As I’ve been observing the response to the Hamas-Fatah reconciliation process, one aspect of it stood out: the U.S. has attempted to insert itself into the process as if it was a full party to the agreement.  Of course it isn’t.  It is an outsider.  Not even a recognized mediator.

In fact, it’s likely that, like Netanyahu, the U.S. wanted nothing to do with this Palestinian reconciliation.  That’s because a divided Palestine is a weakened force that can’t threaten the status quo, which is what both Trump and Bibi want.  Contrary to what the U.S. president says, he doesn’t want a successful peace process.  Or at least not one that offers both sides enough that they can swallow it and support it among their constituents.  What Trump wants is an agreement that offers Israel carte blanche and the Palestinians, peanuts.

That’s why both the Israelis and today, Jason Greenblatt, raised their own objections.  Hamas is the sticking point.  Unlike Fatah, it offers continuing resistance to Israel, both politically and militarily (through its military wing).  Fatah are patsies and Hamas remains a viable force of resistance.  That has to irk the Israel-U.S. nexus.

So Greenblatt said yesterday:

“Any Palestinian government must unambiguously and explicitly commit to nonviolence, recognize the state of Israel, accept previous agreements and obligations between the parties — including to disarm terrorists — and commit to peaceful negotiations. If Hamas is to play any role in a Palestinian government, it must accept these basic requirements,” Greenblatt said in a statement.

First, let’s examine the assumptions here: he’s demanding that Hamas renounce armed resistance while refusing to demand the same from Israel.  The assumption being that Israel is merely defending itself, while Hamas is a terrorist body using violence for some sort of nihilist purpose.  The truth is that Hamas’ resistance is rooted in the very same impulses which motivate Israeli armed violence against Palestinians.

There is only way to do this: both sides must be treated the same.  If you demand something of one side you must demand it of the other.  If you insist, as Greenblatt does here, that one side’s motives are completely transparent and justified, while the other’s are mysterious and incomprehensible, you have a recipe for failure.

The same holds true of the next element in his statement: if you demand that Hamas recognize Israel, while not demanding that Israel either recognize Palestine or Hamas, you again have a recipe for failure.  Further, such a demand puts the cart before the horse.  A negotiation process begins with discussion and resolution of major issues and then leads to the major goals that each side wants.  In other words, mutual recognition comes at the end of the negotiation process, not the beginning.  If Hamas gave Israel everything it demanded before the process began what would be the point of negotiation?  And what would Israel have to give in return for these concessions?  Nothing.  You don’t get something for nothing: unless of course you’re Israel and you expect the normal rules of diplomacy and international negotiation don’t apply.

Hamas responded to Greenblatt with an entirely apt reply:

…Hamas said it rejected “the extortion and American bias toward the Israeli positions expressed by Jason Greenblatt.”

“Hamas will go ahead in the reconciliation and will not pay attention to any attempt to sabotage or block this track,” it said.

Blessedly, Greenblatt didn’t demand that Hamas accept Israel as a Jewish state–another deliberate wooden plank Netanyahu has stuck in the PA’s craw in order to torpedo previous negotiations.  But you can be sure that if Hamas had miraculously agreed to all these demands, that this one would suddenly rear its ugly head once again.

My point is to say that this is not a negotiation.  It is political theater.  And not very good theater at that.  Trump and the Israeli regime want to appear to favor negotiations.  But they want these negotiations to fail so they can say to the world that they were serious and that the other side balked.  This takes the pressure off them and makes them look like the good guys.  And it’s worked to a certain extent.  There are enough smoke and mirrors involved that the average person looks at the peace process, throws up their hands and says: “this is so complicated and there are so many contradictory claims flying back and forth, I can’t tell who’s at fault.”

The danger of Palestinian reconciliation is that it will ratchet up pressure on the real rejectionists (Israel and the U.S.).  The world may come to see the Palestinians as the ones who are really ready and willing to deal and the other side as the recalcitrants.  This is turn could put pressure on the EU, which has labelled Hamas a terrorist group, to change that designation.  It could also intensify the movement to recognize Palestine as a full-fledged national entity within the international community, including the UN.  Finally, it could add momentum to the BDS movement, which seeks to punish Israel as long as it continues to reject the three basic principles of ending Occupation, recognizing the right of return, and offering full, and equal rights to Israel’s Palestinian citizens.  Just as the South African boycott movement appeared radical and unrealizable when it first began but grew increasingly reasonable as conditions worsened; so BDS has crossed from a radical movement to a reasonable one due to Israel’s increasing extremism and radicalization.

There are several aspects of the Hamas-Fatah reconciliation pact which puzzled me.  I had difficulty understanding the motivation of a few of the parties.  First, why would Egypt, which has an exceedingly close relationship with both Trump and Israel, abandon his pals in order to ease the suffering of its sworn enemy, Hamas, which al-Sisi has accused of being allied with his sworn enemy, the Muslim Brotherhood.

The answer appears to be that the Islamists in Sinai who have been bedeviling his security forces for years are a greater threat to al-Sisi’s rule than any benefit he may derive from his alliance with the U.S. or Israel.  If Hamas can tamp down terrorist attacks in Sinai and help restore stability within Egypt, then it’s a gamble the leader is willing to take.  This has to smart for Israel, which has carefully cultivated a close security relationship with the Egyptian regime.

Also, one has to wonder at Hamas’ motivation in taking this deal.  Essentially, giving up its control of Gaza to its former sworn enemy, Fatah, has to hurt.  It amounts to a quasi admission of defeat and a retrenchment of the Islamist movement.  Further, news reports say a secret codicil to the agreement calls for Hamas to cease launching terror attacks against Israel from within the West Bank.  This is an important concession because it amounts to the first time Hamas has accepted a restriction to its right to armed resistance, based on a demand from its own side (the PA).  If the agreement does work, it’s possible to conceive of Hamas widening what amounts to a limited ceasefire and ceasing all armed attacks against Israel.  But of course, this can only happen if Israel responds in kind; and it has never, despite many commitments to do so, adhered to such ceasefires with Hamas.

Finally, in some sense Hamas’ relinquishment of its rule over Gaza is a bold move.  It amounts to something like what critics of the PA have called for it to do in the face of Israel’s trampling over Palestinian rights.  These critics have called for the Palestinians to dismantle the PA and cede control back to the Israelis themselves.  In such a way as to expose the underlying flaws in the process which established the PA.  Dissolving the PA would expose Israel as the occupying power that it is and remove the fig leaf of Palestinian agency which permits Israel to say it has given Palestinians rights.  In the same way, giving the PA control over Gaza now places the onus on it to govern and provide services to Gaza.  It puts the burden on the PA to lift the Israeli-Egyptian siege on the enclave.  It removes a major justification for the blockade: Israel’s claim that Hamas must be blockaded because Gaza, under its control, is a nest of terrorists.  Now, if neither party does so, the blame will no longer be on Hamas, but on Fatah.  That by extension will add pressure on Israel and Egypt to lift their own illegal, punitive siege.

Other analysts and observers have declared the agreement a defeat for Hamas: an admission of its failure and powerlessness.  On the contrary, I see it as a shrewd tactic which places the onus on its enemies to change their behavior in ways that will benefit the Palestinian people in the longer term.  And if the agreement fails it will be the PA’s fault, and its supposed allies, Israel and the U.S.  Hamas will be able to say that it was the reasonable one when it dismantled its governance of Gaza.

The only party in this process which gains nothing and possibly loses a great deal is Israel.  It looks on from the outside as its previous patsy-partners the PA and Egypt abandon it for a deal with its sworn enemy: Hamas.  Israel gains nothing.  In fact, pressure could ratchet up considerably if the agreement is implemented and runs smoothly (which is not guaranteed).  In some sense, the ability to implement this deal at all may be due to Bibi’s increasing isolation and political weakness, as he faces indictment and his possible political downfall from multiple corruption investigations closing in on him.

Finally, it’s important to note a caveat here.  There have been multiple previous attempts to implement a Hamas-Fatah reconciliation.  They all failed.  There is no guarantee this iteration will work any better.  But it appears that all the parties have more skin in the game this time.  They recognize they have much more to lose if they fail.  And this may scare them into success.

This article was published at Tikun Olam

Turquoise is an icon of the desert Southwest, with enduring cultural significance, especially for Native American communities. Yet, relatively little is known about the early history of turquoise procurement and exchange in the region.

University of Arizona researchers are starting to change that by blending archaeology and geochemistry to get a more complete picture of the mineral’s mining and distribution in the region prior to the 16th-century arrival of the Spanish.

In a new paper, published in the November issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, UA anthropology alumnus Saul Hedquist and his collaborators revisit what once was believed to be a relatively small turquoise mine in eastern Arizona. Their findings suggest that the Canyon Creek mine, located on the White Mountain Apache Indian Reservation, was actually a much more significant source of turquoise than previously thought.

With permission from the White Mountain Apache Tribe, Hedquist and his colleagues visited the now essentially exhausted Canyon Creek source — which has been known to archaeologists since the 1930s — to remap the area and collect new samples. There, they found evidence of previously undocumented mining areas, which suggest the output of the mine may have been 25 percent higher than past surveys indicated.

“Pre-Hispanic workings at Canyon Creek were much larger than previously estimated, so the mine was clearly an important source of turquoise while it was active,” said Hedquist, lead author of the paper, who earned his doctorate from the UA School of Anthropology in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences in May.

In addition, the researchers measured ratios of lead and strontium isotopes in samples they collected from the mine, and determined that Canyon Creek turquoise has a unique isotopic fingerprint that distinguishes it from other known turquoise sources in the Southwest. The isotopic analysis was conducted in the lab of UA College of Science Dean Joaquin Ruiz in the Department of Geosciences by study co-author and UA geosciences alumna Alyson Thibodeau. Now an assistant professor at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, Thibodeau did her UA dissertation on isotopic fingerprinting of geological sources of turquoise throughout the Southwest.

“If you pick up a piece of turquoise from an archaeological site and say ‘where does it come from?’ you have to have some means of telling the different turquoise deposits apart,” said David Killick, UA professor of anthropology, who co-authored the paper with Hedquist, Thibodeau and John Welch, a UA alumnus now on the faculty at Simon Fraser University. “Alyson’s work shows that the major mining areas can be distinguished by measurement of major lead and strontium isotopic ratios.”

Based on the isotopic analysis, researchers were able to confidently match turquoise samples they collected at Canyon Creek to several archaeological artifacts housed in museums. Their samples matched artifacts that had been uncovered at sites throughout much of east-central Arizona — some more than 100 kilometers from the mine — suggesting that distribution of Canyon Creek turquoise was broader than previously thought, and that the mine was a significant source of turquoise for pre-Hispanic inhabitants of the Mogollon Rim area.

The researchers also were able to pinpoint when the mine was most active. Their samples matched artifacts found at sites occupied between A.D. 1250-1400, suggesting the mine was primarily used in the late 13th and/or 14th centuries.

“Archaeologists have struggled for decades to find reliable means of sourcing archaeological turquoise — linking turquoise artifacts to their geologic origin — and exploring how turquoise was mined and traded throughout the greater pre-Hispanic Southwest,” said Hedquist, who now lives in Tempe, Arizona, and works as an archaeologist and ethnographer for Logan Simpson Inc., a cultural resources consulting firm. “We used both archaeology and geochemistry to document the extent of workings at the mine, estimate the amount of labor spent at the mine and identify turquoise from the mine in archaeological assemblages.”

Research Paves Way for Future Studies

Turquoise is a copper mineral, found only immediately adjacent to copper ore deposits. While detailed documentation of pre-Hispanic turquoise mines is limited, the work at Canyon Creek could pave the way for future investigations.

“I think our study raises the bar a bit by combining archaeological and geochemical analyses to gain a more complete picture of operations at one mine: when it was active, how intensely it was mined and how its product moved about the landscape,” Hedquist said. “Researchers have only recently developed a reliable means of sourcing the mineral, so there’s plenty of potential for future research.”

Similar work involving the UA is already underway to explore the origin of turquoise artifacts found at the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan in Mexico.

“Canyon Creek is but one of many ancient turquoise mines,” Hedquist said. “This study provides a standard for the detailed documentation of ancient mineral procurement and a framework for linking archaeological turquoise to specific geologic locations. Building on other archaeological patterns — the circulation of pottery and flaked stone artifacts, for example — we can piece together the social networks that facilitated the ancient circulation of turquoise in different times and places.”

A better understanding of the pre-Hispanic history of turquoise is important not only to archaeologists and mining historians but to modern Native Americans, Killick said.

“It’s of great interest to modern-day Apache, Zuni and Hopi, whose ancestors lived in this area, because turquoise continues to be ritually important for them,” he said. “They really have shown a great deal of interest in this work, and they’ve encouraged it.”

Tropical rainforests continue to buffer wildlife from extreme temperatures even after logging, a new study has revealed.

Scientists had previously assumed that cutting down trees caused major changes to local climates within tropical forests – something which would have a devastating effect on the animals living there.

However, new research conducted by the Universities of Sheffield, York and Universiti Malaysia Sabah, shows logged forests on the island of Borneo were thermally indistinguishable from the nearby pristine forest.

This is good news for the huge diversity of globally important species that live in logged forests, which may have previously been further destroyed or converted into agricultural land.

The international team of scientists examined the impact that commercial selective logging had on local temperature 9 – 12 years after the trees had been chopped down. This type of logging removes a large amount of timber and can be extremely disruptive to rainforest habitat – this is particularly evident in Southeast Asia.

Rebecca Senior, a NERC ACCE PhD student from the University of Sheffield’s Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, led the ground breaking study which is published today (Friday 20 October 2017) in the journal Global Change Biology.

“This study highlights the resilience and conservation value of logged tropical rainforests. At a first glance it may be tempting to condemn these forests as disturbed beyond repair and convert them to agriculture.

“But to do this would be sacrificing a biological haven, capable of supporting diverse species both in the present day and under the increasing threat from climate change.

“Logging activity affects 20 per cent of the world’s tropical rainforests and in many places only logged rainforest remains, so it is extremely positive news that even after trees have been logged the forest can continue to support many species of conservation.”

Rebecca added: “For long-term survival in logged forests it is vitally important that tropical species are able to respond to other threats – particularly climate change.

“Many tropical species are picky about the temperatures they prefer but have limited options for coping with temperature change. When exposed to extreme heat, a common strategy for animals like frogs and insects is to move to a cool refuge – like people in a warm room moving towards an open window.”

During the study the researchers travelled to Borneo to establish whether intensive logging activity had altered the availability of cool refuges for animals like the Bornean horned frog, Bornean keeled pit viper, and Wallace’s flying frog.

“We recorded temperature using a thermal camera and tiny temperature loggers,” said Rebecca.

“After 9 – 12 years of recovery post-logging, the logged forest had a very different structure with fewer large trees and more young saplings.

“Surprisingly, though, we discovered the average temperature and the availability of cool refuges was comparable with a pristine forest that had never been logged.

“What this means is that regardless of whether the forest was logged or not, the animals that live there should be equally capable of hiding out when it gets too hot.

“This will be increasingly necessary as average global temperatures rise, so it’s important that we recognise the value of degraded forests and the speed with which they can recover, given the chance.”

Jane Hill, Rebecca’s supervisor at the University of York, added: ” Rebecca’s study is important for helping us conserve tropical species in human-affected landscapes. Demonstrating the high value of degraded forest is good news for those species that may be vulnerable to climate change. “

E-cigarettes appear to trigger unique immune responses as well as the same ones that cigarettes trigger that can lead to lung disease, according to new research published online in the American Thoracic Society’s American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

In “E-Cigarette Use Causes a Unique Innate Immune Response in the Lung, Involving Increased Neutrophilic Activation and Altered Mucin Secretion,” Mehmet Kesimer, PhD, senior study author and associate professor of pathology at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and coauthors report findings from what they believe is the first study to use human airway samples to explore the harmful effects of e-cigarettes.

“There is confusion about whether e-cigarettes are ‘safer’ than cigarettes because the potential adverse effects of e-cigarettes are only beginning to be studied,” Dr. Kesimer said, noting that this study looked at possible biomarkers of harm in the lungs. “Our results suggest that e-cigarettes might be just as bad as cigarettes.”

A 2016 Surgeon General’s report found that e-cigarette use increased by 900 percent among high school students from 2011 to 2015. Also in 2016, the Food and Drug Administration extended its regulatory oversight of tobacco products to include e-cigarettes.

The study compared sputum samples from 15 e-cigarette users, 14 current cigarette smokers and 15 non-smokers. They found e-cigarette users uniquely exhibited significant increases in:

• Neutrophil granulocyte- and neutrophil-extracellular-trap (NET)-related proteins in their airways. Although neutrophils are important in fighting pathogens, left unchecked neutrophils can contribute to inflammatory lung diseases, such as COPD and cystic fibrosis.
• NETs outside the lung. NETs are associated with cell death in the epithelial and endothelium, the tissues lining blood vessels and organs. The authors write that more research is necessary to determine if this increase is associated with systemic inflammatory diseases, such as lupus, vasculitis, and psoriasis.

The study also found that e-cigarettes produced some of the same negative consequences as cigarettes. Both e-cigarette and cigarette users exhibited significant increases in:

• Biomarkers of oxidative stress and activation of innate defense mechanisms associated with lung disease. Among these biomarkers are aldehyde-detoxification and oxidative-stress-related proteins, thioredoxin (TXN), and matrix metalloproteinase-9 (MMP9).
• Mucus secretions, specifically mucin 5AC, whose overproduction has been associated with pathologies in the lung including chronic bronchitis, bronchiectasis, asthma, and wheeze.

Study limitations include the fact that of the 15 e-cigarette users, 5 said they occasionally smoked cigarettes and 12 identified themselves as having smoked cigarettes in the past.

“Comparing the harm of e-cigarettes with cigarettes is a little like comparing apples to oranges,” Dr. Kesimer said. “Our data shows that e-cigarettes have a signature of harm in the lung that is both similar and unique, which challenges the concept that switching from cigarettes to e-cigarettes is a healthier alternative.”

By Caleb Mills

On June 25, 2017, the United States Department of Commerce announced it would impose a series of tariffs aimed at Canadian soft lumber producers in an attempt to balance the playing field for American companies who are being outpriced with cheap wood from Canada.

The recent escalation of tensions has brought a surprising amount of attention to the trade crisis that has been overlooked throughout the 21st century, especially in the face of bigger commerce issues like Chinese plastic or German carmakers outsourcing American companies. But with the ascension of US businessman Donald Trump to the American presidency in 2017, it seems many of these longstanding economic problems, including this one, will finally face a permanent outcome.

Despite all of the complicated terminology being thrown around in this argument over subsides and government interference in the marketplace, the core issue itself is actually quite simple.

The United States and Canada both use different models for government investment and ownership within their economies, but the relevant difference between the two in this instance is that US lumber is usually owned and harvested by private companies while Canadian lumber is almost always harvested from crown lands; which are owned by the federal and provincial governments.

According to Livingston Trade, 70% of US forests are privately owned while in stark contrast, Canada’s woodlands are 94% owned by the federal and provincial governments. Companies in the US complain that Canadian companies harvest wood from government lands and only have to pay a fee to take the wood, whereas in America private companies invest more money into growing and caring for their crop directly. In their eyes, this means that their cousins across the border gain an unfair advantage due to their ability to access their product cheaper.

Starting back in 1982, the US business community began protesting that through this system where Canadian companies bought wood cheap from the government, Canada was unfairly subsidizing private companies and therefore manipulating prices.

In 2006, Canada and the US finally came to an agreement on the issue called the Softwood Lumber Agreement or SLA. The accord basically stated that the US would end many of their damaging tariffs as long as Canadian lumber was priced at levels that US companies could compete with. Interestingly enough, in an argument over Canada manipulating the market, the US asked Canada to take steps to artificially raise prices to accommodate America – another manipulation of the market.

But the argument did not end there. US businesses have continually complained about Canadian lumber and the challenges it imposes on the American economy. So with President Trump actively on the move to begin raising tariffs, this begs the question: Does Canada’s lumber pose threat to the United States economy in the first place?

Whether or not you believe what the Canadian government and her provinces are doing is a form of subsidization, it is important to note that despite US claims, panels from the World Trade Organization and NAFTA have both found that the Canadian system should not be classified as subsidization. Not only that, but Canada claims to ensure that initial sales of lumber to private companies are set to reflect already existing market tendencies in production.

The lumber industry accounts for 12.5% of Canada’s manufacturing GDP and the United States is its biggest trading partner, which Canada depends on for 52% of her imports. The US also buys 76.7% of Canadian exports, including soft lumber. Meanwhile, Canadian products only account for 13.2% of American imports.

To add perspective, only 21.5% of US imports come from China. Remember the stereotype that everything in America is made in China? Well, if you think that’s true, just remember Canada is almost a third more dependent on the United States for trade than America is on China. Sadly, it seems Canadians might see the label ‘Made in America’ more than actual Americans do.

A full out trade war with America over soft lumber would do tremendous damage to the Canadian economy in the short run, however, it probably wouldn’t take long for other nations to fill in the gap left by the US. Even though America buys the vast majority of Canadian products, recent trade deals with the European Union and the pursuit of new ones with China have already signaled that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau might be taking his nation in a new direction.

On the other hand, a rise in prices due to tariffs would have a more lasting change on the American side, specifically in the housing market. In a report from the US National Association of Home builders, it was found that less access to cheap Canadian lumber could result in a $1,300 increase in costs for a new single-family home. The report also found that in the case of a 25 percent duty imposed on Canadian lumber, the real cost could end up being 8,000 US jobs, and $450 million in wages.

In the end, the real casualties on both sides would be not only businesses but consumers as well, robbed of cheaper prices and a healthier economy as an extension. The effects of a war over lumber actually a present a more startlingly grim outcome than if we were to continue this Cold War standoff over trade. But perhaps the results of such a battle are due to happen with or without such provocation.

As previously mentioned, Canada is increasingly looking towards Europe and Asia for trade, something that was already happening before Donald Trump’s election. In the end, a dispute over lumber would simply accelerate, in a more painful manner, the already existing trend of Canada reaching out for new partners on the global stage.

The opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints expressed by the authors are theirs alone and don’t reflect any official position of Geopoliticalmonitor.com, where this article was published.

The Catholic Justice and Peace Commission of Hong Kong has held a Mass to pray for missing underground Bishop James Su Zhimin, who was seized by Chinese authorities 20 years ago.

The Mass was also dedicated to other clerics detained by Chinese authorities.

Or Yan Yan, a project officer for the commission, told ucanews.com that Bishop Su, from Hebei Province and now aged 85, is still in the hands of authorities.

Or noted that many people think the Catholic Church in China is developing well because they see it has beautiful buildings.

However, she said underlying problems remained, not least the detention of clerics such as Father Liu Honggeng of Baoding, Coadjutor Bishop Cui Tai of Xuanhua and Bishop Shao Zhumin of Wenzhou.

All three were current cases, said Or.

She noted rumors that Bishop Su is in a nursing home for the aged, but even if true, this was not the same as being free as it would still be a form of house arrest.

Bishop Su’s family and others are still searching for him.

The commission has produced a pamphlet entitled “An Unforgettable Pastor” that details Bishop Su’s life, including labor camp imprisonment during the 1980s.

Or said the bishop’s persistence and faith inspires others.

Bishop Su was taken away 20 years ago during October, while this month is also the Month of Holy Rosary and Our Lady of China is the patron saint of his Baoding Diocese.

Bishop Michael Yeung Ming-cheung of Hong Kong presided over the Mass held Oct. 11 at St. Andrew’s Church and attended by about 200 people.

In his homily, Bishop Yeung said dialogue rather than violent protest was needed to advance negotiations with Chinese authorities in relation to religious affairs even when there is resistance.

Bishop Yeung pointed out that the Vatican had said there needed to be “healthy, positive, rational and realistic thoughts” during such dialogue.

The church believed that while major principles should not be sacrificed, some less important and technical issues could be negotiated or put aside.

Bishop Su, due to his unwillingness to accept official state religious policies and refusal to join the government-controlled Catholic Patriotic Association, has spent more than half his life in prison or under some form of detention.

His last arrest was on Oct. 8, 1997, at a public market in Shijiazhuang, the capital city of Hebei Province.

Hebei Province has the largest Catholic population in China, while Baoding is a stronghold of the underground Church with more than one million Catholics.

Swiss Re said Thursday it estimates its preliminary combined claims burden in the third quarter from the hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria and the earthquakes in Mexico to be approximately $3.6 billion, net of retrocession and before tax. Of the total combined losses, claims from the two earthquakes in Mexico are expected to be approximately $175 million.

Swiss Re said it estimates the total insured market losses of the industry caused by these events to be approximately $95 billion.

The foregoing estimates are subject to a higher than usual degree of uncertainty and may need to be subsequently adjusted as the claims assessment process continues.

Swiss Re’s Group Chief Executive Officer, Christian Mumenthaler, said, “The most recent natural catastrophes have been extremely powerful and we extend our sympathies to all those affected by these events. Through our long-standing and close client relationships, combined with our experience in complex claims handling after large natural catastrophes, we can support our clients when they need us most. It is during these times that we demonstrate our differentiated value proposition and show the value of insurance and reinsurance to society.”

Swiss Re’s Group Chief Financial Officer, David Cole, added: “Swiss Re maintains a very strong capital position and high financial flexibility to support our clients’ needs, respond to market developments and execute on our capital management priorities.”

Recently, Pravda newspaper of Russia has reported [1] that the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been suffering from serious sleep deprivation and that he was yawning and dozed off during a press conference with the Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko while he was on a state visit to Kiev, and the video of the incident has been going viral over social media.

Though this might appear as a minor diplomatic gaffe but bear in mind that insomnia is a serious psychiatric disorder, the cognitive functions of sleep-deprived individuals are severely hampered, and such people are prone to committing rash and reckless acts.

Moreover, readers who have been keenly watching Erdogan’s behavior since the July 2016 coup plot must have noticed in his recent TV appearances that his facial expressions have been quite bland lately, he has been lacking in any warmth even when he is hugging and kissing children for public relations’ photo ops, and he has that look of a madman in his eyes.

In order to substantiate this subjective psychoanalytical evaluation of Erdogan’s attitude and body language with concrete evidence, I would draw the reader’s attention to quite a few rash and impulsive acts committed by the Erdogan administration during the last couple of years.

First, the Turkish air force shot down a Russian Sukhoi Su-24 fighter jet on the border between Syria and Turkey on 24 November 2015 that brought the Turkish and Russian armed forces on the brink of a full-scale confrontation in Syria.

Second, the Russian ambassador to Turkey, Andrei Karlov, was assassinated at an art exhibition in Ankara on the evening of 19 December 2016 by an off-duty Turkish police officer, Mevlut Mert Altintas, who was suspected of being a Muslim fundamentalist.

Third, the Turkish military mounted the seven-month-long Operation Euphrates Shield in northern Syria immediately after the attempted coup plot from August 2016 to March 2017 that brought the Turkish military and its Free Syria Army proxies head-to-head with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces and their US bakers.

And fourth, the Turkish military has recently once again invaded Idlib in northwestern Syria on the pretext of enforcing a de-escalation zone between the Syrian militants and the government, despite official protest from the latter that the Turkish armed forces are in violation of Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Regarding the July 2016 coup plot, instead of a serious attempt at overthrowing the government, the coup plot actually was a large-scale mutiny within the ranks of the Turkish armed forces. Although Erdogan has scapegoated the Gulenists to settle scores with his one-time ally, but according to credible reports, the coup was in fact attempted by the Kemalist liberals against the Islamist government of Turkey.

For the last several years of the Syrian proxy war, the Kemalists had been looking with suspicion at the Erdogan administration’s policy of deliberately training and arming Sunni militants against the Shi’a-dominated government of Bashar al-Assad in the training camps located on Turkey’s borders with Syria in collaboration with CIA’s MOM, which is a Turkish acronym for military operations center.

As long as the US was onboard on the policy of nurturing Sunni Arab jihadists in Syria, the hands of Kemalists were tied. But after the US declared a war against one faction of Sunni militants, the Islamic State, in August 2014 and the consequent divergence between Washington’s policy of supporting the Kurds in Syria and the Islamist government of Turkey’s continued support to Sunni militants, it led to discord and adoption of contradictory policies.

And then, the spate of bombings in Turkey claimed by the Islamic State and separatist Kurds during the last couple of years, all of these factors contributed to widespread disaffection among the rank and file of Turkish armed forces, which regard themselves as the custodians of secular traditions and guarantors of peace and stability in Turkey.

The fact that one-third of 220 brigadiers and ten major generals were detained after the coup plot shows the level of frustration shown by the top and mid-ranking officers of the Turkish armed forces against Erdogan’s megalomaniac and self-destructive policies.

More to the point, it bears mentioning that the United States has been conducting air strikes against targets in Syria from the Incirlik airbase and around fifty American B-61 hydrogen bombs have also been deployed there. The safety of those H-bombs became a matter of real concern during the July 2016 coup plot against the Erdogan administration when the commander of the Incirlik airbase, General Bekir Ercan Van, along with nine other officers were arrested for supporting the coup. The movement in and out of the base was denied, power supply was cut off and the security threat level was raised to the highest state of alert, according to a report [2] by Eric Schlosser for the New Yorker.

The anti-nuclear activists around the world have been worried about North Korea’s nuclear crisis. And during Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, the Democrats made a convincing argument to the American electorate that would they trust a US president affiliated with the infamous Alt-Right movement with nuclear codes?

What’s worth noting in the aforementioned report, however, is the fact that some of NATO’s H-bombs deployed in Turkey are to be delivered by the Turkish air force if the contingency arises. And a Muslim Brotherhood’s fanatic who has been suffering from insomnia and is prone to committing reckless and impulsive acts has absolute control over those nukes.

Therefore, in order to preempt the likelihood of a nuclear Armageddon, Washington should either press upon its NATO ally to constitute a medical examination board to evaluate Erdogan’s psychiatric condition whether he is eligible to serve as president or not, or the US should recall those nukes and deploy them in a safer country like Germany, which is home to one of the largest overseas US airbase Ramstein, where 47,000 US troops have currently been deployed and which already hosts dozens of similar NATO’s nukes on its territory.

Sources and links:

[1] Pravda: Erdogan’s lack of sleep becomes a very serious problem to many http://www.pravdareport.com/world/asia/turkey/12-10-2017/138898-erodgan_turkey_russia-0/

[2] The H Bombs in Turkey by Eric Schlosser: http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-h-bombs-in-turkey

The NAFTA-2 negotiations seem to be faltering after the fourth round of talks recently held in the United States. The Trump administration is pushing Mexico and Canada aggressively to include provisions from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) in order to renegotiate NAFTA in a way that benefits US corporations. Mexico and the US are under particularly high pressure to complete the talks successfully as each country has major elections in 2018.

News reports of the highly secretive talks describe the negotiations as hitting roadblocks. While this is good news, if it is accurate, this is the time for people in Mexico, Canada and the United States to call for each government to not only withdraw from the talks but also to abandon the corporate model of trade that puts profits before protection of people and the planet. Our view is — if it doesn’t work, don’t fix it, get rid of it and adopt a new and more positive trade model.

In “NAFTA talks bog down over U.S. demands as latest round concludes,” the Los Angeles Time reports,

“After seven straight days of talks fraught with emotion, officials representing the U.S., Canada and Mexico were at seeming loggerheads over several American proposals that observers fear could derail the negotiations and ultimately cause an unraveling of the 23-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement.”

Further, they report “observers briefed by trade negotiators said the mood during the latest session of talks had turned grim and pessimistic, and that most everyone expected Canada and Mexico to roundly reject U.S. efforts to weaken NAFTA’s regional structure with U.S. protectionist measures consistent with Trump’s ‘America first’ agenda.”

Reuters described a grim reality, writing that the disagreements are so extreme that they could result in the end of the trade agreement:

“Some downcast participants said the demands, unveiled this week in line with Trump’s ‘America First’ agenda, have increased the odds of NAFTA’s demise. At the very least, they could make it impossible to reach a deal renewing the treaty before a year-end deadline.”

CNBC also warned that time may run out — saying the negotiators are working on a schedule that is “a very tight negotiating schedule — described as ‘insane’ by one official.”  The initial goal was to complete the talks in December of this year in order to avoid the Mexican presidential election. The current pro-corporate president, Enrique Peña Nieto, is very unpopular and is likely to be replaced.

The divisions between the countries were on clear display as the round of talks wound down. The Star reports that Canadian “Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland blasted the Trump administration’s NAFTA proposals publicly for the first time in an awkward joint press conference in Washington on Tuesday, the clearest sign yet that negotiations are strained to the breaking point.”

Freeland denounced the US for “an approach that seeks to undermine NAFTA rather than modernize it,” warning that the “unconventional” proposals from President Donald Trump’s administration would “turn back the clock” and put tens of thousands of jobs at risk. Lighthizer criticized Canada and Mexico for refusing to agree to provisions that they previously accepted in the TPP.

Things are going so badly in the negotiations that the parties have decided to take a short break. Rather than meeting every two weeks, they’ve pushed the next round back to a month and the deadline for completion of the re-negotiations into early 2018.

BBC reports that in an October meeting with Justin Trudeau, President Trump said he would pull out of NAFTA and be open to a new bilateral agreement between the US and Canada if the NAFTA-2 negotiations fail.

NAFTA was the start of a long line of disastrous trade deals that put the interests of large corporations ahead of the necessities of people and planet. Now that people see the results of this model of trade such as a race to the bottom in wages and worker’s rights, environmental destruction and an erosion of democracy, there is widespread opposition to ‘free trade.’ This was evident in the large movement of movements that stopped the TPP and stalled the TTIP.

This is the time to be strong and persistent in our demand for an end to NAFTA and a new era of positive trade. Trade agreements could be negotiated in the open with broad input from all sectors of society. Trade agreements could drive a race to the top in wages and worker protections around the world. Trade agreements could also include enforceable environmental standards and promote meaningful steps to address the climate crisis.

For now, the best way to stop NAFTA is to heighten the controversies so that the talks continue to be delayed. As we did with the TPP, we can push the talks into the election season and make our positive agenda for trade a part of campaigns.

If you are interested in getting involved, please sign up at TradeForPeopleandPlanet.org. Remaking trade in a positive way is another route to the future we need.

By Ryan McMaken*

Now, the only way the market for AHPs can develop and become competition and well-capitalized is to let is exist. It remains to be seen if that will ever be allowed beyond the short term.

Last week, Donald Trump signed a new executive order facilitating more flexibility for consumers of health insurance.

The order allows for more flexibility in purchasing insurance across state lines, and greater freedom both small businesses and groups of consumers in creating “association health plans” (AHPs).

In theory, this will broaden access to the benefits currently enjoyed only by those with employment-based insurance, and other types of group insurance.

The order paves the way for healthcare reforms long favored by Kentucky Senator Rand Paul who believes the reforms will help bring down healthcare costs.

In an op-ed for Breitbart, Paul writes:

Millions of Americans will be eligible to band together to demand less-expensive insurance. The 28 million individuals left behind by Obamacare will now be eligible for inexpensive insurance.

How will it work? Well, nationwide associations like the National Restaurant Association will be allowed to form groups across state lines and, with the leverage of size, demand Big Insurance bring down their outrageous premiums.

Many of the 28 million people left behind by Obamacare who still don’t have insurance work low-wage jobs in our fast food restaurants. The President’s decision today will allow workers from two million restaurants to come together to form a buying group and through sheer size get cheaper and better insurance.

Millions of people will be eligible for the same group insurance that big corporations offer. In fact, Health Associations may grow to be larger than the largest of our corporations. Currently, about half of private insurance is cross-state, self-insured ERISA plans, and most employees love them. The President’s action today will allow the millions of people in the individual market an escape route to group insurance.

Why Do We Need an “Escape” From the Individual Market?

But why should people need an “escape route to group insurance” as Paul describes?

Well, as anyone who’s had to buy health insurance in the non-group market knows, the “independent market” in health care is often an unpleasant ordeal. It’s a small part of the market, and prices are high. Large well-capitalized firms prefer to focus on the more lucrative group insurance market.

This state of affairs, however, isn’t due to some law of nature or some immutable reality of human behavior.

The fact that the independent market is so small and unresponsive is due to decades of public policy that favors group markets, and drives up costs for the independent market.

To see some of the origins of this problem, we need to go back to the 1940s.

As asked in a 2009 NPR article, “How did Americans end up with a system in which employers pay for our health insurance? After all, they don’t pay for our groceries or our gas.”

The answer lies in policies that encouraged the creation and spread of health insurance.

The concept of health insurance in the United States began in the late 1920. From there, it grew into a nationwide industry, and it was helped along by the federal government:

In 1942, the Roosevelt administration imposed price controls on wages. Offering health insurance as a fringe benefit thus because an easy back-door way to raise wages.

More changes followed. Mike Holly at mises.org explains how “In 1945, buyer monopolization begun after the McCarran-Ferguson Act led by the Roosevelt Administration exempted the business of medical insurance from most federal regulation, including antitrust laws.”

By the 1950s, federal law began to favor not just any health insurance, but specifically group health insurance.

Holly continues: “In 1951, employers started to become the dominant third-party insurance buyer during the Truman Administration after the Internal Revenue Service declared group premiums tax-deductible.”

The Individual market then became even more irrelevant in the 1960s with the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, which were types of group coverage themselves. This drive up prices for all types of insurance as it subsidized demand.

By 2013, before Obamacare took effect, 31 percent of the population was covered by Medicare or Medicaid. An additional 50 percent was covered by employer-based insurance. Before Obamacare started requiring that the uninsured purchase insurance through the independent market, only four percent of the American population was getting insurance through non-group health insurance. Since then, with Obamacare’s mandated coverage, the market has increased to only seven percent, as of 2016.

In recent decades, state governments have also been adding numerous mandates to health insurance coverage that required certain types of medical care, such as mental health care and prenatal care, be included. This drove up costs and prices for everyone, but it especially impacted the non-group market where costs and risks were not spread out among members of a large group. With the introduction of Obamacare, these mandates became even more numerous, and costs in the individual market rose even more.

This is where the Trump executive order comes in. It allows small employers, professional associations, and presumably other small groups to enter into AHPs that would offer similar advantages as group plans.

The order in many ways reflects the provisions of 2003 legislation that never passed, but was reintroduced earlier this year. Back in March, NPR noted the basics of the legislation, which appear to apply to Trump’s order as well:

Plans from associations could offer stripped down coverage and would have more latitude in setting premiums than regular plans in the small-group market. They could operate in multiple states and generally avoid state-mandated benefits and other state insurance rules.

Under the Republican bill, association health plans still couldn’t discriminate against individuals based on their health, but they could charge higher premiums to companies with sicker workers.

The idea behind the executive order here, however, is that even when older, sicker consumers join an AHP, firms would compete to keep costs down while increasing coverage or keeping it stable. This, after all, is what already often happens in employer-based group coverage — even in spite of crippling government regulation.

Critics of the plan assume that markets will remain static, and, unlike markets in food, transportation, and clothing — which have declined as household expenses for middle- and low-income households — healthcare prices will become increasingly unaffordable even for the middle class. But even in housing, where overall prices have increased, square footage per unit has increased in both multifamily and singlefamily units. In other words, healthcare seems to be the only industry where it can be assumed that quality (i.e., coverage) will go down as prices increase.

Experience would suggest that this only happens in the presence of ongoing government intervention. As we’re noted many times here at mises.org, the story of healthcare in the United States is one of rapidly increasing government subsidy of healthcare and over ever-increasing regulation. Both work to increase prices.

Moreover, in spite of the tiny baby steps made toward de-regulation by the Trump executive order, it’s unlikely that this move will be accompanied by any significant changes in other regulations that might pave the way for more competition and more production on the part of service providers.  Policymakers will continue to cripple markets with anti-competitive regulations that limit healthcare facilities, and healthcare personnel. Then, when markets fail to overcome these barriers, we’ll declare “market failure” and demand even more regulations, and more subsidies.

Why AHPs Were Undercapitalized When Tried

Critics of the new executive order also claim that in the 1980s — when AHPs were more easily formed under the federal law of the time — many providers were undercapitalized, provided poor service, and were prone to overpromising what they could deliver.

However, if we want real insight into why AHPs in the past have been undercapitalized  — or lacking the robustness of the employer-based market — we need look no further than the federal government to understand why.

After decades of controls on interstate purchases, and in the wake of a tax code that favors employer-based insurance, who can be surprised that the markets for other group plans and the individual market are now under-developed? Essentially, health insurance markets have lost decades of innovation, competition, and capitalization outside the employer group market thanks to federal law.

Now we’re being told that allowing people to buy group insurance outside the usual straitjacket of federal policy is unworkable. It’s not unworkable, of course, it’s just a market that has been all but destroyed by government intervention.

About the author:
*Ryan McMaken (@ryanmcmaken) is the editor of Mises Wire and The Austrian. Send him your article submissions, but read article guidelines first. Ryan has degrees in economics and political science from the University of Colorado, and was the economist for the Colorado Division of Housing from 2009 to 2014. He is the author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.

Source:
This article was published by the MISES Institute

Growing numbers of refugees cross multiple borders, and nations tighten rules to separate those who pursue economic versus political security.

By Will Hickey*

The European Union is going out of its way to distinguish asylum seekers from economic migrants even though institutional economists, who focus on how systems change behavior, have long derided attempts to handle politics and economics as exclusively discrete. At the core, the issue may seem dichotomous, promoting freedom versus advancement, but appearances are deceiving.

Consider Germany’s plan to expel several thousand Balkan economic refugees to accommodate hundreds of thousands of newly arriving asylum seekers from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq besieging its borders and putting significant pressure on EU countries in the Schengen agreement zone. Some EU nations are building fences and fortifying borders with fellow EU members. Many analysts point to Angela Merkel’s liberal policies on immigration as a reason for her party losing seats in parliament and a far-right party doing so well.

The economy and politics are inextricably intertwined: All political problems are rooted in economic ones and vice versa, argued Douglas North, who received the Nobel Prize in Economics for his theory on “natural state” of human existence. He suggested that much of the world remains defined by personal transactions and favoritism whereby forming and enforcing agreements are limited to an exclusive group of elites. If there is no political gain-sharing or democratic channels among groups in a given society, the theory suggests, those excluded rebel and seek greener pastures elsewhere as economic necessity.

The theory describes Syria today, with civil war and no economic advancement. North argues that a sustainable and open society requires enfranchisement and empowerment of all competing groups. Only a handful of countries, mostly in Scandinavia and Northern Europe, have reached this level of cognizance. The real issues of the Balkans, for example, and transitory migrants are of integration and identity. A legacy of communism forced cultural homogeneity, and historically, the dividing line of Christian/Islamic identity has always been contentious there. Modern secularist mandates cannot neatly solve such conflicts.

The dilemma of political refugees versus economic migrants is not new, and Germany is not alone in struggling to determine the worthiest or neediest migrants – which persons or families deserve asylum and which do not. Harvard’s Michael Teitelbaum’s 1980 prediction that immigrants and refugees would become among the most troubling issues was prescient. Teitelbaum has researched international migration for decades and argues that economics is a strong driver for why people migrate and become refugees.

Teitelbaum and North each understood that economics and politics cannot be cleanly separated. There are gray areas, often complicated by contradictory policies, such as skilled and family-based migration. Multiple examples can be found within the context of recent mass migrations – the Rohingya fleeing Myanmar, Syrians fleeing civil war, Tamils fleeing political retribution in Sri Lanka, Guatemalans fleeing gang and drug violence as well as North Koreans and South Sudanese fleeing brutal political oppression.

Malcolm Turnbull, the prime minister of Australia, has proclaimed that no one arriving by boat should be allowed to permanently settle in that country. Besides Australia’s controversial policy of placing illegal migrants in third countries such as Papua New Guinea and Cambodia for payment, he posited questions, ones that should not be immediately dismissed as political pandering: If migration is really about refugee status, then shouldn’t political obligations stop at the first border? Wouldn’t crossing subsequent borders hence render the political asylum process moot?

Countries can be both embarkation and host countries depending on the reasons for migration, as well as transit countries and destination countries, depending on anticipated welcome, support and affinity.

By Thomas J. Shattuck*

(FPRI) — On Wednesday, October 18, President Xi Jinping of China opened the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) 19^th Party Congress with 3+ hours-long speech. The title of his report was “Secure a decisive victory in building a moderately prosperous society in all respects and strive for the great success of socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era.”

Xi covered many topics from military, China’s foreign policy, pollution, among other things, but the focus of this article will be on what Xi regarding Taiwan.

On particular thing that observers were keeping an eye on was how Xi would address the “Taiwan question.” Would he use stricter language in dealing with Taiwan? Would he further chastise President Tsai Ing-wen? Would he focus on Taiwan, or perhaps the pressing issue of North Korea or China’s relationship with Donald Trump?

Taiwan, and the world, would have to wait until about two and a half hours into Xi’s speech to find out.

Xi’s Taiwan section hit many familiar notes. This section, which came immediately after Hong Kong and Macao, began by further pressing Tsai (though she was not explicitly mentioned) to accept the 1992 Consensus, which states “there is only one China with each side of the Strait defining the term as it sees fit.” China views the 1992 Consensus as the “One China Principle.”

The 1992 Consensus embodies the one-China principle and defines the fundamental nature of cross-Straits relations. Recognize the historical fact of the 1992 Consensus and that the two sides both belong to one China, and then our two sides can conduct dialogue to address through discussion the concerns of the people of both sides, and no political party or group in Taiwan will have any difficulty conducting exchanges with the mainland.

The implication here is that since Tsai has not accepted the 1992 Consensus, Taiwan and China cannot have any sort of relations or contact. In fact, China cut off all official forms of communication with Taiwan after Tsai took office in May 2016 for failing this test. While Tsai has not explicitly accepted the 1992 Consensus in such terms—and probably never will—she has accepted the status quo forged under this agreement. In her inaugural address, Tsai specifically said,

We will also work to maintain the existing mechanisms for dialogue and communication across the Taiwan Strait. In 1992, the two institutions representing each side across the Strait (SEF & ARATS), through communication and negotiations, arrived at various joint acknowledgements and understandings. It was done in a spirit of mutual understanding and a political attitude of seeking common ground while setting aside differences. I respect this historical fact. Since 1992, over twenty years of interactions and negotiations across the Strait have enabled and accumulated outcomes which both sides must collectively cherish and sustain; and it is based on such existing realities and political foundations that the stable and peaceful development of the cross-Strait relationship must be continuously promoted.

Accepting it as “historic fact” and respecting the stability that this “agreement” brought has not appeased China. As a result, relations have been at their lowest point in years. The final part of this paragraph is a backhanded way of referring to Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), and it lays all of the blame on the DPP for the current poor state of cross-Strait relations.

Nothing in the above quote is particularly new in how Xi has addressed or treated Taiwan since May 2016. It is standard boiler-plate language about the 1992 Consensus and how Taiwan is to blame for the current state of cross-Strait relations.

Next, Xi moved on to the benefits that Taiwan and its people would receive after Tsai bends to Xi’s will as well as what would happen after unification:

We are ready to share development opportunities on the mainland with our Taiwan compatriots first. We will ensure that over time, people from Taiwan will enjoy the same treatment as local people when they pursue their studies, start businesses, seek jobs, or live on the mainland, thus improving the wellbeing of Taiwan compatriots. People from both sides are encouraged to work together to promote Chinese culture and forge closer bonds between them.

Here, Xi is playing hardball with Taiwan and the fact that Taiwan is heavily dependent on access to the Mainland economy. Everything that Xi mentioned in the above quote Taiwanese people can already do. Granted, some of these have become harder since Tsai took office making this part of his speech a veiled threat of removal of access to these areas. Taiwanese people can still study in China; in 2015, over 10,000 Taiwanese students were studying at universities on the Mainland. Also, there is estimated to be over one million Taiwanese people living and working in China. Yes, these people do not have the same and equal rights as Chinese citizens (neither do American citizens), but they are able to do almost anything that they desire in China despite the current state of cross-Strait relations. The only way to achieve unfettered access would be unification, but that is not likely to happen: only 22.4% of the population supports unification and over 70% believe that Taiwan is a sovereign nation.

The final part of Xi’s Taiwan section has caused the most controversy for its seemingly aggressive attitude. Xi implicitly threatens to invade Taiwan—or any “Chinese territory”—that tries to separate itself from the People’s Republic:

We stand firm in safeguarding the nation’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and will never allow the historical tragedy of national division to repeat itself. We have the resolve, confidence and ability to defeat separatist attempts for ‘Taiwan independence’ in any form. We will never allow anyone, any organization, or any political party, at any time or in any form, to separate any part of Chinese territory from China.

While the above quote sounds like an ominous threat of invasion—and there are even reports that China has a secret plan to invade Taiwan by 2020—what Xi said is nothing new or groundbreaking. In 2005, the CCP enacted the Anti-Secession Law which says that China would use force to prevent Taiwan from achieving independence/seceding from China. Article 8 of the law states,

In the event that the ‘Taiwan independence’ secessionist forces should act under any name or by any means to cause the fact of Taiwan’s secession from China, or that major incidents entailing Taiwan’s secession from China should occur, or that possibilities for a peaceful reunification should be completely exhausted, the state shall employ non-peaceful means and other necessary measures to protect China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

The issue goes even further back than the 2005 law. A 1993 Chinese White Paper addressed the issue of Taiwan’s independence and discussed how reunification would happen. Another White Paper from 2000 did not rule out the use of force to achieve reunification. How is what Xi said any different? He just reiterated what is already law. He did not offer any new take on the issue of Taiwanese independence and the Chinese use of force to prevent it from happening.

Overall, Xi’s opening speech was an exercise in chest thumping and a minor sabre rattling over Taiwan. He offered both a carrot and stick to Taiwan: if Taiwan joins China, its people will receive great benefits; if Tsai bows to pressure and uses PRC-approved language about the 1992 Consensus, then we can talk again; but if Taiwan tries to declare independence, China will respond with force. It’s the same language used in past speeches, but with some extra bluster and the world’s attention. Instead of overplaying the words in Xi’s speech—which is supposed to set the tone for the rest of the week—observers should pay close attention to whether or not any changes in actual policies regarding Taiwan are made over the course of the week. Look out for something new, not just a restatement of what we already know.

About the author:
*Thomas J. Shattuck is the Editor of Geopoliticus: The FPRI Blog and a Research Associate at FPRI

Source:
This article was published at FPRI.

Minister of Foreign Affairs Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani said that 90% of Qatar’s exports head to Asia, stressing the importance of the Asian market to the State of Qatar.

In an interview with the American TV Channel “CNBC”, the Foreign Minister said that ASEAN countries are 50% of Qatar’s market, so there is a continuous dialogue with the Asian countries which with Qatar is hoping to improve and develop the relationship and use the potentials in this relationship.

As a result of this relationship, the Foreign Minister noted dramatically increased investments in the last few years in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, China. So Qatar investments are widespread in this region in Asia which represents a very high importance for Qatar.

Al-Thani said that Singapore has a special status with Qatar because of the high level of joint committee between the two countries. There has been a cooperation for 12 years, where more than 46 enterprises have been realized out of this joint committee, including two of the major environmental projects in Qatar which were conducted as a result for this committee. So there is a lot of progress and a lot of work between Qatar and the Asia region, Southeast Asia especially.

On the other hand, Al-Thani said that since the beginning of the Gulf crisis, the State of Qatar has dealt with high morals and will never seek to pressure any country, on the contrary, Saudi and the blockading countries were trying to exercise whatever kind of leverage they have on the countries especially in Africa and some countries of Southeast Asia, which Qatar sees as a blackmailing for nations and trying to impose something on their sovereignty, which it does not accept.

The countries which decided to join their club without any support for the arguments, this is something up to them but it really means that those countries are not having their full control over their decision making process. No country can impose any demands or anything on another sovereign nation, so they have their own assessment and they have to decide whether Qatar is a country which is a reliable partner that they can work with, or Qatar is a country which is a source of disturbance for them, HE the Foreign Minister added.

Regarding the continuous statements and allegations from the Saudis and from the other blockading nations toward Qatar which has never been proven, Al-Thani said, “this is something which is all of us are against. This is something which is related to the collective security of our region, which is a priority for Qatar, as it’s priority for them,” noting that just throwing those allegations without even any evidence, is just showing inconsistency in their behavior and that they do not want to solve this issue.

“They started the entire issue, the entire crisis with a cyber-attack. This cyber-attack was to create a foundation for the crisis. So if there was a real justification for this crisis they wouldn’t need to attack our state news agency, to put a fabricated statement attributed to the HH the Emir of Qatar in order to launch this campaign. So we are still calling them if you have any allegations, if you have anything any concerns need to be addressed by Qatar we are willing to sit on the table. Show us your concerns if there is something which needs measures being taken, it should be taken by Qatar and by other countries because it’s a collective concern for everyone,” the Foreign Minister added.

Answering a question about Saudi denial that a cyber-attack was behind this issue, Al-Thani said: “their denial actually is not true because we were just in Riyadh two days before the cyber-attack. Why none of them has raised any concern? Before that even a few days we were also in Riyadh at the GCC Ministerial Council. They never raised any concern about any issue. We were talking about regional issues. We were discussing the future of the GCC and none of them has raised any of those issues and those allegations”.

Al-Thani said that since the beginning of this crisis which is taking more than four months, everybody realizes that Qatar wants to have a solution for this, “because we see that there is no winner out of this, we have a lot of other challenges in our region, and we don’t need a further crisis to the other open war zones”.

“All our allies and friends want a solution for this crisis, including the United States, even the president of the United States was calling to bring the leaders together in order to put an end for this crisis. HH the Emir of Kuwait was leading the mediation, and he’s continuing his efforts, two days ago he was in Riyadh, but there is no result yet, which demonstrate a consistent intention from the blockading nations to continue the crisis, disrespect and bully,” the Foreign Minister added.

Answering a question on Saudi Arabia looking at ways to bring about regime change in Qatar, Al-Thani said: “we see that there are officials and government officials talking about regime change. When we see their government officials inciting people to protest against our government, so it’s about regime change. We see a country which is bringing back the Dark Ages of tribes through creating a pressure on tribes linked to other tribes inside Qatar. That means that they want to destabilize this country, and so they are not willing for a solution. They are into escalation, they are into thinking about regime change and other things. But from Qatar’s side we were always calling for dialogue, and that if there is any concern, we are going to address”.

Al-Thani added, “since the beginning of the crisis and based on our assessment we have seen that there were some possibilities for military activity, whether its invasion or intervention or maybe by different means. Our allies in the United States as well as the Emir of Kuwait have been active from the beginning, trying to calm down the situation. Everybody worked collectively in order to deescalate the situation and to resort to dialogue rather than going for escalation. The way they are dealing with the entire matter is just showing irresponsibility to the region and to regional security”.

Al-Thani underlined that the United States is a reliable ally and has very strong relations with Qatar, noting that the State hosts more than 11,000 US soldiers, in addition to the largest US base in the Middle East, which make it necessary for the United States and Qatar to work together to ensure stability in the region, and make it necessary for both sides to be reliable allies to each others.

Asked if he thinks the US president and the secretary of state are aligned on the matter, Al-Thani said that since the beginning of the crisis the US president has called for the need to deal with situation by dialogue and spoke on this matter with HH the Emir, as well as the different government agencies. The Defense Department and the State Department were always advocate for the solution of dialogue.

“So we didn’t see a mixed message. This is something not relevant to us. What is really concern us is the overall US policy toward this crisis, which has been consistent from the beginning of the crisis to put an end to it and to solve it by dialogue,” the Foreign Minister noted.

Al-Thani said that the US president was very much into the situation and he was speaking very seriously about that. He is very confident that he could help bring about a resolution very soon in the coming days, weeks even. He doesn’t want to see this conflict prolonging, but from the other hand there is no positive response from the blockading nations. “We are hopeful that things will reach to a solution and we will come to dialogue. And also we are confident that the US can play a strong role and President Trump can play a positive role in this and in bringing all the leaders together”.

Al-Thani said that the Gulf crisis affected the battle against ISIS, noting that 90% of food and medicine supply is coming through the land border and part of those supplies go to the military base.

“Our airspace was blocked. The Qatari airplanes which provide logistic support for the military are not allowed to fly over their skies except Iran. Also, our officers who were participating in the coalition activity and the Fifth Fleet have been expelled. So there are a lot of things which undermine the global efforts in countering the ISIS because of this crisis and the blockade and the measures imposed on Qatar,” he added.

Talking about the impact of the US military’s recent announcement that it’s going to suspend some drills with Gulf allies, and may be going to put a freeze on some weapon sales and arms sales to Gulf allies, and if that would that be enough to bring the parties to the table to talk, the Foreign Minister said: “we are hopeful that they don’t need to do all those measures to bring the parties to the table. We hope that wisdom will prevail”.

“But what we have seen for the last four months a consistent systematic behavior of disrespect and bullying. They do whatever they want despite the demands. We hope that at the end they will come to dialogue and we hope that they come at the right time. They just keep pushing it away in order to make Qatar weaker, but Qatar became much stronger than it was before the blockade,” the Foreign Minister added.

Asked if the reason that Saudi Arabia may not be coming to table is Qatar’s relations with Iran, Al-Thani underlined that this accusation is entirely baseless, noting that Qatar has differences in policies with Iran, but not with Iran as a state. However, the Gulf countries have agreed on a common policy toward Iran. The policy stipulates that Iran does not export its revolutionary ideology or harm security. This policy is clear and Qatar is committed to it, and its policy towards Iran itself has not changed because of the crisis.

Al-Thani said that they were trying to create just a justification to legitimize their blockade. “Our restoration to our diplomatic relations with Iran doesn’t mean that Qatar change its policy because we will go back to the reason, the real reason of our withdrawal of our ambassador was just a gesture of solidarity with the Saudis after the attack on their diplomatic mission, which is not exist anymore because we cannot show solidarity to a country which blockaded our people. We are neighbors with Iran. We have borders together. We are sharing a gas field together. We have to overcome and bridge the gaps in our differences by dialogue. We cannot increase the tension in the region. We have to resort to dialogue,” the Foreign Minister underlined.

Meanwhile, Al-Thani added: “there is absolutely no support to Iran. Qatar and Iran have very consistent relationship since long time. We have differences, we are opponents in what’s happening in Syria. We are opponents in what’s happening in Yemen, we are opponents in what’s happening in their policies in Iraq. We are adversaries in those different political battles, we were and still first voice against Bashar al Assad regime. So there is nothing being changed about our policy”.

“The US has its own policy towards Iran and it is thousands of miles away from Iran, but we are neighbors. Now after this blockade, if we have just one pathway from the north toward Iran and the three other sides east west and south are blocked, how can I assure the food supply for my country, how can I assure medicine supply for my country. And in fact the Emirates accounts for 96% of GCC bilateral trade with Iran. Qatar’s trade with Iran do not exceed more than 50 million dollars. So what kind of a special relation between Qatar and Iran?” the Foreign Minister said.

Asked about Saudi Arabia making Iran a big part of the issue, Al-Thani said that since the beginning of the crisis they have been talking about Iran. They have been talking about everything they believe that might give them legitimacy for what they did. They don’t want to appear before the Western country that they did this out of their desire to hijack the country’s policies and keep it under its guardianship, which is totally unacceptable.

On the agenda for his upcoming trip to Washington, and whether he will be meeting with the US secretary of state or other members of the administration, Al-Thani said that he will be following up on the last meeting which took place in September when was accompanying HH the Emir in his meeting with the US President, noting that he will be meeting some of the US officials as well as some of the congressmen and senators to follow up on matter.

The U.S. and Israel both threaten the prospect of reconciliation between rival Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah, Hamas Gaza chief Yahya al-Sinwar said Thursday.

Addressing Palestinian youth in Gaza City, al-Sinwar said he expected Gaza’s political situation “to become even more difficult” in light of recent statements emanating from Israeli officials and from U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East Jason Greenblatt.

“If [inter-Palestinian] reconciliation is thwarted, this will in turn threaten the Palestinian national project,” he said.

Earlier Thursday, Greenblatt had called on Hamas to abandon its policy of armed resistance to Israel — and officially recognize the self-proclaimed Jewish state — within the context of a sought-for Palestinian unity government.

“Any Palestinian government must unambiguously and explicitly commit to non-violence, recognize the State of Israel, accept previous agreements and obligations between the parties — including to disarm terrorists — and commit to peaceful negotiations,” Greenblatt said in a statement.

“If Hamas is to play any role in a Palestinian government, it must accept these basic requirements,” he added.

Responding to Greenblatt’s assertions, al-Sinwar said: “No one can force us [to recognize Israel]. This is an issue that is beyond the discussion phase.”

He went on to stress Hamas’s desire to “end the era of Palestinian division and spare no effort to achieve reconciliation” with Fatah.

Al-Sinwar also said Hamas was committed to implementing all the terms of a reconciliation deal signed last week in Cairo.

On October 12, Hamas and Fatah signed a landmark reconciliation agreement in the Egyptian capital in hopes of ending a bitter, decade-long rivalry that has polarized the Palestinian body politic.

Al-Sinwar also said Hamas would provide Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (who also heads Fatah and the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority) in the event that the latter visited Gaza.

On Tuesday, the Israeli government said it would not resume peace talks with the PA — suspended since 2014 — until several demands had been met.

These included the disarming of Hamas and the return of the Gaza Strip to the PA’s control after 10 years of Hamas rule.

On Israeli hostages allegedly held by Hamas, al-Sinwar said the group was ready to hammer out a prisoner swap.

In early April, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s armed wing, announced it was holding four Israeli soldiers. The group did not say whether they were dead or alive.

“We are ready to cut a deal that would also include the release of the leaders of several Palestinian factions currently held by Israel,” he said.

On Hamas’s relations with Iran — another source of distress for Israel — al-Sinwar said the group planned to maintain close ties with Tehran, with which Hamas recently reconciled after a years-long falling-out over Syria.

“Iran has been the biggest benefactor of the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades,” he added.

The PA-run West Bank and the Hamas-run Gaza Strip have remained politically divided since 2007, when Hamas wrested control of the strip from the Fatah-led PA.

The schism ended a short-lived unity government set up after Hamas swept democratically-held Palestinian legislative polls in early 2006.

Original source

By Ben Flanagan

Qatar issued a false statement about a visit by British politicians to Doha, in which it was claimed an official committee called for the lifting of the blockade on the Gulf state, the UK Parliament has told Arab News.

The state-run Qatar News Agency (QNA) in September claimed that the “British Parliamentary Inquiry Committee” had been “charged by the British Parliament to investigate the violations of the siege imposed on the State of Qatar.”

But no committee of that name exists, and the UK Parliament made no order for such a visit, it was confirmed this week.

The QNA report — which also referenced a non-existent MP called “J. Morse” — was picked up by several Qatar-based media outlets. Some claimed that the group of politicians had called for the blockade on Qatar to be lifted.

The UK Parliament confirmed that a group of British politicians visited Qatar in September, but denied that it was an official visit.

“A number of parliamentarians visited Qatar in partnership with the Arab Organization for Human Rights in the UK,” a parliamentary spokesperson told Arab News.

“This was done in their personal capacity, and not as part of an official committee of the UK Parliament. The rules concerning registration of foreign travel for MPs and peers are set out in the relevant codes of conduct.”

The delegation to Qatar in September included Grahame Morris MP, Lord Nazir Ahmed, Lord Kilclooney and Lord Qurban Hussain. All refused to comment on the nature or funding of the trip, despite repeated requests by Arab News.

The three members of the House of Lords all declared the visit in the parliamentary register of interests, saying that the travel and accommodation costs were met by the Arab Organization for Human Rights in UK. Lord Kilclooney and Lord Qurban Hussain declared it as a “cross-party parliamentary visit.”

Records for the Arab Organization for Human Rights lodged at Companies House in the UK show that it is a non-trading company. The organization did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The freelance journalist Bill Law also accompanied the group trip to Qatar, and was pictured, with a wide smile on his face, in group photographs with the politicians.

Law later filed a report for the BBC radio show “From Our Own Correspondent,” in which he quotes Qataris who were highly critical of the Anti-Terror Quartet, including one unnamed person who claimed the action of the quartet amounted to “terrorism.”

A BBC spokesperson stood by the report. “This first person piece from Qatar looks at the impact the current situation is having on the mood of the country, families, as well as at the economic upset. We’re satisfied the piece is an impartial piece of journalism,” the spokesperson told Arab News.

The Anti-Terror Quartet — Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and Bahrain — imposed a blockade in June over allegations that Qatar supports extremist groups. Doha denies the charges.

By Abdulrahman Al-Rashed*

The president of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), Masoud Barzani, tried to realize his people’s long-held dream of an independent state, despite predictions of failure. So why did he do it?

Had he not tried, he may have been accused of failing his people, especially since he assumed the task of working with Iraq’s government militarily and politically in the past few years, and cooperating with the international community to fight terrorist organizations, during which Kurdish blood was spilled.

But Barzani’s referendum, which would guarantee a vote in favor of independence, was ill-conceived because no states in the region were prepared to support him due to their fears of separatism within their own borders. The same applies to secessionist plans in southern Yemen and elsewhere in the region. A majority vote is not enough to accomplish independence; international recognition of the referendum result is much more important.

That is why Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran, despite their differences, opposed Kurdish secession, or more diplomatically, announced their support for Iraq’s unity. These regional powers were supported by international ones.

There was an important message in opposing Kurdish secession: No local or regional power is allowed to change internal situations. This message was not only meant for the Kurds, but also for all Iranian-supported groups in Iraq, and any other group for that matter. It was also directed at all regional states that are trying to exploit the chaos of war in order to impose their own little republics.

Moreover, it seems that the rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iraq was accelerated in order to make an important correction in the foreign policy toward these areas which need rapprochement rather than negligence.

Although we are against dividing Iraq for the benefit of any group, this does not mean staying silent about attempts to weaken the Kurdish component, which is very important for Iraqi and regional balances.

It should also not be assumed that we will accept weakening Barzani’s authority, as he is a prominent leader in Iraq and the region. Some Kurdish powers are trying to exploit the current crisis against Barzani and his authority. Ankara, Tehran and Baghdad are also trying to weaken him by imposing sanctions on Iraqi Kurdistan and making military threats.

The Kurds made a mistake by holding the referendum and using its result to legitimize secession. Nevertheless, the crisis should be tackled not by confrontation and escalation, but by reconciliation between Irbil and Baghdad. Attempts by some Iraqi powers to punish Kurdish leaders are not in Baghdad’s interests. Rather, they widen the gap between the two sides.

Let us remember that the Kurdish stance in Baghdad, which supported all other Iraqi parties, contributed to ending the rule of Nouri Al-Maliki when he refused to resign and tried to remain as prime minister with unlimited authority for life. The Kurds are vital for the balance of power in Iraq’s political system, which was built during the US occupation of the country.

Exploiting the crisis to weaken the Kurds and the KRG is an Iranian project that suits militias such as the Popular Mobilization Units which, despite raising the Iraqi flag, competes with the Iraqi Army — the country’s legitimate force — and threatens its unity.

In order to stop secessionist tendencies and threats to marginalize the authorities in Baghdad, the promises and commitments that formed modern Iraq and its constitution should be implemented. The Iraqi state is for all Iraqis, not just for the majority or the better-armed party, and its authority is stated in the constitution.

• Abdulrahman Al-Rashed is a veteran columnist. He is the former general manager of Al Arabiya News Channel, and former editor in chief of Asharq Al-Awsat, where this article is also published.

Socialism a century ago seemed to be the wave of the future. There were various schools of socialism, but the common ideal was to guarantee support for basic needs, and for state ownership to free society from landlords, predatory banking and monopolies. In the West these hopes are now much further away than they seemed in 1917. Land and natural resources, basic infrastructure monopolies, health care and pensions have been increasingly privatized and financialized.

Instead of Germany and other advanced industrial nations leading the way as expected, Russia’s October 1917 Revolution made the greatest leap. But the failures of Stalinism became an argument against Marxism – guilt-by-association with Soviet bureaucracy. European parties calling themselves socialist or “labour” since the 1980s have supported neoliberal policies that are the opposite of socialist policy. Russia itself has chosen neoliberalism.

Few socialist parties or theorists have dealt with the rise of the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector that now accounts for most increase in wealth. Instead of evolving into socialism, Western capitalism is being overcome by predatory finance and rent extraction imposing debt deflation and austerity on industry as well as on labor.

Failure of Western economies to recover from the 2008 crisis is leading to a revival of Marxist advocacy. The alternative to socialist reform is stagnation and a relapse into neofeudal financial and monopoly privileges.

Socialism flowered in the 19^th century as a program to reform capitalism by raising labor’s status and living standards, with a widening range of public services and subsidies to make economies more efficient. Reformers hoped to promote this evolution by extending voting rights to the working population at large.

Ricardo’s discussion of land rent led early industrial capitalists to oppose Europe’s hereditary landlord class. But despite democratic political reform, the world has un-taxed land rent and is still grappling with the problem of how to keep housing affordable instead of siphoning off rent to a landlord class – more recently transmuted into mortgage interest paid to banks by owners who pledge the rental value for loans. Most bank lending today is for real estate mortgages. The effect is to bid up land prices toward the point where the entire rental value is paid as interest. This threatens to be a problem for socialist China as well as for capitalist economies.

Landlords, banks and the cost of living

The classical economists sought to make their nations more competitive by keeping down the price of labor so as to undersell competitors. The main cost of living was food; today it is housing. Housing and food prices are determined not by the material costs of production, but by land rent – the rising market price for land.

In the era of the French Physiocrats, Adam Smith, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill, this land rent accrued to Europe’s hereditary landlord class. Today, the land’s rent is paid mainly to bankers – because families need credit to buy a home. Or, if they rent, their landlords use the property rent to pay interest to the banks.

The land issue was central to Russia’s October Revolution, as it was for European politics. But the discussion of land rent and taxation has lost much of the clarity (and passion) that guided the 19^th century when it dominated classical political economy, liberal reform, and indeed most early socialist politics.

In 1909/10 Britain experienced a constitutional crisis when the democratically elected House of Commons passed a land tax, only to be overridden by the House of Lords, governed by the old aristocracy. The ensuing political crisis was settled by a rule that the Lords never again could overrule a revenue bill passed by the House of Commons. But that was Britain’s last real opportunity to tax away the economic rents of landlords and natural resource owners. The liberal drive to tax the land faltered, and never again would gain serious chance of passage.

The democratization of home ownership during the 20^th century led middle-class voters to oppose property taxes – including taxes on commercial sites and natural resources. Tax policy in general has become pro-rentier and anti-labor – the regressive opposite of 19^th-century liberalism as developed by “Ricardian socialists” such as John Stuart Mill and Henry George. Today’s economic individualism has lost the early class consciousness that sought to tax economic rent and socialize banking.

The United States enacted an income tax in 1913, falling mainly on rentier income, not on the working population. Capital gains (the main source of rising wealth today) were taxed at the same rate as other income. But the vested interests campaigned to reverse this spirit, slashing capital gains taxes and making tax policy much more regressive. The result is that today, most wealth is not gained by capital investment for profits. Instead, asset-price gains have been financed by a debt-leveraged inflation of real estate, stock and bond prices.

Many middle-class families owe most of their net worth to rising prices for their homes. But by far the lion’s share of the real estate and stock market gains have accrued to just One Percent of the population. And while bank credit has enabled buyers to bid up housing prices, the price has been to siphon off more and more of labor’s income to pay mortgage loans or rents. As a result, finance today is what is has been throughout history: the main force polarizing economies between debtors and creditors.

Global oil and mining companies created flags of convenience to make themselves tax-exempt, by pretending to make all their production and distribution profits in tax-free trans-shipping havens such as Liberia and Panama (which use U.S. dollars instead of being real countries with their own currency and tax systems).

The fact that absentee-owned real estate and natural resource extraction are practically free of income taxation shows that democratic political reform has not been a sufficient guarantee of socialist success. Tax rules and public regulation have been captured by the rentiers, dashing the hopes of 19^th-century classical reformers that progressive tax policy would produce the same effect as direct public ownership of the means of production, while leaving “the market” as an individualistic alternative to government regulation or planning.

In practice, planning and resource allocation has passed to the banking and financial sector. Many observers hoped that this would evolve into state planning, or at least work in conjunction with it as in Germany. But liberal “Ricardian socialist” failed, as did German-style “state socialism” publicly financing transportation and other basic infrastructure, pensions and similar “external” costs of living and doing business that industrial employers otherwise would have to bear. Attempts at “half-way” socialism via tax and regulatory policy against monopolies and banking have faltered repeatedly. As long as major economic or political choke points are left in private hands, they will serve s springboards to subvert real reform policies. That is why Marxist policy went beyond these would-be socialist reforms.

To Marx, the historical task of capitalism was to prepare the way for socializing the means of production by clearing away feudalism’s legacy: a hereditary landlord class, predatory banking, and the monopolies that financial interests had pried away from governments. The path of least resistance was to start by socializing land and basic infrastructure. This drive to free society from economic overhead in the form of hereditary privilege and unearned income by the “idle rich” was a step toward socialist management, by minimizing rentier costs (“faux frais of production”).

Proto-socialist reform in the leading industrial nations

Marx was by no means alone in expecting a widening range of economic activity to be shifted away from the market to the public sector. State socialism (basically, state-sponsored capitalism) subsidized pensions and public health, education and other basic needs so as to save industrial enterprise from having to bear these charges.

In the United States, Simon Patten – the first economics professor at the new Wharton business school at the University of Pennsylvania – defined public infrastructure as a “fourth factor of production” alongside labor, capital and land. The aim of public investment was not to make a profit, but to lower the cost of living and doing business so as to minimize industry’s wage and infrastructure bill. Public health, pensions, roads and other transportation, education, research and development were subsidized or provided freely.[1]

The most advanced industrial economies seemed to be evolving toward some kind of socialism. Marx shared a Progressive Era optimism that expected industrial capitalism to evolve in the most logical way, by freeing economies from the landlordship and predatory banking inherited from Europe’s feudal era. That was above all the classical reform program of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and the intellectual mainstream.

But the aftermath of World War I saw the vested interests mount a Counter-Enlightenment. Banking throughout the Western world find its major market in real estate mortgage lending, natural resource extraction and monopolies – the Anglo-American model, not that of German industrial banking that had seemed to be capitalism’s financial future in the late 19^th century.

Since 1980 the Western nations have reversed early optimistic hopes to reform market economies. Instead of the classical dream of taxing away the land rent that had supported Europe’s hereditary landed aristocracies, commercial real estate has been made virtually exempt from income taxation. Absentee owners avoid tax by a combination of tax-deductibility for interest payments (as if it is a necessary business expense) and fictitious over-depreciation tax credits that pretend that buildings and properties are losing value even when market prices for their land are soaring.

These tax breaks have made real estate the largest bank customers. The effect has been to financialize property rents into interest payments. Likewise in the industrial sphere, regulatory capture by lobbyists for the major monopolies has disabled public attempts to keep prices in line with the cost of production and prevent fraud by breaking up or regulating monopolies. These too have become major bank clients.

The beginning and end of Russian socialism

Most Marxists expected socialism to emerge first in Germany as the most advanced capitalist economy. After its October 1917 Revolution, Russia seemed to jump ahead, the first nation to free itself from rent and interest charges inherited from feudalism. By taking land, industry and finance into state control, Soviet Russia’s October Revolution created an economy without private landlords and bankers. Russian urban planning did not take account of the natural rent-of-location, nor did it charge for the use of money created by the state bank. The state bank created money and credit, so there was no need to rely on a wealthy financial class. And as property owner, the state did not seek to charge land rent or monopoly rent.

By freeing society from the post-feudal rentier class of landlords, bankers and predatory finance, the Soviet regime was much more than a bourgeois revolution. The Revolution’s early leaders sought to free wage labor from exploitation by taking industry into the public domain. State companies provided labor with free lunches, education, sports and leisure activity, and modest housing.

Agricultural land tenure was a problem. Given its centralized marketing role, the state could have reallocated land to build up a rural peasantry and helped it invest in modernization. The state could have manipulated crop prices to siphon off agricultural gains, much like Cargill does in the United States. Instead, Stalin’s collectivization program waged a war against the kulaks. This political shock led to famine. It was a steep price to pay for avoiding rent was paid to a landlord class or peasantry.

Marx had said nothing about the military dimension of the transition from progressive industrial capitalism to socialism. But Russia’s Revolution – like that of China three decades later – showed that the attempt to create a socialist economy had a military dimension that absorbed the lion’s share of the economic surplus. Military aggression by a half dozen leading capitalist nations seeking to overthrow the Bolshevik government obliged Russia to adopt War Communism. For over half a century the Soviet Union devoted most of capital to military investment, not provide sufficient housing or consumer goods for its population beyond spreading literacy, education and public health.

Despite this military overhead, the fact that the Soviet Union was free of a rentier class of financiers and absentee landlords should have made the Soviet Union the world’s most competitive low-cost economy in theory. In 1945 the United States certainly feared the efficiency of socialist planning. Its diplomats opposed Soviet membership on the ground that state enterprise and pricing would enable such economies to undersell capitalist countries.[2] So socialist countries were kept out of the IMF, World Bank and the planned World Trade Organization, explicitly on the ground that they were free of land rent, natural resource rent, monopoly rent and financial charges.

Capitalist economies are now privatizing and financializing their basic needs and infrastructure. Every activity is being forced into “the market,” at prices that need to cover not only the technological costs of production but also interest, ancillary financial fees and pension set-asides. The cost of living and doing business is further privatized as financial interests pry roads, health care, water, communications and other public utilities away from the public sector, while driving housing and commercial real estate deeply into debt.

The Cold War has shown that capitalist countries plan to continue fighting socialist economies, forcing them to militarize in self-defense. The resulting oppressive military overhead is then blamed on socialist bureaucracy and inefficiency.

The collapse of Russian Stalinism

Russia’s Revolution ended after 74 years, leaving the Soviet Union so dispirited that it ended in collapse. The contrast between the low living standards of Russian consumers and what seemed to be Western success became increasingly pronounced. In contrast to China’s housing construction policy, the Soviet regime insisted that families double up. Clothing and other consumer goods had only drab designs, needlessly suppressing variety. To cap matters, public opposition to Russia’s military personnel losses in Afghanistan caused popular resentment.

When the Soviet Union dissolved itself in 1991, its leaders took neoliberal advice from its major adversary, the United States, in hope that this would set it on a capitalist road to prosperity. But turning its economies into viable industrial powers was the last thing U.S. advisors wanted to teach Russia.[3] Their aim was to turn it and its former satellites into raw-materials colonies of Wall Street, the City of London and Frankfurt – victims of capitalism, not rival producers.

Russia has gone to the furthest anti-socialist extreme by adopting a flat tax that fails to distinguish wages and profits of labor and capital from unearned rental income. By also having to pay a value-added tax (VAT) on consumer goods (with no tax on trading in financial assets), labor is taxed much higher than the wealthy.

Most Western “wealth creation” is achieved by debt-leveraged price increases for real estate, stocks and bonds, and by privatizing the public domain. The latter process has gained momentum since the early 1980s in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain and Ronald Reagan’s America, followed by Third World countries acting under World Bank tutelage. The pretense is that privatization will maximize technological efficiency and prosperity for the economy as a whole.

Following this advice, Russian leaders agreed that the major sources of economic rent – natural resource wealth, real estate and state companies – should be transferred to private owners (often to themselves and associated insiders). The “magic of the marketplace” was supposed to lead the new owners to make the economy more efficient as a byproduct of making money in the quickest way possible.

Each Russian worker got a “voucher” worth about $25. Most were sold off simply to obtain money to buy food and other needs as many companies stopped paying wages. Russia had wiped out domestic savings with hyperinflation after 1991.

It should not be surprising that banks became the economy’s main control centers, as in the West’s bubble economies. Instead of the promised prosperity, a new class of billionaires was endowed, headed by the notorious Seven Bankers who appropriated the formerly state-owned oil and gas, nickel and platinum, electricity and aluminum production, as well as real estate, electric utilities and other public enterprises. It was the largest giveaway in modern history. The Soviet nomenklatura became the new lords in outright seizure that Marx would have characterized as “primitive accumulation.”

The American advisors knew the obvious: Russian savings had been wiped out by the polst-1991 hyperinflation, so the new owners could only cash out by selling shares to Western buyers. The kleptocrats cashed out as expected, by dumping their shares to foreign investors so quickly at such giveaway prices that Russia’s stock market became the world’s top performer for Western investors in 1994-96.

The Russian oligarchs kept most of their sales proceeds abroad in British and other banks, beyond the reach of Russian authorities to recapture. Much was spent on London real estate, sports teams and luxury estates in the world’s flight-capital havens. Almost none was invested in Russian industry. Wage arrears often mounted up half a year behind. Living standards shrank, along with the population as birth rates plunged throughout the former Soviet economies. Skilled labor emigrated.

The basic neoliberal idea of prosperity is financial gain based on turning rent extraction into a flow of interest payments by buyers-on-credit. This policy favors financial engineering over industrial investment, reversing the Progressive Era’s industrial capitalism that Marx anticipated would be a transition stage leading to socialism. Russia adopted the West’s anti-socialist rollback toward neofeudalism.

Russian officials failed to understand the State Theory of money that is the basis of Modern Monetary Theory: States can create their own money, giving it value by accepting it in payment of taxes. The Soviet government financed its economy for seventy years without any need to back the ruble with foreign exchange. But Russia’s central bank was persuaded that “sound money” required it to back its domestic ruble currency with U.S. Treasury bonds in order to prevent inflation. Russian leaders did not realize that dollars or other foreign currencies were only needed to finance balance-of-payments deficits, not domestic spending except as this money was spent on imports.

Russia joined the dollar standard. Buying Treasury bonds meant lending to the U.S. Government. The central bank bought U.S. Treasury securities to back its domestic currency. These purchases helped finance Cold War escalation in countries around Russia. Russia paid 100% annual interest in the mid-1990s, creating a bonanza for U.S. investors. On balance, this neoliberal policy lay Russia’s economy open to looting by financial institutions seeking natural resource rent, land rent and monopoly rent for themselves. Instead of targeting such rents, Russia imposed taxes mainly on labor via a regressive flat tax – too right wing to be adopted even in the United States!

When the Soviet Union dissolved itself, its officials showed no apprehension of how quickly their economies would be de-industrialized as a result of accepting U.S. advice to privatize state enterprises, natural resources and basic infrastructure. Whatever knowledge of Marx’s analysis of capitalism had existed (perhaps in Nicolai Bukharin’s time) was long gone. It is as if no Russian official had read Volumes II and III of Marx’s Capital (or Theories of Surplus Value) where he reviewed the laws of economic rent and interest-bearing debt.

The inability of Russia, the Baltics and other post-Soviet countries to understand the FIRE sector and its financial dynamics provides an object lesson for other countries as to what to avoid. Reversing the principles of Russia’s October 1917 Revolution, the post-Soviet kleptocracy was akin to the feudal epoch’s “primitive accumulation” of the land and commons. They adopted the neoliberal business plan: to establish monopolies, first and most easily by privatizing the public infrastructure that had been built up, extracting economic rents and them paying out the resulting as interest and dividends.

This Western financial advice became a textbook example of how not to organize an economy.[4] Having rejoined the global economy free of debt in 1991, Russia’s population, companies and government quickly ran up debts as a result of its man-made disaster. Families could have been given their homes freely, just as corporate managers were given their entire companies virtually for free. But Russian managers were as anti-labor as they were greedy to grab their own assets from the public domain. Soaring housing prices quickly plagued Russian’s economy with one of the world’s highest-priced living and business costs. That prevented any thought of industrial competitiveness with the United States or Europe. What passed for Soviet Marxism lacked an understanding of how economic rents and the ensuing high labor costs affected international prices, or how debt service and capital flight affected the currency’s exchange rate.

Adversaries of socialism pronounced Marxist theory dead, as if the Soviet dissolution meant the end of Marxism. But today, less than three decades later, the leading Western economies are themselves succumbing to an overgrowth of debt and shrinking prosperity. Russia failed to recognize that just as its own economy was expiring, so was the West’s. Industrial capitalism is succumbing to a predatory finance capitalism that is leaving Western economies debt-ridden.[5] The underlying causes were clear already a century ago: unchecked financial rentiers, absentee ownership and monopolies.

The post-Soviet collapse in the 1990s was not a failure of Marxism, but of the anti-socialist ideology that is plunging Western economies under domination by the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector’s symbiosis of the three forms of rent extraction: land and natural resource rent, monopoly rent, and interest (financial rent). This is precisely the fate from which 19^th-century socialism, Marxism and even state capitalism sought to save the industrial economies.

A silver lining to the Soviet “final” stage has been to free Marxist analysis from Russian Marxology. Its focus of Soviet Marxology was not an analysis of how the capitalist nations were becoming financialized neo-rentier economies, but was mainly propagandistic, ossifying into a stereotyped identity politics appealing to labor and oppressed minorities. Today’s revival of Marxist scholarship has begun to show how the U.S.-centered global economy is entering a period of chronic austerity, debt deflation, and polarization between creditors and debtors.

Financialization and privatization are submerging capitalism in debt deflation

By 1991, when the Soviet Union’s leaders decided to take the “Western” path, the Western economies themselves were reaching a terminus. Appearances were saved by a wave of unproductive credit and debt creation to sustain the bubble economy that finally crashed in 2008.

The pitfalls of this financial dynamic were not apparent in the early years after World War II, largely because economies emerged with their private sectors free of debt. The ensuing boom endowed the middle class in the United States and other countries, but was debt financed, first for home ownership and commercial real estate, then by consumer credit to purchase of automobiles and appliances, and finally by credit-card debt just to meet living expenses.

The same debt overgrowth occurred in the industrial sector, where bank and bondholder credit since the 1980s has been increasingly for corporate takeovers and raiding, stock buybacks and even to pay dividends. Industry has become a vehicle for financial engineering to increase stock prices and strip assets, not to increase the means of production. The result is that capitalism has fallen prey to resurgent rentier interests instead of liberating economies from absentee landlords, predatory banking and monopolies. Banks and bondholders have found their most lucrative market not in the manufacturing sector but in real estate and natural resource extraction.

These vested interests have translated their takings into the political power to shed taxes and dismantle regulations on wealth. The resulting political Counter-Reformation has inverted the idea of “free market” to mean an economy free for rent extractors, not free from landlords, monopolists and financial exploitation as Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and other classical economists had envisioned. The word “reform” as used by today’s neoliberal media means undoing Progressive Era reforms, dismantling public regulation and government power – except for control by finance and its allied vested interests.

All this is the opposite of socialism, which has now sunk to its nadir through the Western World. The past four decades have seen most of the European and North American parties calling themselves “socialist” make an about-face to follow Tony Blair’s New Labour, the French socialists-in-name and the Clinton’s New Democrats. They support privatization, financialization and a shift away from progressive taxation to a value-added tax (VAT) falling on consumers, not on finance or real estate.

China’s socialist diplomacy in today’s hostile world

Now that Western finance capitalism is stagnating, it is fighting even harder to prevent the post-2008 crisis from leading to socialist reforms that would re-socialize infrastructure that has been privatized and put a public banking system in place. Depicting the contrast between socialist and finance-capitalist economies as a clash of civilizations, U.S.-centered “Western” diplomacy is using military and political subversion to prevent a transition from capitalism into socialism.

China is the leading example of socialist success in a mixed economy. Unlike the Soviet Union, it has not proselytized its economic system or sought to promote revolution abroad to emulate its economic doctrine. Just the opposite: To avert attack, China has given foreign investors a stake in its economic growth. The aim has been to mobilize U.S. and other foreign interests as allies, willing customers for China’s exports, and suppliers of modern production facilities in China.

This is the opposite of the antagonism that confronted Russia. The risk is that it involves financial investment. But China has protected its autonomy by requiring majority Chinese ownership in most sectors. The main danger is domestic, in the form of financial dynamics and private rent extraction. The great economic choice facing China today concerns the degree to which land and natural resources should be taxed.

The state owns the land, but does fully tax its rising valuation or rent-of-location that has made many families rich. Letting the resulting real-estate and financialized wealth dominate its economic growth poses two dangers: First, it increases the price that new buyers must pay for their home. Second, rising housing prices force these families to borrow – at interest. This turns the rental value of land – value created by society and public infrastructure investment – into a flow of interest to the banks. They end up receiving more over time than the sellers, while increasing the cost of living and doing business. That is a fate which a socialist economy must avoid at all costs.

At issue is how China can best manage credit and natural resource rent in a way that best meets the needs of its population. Now that China has built up a prosperous industry and real estate, its main challenge is to avoid the financial dynamics that are subjecting the West to debt deflation and burying Western economies. To avoid these dynamics, China must curtail the proliferation of unproductive debt created merely to transfer property on credit, inflating asset prices in the process.

Socialism is incompatible with a rentier class of landlords, natural resource owners and monopolists – the preferred clients of banks hoping to turn economic rent into interest charges. As a vehicle to allocate resources “the market” reflects the status quo of property ownership and credit-creation privileges at any given moment of time, without consideration for what is fair and efficient or predatory. Vested interests claim that such a market is an immutable force of nature, whose course cannot be altered by government “interference.” This rhetoric of political passivity aims to deter politicians and voters from regulating economies, leaving the wealthy free to extract as much economic rent and interest as markets can bear by privatizing real estate, natural resources, banking and other monopolies.

Such rent seeking is antithetical to socialism’s aim to take these assets into the public domain. That is why the financial sector, oil and mineral extractors and monopolists fight so passionately to dismantle state regulatory power and public banking. That is the diplomacy of finance capital, aiming to consolidate American hegemony over a unipolar world. It backs this strategy with a neoliberal academic curriculum that depicts predatory financial and rentier gains as if they add to national income, not simply transfer it into the hands of the rentier classes. This misleading picture of economic reality poses a danger for China sending its students to study economics at American and European universities.

The century that has elapsed since Russia’s October 1917 Revolution has produced a substantial Marxist literature describing how finance capitalism has overpowered industrial capitalism. Its dynamics occupied Marx in Volumes II and III of Capital (and also his Theories of Surplus Value). Like most observers of his era, Marx expected capitalism to make a substantial step toward socialism by overcoming the dynamics of parasitic capital, above all the tendency for debt to keep on expanding at compound interest until it produces a financial crash.

The only way to control banks and their allied rentier sectors is outright socialization. The past century has shown that if society does not control the banks and financial sector, they will control society. Their strategy is to block government money creation so that economies will be forced to rely on banks and bondholders. Regulatory authority to limit such financial aggression and the monopoly pricing and rent extraction it supports has been crippled in the West by “regulatory capture” by the rentier oligarchy.

Attempts to tax away rental income (the liberal alternative to taking real estate and natural resources directly into the public domain) is prone to lobbying for loopholes and evasion, most notoriously via offshore banking centers in tax-avoidance enclaves and the “flags of convenience” sponsored by the global oil and mining companies. This leaves the only way to save society from the financial power to convert rent into interest to be a policy of nationalizing natural resources, fully taxing land rent (where land and minerals are not taken directly into the public domain), and de-privatizing infrastructure and other key sectors.

Conclusion

Markets have not recovered for the products of American industry and labor since 2008. Industrial capitalism has been sacrificed to a form of finance capitalism that is looking more pre-capitalist (or simply oligarchic and neofeudal) with each passing year. The resulting polarization forces every economy – including China – to choose between saving its bankers and other creditors or freeing debtors and lowering the economy’s cost structure. Will the government enforce bank and bondholder claims, or will it give priority to the economy and its people? That is an eternal political question spanning pre-capitalist, capitalist and post-capitalist economies.

Marx described the mathematics of compound interest expanding to absorb the entire economy as age-old, long predating industrial capitalism. He characterized the ancient mode of production as dominated by slavery and usury, and medieval banking as predatory. These financial dynamics exist in socialist economies just as they did in medieval and ancient economies. The way in which governments manage the dynamics of credit and debt thus are the dominant force in every era, and should receive the most pressing attention today as China shapes its socialist future.

Notes:

[1] I give the details in “Simon Patten on Public Infrastructure and Economic Rent Capture,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 70 (October 2011):873-903.

[2] My book Super-Imperialism (1972; new ed. 2002) reviews this discussion during 1944-46.

[3] I discuss the IMF and World Bank plan to wipe out Russian savings with hyperinflation and make manufacturing investment uneconomic in “How Neoliberal Tax and Financial Policy Impoverishes Russia – Needlessly,” Mir Peremen (The World of Transformations), 2012 (3):49-64 (in Russian). МИР ПЕРЕМЕН 3/2012 (ISSN 2073-3038) Mir peremen М. ХАДСОН, Неолиберальная налоговая и финансовая политика приводит к обнищанию России, 49-64.

[4] I give details in “How Neoliberals Bankrupted ‘New Europe’: Latvia in the Global Credit Crisis,” (with Jeffrey Sommers), in Martijn Konings, ed., The Great Credit Crash (Verso: London and New York, 2010), pp. 244-63, and “Stockholm Syndrome in the Baltics: Latvia’s neoliberal war against labor and industry,” in Jeffrey Sommers and Charles Woolfson, eds., The Contradictions of Austerity: The Socio-Economic Costs of the Neoliberal Baltic Model (Routledge 2014), pp. 44-63.

[5] For more analysis see Dirk Bezemer and Michael Hudson, “Finance is Not the Economy: Reviving the Conceptual Distinction,” Journal of Economic Issues, 50 (2016: #3), pp. 745-768.

By Terri Moon Cronk

The Army Corps of Engineers is installing up to 500 temporary generators until Puerto Rico’s old and deteriorating power grid can be made operational again, but long-term total power restoration could take nearly a year, the Corps’ chief of engineers told reporters at the Pentagon Friday.

The Corps is starting with public facilities and it faces power restoration to 3.4 million houses on the U.S. territory, some of which are in remote areas, Army Lt. Gen. Todd T. Semonite said.

Semonite said the island governor’s immediate goals are to restore power to 30 percent of Puerto Rico by the end of October and to 50 percent by the end of November, which the general said he considers a challenge.

The Corps is responding to the effects of four major hurricanes that struck the U.S. mainland, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands within a six-week span. Puerto Rico remains a challenge in part because it is an island, making it difficult to receive supplies, such as the 62,000 utility poles needed for power restoration.

“Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands is a completely different paradigm,” he said. “People have asked me in the last several weeks … ‘Why don’t you do in Puerto Rico what you could have done in Florida?’ Because it is an island and it is very, very hard to just drive hundreds of pole trucks … down into the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.”

The Corps also needs about 338 utility towers, Semonite said, noting that each one is 75 feet long and must be flown in. “And then we need an awful a lot of connectors and cable, as well. But the whole goal is to get the transmission up and running,” he added.

Four-fold Strategy

The Corps’ power strategy is fourfold, starting with the temporary generators. As of today, 148 have been put in place, Semonite said.

The second line of effort is generation from the power plants.

“We need about 2,500 megawatts of power … to be able to restore the power back up to where it was at the beginning of the storm. Today, right now, we’ve got about 21.6 percent of that up,” he said.

Transmission is the third line of effort in the strategy to restore power, Semonite said. “The No. 1 goal right now of what the Corps is doing is to be able to move this electricity that’s in the south up to the north,” he explained.

The fourth line of effort is distribution — getting power to homes and other buildings along terrain that is a massive logistics challenge, the general said.

“There are seven large power plants that normally run off of fossil fuel,” he said. There are also about seven solar or wind power plants and 21 hydropower plants, Semonite added. But, the general explained, the majority of that power is generated in the southern part of the island, while the majority of the need is in the north — particularly around San Juan.

Moving Power

And though transmission and distribution remain a challenge, there just isn’t enough capacity in Puerto Rico’s existing power plants to provide electricity to the island, Semonite said.

“Even if in fact all of the power plants are up and running, we would have a generation shortfall,” he said. “So about a week and a half ago, we cut a contract to a large company to come back in and place a temporary power plant in San Juan.”

The Corps and the Defense Department are working alongside the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Puerto Rico’s local government to restore power to the island, he emphasized.

Restoring power to the island is going to take a massive, long-term rebuild of the power grid, Semonite said.

“So what we are doing is to go all-out and put as many generators in as we can, mainly in public facilities. We got a list from the governor, and all the mayors donated to that list,” the general said. “And the list has got about 428 different requirements on it today.”

By Sinisa Jakov Marusic

After Macedonia’s former ruling party called for all those involved in the April 27 storming of parliament to receive an amnesty – members of the current government and legal experts have condemned the proposal.

Ruling party MPs, legal experts and political observers have condemned an opposition demand for all those involved in the April 27 storming of parliament which left some 100, including MPs, injured, to receive an amnesty.

The former ruling VMRO DPMNE party, which was ousted from power in May, weeks after its supporters stormed parliament, attacking MPs, on Thursday said an amnesty would help the process of political reconciliation.

“For several years, Macedonia has been in a tense political situation, which reflects badly on all social aspects. VMRO DPMNE wants to contribute towards the relaxation of these political tensions and to reconciliation among the citizens,” a party central committee member, Orce Gjorgjievski, said on Thursday.

He said the party would soon file an amnesty motion in parliament, although it “sympathizes with the injured MPs and is against violence”.

The initiative came after police earlier this week apprehended five, and later three more people, suspected of involvement in the rampage and in an attempt to kill MP Zijadin Sela.

Former Constitutional Court head Trendafil Ivanovski said that the call for an amnesty for such a serious case was paradoxical, and would undermine the authority of an already shaken legal system.

“There are people in this case who directly committed attacks in parliament. Although it is not yet legally clear whether this was an attempted coup, it is clear that people are being charged with attempted murder,” Ivanovski noted.

Political analyst and former MP Naser Ziberi said the demand for an amnesty showed that VMRO DPMNE was now indirectly admitting its role in the events – and was trying to prevent the investigation from reaching the people who possibly organized or gave the orders for the violent attack.

“Otherwise, what would VMRO DPMNE’s motive be, to get involved in the process of shedding light on the events in parliament?” Ziberi asked Radio Free Europe.

The angry crowd stormed the parliament building in Skopje after a majority of 67 of the 120 MPs elected a new speaker from the ranks of the opposition, Talat Xhaferi.

The speaker’s election paved the way for the establishment of the new Social Democrat-led government, marking the end of VMRO DPMNE’s 11 years in power.

So far, courts have issued only two court verdicts in relation to the attack. In May, nine people were given mild probation sentences for “participation in a violent crowd”.

On October 12, another man was jailed for four years for attacking the then MP and current Defence Minister Radmila Sekerinska. Other people have been arrested and await trial.

But the prosecution has not yet questioned VMRO DPMNE MPs Krsto Mukoski and Saso Vasilevski, who were spotted on security footage opening the doors of the parliament building to the angry crowd.

The prosecution also has not questioned the then police chief, Mitko Cavkov, who unaccountably waited two hours after the rampage started before sending reinforcements.

The then opposition, now ruling, Social Democrats, whose MPs, including the leader and current Prime Minister, Zoran Zaev, were the main targets of the attack, have rejected the proposition for an amnesty.

Apparently indiscriminate firing during fighting on October 16, 2017, in a town near Kirkuk involving the Kurdistan Regional Government’s Peshmerga forces and various Iraqi government forces left at least 51 civilians wounded and five dead, Human Rights Watch said Friday. Iraqi forces in control of the town, Tuz Khurmatu, subsequently let civilians loot property unimpeded for at least a full day before taking action. Iraqi and Kurdistan Regional Government forces should take all feasible steps to minimize civilian casualties and prevent looting.

“Iraqi and Kurdish forces need to resolve the current crisis in ways that fully respects human rights and avoids harming civilians or their property,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch.

Tuz Khurmatu, an ethnically mixed Kurdish, Turkmen, and Arab town in the disputed territories around Kirkuk, 65 kilometers south of the city, had been under the joint control of Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) forces, the Popular Mobilization Forces (known as the PMF or Hashd al-Sha’abi,) and local police, and the scene of sporadic clashes over the last three years. Fighting again erupted on October 16, 2017, as Iraqi forces asserted control over the city of Kirkuk and other disputed areas. According to three medical workers at a Turkmen-run hospital, fighting on October 16 left five civilians dead, and 51 wounded.

Human Rights Watch spoke to three men wounded by apparent indiscriminate fire during the clashes. “Hamid,” said that at about 3:45 a.m. he, his brother, and his mother were sitting in the living room of their home in a Turkmen neighborhood when, he said, “there were two blasts all of a sudden and I lost consciousness. I woke up at about 4:30 a.m. at the hospital, bleeding from my head and the left side of my torso.”

When Hamid returned home that night, he saw two large holes in their living room roof. “I don’t know why our house was hit,” Hamid said. “There was no fighting nearby, nor any military installations that I know of.”

“Nadim,” a Turkmen living in another Turkmen neighborhood, said he was in his garden at 4 a.m. when a mortar landed next to him, hurling metal fragments into his right hand and leg. Nadim said that as the mortar landed, he saw an ongoing battle between Peshmerga forces and PMF about 300 meters from his home.

“Ammar,” a Turkmen, lives in the same neighborhood, about 500 meters from the local headquarters of the Badr Organization, one of the most prominent PMF groups. Ammar said he and his brother were wakened at 5:30 a.m. by heavy fire. Just as they went outside, a projectile landed about two meters away. Metal fragments wounded Ammar’s left hand and head, and both of his brother’s legs. Worried about continued gunfire, they stayed inside their home until 11 a.m. before fighting in the area abated and their neighbor drove them to the hospital, he said.

Human Rights Watch was unable to determine if there were casualties among Kurdish or other civilians in Tuz. Four Tuz residents said the clashes were heaviest in the Turkmen neighborhoods because of the proximity to both PMF and KRG military and security installations. Two aid workers whose organizations work in camps for displaced families in Kirkuk said there was also fighting near Laylan 2 camp, 15 kilometers southeast of Kirkuk, killing or wounding two camp residents. Human Rights Watch was unable to obtain any specific civilian casualty numbers for other areas in and around Kirkuk.

On the morning of October 16, all remaining KRG forces and Kurdish residents fled Tuz Khurmatu. A resident said he visited the predominantly Kurdish northern neighborhood of al-Jumhouri, at around 4:30 p.m., and saw what he knew to be at least 10 Kurdish shops on fire. He saw two boys looting plastic building materials from another Kurdish shop nearby. He said three officers from the Iraqi Interior Ministry’s Emergency Response Division were parked 20 meters away, watching the boys without intervening. A passer-by told him that the boys were taking revenge for looting and burning of Turkmen houses and shops by Peshmerga forces and armed Kurdish civilians in 2015 and 2016.

The resident said he saw a man coming from the direction of the shops in a car loaded with TVs, computers, and other electronics. The three Emergency Response Division officers waved the man past without questioning him. The resident said another civilian in the area had told him that at around noon he had seen a group of about 10 armed civilians in the same neighborhood looting homes but avoiding a few that had “Turkmen Shia” graffitied on them.

A United Nations Assistance Mission to Iraq (UNAMI) statement on October 19 said it had received allegations that about 150 homes were burned in Tuz on October 16 and 17 “by armed groups” and another 11 destroyed by explosives. In an October 17 news conference, Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi acknowledged incidents of abuse in Tuz saying he had given “strict orders to arrest anyone who endangers internal security, and attacks citizens, their property.”

In the early hours of October 18, Ataf Najar, the local head of the Badr Organization, publicly called on all civilians in Tuz to stop looting, after which local police cordoned off the largest Kurdish neighborhood. The resident who had told Human Rights Watch about looting in one Kurdish area said he was unable to return to verify that looting had stopped.

Kurdish journalists and activists shared photos of the burned-out interiors of buildings with Human Rights Watch, saying they were from the city of Kirkuk. Human Rights Watch could not find any witnesses to the looting or burning of buildings in Kirkuk. Three international journalists who visited Kirkuk on October 17 and 18 told Human Rights Watch they had seen no signs of arson or looting inside the city. One said he saw a Peshmerga military base on the road to Erbil on fire, but did not know who had started it.

Iraqi authorities should investigate allegations of looting and destruction of civilian property and prosecute anyone responsible for crimes, and security forces should prevent any further looting, Human Rights Watch said.

Starting on October 16, Iraqi forces including PMF units retook other parts of the disputed territories under de facto KRG control since 2003, including Sinjar, Zummar, Rabia, Hasansham, Khazir, Dibis, Kirkuk, Taza Khurmatu, Jalawla, Khanaqin, and Mandali. The Peshmerga forces retreated after very limited engagements. Authorities should ensure the safety and security of the minority communities in these areas.

According to the United Nations, as Iraqi forces retook the areas an estimated 61,200 people fled their homes to stay with relatives in more stable areas, with some returning over the following days. Human Rights Watch did not identify any incidents of forced displacement.

On October 18, Iraq’s Joint Operations Command, the Iraqi military’s communications branch, issued a statement condemning coverage by two leading Kurdish outlets, Rudaw and Kurdistan 24, saying they had “continue to mislead public opinion and accuse the security forces of baseless accusations.” The statement called on Iraq’s Communications and Media Commission to monitor the outlets and bring legal action where their coverage has “threaten[ed] the civil peace.”

Human Rights Watch has previously raised concerns over the media commission and its “mandatory” guidelines, which unjustifiably restrict media freedom. The guidelines demand that media avoid making information about insurgent forces public and requires them to report on government forces only in favorable terms. Article 1 forbids media from broadcasting or publishing material that “may be interpreted as being against the security forces” and insists that they “focus on the security achievements of the armed forces, by repetition throughout the day.”

“Lashing out against media unfavorable to Baghdad undermines the same authorities who are telling Iraqis they are protecting the rights of all of them equally,” Stork said.