hanging fruit, that is, put money into already-running programs that will produce immediate results. For example, in James Galbraith’s epic article “No Return to Normal” the economist recommends increasing Social Security payments. Think about that. It’s a complete no-brainer. The people who live on Social Security spend every dime they get every month, which means that — if their payments go up by, let’s say, $200 or more per month– then all that dough goes straight into the economy which is what fiscal stimulus is all about. Also, increase food stamp funding, lower the Medicare age of eligibility, and rehire a portion of the 500,000 federal workers who lost their jobs in the Crash of ’08. These policies will put money into the economy immediately, boosting growth, increasing wages, and strengthening the prospects for whatever political party happens to be in office.

The point is, fiscal stimulus doesn’t have to be a boondoggle and it doesn’t require “shovel ready” jobs. All that’s needed is a competent team of economic advisors who know what the hell they’re doing and the political will to get the job done. Trump’s economic plan doesn’t do that, all it does is slightly improve GDP while trillions of dollars are transferred to the bank accounts of behemoth corporations and Wall Street cronies.

If Bannon is serious about fixing the economy and rebuilding the Republican party, my advice to him would be: Give Galbraith a call.

China-Pakistan Economic Corridor: Corridor Of Discontent – Analysis

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By Priyanka Singh

The flagship project under the Belt and Road Initiative – the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), has been seen as a ‘game changer’ in the regional geopolitical discourse since its formal unveiling in April 2015. It has become the foremost bilateral initiative between China and Pakistan, entailing a budget above $46 billion. CPEC has captured popular imagination in Pakistan, at a time when it is struggling to get its economy back on track. Through the successful execution of the CPEC, China looks forward to adding a significant brand value to its overseas developmental initiatives enunciated as One-belt-One-Road.

With a spectacular GDP having trillions of dollars in reserve, China is seeking to invest in projects abroad that can enhance connectivity, utilise idle capital and sustain its economic growth. In this context, CPEC is conceived as a project that will give China overland access to the Arabian Sea through the Pakistani port of Gwadar, bring development and prosperity to Pakistan – a long-time friend and ally, and cement strategic ties between the two. Innocuous as it may appear, with its passage through the disputed territory of Gilgit-Baltistan and its access and control of Gwadar port – situated in close proximity to the energy-rich Western Asian region, CPEC has provoked the regional/sub-continental security debate ever since it was announced with great gusto by China and Pakistan.

Enveloped in a geopolitical chimera, the focus of the emerging discourse on CPEC is clearly tilted towards its economic and strategic imperatives. However, the flip side of the project concerning its political viability is being ignored. Considering that the CPEC is set to traverse through Xinjiang, Gilgit Baltistan and Balochistan simmering with large-scale political discontent, there are lurking uncertainties facing the future prospects of the project, widely hailed as a harbinger of enhanced regional connectively and trade.

The staple factors put forth to justify the CPEC include China’s geographical constraints vis-à-vis southern waters in the Indian Ocean as well as Pakistan’s ever intensifying energy crisis. The idea of connecting China to the strategically important waters of the Arabian Sea though has evolved over a period of time, way back to when the Karakoram Highway was constructed during the 1960’s and 1970’s. The strategic highway built through the only land link between China and Pakistan (read Gilgit Baltistan) in many ways blueprinted the idea of an intensive connectivity network of what is today envisaged as the grand CPEC project.

The issue brief is an attempt to assess the CPEC on the viability quotient as it stands on the plank of long-raging political questions and evaluate the level of concord in the three major geographical segments of the corridor. Premised on the fact that the political conflict in these regions has received comparatively lesser attention in the overall CPEC discourse, the issue brief seeks to un-layer strands of commonalties in these regions vis-a-vis political unrest and collate the larger complexities of prolonged neglect and abject exclusion. Parallel to the political prism, the brief takes into account the geopolitical discontent triggered by the CPEC, whilst looking at likely impacts to be incurred on the complex triangular geopolitical equations between India, Pakistan and China in general and CPEC in particular.

Across Contested Geographies

The CPEC stretches across zones witnessing conflict, subjugation and political exclusion. These regions continue to be tarred in raging political discontent and are inflicted by deep seated deficit of trust. Slated to originate in Kashgar in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR), the corridor is designed to enter Gilgit Baltistan via the Khujerab Pass before spreading out in parts of Pakistan. In Pakistan, the CPEC travels through Khyber Paktunkhwa, Punjab before culminating at the warm water deep sea port at Gwadar, situated at the southern edge of the restive Balochistan province. While Xinjiang for long has witnessed an incessant ethnic strife offering stiff resistance to Han dominance, Gilgit Baltistan is reeling under lack of constitutional status and political ambiguity since the region’s violence-embroiled accession to Pakistan in 1947. Balochistan in Pakistan is infested by insurgency and prominent political groups led by ethnic Balochs have directly challenged the writ of the state during multiple phases of extreme violence and conflict.

All three regions – Xinjiang, Gilgit Baltistan and Balochistan – share rather conspicuous parallels concerning territorial contestations, rejection of state apparatus by the local populace who claim a legitimate right over local resources. Similarly, all these geopolitically key regions contain vast expanses of landmass – Xinjiang is the largest administrative division of China, Balochistan forms 46 per cent of Pakistan while Gilgit Baltistan forms the major portion of what is referred to as Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (POK). It is rather intriguing that the CPEC which is riding high on the developmental, network-connectivity agenda, boasting of a mammoth multi-billion budget, is traversing regions where the state has allegedly been deeply involved in altering demographics to diminish/wipe their exclusive ethnic characters. As a result, strong undercurrents of rebellion and dissidence prevail in these geographical entities.

Xinjiang: Xinjiang, the western most part of China where the CPEC originates, has been reeling under strife owing to political and ethnic reasons. The political discontent stems from ethnic/identity issues and of late has been triggered by relentless subjugation of the majority Uighur population in the province (and a minority in China). Groups such as Turkistan Islamic Party (formerly the East Turkestan Islamic Movement-ETIM) advocate Xinjiang’s independence from China. They have refused to accede to the Chinese control on the region obtained in 1949, challenging it on the pretext that the origin of the state lay somewhere else and it does not belong to the Peoples Republic of China (PRC).

Gilgit-Baltistan: As noted earlier, Gilgit Baltistan is part of POK. While under Pakistan’s territorial control, the region is still not considered a part of it either constitutionally or politically after almost seven decades. More significantly, the region is claimed by India as part of the erstwhile princely state of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) ever since the Instrument of Accession was signed in India’s favour by Maharaja Hari Singh in October 1947. An inordinate wait for political rights and identity has been aggravated by a prolonged phase of political neglect and state apathy. Nationalist sentiments have spawned in Gilgit Baltistan over the years and have found vent in an array of nationalist/political groups some of whom are defiant to the extent of seeking independence from Pakistan.

Balochistan: Balochistan did not immediately accede to the newly formed Pakistan in 1947. Its formal accession to the latter in March 1948 was preceded by a spell of uncertainty and intervention by the Pakistan military. Ever since then, the region has been embroiled in a perpetual state of turmoil and political tussle with the Pakistani state. The insurgency in Balochistan has refused to recede even after military’s stringent measures to tide over violence. The Balochistan situation has degenerated especially since 2003-04 under a patently ruthless regime involving indiscriminate state action against individuals, institutions and political groups refusing to comply with Pakistan’s control. Draconian tales of forced disappearances, death squads and extra-judicial killings have continuously poured out of Balochistan on a regular basis.

Disenchanted Populations

The CPEC covers expanse of populations that are inflicted by political angst – ones that have challenged directly the writ of the state controlling them. These people for decades continue to be been at odds with the state authority concerning issues of political rights, resource ownership, economic rights and power sharing. A significant section of population in these region remains disenchanted, more so, disengaged to the mainstream processes.

Ethnic and political exclusion: The regions face ethnic exclusion against dominant majoritarian groups – Uighurs against the Han Chinese, Shias of Gilgit Baltistan versus Pakistan’s Sunni dominance and ethnic Baloch people against Punjabi patronization. In Xinjiang, China has subjected ethnic population to high handedness and freak elements of control. The state has used possible tools of discrimination against the ethnic Uighurs, who constitute about 90 per cent of the local population. Popular outbursts have frequently resulted in widespread ethnic riots in Xinjiang as manifested grossly in 2009.1 Recently, there were extensive reports that the Chinese government resorted to extreme measures at times by forbidding the ethnic Uighurs from observing fast during the holy month of Ramzan.2

Balochistan has witnessed similar persecution of ethnic Baloch and brazen discrimination by the Pakistani state. Since 1947-48, Pakistan’s equations with Balochistan have been patchy and rough. Resistance against Pakistan has persisted through several phases in 1950s, 1960s, and so on. The military has been at the helm of Pakistan’s equations with the Balochi people. Autocratic practices such as death squads, forced disappearances, wrongful detention and extrajudicial killings allegedly perpetrated by the state continue unabated even as the region remains one of the flashpoints of human rights advocacy and international attention at large.3

Similarly in Gilgit Baltistan, the sense of political alienation and malaise is extremely deep-rooted. The lack of a political status and constitutionality in Gilgit Baltistan has ratcheted up popular sentiments against Pakistan. Complementing the popular attitudes, a number of political groups exist in the region dissenting Pakistan’s highhanded rule, while others seek autonomy or even complete independence. Politics in Gilgit Baltistan has remained subservient to Pakistan’s larger agenda against the region – one that has reduced it to be a mere pawn in Pakistan’s dubious Kashmir gambit.

Outsourced resources: Coincidentally, the three in-focus regions are rich in natural resources. Designated as ‘‘national energy strategy base’’4 , Xinjiang houses oil reserves that run in billions of tons, accounting for 1/5th of China’s aggregate oil reserves. Besides, coal reserves are about 40 per cent of the total followed by the largest gas reserves within China.5 Irrespective of ethnic strife, China has engaged in expanding refineries and extraction activities in the region. Gilgit Baltistan has vast reserves of minerals and hydro power potential while Balochistan is blessed with significant gas reserve.

The availability of resources unfortunately does not reflect as much in the development indexes concerning these regions. For long, these resources remained untapped before the states in question decided to harness these by either outsourcing them to external players like China (in Balochistan and Gilgit Baltistan) or diverting the resource wealth towards purposes other than local development. Sustained neglect of local interests has accentuated popular angst in these regions which has frequently led to protests and disruptive activities.

Trepidation against China: A common strand of widespread China-centric apprehensions is visibly prevalent in Xinjiang, Gilgit Baltistan and Balochistan with strong undercurrent of anti-China trepidations. While in Xinjiang, the anti-China sentiments is attributed to marginalization and suppression of ethnic Uighurs, in Balochistan the quest against the Chinese revolves around the fear that local resources are being exploited to serve Chinese interests. Notably, the broader understanding is that the immediate trigger for the outbreak of the current spell of insurgency in the region was due to the award of the Saindak mining field contract in the Chagai hills to the Chinese.6 Similar sense of apprehensions and resistance overcast the handing over of the Gwadar Port administration to China in 2013 after the previous Singaporean enterprise decided to withdraw.

Elements Of Dissonance

Apart from the geography-driven factors as discussed above, the CPEC has already unleashed a series of discord both at the political and geopolitical level. In Pakistan, the CPEC is emerging as the latest flashpoint of inter-provincial tussle after the controversial Kalabagh dam project. On the other side, CPEC has been at the centre of bilateral/trilateral discord between India, China and Pakistan. Some of the broad drivers of discontent already playing out, well before the CPEC could actually culminate.

Political dissonance: In Pakistan, the CPEC is currently hailed by metaphorical adjectives such as ‘game changer’, and being advertised as a fountainhead of peace, stability and development.7 The corridor that spreads across several parts of Pakistan has spiralled inter-provincial rivalry and discord regarding share and benefits. Such dynamics have previously marred the pace of development-oriented infrastructure projects, glaring examples being the Kalabagh dam and the Diamer Bhasha dam project.8 The interprovincial ties within Pakistan have perennially been fragile and equally precarious – explicit during the Kalabagh dam controversy, wherein a much wanted hydropower project was shelved owing to discord between Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab.9 It is important to note that had the Kalabagh dam project reached fruition, the much pronounced energy woes in Pakistan today would have largely been averted.

Years down the line, the ghosts of Kalabagh appear to hover on the CPEC route controversy. There is much bad blood between the provinces over preferred route options and share in the proceeds from several projects within. For instance, there were several routes floating in the public domain and consensus on zeroing in on a particular route had been eluding ever since. For a long time, there was uncertainty whether Balochistan to the extent possible would be avoided in the CPEC routing. This was mainly due to concerns on continuing political strife and cyclical occurrence of violence in the region.

Likewise in Gilgit Baltistan (part of POK), people are oblivious to their role and share in the CPEC.10 In August 2015, the Gilgit Baltistan Legislative Assembly passed resolutions demanding setting up of economic zones in the region under the CPEC stable. At the same time, the house also demanded Gilgit Baltistan’s participation in the Consultative Committee on the CPEC.11 Seething under lack of a constitutional status, popular opinion in the region seems incrementally driven towards knowing their actual stakes in the multi-billion corridor. Concerns on getting a rightful share in the CPEC harvest have also resonated in the so called Azad Jammu and Kashmir (‘AJK’) – the other name for POK, where the newly appointed President Masood Khan contended before the Standing Committee of the National Assembly on Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan that the region too should get its ‘due share’ being a ‘natural part’ of the CPEC.12

The overbearing Punjabi component in Pakistani politics and the army has spurred apprehensions with some sections referring to the CPEC as the ‘China Punjab Economic Corridor’.13 Such views gravely overshadow the popular enthusiasm involving the sheer size and volume of the over $46 billion Chinese-aided development corridor.

Geopolitical/strategic discord: The CPEC is slated to cut through swathes of territory in POK on which India has a standing claim. India’s rather underplayed policy on POK has, nevertheless, featured several objections to Chinese involvement in building hydropower projects and infrastructure in parts of POK. In sync with its official stance, India has been opposed to the idea of a connectivity corridor being built through a contested territory i.e., Gilgit Baltistan – geographically an essential part of India’s extant claim. India’s concerns have been taken up at the highest level with China, including during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the PRC in May 2015. India’s reservations on the CPEC have also been emphasised in the bilateral parleys with China and Pakistan. While the public opinion on the CPEC in India is still shaping up, it appears somewhat divided with a sizeable constituency viewing the corridor as a potent challenge for India’s long term security interests.

India-Pakistan ties have yet again hit a rough patch in the wake of the Uri attack and subsequent cross Line of Control (LoC) strikes. This was in the immediate aftermath of the spate of violence in J&K in July 2016 followed by Prime Minister Modi’s Independence Day speech in which he boldly expressed gratitude to the people of POK and Balochistan.14 India not only appears to substitute the policy rut on POK with proactive forthrightness but also looks prepared to harden its stance on POK and Balochistan, if need be. India-China ties have been on test due to the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) episode and China’s gambit in obstructing Jaish e Mohamed chief Masood Azhar’s proscription at the United Nations. Disturbing trends such as these afflict triangular dynamics between the three countries. Coupled with India’s freshly acquired Balochistan pitch, constellation of forces such as these may impact the feasibility/viability of the CPEC in some, if not considerable measure.

The Road Ahead

It is essential that the discussion on these three regions is also contextualized in the development versus discontent paradox. The debate on the correlation between development and political stability – on how the two propositions impact each other or remain diametrically opposed, is wide. Correspondingly, there is also the dilemma regarding what comes first – political stability or economic development. Considering the extent of political instability and economic lag in the regions the CPEC travels through, it would be interesting and worthwhile to observe the prospects of medium and long term impact of the CPEC over these lands.

More significantly, any approximate analysis concerning the contours of CPEC’s future course must essentially factor in two drivers of prime significance – Pakistan’s grim international security parameters and China’s risk averse behaviour. CPEC’s arterial spread inside Pakistan as well as POK make it dependant on Pakistan’s internal security situation, which has witnessed a steep downslide despite the army’s projected resolve to purge militancy and violence. In view of recurring incidents of mass killings abetted by several militant groups across Pakistan, especially Balochistan, the prospects of the CPEC acting as a harbinger of stability and development appear more than dismal. Before this happens, Pakistan needs to shed its long standing affinity to militancy as an instrument of state policy and inspire confidence amongst provinces thereby creating an environment conducive for economic development and stability.

As the corridor charts across hotbeds of unrest and instability, through lands of contested statuses, it will litmus-test China’s risk-averse investment behaviour. China in the past has steered clear of politically contentious projects such as the Diamer Bhasha dam (in Gilgit Baltistan) – a controversial project territorially challenged by India and also the scene of an existing boundary discord between Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Gilgit Baltistan. Whether or not China is able to take a deep plunge in the risk-ridden investment landscape remains to be seen.

The brief is excerpted from the larger study currently undertaken by the author as part of IDSA fellowship; Short excerpts from the brief were part of an ‘Ask an Expert’ response by the author published on November 4, 2016 on the IDSA website.

Views expressed are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the IDSA or of the Government of India. Originally published by Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (www.idsa.in) at http://idsa.in/issuebrief/cpec-corridor-of-discontent_psingh_231116

A Trump-Putin Axis? – OpEd

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US President-elect Donald Trump admires Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. That much became clear during Trump’s presidential campaign, as did his intention when in office to repair the US’s damaged relations with the Russian Federation. At the moment the US and Russia, although both nominally combating Islamic State (IS) in the Syrian civil war, are so far from allies that they are very nearly belligerents.

In September 2014 the Obama administration brought together a coalition of countries to undertake a twin-objective military effort in Syria: to defeat the rampant IS that had seized large swathes of the country, and to remove President Bashar al-Assad from power, establishing democratic governance in his stead. There was one proviso: there were to be no Western boots on the ground. The strength of the coalition was to be focused on providing training, logistical support and air cover for the “moderate” forces fighting IS and opposing Assad, mainly the Free Syrian Army (FSA).

Assad, for his part, controlled the formidable Syrian army and was supported by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, by the forces provided by Iran’s puppet, Hezbollah, and in addition, since autumn 2015, by the full weight of a massive Russian military build-up. But although IS was nominally in Russia’s sights from the start, estimates are that less than 10 per cent of Russian air strikes have been targeting it. Russia’s powerful air support, to say nothing of the Kalibir NK cruise missiles first fired on Aleppo from the Russian frigate Admiral Grigorovich on 15 November, has been directed primarily against the FSA.

So Russia has been battering the FSA while the US-led coalition has been supporting it. In short, Russia and the US are virtually at war with each other in Syria, albeit by proxy. Trump wants to stop that proxy contest turning into a full-scale conflict.

The long-standing US position has been that to end Syria’s complex and multisided struggle, Assad must be removed from power and democratic elections take place. Trump takes a different stance. Hard-line Sunni Islamist elements are known to be present within the ranks of the FSA, and in an interview with the Wall Street Journal on November 11, Trump cast doubt on its democratic credentials. “We’re backing rebels against Syria,” he said, “and we have no idea who those people are.” Moreover, while he “did not like [Assad] at all”, he judged that shoring up his regime was the best way to stem the extremism that has flourished in the chaos of the civil war and threatens US domestic security.

Taking his position to its logical conclusion, he said that since Russia is now totally aligned with Syria, if the US goes on attacking Assad, “we end up fighting Russia.”

This is an essentially pragmatic line to adopt. It acknowledges that the result of President Obama’s weak-kneed policies in the Middle East was to leave a power vacuum that Putin was quick to fill. Trump admires Putin for his diplomatic and military boldness, and seems prepared to allow Putin to enjoy the fruits of his adventurism.

Putin’s Syrian adventure was partly an effort to counter the sanctions and diplomatic cold-shoulder by Western powers that followed his annexation of Crimea and subsequent military involvement in eastern Ukraine. By bulldozing his way to influence and power in the Middle East, Putin has gained a position in which the West simply has to take account of him. Putting aside any personal admiration for the man’s audacity, Trump is actually bowing to the inevitable.

Putin’s clever, multi-faceted Syrian initiative kills several birds with one stone. In sustaining Assad in power he is safeguarding Russia’s long-standing military and commercial interests in Syria. Foremost among these is the naval facility at Tartus, Russia’s sole outlet to the Mediterranean, about to become “a fully-fledged overseas base of the Russian Navy” according to an announcement on 21 November 2016. Putin is also protecting the strategic center of Russia’s military operations in Syria – the Hmeymim airbase near Latakia – to say nothing of billions of dollars of commercial investments including oil and gas infrastructure.

There are also domestic security issues at stake, with which Trump can empathise. Russia is combatting an Islamist insurgency of its own in Chechnya and the North Caucasus, and the last thing Putin wants is for young impressionable Muslims, inspired by further Islamist successes in Syria, to join its ranks.

But there is an apparent circle to be squared. Russia counts Iran as a close ally in its efforts to shore up the Assad regime. Trump is a harsh critic of Iran and the nuclear agreement (“the stupidest deal of all time”), and while on the campaign trail advocated either renegotiating it or “tearing it up”. Jeff Sessions, Trump’s nominee for attorney general, voted against the nuclear deal in the Senate, while Congressman Mike Pompeo, selected by Trump to be CIA director. has investigated the Obama administration’s secret negotiations with Tehran. In short, a US accommodation with Putin under President Trump is unlikely to incorporate a love-in with Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei – a situation much to the liking of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, which regard Iran as their worst enemy, and Obama’s consistent appeasement of its leaders as a disaster.

A continued stand-off between Trump’s America and Iran is not likely to concern Putin overmuch. While providing Iran with billions of dollars-worth of military hardware, Putin by no means shares Iran’s declared intention of eliminating Israel. On the contrary, he seems intent on expanding Russian influence in the Jewish state. One example is the 20-year deal signed recently between a subsidiary of Russia’s Gazprom and Levant Marketing Corporation, allowing for the exclusive purchase by Russia of three million tonnes per year of liquefied natural gas from Israel‘s Tamar offshore gas field. Moreover Putin has met Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, no less than five times in the past year. He seems very nearly as strong a supporter of Israel as Trump claims to be.

An agreed US-Russian end to the Syrian conflict, a combined victory over IS, a concerted effort to support a new Israeli-Palestinian peace effort, renewed confidence in America from the Arab world – given the complex factors at play on the Middle East board-game, a future Trump-Putin understanding might do much more for global security than Obama’s “hands-off” policies ever achieved.

Five Stages Of Climate Grief – OpEd

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Ever since the elections, our media, schools, workplaces and houses of worship have presented stories showcasing the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

Liberal-progressive snowflakes are wallowing in denial, anger and depression. They cannot work, attend class or take exams. They need safe “healing” spaces, Play-Doh, comfort critters and counseling. Too many throw tirades equating Donald Trump with Adolph Hitler, while too few are actually moving to Canada, New Zeeland or Jupiter, after solemnly promising they would.

Nouveau grief is also characterized by the elimination of bargaining and acceptance – and their replacement by two new stages: intolerance for other views and defiance or even riots. Sadly, it appears these new stages have become a dominant, permanent, shameful feature of liberal policies and politics.

The Left has long been intolerant of alternative viewpoints. Refusing to engage or debate, banning or forcibly removing books and posters, threatening and silencing contrarians, disinviting or shouting down conservative speakers, denying tax exempt status to opposing political groups, even criminalizing and prosecuting climate change “deniers” – have all become trademark tactics. Defiance and riots were rare during the Obama years, simply because his government enforced lib-prog ideologies and policies.

Liberals view government as their domain, their reason for being, far too important to be left to “poorly educated” rural and small-town voters, blue-collar workers or other “deplorable” elements. Liberals may not care what we do in our bedrooms, but they intend to control everything outside those four walls.

They are aghast that over 90% of all US counties and county equivalents voted for Trump. They’re incensed that President Trump and Republicans in Congress, 33 governor’s offices and 69 of 99 state legislatures nationwide will likely review and reform policies, laws and regulations on a host of issues.

Above all, they are outraged over what might happen to their “dangerous manmade climate change” mantra. It was supposed to be their ticket to endless extravaganzas at 5-star venues in exotic locales – their trump card for controlling the world’s energy, economy, livelihoods and living standards.

That is why they demand that only their “facts” be heard on the “consensus science” supporting policies they say are essential to prevent a “disastrous” 2º C (3.6º F) rise from 1850 levels, when the Little Ice Age ended (and the modern industrial era began). It’s why the Paris climate agreement tells developed nations to keep fossil fuels in the ground, roll back their economies and reduce their living standards – while giving $100 billion per year to poor countries for climate mitigation and reparation.

That, in turn, is why developing countries eagerly signed the Paris accord, bringing it into force and effect just before this year’s climate confab in Marrakech. They would not be required to reduce their fossil fuel use or greenhouse gas emissions. And they – or at least their governing classes – would receive trillions of dollars over the coming decades. Countless thousands were thus in jolly spirits as they flew giant fuel-guzzling, GHG-spewing jetliners into Morocco for the historic event.

But then, on the third day, news of the US elections brought misery and mayhem to Marrakech. Event organizers had tolerated credentialed Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow representatives handing out Climate Hustle DVDs and discussing Real World climate science and energy development. But when CFACT erected a Donald Trump cutout and shredded a copy of the Paris accord, they sent armed police to forcibly end the educational event and boot the impudent non-believers out of the hallowed conference.

Marrakech may have marked the zenith of the religious-political climate movement. President-Elect Trump has long held that there is likely “some connectivity” between human actions and the climate – but he has also said it is a “hoax” to say humans are now causing catastrophic global warming and climate change. He also says he has an “open mind” on the issue and will be studying it “very closely.”

Here are a few important facts and probing questions that he could raise, to get the ball rolling.

1) The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was formed to detect and assess possible human influences on global climate systems, amid many natural forces. However, it soon began looking only at human influences. Now it claims warming, cooling and weather are driven only by human emissions. How and why did this happen? How can alarmists ignore the powerful natural forces, focus solely on air emissions associated with fossil fuel use – and call it solid, honest, empirical, consensus science?

2) Your “manmade climate chaos” thesis – and computer models that support it – implicitly assume that fossil fuel emissions and feedbacks they generate have replaced numerous powerful natural forces that have driven climate cycles and extreme weather events throughout Earth and human history. What caused the ice ages and interglacial periods, Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age, Anasazi and Mayan droughts, and other major climate and weather events – before fossil fuel emissions took over?

Where did all those natural forces go? Why are they no longer functioning? Who stole them? When did they stop ruling the climate: in 1850, 1900, 1950 … or perhaps 1990, after the IPCC was established?

3) You claim climate and weather patterns are already “unprecedented” and increasingly cataclysmic. But even as plant-fertilizing CO2 levels continue to climb, average global temperatures have risen barely 0.1 degrees the past two decades, amid a major El Niño. Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are growing at record rates. Seas are rising at barely seven inches per century. It has now been a record eleven years since a category 3-5 hurricane struck the US mainland; the previous record was nine years, 1860 to 1869. The 2016 US tornado count was the lowest on record. Where are the unprecedented cataclysms?

4) Your computer models begin with the assumption or assertion that increasing levels of carbon dioxide will cause rapidly, dangerously rising global temperatures, and more extreme weather events. But if this assumption is wrong, so are your models, projections and scenarios. It’s garbage in / garbage out. And in fact your models have been wrong – dramatically and consistently, year after year. When will you fix them? When will they factor in data and analyses for solar, cosmic ray, oceanic and other natural forces?

5) The manmade climate cataclysm community has refused to discuss or debate its data, methodologies, analyses and conclusions with those whom you call “skeptics” or “deniers.” 97% consensus, case closed, you say. What do you fear from open, robust debate? What manipulated data or other tricks are you trying to hide? Why are you afraid to put your cards on the table, lay out your supposed evidence – and duke it out? Do you really think taxpayers should give you one more dime under these circumstances?

6) The FDA and other federal agencies require that applications for drugs, medical devices and permits for projects include extensive raw data, lab and project methodologies, and other information. Your modeling and other work is largely paid for with taxpayer money, and used to determine public policies. Why should you be allowed to hide your data and methodologies, treat them as proprietary, refuse to share them with Congress or “realist” scientists, and refuse to engage in a full peer-review process?

7) EPA’s “social cost of carbon” scheme blames everything imaginable on fossil fuels – but totally ignores the huge benefits of using these fuels. Isn’t that misleading, disingenuous, even fraudulent?

8) America already produces more ethanol than it can use. Now EPA wants another 1.2 billion gallons blended into our gasoline. Why should we do this – considering the land, water, environmental, CO2, fuel efficiency and other costs, rampant fraud in the RIN program, and impacts on small refiners? If we replace all fossil fuels with biofuels, how much land, water, fertilizer and energy would that require?

9) Wind turbines are land intensive, heavily subsidized and exempted from most environmental rules. They kill millions of birds and bats. Their electricity is expensive and unreliable, and requires fossil fuel backup generators. Why should this industry be exempted from endangered species laws – and allowed to conduct bogus mortality studies, and prevent independent investigators from reviewing the work?

Mr. Trump, keep an open mind. But keep exercising due diligence. Trust, but verify. And fire anyone who lies or refuses to answer, or provides the climate equivalent of shoddy work and substandard concrete.

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