By Dr. Majid Rafizadeh*

Iran’s state-owned media outlets are heavily covering Europe’s Iran policy. Several major newspapers, including Kayhan, are focusing on the European Union’s strong support for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), known as the nuclear agreement. The front pages of several newspapers highlighted statements from EU officials, such as the one from foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, who described the 2015 deal between Tehran and the world powers as a “key security priority” for both Europe and the Middle East.

Iranian leaders are attempting to project power and appeal to their hardline domestic social base by pointing out that Tehran enjoys international support and global legitimacy. The regime is also trying to assure its sponsored militias, terrorist groups and proxies that Tehran continues to be on the winning side.

In addition, the Islamic Republic is attempting to send a message to the Trump administration and critics of Iran’s aggressive foreign policy that, despite their opposition, sanctions relief will continue due to the EU’s support.

Why is the EU jumping on the Iranian regime’s side when other global powers criticize Tehran for its destabilizing policies in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, and for its human rights violations? Mostly because of increasing revenues through imports and exports.

But the EU should be cognizant of the fact it is shooting itself in the foot by prioritizing short-term business deals and the nuclear agreement over long-term strategic and geopolitical interests. The current political establishment of the Iranian regime never has been, and never will be, a natural ally of the West.

The regime is an extremist revolutionary theocracy that was founded on the core revolutionary principle of objecting to the West culturally, geopolitically and strategically. The survival of the regime depends on its anti-Western sentiments and policies.

To achieve its hegemonic ambitions, the Iranian leaders often make tactical shifts that may mistakenly appear as fundamental strategic shifts. The JCPOA is an example. The nuclear agreement does not mean that Tehran has altered its fundamental policies towards Europe. The regime’s hold on power was in danger before the deal because of the four crippling rounds of international sanctions. The regime’s expenses abroad were rising due to Tehran’s increasing military, financial, intelligence and advisory support to the Syrian regime, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Shiite militias in Iraq. The regime found no option other than to come to an agreement with the West — an agreement that suits the regime’s objectives perfectly: Sanctions relief in exchange for a short period of time partially halting nuclear activities. Then, when the deal expires, the regime can pursue its nuclear ambitions with no restrictions based on the sunset clauses.

Once the Iranian regime achieves its objectives, it will return to its core fundamentalist policies. In fact, a recent incident illustrates this: The generals of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) threatened to increase the range of their ballistic missiles to more than 2,000km so that they can reach Europe. Brig. Gen. Hossein Salami, the deputy head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, added that: “If we have kept the range of our missiles to 2,000km, it’s not due to a lack of technology. We are following a strategic doctrine.”

The EU ought to consider a long-term Iran policy, because Iran’s ruling clerics conduct their policies on a long-term basis.

In addition, when examining what European powers consider as threats to their national security, one can witness the Iranian regime’s footprint behind these threats. Tehran engages in asymmetrical warfare funding, arming, training and supporting terrorist and militia groups that are sworn to damage EU nations’ security and scuttle European countries’ foreign policy in the region.

Furthermore, the Iranian regime’s long-term policy is based on favoring Russia, advancing its interests in the region, and tipping the balance of power in favor of Moscow, not Europe.

European powers should be aware that their appeasement policies toward the Iranian regime are endangering stability in the region. Business deals and support for the nuclear agreement are emboldening and empowering hardline institutions such as the IRGC and the Quds Force, as well as terrorists and violent militia groups across the region, including those in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Hence, these appeasement policies are leading to more radicalization and militarization of the region and are also leading to more human rights violations by the Iranian regime.

It is in the national interests of the EU to favor a long-term Iran policy rather than the short-term benefits of business deals through the nuclear agreement. The EU should step up pressure on the Iranian regime for its aggressive policies in the region and human rights violations, and halt the nuclear deal sanctions relief until Tehran changes the fundamentals of its foreign policy and becomes a constructive player in the region and on the global stage.

• Dr. Majid Rafizadeh is a Harvard-educated Iranian-American political scientist. He is a leading expert on Iran and US foreign policy, a businessman and president of the International American Council. He serves on the boards of the Harvard International Review, the Harvard International Relations Council and the US-Middle East Chamber for Commerce and Business.

By Elise Harris

In his five years in office, Pope Francis has gained a reputation for embracing spontaneity. Today, he did it again with another papal first: witnessing the marriage of two flight attendants on board his flight from Santiago to Iquique.

According to journalists traveling with the Pope, the couple – Paula Podesta and Carlos Ciuffardi – went to the Pope during the Jan. 18 flight to ask for his blessing.

The couple told Francis they had been civilly married, but said they had not been able to get married in the Church because their parish was destroyed in the massive 8.8 earthquake that rocked Santiago in 2010.

In response, the Pope offered to convalidate their marriage on the spot. Ignacio Cueto, owner of the airline company, LATAM, was a witness in the ceremony.

According to Ciuffardi, who spoke briefly with journalists after the ceremony, the Pope asked the couple if they were married yet, and when they explained why they hadn’t been married in the Church, he said “do you want to get married?”

The Pope, Ciuffardi said, asked them “Are you sure, absolutely sure?” They said yes, gave the Pope thier rings and asked Cueto if he would be a witness. The Pope then blessed the rings, placed their hands together, offered some brief reflections and pronounced them man and wife.

According to Ciuffardi, Francis told them what happened “was historic,” because “never has a Pope married a couple on a plane.”

Referring to the rings, Francis jested that they shouldn’t be too tight, because “they would be a torture,” nor too loose, because they might lose them.

Since they didn’t have an official marriage certificate to sign, Pope Francis asked the cardinals with him to draft one, so they grabbed a piece of blank copy paper and each signed their names and what role they played in the ceremony. One of the cardinals also signed as a witness.

The Pope gave the couple two rosaries, Podesta received a white rosary and Ciuffardi a black one.

The couple – who have two children, Rafaela, 6, and Isabela, 3 – said they will be traveling with the Pope to Iquique, and from there will take a different flight to another destination, and will celebrate after.

“It was something historic, really. Very exciting. What he told us was very important: he told us ‘this is the sacrament that the world needs, the sacrament of marriage. Hopefully, this will motivate couples around the world to get married’,” Ciuffardi said.

Sri Lankan tea workers are being affected by a government ban on a popular weedicide as large plantations become overgrown with weeds.

The country banned the import of glyphosate in 2015 under the Import and Export (control) Act over concerns that it could cause chronic kidney disease.

Environmental groups say commonly used pesticides including glyphosate have been blamed for the deaths of more than 20,000 farmers in Sri Lanka over the past two decades because of their higher levels of cyanide, mercury and arsenic. The World Health Organization (WHO) says chronic kidney disease of unknown etiology has affected a minimum of 15 percent of people in the 15-70 age group.

Sri Lankan trade unions say there is less work on tea plantations because the overgrowth of weeds has hit productivity. Weeds cannot be weeded manually as these are large plantations owned by private companies on long-term leases.

“Workers on the estates have no additional income generation due to the current grave situation,” said Arul Swami, an official of a trade union with a membership of more than 175,000.

He said the union was in discussions with companies and the Plantation Ministry stressing the importance of the use of chemicals to control weeds on the estates.

Tea workers are almost all Tamils descended from those brought to Sri Lanka from India by the British in the 1820s to provide cheap labor. Around 52 percent of tea workers are women who are among the poorest paid in the country.

Sri Lanka is the world’s fourth largest producer of tea and the industry is one of the country’s biggest recipients of foreign exchange, but families working on tea estates are among the homeless.

Father Premalal Cooray, director of Caritas Badulla, said the decision to ban glyphosate seems to have had a political connotation that was clearly impacting workers.

He said that although it was possible to carry out manual weeding on smaller plantations, it would not be possible on the larger estates.

After banning glyphosate, the government issued a statement saying that “scientists who carry out research on renal diseases prevailing in many parts of the country have pointed out that the use of pesticides, weedicides and chemical fertilizer could be contributing to this [chronic kidney disease] situation.”

Lasanatha Ratnaweera, senior research officer at the Office of the Registrar of Pesticides, said the ban was clearly a political decision.

He pointed out that his department had nothing to do with the decision and politicians were simply using the WHO statement which indicated that glyphosate could be “carcinogenic” or cancerous.

Sri Lanka exports tea to Russia, Pakistan, Hong Kong, Britain, Germany, the UAE and other Middle Eastern countries.

Union officials say that tea workers are migrating in greater numbers to urban areas because of the fall in their incomes.

Armenian midfielder Henrikh Mkhitaryan’s potential move to Arsenal could now be at risk of falling through.

It looks as though Atletico Madrid are ready to pounce should the Armenia international have second thoughts about moving to the Emirates, The Express says citing a report by El Gol Digital.

The Spanish-language media claims the La Liga side are willing to rescue Mkhitaryan from Old Trafford.

But the report goes on to say he would be offered a wage lower than he currently earns at United.

Arsenal-Manchester United swap deal involving Alexis Sanches and Mkhitaryan has long been discussed in the media.

However, some media reports claim that even without Mkhitaryan, Arsenal are expecting Sanchez to move to Old Trafford and the fact that both players were axed for their teams’ last games points to the fact they are on the move.

As reported earlier, the deal is being delayed as the Armenia international wants an increase on his £150,000-a-week deal.

Mkhitaryan’s agent Mino Raiola has laid out a set of demands after insisting the United midfielder is in no rush to leave Old Trafford.

Mkhitaryan, 28, has got three and a half years left on his £150,000-a-week contract, wants a pay rise to go to Arsenal and will also want a “golden handshake” to leave United.

Raiola wants a big agent commission – more than £5m – and it is believed he will use the opportunity to try and renegotiate future terms for Zlatan Ibrahimovic, another of his clients.

Meanwhile, former Manchester United striker Dwight Yorke has encouraged Mkhitaryan to join Arsenal in order to reinvigorate his career.

Yorke, speaking earlier this week, insisted that the 28-year-old was an “Arsenal type of player”.

“Don’t forget, Mkhitaryan was in really exceptional form earlier on this season,” he told talkSPORT. “For some reason in the last few months he’s fallen out of favour. Maybe it’s a lack of form or a lack of confidence he showed earlier on this season.”

“But [he’s] an Arsenal type of player. He’s got quality and we’ve seen that at Old Trafford but he’s sort of lost his way here.

“A new start in London, playing for Arsenal, it might be the key factor in him going.”

News that YouTube is to drop thousands of small video makers from its ad revenue-sharing program has been met with a sombre reaction online.

Prompted by recent scandals involving offensive videos appearing on the platform, the company announced a series of changes. It includes a pledge to have every video in its “Google Preferred” program approved by a human.

The reforms, designed to improve “compliance with advertiser-friendly guidelines,” also require that posters have 1,000 subscribers and generate 4,000 hours of “watchtime” over a year before they can benefit from ad revenue. The previous threshold was just 10,000 overall views. Google described the new rules as “tough but necessary.”

Some accused YouTube of turning its back on new and smaller creators – the people who critics claim made the video streaming service into what it is today.

The change follows controversy surrounding popular vlogger Logan Paul, who posted footage of his visit to Japan’s Aokigahara forest, a well-known suicide black spot at the foot of Mount Fuji, last week. The video, since pulled from the platform, showed Paul laughing while approaching the body of an apparent suicide victim. Despite being vilified online, experts say Logan may have made up to $96,000 from the video.

YouTube blogger Kat Blaque expressed dismay at the new rules, saying the lack of controls on profitable personalities ultimately led the company to impose measures that punish those who post inoffensive content.

Many small video bloggers, just shy of the 1,000-subscriber threshold, are now appealing for followers, with some offering to promote channels to help them over the qualifying line.

The changes to YouTube will be introduced immediately, with a new “three-tier suitability system” coming into effect in the next few months. The new scheme aims to give marketers more control over where they place their ads.

Visiting Skopje on Thursday the NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg met with Macedonia’s Prime Minister Zoran Zaev and praised his country’s efforts and progress towards long-term political stability.

“NATO will continue to support your country’s efforts,” he said. The Secretary General also thanked the Prime Minister for his country’s continuing contributions to NATO’s training mission in Afghanistan, a clear sign of commitment to international security.

Stoltenberg commended the efforts being made to find a solution to the name issue. “Agreement on this issue is crucial for your country to join NATO. The reforms you are working on are also important: good governance; strengthening the rule of law; building an open, multi-ethnic society; and good neighbourly relationships,” he added.

The Secretary General stressed that reform is not easy, but it can be done. He urged all parties to work constructively.

“I encourage you to continue on the path of reform. We want you to succeed,” he said.

Stoltenberg also met with President Gjorge Ivanov, with Minister of Foreign Affairs Nikola Dimitrov , Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defence Radmila Šekerinska, with the President of the Parliament Talat Xhaferi , and with other high level officials. Addressing the parliament in Skopje earlier in the day, Mr. Stoltenberg said that Allies have been impressed by the country’s determination to join the Alliance.

The Secretary General highlighted that Allies are bound together not just by common interests but by common values, and countries wishing to join the Alliance must demonstrate that they share those values.

“That means sticking to the path of reform. I commend you for the efforts you have already made,” he said.

In Skopje Mr. Stoltenberg also met with the leader of the main opposition party VMRO-DPMNE Hristijan Mickoski and with the Special Prosecutor Katica Janeva.

We already knew that Tulsi Gabbard was courageous, when the Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii resigned from her position as vice chair of the Democratic National Committee in disgust during the primary season in 2016, declaring publicly what we now know to have been true — that the DNC was manipulating the primaries to favor Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders — was courageous. Now as basically the only member of Congress with the guts to call out the US as the cause of our current knife-edge threat of a nuclear war, she’s demonstrated her courage again.

Gabbard, [1]interviewed on ABC News, declared unambiguously that the reason that North Korea has worked so diligently to develop nuclear weapons and missiles capable of delivering them to the US is that the United States over several decades and under a number of presidents, has had a policy of “regime change,” and a history of violently attempting to overthrow governments that it doesn’t like. As she put it in an interview over the weekend with ABC news host George Stephanopolos, “Our country’s history of regime-change wars has led countries like North Korea to develop and hold on to these nuclear weapons because they see it as their only deterrent against regime change.”

Rep. Gabbard, who has been calling for the US to negotiate directly “and without pre-conditions” with North Korea to resolve the crisis, says the US also needs to recognize the reality that North Korea already has nuclear weapons and is not going to give them up unless it feels secure from US attack.

She is firm in saying that the US history of overthrowing Libyan leader Muamar Gaddafi after first convincing him that if he dropped his efforts to develop a nuclear weapon they would not attempt to overthrow his government, and then invading and overthrowing him, and of invading and overthrowing Saddam Hussein after trumping up a fake claim that he was attempting to develop nuclear weapons, will make it all the harder to convince North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to agree to halt or scale back, much less eliminate his nuclear weapons and missile arsenal. She adds that President Trump’s current threat to cancel an agreement reached by his predecessor, President Barack Obama and the leaders of Iran to terminate their nuclear fuel enrichment program in return for the US dropping sanctions on that country will also undermine any future efforts by the US to reach negotiated agreements on weapons and nuclear disarmament with Kim and any other countries that might seek to go nuclear.

It was all a little more than Stephanopolos, once a press spokesman for the administration of President Bill Clinton, who asked her, feigning incredulity, “Just to be clear, are you saying that Kim Jong-un’s nuclear arsenal is our fault?”

That’s the point in an interview where your typical American pol would backpedal like mad to defend the sanctity of American exceptionalism, but Gabbard remained as forthright and direct as her analysis was correct, replying, “What I’m saying is the Democratic and Republican administrations for decades, going back over 20 years, failed to recognize the seriousness of this threat, failed to remove it, and we know that North Korea has these nuclear weapons because they see how the US in Libya, for example, guaranteed Gaddafi ‘We’re not going to go after you. You should get rid of your nuclear weapons.’ He did, and then we went ahead and led an attack that toppled Gaddafi.”

Of course Rep. Gabbard is correct. A country that acts unilaterally, violating international law by overthrowing the governments of sovereign nations and that lies about its intentions when negotiating, is a country that will never be able again to negotiate to solve international problems. It will only have force remaining as a tool (and we’ve seen in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria how costly and ineffective a tool US force is these days). But as Gabbard also says, pointing to the chaos and panic that ensued when Hawaiians were given what appeared to be an alert about an actual nuclear missile attack on the islands by North Korea, when dealing with a nuclear power — even one as small as North Korea — force is simply not an option. There is only negotiation. And because nuclear weapons are so destructive, the size and power of the parties is irrelevant in such negotiations — it is inevitably a negotiation between equals.

Brava for this singularly courageous and outspoken member of Congress! Once again she has proven that she stands head and shoulders above her colleagues, Republican and Democrat, in the Capitol, just as she did when she quit the DNC and outed it for its perfidy in stealing the primaries for Hillary Clinton.

This Samoan American, elected to the House in 2013 from Hawaii, also, by the way, has been courageously calling for the US to “get out of Syria,” where she correctly notes it has been supporting Al Qaeda-linked terrorist groups — another position that puts her at odds with almost all of her congressional colleagues who are afraid to challenge US militarism. At the same time, she also happens to be a major in the US Army, a member of the Hawaiian National Guard, and is a member of the House Armed Services Committee. She served a tour in Iraq in 2006 and volunteered for a second tour in the Middle East in 2009, again making her a standout among all the chicken hawks of both parties in Congress and the White House.

As far as I’m concerned, Gabbard, not Opra, is the person Democrats should be talking about as the ideal candidate for 2020 to give Trump the boot.

(RFE/RL) — Supporters of Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny say their members have been harassed by police with some offices searched and leaflets calling for a boycott of Russia’s upcoming election seized.

The coordinator of Navalny’s office in the Volga regional city of Cheboksary, Semyon Kochkin, said on Twitter on January 18 that police officers had confiscated leaflets from him.

The chief of Navalny’s local office in the Siberian city of Kemerovo, Ksenia Pakhomova, wrote on Twitter that a teenage Navalny supporter, Vasily Kaverin, had been detained by police for several hours after distributing election boycott leaflets.

Navalny himself said that police had searched his office in St. Petersburg.

A video placed on Navalny’s official Twitter account showed several officers forcing people out of the premises saying that they received information that illegal activities or an illegal document were inside the office.

Navalny, an anticorruption crusader and vocal opponent of President Vladimir Putin, called for the boycott of the March 18 vote after election authorities in December barred him from the ballot due to a criminal conviction he says was fabricated.

His supporters plan to organize mass rallies across Russia on January 28 to protest against the decision.

Putin, who has been president or prime minister since 1999, is seeking a fourth six-year term in the upcoming election.

Kremlin critics contend that most of the other candidates are being used as window-dressing in a vote Putin is certain to win in Russia’s tightly controlled political environment.

US President Donald Trump says that Moscow is not just failing to help the US on North Korea but is undermining the impact of sanctions China among others has agreed to. But the situation is even worse, Kseniya Kirillova says. The Kremlin has sent a clear message that it is ready to continue to support Pyongyang’s nuclear blackmail tactics.

Various analysts have suggested that Washington would seek Moscow’s assistance on North Korea, the US-based Russian journalist says, but that apparently has not happened. Instead, the US hoped that Russia would go along with the internationally approved sanctions regime (slavicsac.com/2018/01/17/kremlins-nuclear-blackmailing/).

And Moscow is angry at being ignored or sidelined from a conflict in which it believed it would be a key player and that it could use as leverage on the United States about other issues, including possibly a softening or even a lifting of sanctions. Anatoly Antonov, Russia’s ambassador to the US, implied as much in a speech in San Francisco.

The American decision not to appeal to Moscow was made even more stinging for the Kremlin by Washington’s achievement of an agreement on North Korea with Beijing, Kirillova argues. In support of her argument, she offers a detailed discussion of a new article by Andrey Lankov, perhaps Russia’s most prominent specialist on the Koreas.

On the portal of the Carnegie Moscow Center, he said that China not Russia has been the one that has made current sanctions ineffective and that any new sanctions would “not in any case correspond to the interests of Russia” (carnegie.ru/commentary/75259). China too had been against sanctions, Lankov said, but now it is conforming to American demands.

But it is what the St. Petersburg-based analyst says next that is critical: He describes “an apocalyptic picture” in which sanctions will produce an economic crisis in North Korea but instead of forcing Pyongyang to back down, that will only make it more committed to developing its nuclear and missile programs – and possibly to use the results.

According to Kirillova, “behind these words is a completely clear message to the West and china: If broad new sanctions toward North Korea are introduced without Moscow’s opinion being taken into account, Russia will use to the maximum degree its influence in Pyongyang to strengthen the Korean efforts at nuclear blackmail.”

If new sanctions lead to popular risings, Pyongyang won’t back down as it has the Libyan case very much in mind, Kirillova says. Instead, having been pushed into a corner, it “may try to provoke a conflict with the outside world” and if that should prove the case, Lankov’s words suggest, it may strike out even with nuclear weapons at its neighbors.

But the St. Petersburg analyst warns that even if the sanctions worked as intended and led to the overthrow of the Kim family dictatorship in North Korea, that would not be a good thing but would mark “the beginning of an extremely complex period which would touch not only both Koreas and all neighboring countries.”

Because of this, Kirillova says, Lankov gives the following specific advice to Russian diplomats at the UN: “seek the softening of resolutions on sanctions and in general do everything that china has been doing over the course of the last decade by including in the text of the resolution the maximum number of loopholes which would allow North Korea more or less freely to trade its non-military production.”

From what one can tell, Kirillova says, “Russian diplomats have adopted this strategy even without Lankov’s advice.” Donald Trump has recognized part of this Moscow approach, but he has not yet pointed to the even more dangerous aspects of Russian policy on Pyongyang that very well may lie ahead.

By Maja Zivanovic

While approval of the US leadership and of President Donald Trump varies in the countries of the Balkan region, a poll by Gallup showed that support is higher in Kosovo than anywhere else in Europe.

The poll published on Thursday showed that 75 per cent of people in Kosovo support the performance of the leadership of the United States. Neighbouring Albania comes second, with 72 per cent support, the report said.

“The US garnered majority approval in just three countries or areas in Europe in 2017 — Kosovo, which leads the region and the world in approval of US leadership, Albania, which ranks second worldwide, and Poland,” the report said.

“It is not unusual to see Kosovars and Albanians at the top of the approval list; these two populations typically give US leadership high ratings,” it noted.

However, the report showed that even in these two countries support for the US had dropped compared to the previous year.

Meanwhile, support for Trump was far lower elsewhere. In Macedonia, 45 per cent supported the current US leadership, while 34 per cent disapproved, though the rate in Macedonia was higher than it had been.

“US approval ratings increased substantially — 10 points or more — in two countries, Belarus and Macedonia,” the report said.

“In Macedonia, which recently renewed its US-backed efforts to join NATO and the European Union, approval rose from 30 per cent to 45 per cent. Its approval of the EU’s leadership rose just as much during the same time frame, from 41 per cent to 54 per cent,” the poll showed.

Gallup says its World Leaders 2018 Rating provides a snapshot of how the world views the leadership of the US. The survey was conducted in 134 countries and areas.

Generally, approval of the US leadership under President Trump has hit a historic low.

“Only 30 per cent of the world, on average, approves of the job performance of the US’s leadership, down from 48 per cent in 2016. In fact, more people now disapprove of US leadership than approve.”

In Romania, 41 per cent registered approval, and only 28 per cent in Bosnia, the same is in Bulgaria.

“Poland, Slovakia and Montenegro were the only European NATO members in which ratings of US leadership moved in a positive direction,” the report said and pointed out on 25 per cent approval in Montenegro – seven points more than in 2016.

In Croatia, support for Trump scored only 24 per cent, which was a 20-point drop compared to year before.

Serbia is on the very bottom of the support level in Europe, with only 16 per cent support.

By John Feffer*

The United States has never invaded Norway. It has never bombed Oslo. It has never rounded up Norwegians and thrown them in Guantanamo.

Perhaps some U.S. diplomats have referred to the country as “shithole” — because the food’s rather bland and the nightlife rather staid — but the important thing is that the United States has never treated Norway as a “shithole.”

Between the word and the deed lies a world of difference.

Donald Trump outraged everyone outside his ever-more concentrated base with his recent comment that the United States should stop accepting immigrants from “shithole” countries in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean and instead bring people in from places like Norway.

Foreign governments from Botswana and Haiti to El Salvador and even Norway denounced the president. Rupert Colville, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, called the president “racist.” Even a handful of Republican lawmakers put some distance between themselves and the insulter-in-chief.

But all of this outrage is outrageously beside the point. Trump was only putting into words an underlying principle of U.S. foreign policy. For decades, the United States has treated countries like “shitholes” even if policymakers haven’t called them such, at least not in public.

Trump is a racist and the names he blurts out are offensive, no question about it. But it’s the sticks and stones of U.S. foreign policy that are really going to hurt you. So, why is everyone more upset about Donald Trump’s frank utterances — saying what many of his equally racist Washington colleagues are thinking — than the far more brutal excesses of U.S. foreign policy?

Insult, Then Injury

All armies train their soldiers to dehumanize the enemy. If you think of your enemy as a person, it’s very difficult to shoot him or her between the eyes.

The same holds true for countries. If you think of a country as a civilized place, it’s very difficult to bomb it back to the Stone Age.

The United States, in its more than a century of imperial ambitions, has long been subjecting other countries to the “shithole” treatment. At the outset of empire, the United States branded the Philippines as a place beyond the pale — filled with, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy Teddy Roosevelt put it, “savages, barbarians, a wild and ignorant people.” Such rhetorical dehumanization made it easier for U.S. troops to kill 20,000 Filipino fighters and preside over a three-year war that left more than 200,000 Filipino civilians dead.

The northern parts of Korea and Vietnam received similar “shithole” treatment in the Cold War era. The Koreans and Vietnamese suffered from the same dehumanizing epithets as the Filipinos several generations before. Worse were the saturation bombings that they endured. This was the era of destroying the village to save it. If a place is a “shithole” to begin with, this kind of logic makes perfect sense.

For geopolitical reasons, Vietnam is back in the good graces of the United States: After all, it serves as a wedge against China.

North Korea is another matter. It is the “scourge of our planet” ruled over by a “depraved regime,” Trump said at the UN last year. Trump’s epithets aren’t part of a campaign to bring North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to the International Criminal Court. Trump cares little about human rights, and after all, he either “has a very good relationship” with Kim, according to The Wall Street Journal, or “he’d have a good relationship (according to Trump). Honestly, who cares about the verb tense? It’s the adjective “good” that counts most: These two guys are cut from the same cloth.

So, forget about human rights. Trump has reduced North Korea to rhetorical rubble as a strategy to prepare the American public for a future military action against the country — an option that Trump continues to cultivate despite the recent inter-Korean warming. Thus does insult precede injury.

But the United States isn’t just in the business of identifying “shitholes.” It’s also in the business of making them.

Sow the Wind, Reap the Shitstorm

After September 11, the United States adopted a more muscular foreign policy that produced one “shithole” country after another.

The Bush administration invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. The Obama administration led from behind in a regime-change effort in Libya. First Obama and then Trump waded into the quagmire of Syria. U.S. Special Forces are involved throughout most of what was once called the Third World (and now, according to Trump, should be renamed the “Shit World”).

In Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States played the pivotal role in turning brutally run countries into certifiable “shitholes.” With Libya and Syria, Washington has helped accelerate the virtual collapse of the countries. Forget nation-building and post-conflict reconstruction: The United States over the last couple decades has been much better at breaking things than putting them back together.

Trump didn’t single out Afghanistan as a “shithole” in his recent comments. He didn’t have to. His policy toward the country conveys very clearly what his evaluation is.

“The gloves are off,” the Pentagon has rejoiced. Between last August and December, Washington conducted almost as many air strikes in the country as 2015 and 2016 combined. The U.S. military now attacks the Taliban anywhere and everywhere — which helped ensure more civilian deaths last year than at any other point in the 16-year war — and not just in defense of Afghan forces (which was the Obama-era policy).

Which brings us back to Trump and his woeful perspective on immigration. Afghanistan continues to be the world’s second leading source of refugees (just behind Syria). Libya and Iraq have been hemorrhaging their populations. Other sending countries — El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Haiti, Congo — can point to the United States as a key player in contributing to the violence, economic chaos, and social unrest that have uprooted a substantial portion of the population — whether it’s been U.S. support for murderous dictatorships, misguided U.S. economic programs, or the U.S. market for narcotics.

In other words, so many of the people trying to get into Europe and the United States these days are escaping the conditions that Washington helped to create.

Hey, President Trump, you want to know why those folks, and not Norwegians, are clamoring to get into this country? Ask all those generals that are sitting around your table. However profane they might be in private — just consider the military origin of the acronyms “snafu” and “fubar” — these military professionals would never violate protocol by referring to other countries in a derogatory fashion. This isn’t the 19^th century. But they have blood on their hands nonetheless.

Flipping the Script

Trump made his comments about immigration shortly after meeting with Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg. Trump was suitably impressed with the country. No doubt he wished he could run a predominantly white country made wealthy by oil.

Although the United States currently enjoys a booming stock market and low unemployment, Trump knows quite well the economic distress in much of the country. Those are the areas that put him over the top in the Electoral College. Those are the areas he loves to visit as president to remind him of those boisterous campaign rallies where everyone, and not just 30 percent of the audience, loved him. Those are also the areas that are going to continue to suffer as a result of his feed-the-rich economic policies.

Those are the areas that, dare I say it, Trump considers “shitholes.”

I’m not putting words in his mouth. “I want to make the country great again,” he told the press back in May 2015. “This country is a hellhole. We are going down fast.”

As I said, first come the insults, then comes the injury. Trump has, in a sense, invaded the United States and unleashed his special brand of fire and fury on the homeland. Now he’s methodically turning this country into a shithole for 99 percent of its residents. He’s been busy all year destroying the United States in order to “save” it.

Trump was prophetic. We are indeed going down fast. And the Norwegians are not coming to the rescue.

*John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus and the author of the dystopian novel Splinterlands.

Britain is ill, and even as the opportunists and populists scramble before the hardened negotiators of the European Union over imminent exit, revising optimistic forecasts and notions of sovereign greatness has begun.  Within Theresa May’s decaying state comes yet another economic disaster, and one that has prompted a revival of government assistance before the vicissitudes of the market. This, from a Tory government extolling the divine nature of free market enterprise.

Carillion, the UK’s second biggest construction company, is in a mammoth pickle, one to the tune of £1.5 billion.  It has gone into liquidation after the weekend failure to reach agreement with lenders and the government, a fact that literally threatens up to 20,000 jobs within the country, not to mention pension funds to the value of £600m.

Things get even more interesting when one sees where these jobs are, located across a range of industries from defence, health, transport (the HS2 high-speed rail line comes to mind) and education (notable here is the provision of dinners and cleaning for hundreds of schools).  In short, the company was something of a poster boy in the outsourcing agenda of government, golden boy of the competitive, tendering process.

The situation for the company has been so notably stricken as to prompt an emergency Cobra meeting by May’s Cabinet lasting for up to two hours.  Cabinet Office minister David Lidington suggested with usual understatement in the face of imminent catastrophe that matters had gone “pretty well” given that “people were turning up to work” and no “reports of serious interruption to service delivery” had been received.

Lidington’s language is that of a session at your MP’s surgery: dull, medicated, non-committal. Most of all, there is no sense of alarm.  The meeting, he continues, provided an “opportunity for ministers to test what sort of concerns are being expressed and decide how we should best address them”.

To date, the government has committed its first notable transgression against its self proclaimed free market ideology: covering the dues for small businesses and employees connected with Carillion’s public contracts.  The disastrous conduct of the golden boy must be somehow addressed.

Lidington’s point is to dress the assistance to those connected with the provision of public services in a different costume: avoid, for instance, any reference to a bailout, which reeks of the socialist hand and state-directed philosophy. “The action we have taken is designed to keep vital public services running rather than to provide a bailout on the failure of a commercial company.”

The consequences of such a patchy approach are already evident.  Given the web of contracts and commitments other companies have with Carillion, jobs are already being lost, the devastation starting to bite.  As a worker for the Midland Metropolitan Hospital Building told the BBC, “Everyone on the site told: ‘That’s it, go home.’  My company said, ‘You’ve been laid of.’”

Did anybody see this coming?  The situation last summer was already providing smoke signals of danger that all was not prudent on the financial side of Carillion.  The books were simply not tallying.  The company had issued profit warnings, largely triggered by overrunning costs regarding the Midland Metropolitan Hospital in Sandwell, the Royal Liverpool Hospital, and the Aberdeen bypass.

Notwithstanding these concerns, ideology prevailed: the company still received £2bn worth of contracts.  It was too big not to, being the fundamental face of outsourcing.  An export guarantee issued on July 6 even went so far as to put £130m of taxpayer funds at risk.

Frank Field MP, chair of the Work and Pensions select committee, was unflattering: “Carillion took on mega borrowings while its pension deficit ballooned. We called over a year ago [The Pensions Regulator] to have mandatory clearance powers for corporate activities like these that put pension schemes at risk, and powers to impose truly deterrent fines that would focus boardroom minds.”

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has been, predictably, the first to take the hammer to government policies on privatisation, most notably what he terms the “out-source first dogma”.  “In the wake of the collapse of the contractor Carillion, it is time to put an end to the rip-off privatisation policies that have done serious damage to our public services and fleeced billions of pounds.”

Showing that this was not merely a concern on the left of politics, the traditional gristle of progressive concern for market forces, Bernard Jenkin, Conservative chairman of the House of Commons Public Administration Committee, made a rather damning admission.  Carillion’s collapse “really shakes public confidence in the ability of the private sector to deliver public services and infrastructure.”

This is the Thatcherite sin of Britain, government prostrate before the private provision of services, the state indifferent to accountability.  In May’s declining Britain, even receiving a half-credible, resourced public service from any sector, is a doomed challenge.

Former President Barack Obama continues to mystify his supporters. He is watching his successor tear down what they see as his administration’s hard-earned initiatives to protect the people’s health, safety and economic well-being, while twisting Washington toward more coddled, tax-subsidized corporatism. Yet our former president mostly remains quiet on matters of substance, providing no powerful voice for Americans to rally around.

Mr. Obama is the most popular politician in America. He can command the mass media like no other citizen, should he choose to strengthen the opposition to the corrupt Donald Trump. Even more, he has reportedly the third largest twitter following—a staggering 98 million followers—in the U.S. Of the top ten, all the rest are well known entertainers. With only Katy Perry (at 108 million) and Justin Bieber (at 105 million) exceeding his numbers, Obama’s twitter followers are almost triple those who follow Trump’s daily hard-edged rages that make mass media news.

It is said that to keep such a large fan base, one must tweet daily and frequently. Not so with Mr. Obama. His tweets in December numbered less than a dozen. You’ll remember the last two months of 2017 as a time when Trump and his wrecking crew cabinet accelerated their rollbacks and suspensions of federal programs and rules designed to save American lives, prevent injuries and diseases and defend people’s economic well-being. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the EPA, the Food and Drug Administration, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Departments of the Interior and Agriculture—all of these are weakened, imperiled, understaffed, or directed to work against their Congressionally mandated missions. If their fangs aren’t now out for consumers and workers, they’ve been put on sleeping pills.

So does Obama care? Does he galvanize his huge following with a reach into the media? Not at all. He is urging people generally to make the world better in 2018. He is praising various persons by name who have helped homeless people in Chicago or have funded scholarships in Charlottesville, Virginia. While Trump is rampaging against Obama’s achievements, our ex-president is tweeting: “Michelle and I are delighted to congratulate Prince Harry and Meghan Markle on their engagement.”

Mr. Obama does urge people to vote, praises voters who came out for races that brought Democratic victories in Virginia and New Jersey, mentions a town hall in New Delhi hosted by the Obama Foundation, and vigorously urges consumers to sign up for Obamacare, without even mentioning Trump’s unending drive to destroy it.

Meanwhile, the Trump bulldozer is barreling through the positions Obama stood for—such as protecting civil rights and maintaining long-held diplomatic bonds, preserving the public lands and prohibiting offshore drilling in the arctic, modestly protecting financial consumers and keeping the better remnants of a porous tax code. Amidst all of this, Obama still doesn’t want to publicly speak truth to Trump’s power abuses and fabrications.

Defenders of the civil Obama’s self-imposed censorship may say he is avoiding a distracting pissing match with the foul-mouthed Trump. Do they mean that he cannot rise above such a tangle by the way he expresses himself to dismantle the Trump temper, by the citizen action groups he can start or expand to keep the Trump regime more on the defensive? Can’t he reach retired high officials in his administration, many of whom are also keeping quiet, and urge them to speak out, stand up and rebut the unrebutted bile oozing from the White House?

Granted he has joined with former Attorney General Eric Holder, who is back at his lucrative partnership in the corporate law firm of Covington and Burling, to oppose voter suppression and diminish the scourge of electoral gerrymandering wherein the politicians pick the voters. But there is little rising public agitation evident behind these efforts attributed to their pro forma energies.

Let’s put it simply. Obama’s America and his domestic vision of America are under relentless attack by Trump, his mass media of talk show hosts and the forces of extreme reaction. Obama can use the mass media and rally the opposition to Trump like no other Democrat in the public arena. Instead, he is behaving like a rock star, as if posing for Parade Magazine with all the pomp and celebrity imagery which, by the way, keeps his Twitter audience ahead of Rihanna, Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga.

Trump couldn’t be more delighted. His bullying politics of intimidation works, especially for visible public figures without the tough fortitude behind their very general compassionate pronouncements.

In a region of the world where Christians continue to be targets of terrorist attacks, and governmental policies that oppress Christians are becoming more common, opportunities should be seized to preserve Christian heritage sites in the Middle East and North Africa.

By Richard Bone*

Throughout history, Christianity has played a central role in the Middle East and North Africa. Distinct sites from both the ancient and modern times demonstrate Christianity’s unique and vast place in the region. Tragically, Christianity’s cultural and contemporary position in the region is persistently under attack.

According to the World Watchlist Report (2017), the persecution of Christians is worst in Libya, Iraq, and Syria, and is worsening in Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, and Algeria. The attack on Christianity is most visible by examining the number of Christians who now call the region home.  A century ago, Christians made up over 20 percent of the region’s population, while today they comprise under two percent.

Continuously, extremist groups destroy renowned churches, and kill those who worship there. For example, in 2015 the first ever attack on a church in Yemen occurred when the Catholic cathedral in Aden was completely destroyed by militants in affiliation with Daesh (ISIL). This attack was followed by the killing of 16 Catholics assisting victims of the country’s civil war at a Sisters of Charity Center in Aden.  Until today, multiple attacks on Yemen’s Christian community occur every year, and in 2017 it was ranked the ninth worst country for Christians in the world.

Yemen is not the only example of a country experiencing newfound violence upon Christians. In Libya, 21 Christians were beheaded in 2015,while the number of Christians continues to decline as they are targeted in attacks by multiple extremist groups operating within the country’s borders. Iraq’s Christian population has dwindled from over one million to around two hundred thousand in the past seventeen years.

Within the past two years, it is estimated that over eight hundred Christians have been killed because of their faith in the Middle East and North Africa, and this does not include the Christians amongst the thousands of civilians that have likely been killed in attacks that were not faith related, including the detonation of explosive devices in public areas, attacks using motor vehicles, and other terrorist attacks as have been seen in the region.

Furthermore, governments oftentimes suppress and persecute those who simply wish to practice their faith freely. Sacred texts are banned by governments, as is the long standing practice in Saudi Arabia, where bibles are confiscated upon entry to the country. Similar practices have been carried out in Libya, when former president Muammar al Gaddafi was in power, and it is still carried out by the various groups in control of different sections of the country.

Subsequently, such actions have been reported to have occurred by national or local authorities in nearly every country in the region, even if it is not state policy.  Furthermore, Islamist movements ranging from the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, to the Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria, have expressed support of such actions. A unique exception among Islamic parties to the seemingly widespread persecution of Christians is Morocco’s Party for Justice and Development (PJD), which supports a ban on foreign missionaries, but is vehemently opposed to any ban on Christianity.

In short, the disturbing rise in violence against Christians in the region is dire. Iin 2007, not a single targeted attack on Christians was recorded.  Starting in 2008, the number of assaults on Christians has increased annually, reaching over fifty violent assaults in 2015. Consequently, Christianity’s presence now continues to dwindle in the Middle East, where the religion began millenia ago, and thrived until recently. Consequently, once vibrant Christian communities are now abandoned, and the vast majority of the region’s citizens are not aware of both the historic and modern Christian communities in their respective countries, nor have they had a personal relationship with someone who practices another faith.

The Kingdom of Morocco, at the westernmost edge of the region, presents a unique opportunity to preserve and even restore the role of Christianity. Christianity has been practiced in Morocco for millennia, originating during the days of the Roman Empire in the fourth century. Today, the kingdom is home to a sizable Christian community that continues to grow, despite some repression including confiscation of bibles, accusations of cooperating with foreign missionaries (an illegal practice in the kingdom), and a lack of places to worship, as many large cities are home to one church. In 2014, it was estimated that the Kingdom is home to more than 380,000 Christians.

The unique place that Christians, and in fact all religious minorities play in Morocco is underlined in the Marrakesh Declaration, a religious document supported by the King of Morocco, His Majesty, Mohammed IV, which states that all religious minorities must be able to freely practice their respective faith.  In comparison, neighboring Algeria is home to around 100,000 Christians, and the conditions of religious minorities in the country continue to worsen.

Along the Atlantic coast, in the city of Essaouira, there in a Franciscan church that has fallen into neglect and ruin, with a history dating back to the eighteenth century. In many ways, this church is emblematic of the Kingdom’s distinct historical experience, built by the Portuguese, and utilized by the French, Arabs, and others. It is a special representation of the multiculturalism, respect, and diversity that is part of Morocco’s identity and codified in its Constitution. Unfortunately, today this collapsed church in Essaouira is unable serve as the beacon of an exceptional past and present.

In a region of the world where Christians continue to be targets of terrorist attacks, and governmental policies that oppress Christians are becoming more common, opportunities should be seized to preserve Christian heritage sites in the Middle East and North Africa.  This is especially true when preservation leads to advancing human development.  In the case of this church, it will be dedicated to local civil associations, to provide them a work and meeting space for education and inclusive development planning of community projects.  The King of Morocco, Mohammed VI, is a champion of cultural projects that are a “driving force” for dialogue and development.  These projects require leadership at all levels.

The High Atlas Foundation seeks to restore the Franciscan church in Essaouira so that it may serve as a reminder of the central role that Christianity has, and continues to play, in Morocco and the region.  However, we do not simply wish to restore the building. The city government will transfer the church to civil society to serve as a location for public workshops, family education, and a meeting point for interfaith relations and development stakeholders. Restoring the Franciscan church in Essaouira will not only preserve the Moroccan cultural past, but can serve as a catalyst in the Kingdom’s strive to set an example of religious and social integration toward shared prosperity in a region where these very values are being fundamentally challenged.

*Richard Bone supports communications for the High Atlas Foundation from Washington, D.C., where he currently studies International Affairs at the George Washington University.

The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of TransConflict.

When Donald J. Trump took over as president, there were concerns that the US would become more isolationist given his ‘America First’ approach. Trump’s campaign rhetoric had clearly promised such a shift. One year into his presidency, has the US moved away from multilateralism?

By Amanda Huan*

To say that a Trump presidency is unlike that of his predecessor would be an egregious understatement. In fact, being different from his predecessor was exactly what he had prided himself to be, and what presumably appealed to voters who had become discontented with the US political establishment. One way that President Trump has differed from Barack Obama is in his disdain for news media and his preference for using social media to air his views.

Mr Obama is often referred to as the ‘first social-media president’ given the burgeoning use of social media by the public at the time and his administration’s deft use of such platforms as public communication and engagement tools. President Donald Trump has really made social media, specifically Twitter, a key tool in his engagement with the American public and the world.

The Real Donald Trump on @realDonaldTrump

With approximately 46.4 million followers on his @realDonaldTrump Twitter account, Mr Trump has continued to use his personal account, instead of the official @POTUS account (21.7 million followers), to air his views on a variety of issues including domestic policies, the role of the media, terrorism, and foreign policy. Mr Trump’s tweets have been examined and analysed by numerous experts such as data analytics companies, the media, data scientists, and linguists.

Some of their findings demonstrate that not all tweets by @realDonaldTrump are actually tweeted by Mr Trump himself (the use of language, the time of the tweet, and even what kind of device it was tweeted from can help differentiate between Trump’s own musings and his administration’s writings). Congratulatory tweets and tweets about announcements (i.e. ‘official’-sounding tweets) tend to be written by his staff while the more emotionally-charged tweets are his own.

Is It Truly ‘America First’?

How do President Trump’s tweets about policy relate to actual policy? It is unclear if his tweets are an accurate representation of his administration’s stance or if the tweets themselves have an impact on the policy-making process even though the tweets are considered official government statements. For example, the Washington Post did their own analysis on Mr Trump’s tweets and US foreign policy and noted that in 2017, his tweets repeatedly offended close US allies and made it difficult to understand what his administration’s exact position on issues was.

President Trump’s foreign policy stance is encapsulated in the phrase ‘America First’. His foreign policy style assumes a cynical and ominous view that the world is out to ‘cheat’ America (e.g. foreigners stealing jobs, allies free-riding on US commitment and security) and thus he aims to put American needs at the forefront and lessen the burden of global leadership.

This has translated into tweets that are combative in tone (e.g. lashing out at Pakistan over US aid, calling Mexico and Canada ‘difficult’ over NAFTA negotiations) and led to plans to reduce US commitment in multilateral forums. Despite the aforementioned, has actual policy shifted? In Donald Trump’s first year in office, has the US retreated from multilateralism?

Between Twitter-speak and Actual Policy

An examination of Mr Trump’s tweets from 20 January 2017 (the day he was sworn into the Oval Office) to 17 January 2018, looking specifically at mentions of US commitment to multilateral institutions threw up some interesting findings. Listed below is a table of the multilateral institution involved, the comments that he has made about the said institution on Twitter, and the actual policy that has been effected with regard to the said institution.

The data suggests that despite his tweets and rhetoric, US engagement with multilateral institutions remains consistent. In the case of the United Nations, while the US has sought to reduce its financial commitments to the institution, Washington remains generally actively involved with the global body. In the case of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), the same holds true.

While Mr Trump was highly critical of the security institution, calling it ‘obsolete’ and criticising NATO allies for not meeting their financial commitments to the alliance, the US remains committed and US military presence in Europe has not decreased. Likewise for other institutions such as the European Union, despite what Mr Trump tweets, there has been no change to US policy and/or involvement in these organisations.

It is important to note, however, that despite his proclivity for Twitter, Mr Trump has mentioned multilateral forums infrequently in his tweets as the bulk of his tweets tend to focus on domestic issues or bilateral relations. While the lack of mention of multilateralism may in itself be taken as an indicator of Mr Trump’s shift away from it, his administration’s continued work in the area suggests otherwise.

In all, the concerns surrounding an increasingly isolationist America wanting to shift away from multilateralism should ease. Despite Mr Trump’s rhetoric and tweets, the US remains involved and committed to the various multilateral institutions that it is a member of.

*Amanda Huan is a Senior Analyst with the Centre of Multilateralism Studies at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

The evidence is in: The biggest beneficiaries of the Trump-Republican tax plan are shareholders.

Yesterday, Bank of America Brian Moynihan said that “most of the benefits” from the tax cuts “will flow to the bottom-line through dividends and share buybacks over time.”

Exactly. Dividends and share buybacks boost share prices. And that’s all corporate America wants to do.

Moynihan noted that in 2017, Bank of America had $16.6 billion of net income available to shareholders and returned $16.8 billion through dividends and buyback. “So, yes, we will expect to return more capital to shareholders given the tax [cut].”

Even the expectation of a big corporate tax cut have caused shares to soar.

Because the richest 1 percent of Americans owns 40 percent of all shares of stock, and the richest fifth owns 80 percent, this is great news for the wealthy.

It’s not great news for anyone else.

But wait. Didn’t Apple just announce it would “contribute” $350 billion to the U.S. economy over the next five years? Apple’s statement prompted Trump to gloat: “Great to see Apple follow through as a result of TAX CUTS. Huge win for American workers and the USA!”

Rubbish.Analysts at RBC Capital Markets believe Apple will bring back to the U.S. $207 billion after taxes and “almost all of it” will be used to reward shareholders through share buybacks or dividends.

Apple also announced that all employees will get $2,500 of restricted stock. Good for Apple employees, but another acknowledgement that the biggest beneficiaries of the tax cut will be shareholders.

The new tax law is a great deal for Apple and its shareholders. Apple has been sitting on a huge “overseas” money hoard of some $252 billion, as Apple’s accountants have assigned its earnings to other countries with lower tax rates than the United States.

Now, though, Apple’s accountants can reallocate the money to the United States subject to a one-time tax of 15.5 percent – lower even than the new corporate tax of 21 percent.

In addition, the new law allows U.S. companies to pay only a 10.5 percent tax on “foreign profits” – inviting Apple’s accountants to continue to find ways to transfer its future profits abroad, and further boosting Apple’s shares.

Bottom line: Apple pays less in taxes so it can send out more dividends and buy back more shares of stock.

Make no mistake: Trump and the Republicans are working on behalf of America’s biggest and richest investors, not American workers.

This shouldn’t be surprising. After all, the big investors are the ones who invested in getting Trump and the Republicans into office.

The members of the International Monetary and Financial Committee (IMFC), the policy advisory committee of the Board of Governors of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), have selected Mr. Lesetja Kganyago, Governor of the South African Reserve Bank, as Chairman of the Committee for a term of three years, effective January 18, 2018.

The IMFC, comprising finance ministers and central bank governors, is the primary advisory body of the IMF Board of Governors and deliberates on the principal policy issues facing the IMF. The Committee has 24 members, reflecting the composition of the IMF Executive Board.

Kganyago succeeds Agustín Carstens, former Governor of the Banco de México, who resigned his chairmanship on December 1, 2017 to assume the position of General Manager of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).

Kganyago has been the Governor of the South African Reserve Bank since November 2014. He served as Deputy Governor of the South African Reserve Bank from May 2011, and was responsible for a wide range of areas, including research, financial stability and regulatory reform, bank supervision, and risk management and compliance. During his tenure as Director-General of the National Treasury of South Africa, he successfully steered a number of public finance and financial markets reforms.

Kganyago led South Africa’s technical team to various meetings of G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors, including during South Africa’s presidency in 2007. Kganyago also chaired the IMF/World Bank Development Committee Deputies and the G20 Working Group on IMF Governance Reform. Kganyago is currently the chair of the Association of African Central Bankers, the chair of the Committee of Central Bank Governors of the Southern African Development Community, and the co-chair of the Financial Stability Board’s Regional Consultative Group for Sub-Saharan Africa. He is also the chair of the Financial Stability Board’s Standing Committee on Standards Implementation.

Fearing that peace might break out with the two Koreas talking to each other, Washington instructed South Korean President Moon Jae-in to keep the message about anything but peace. It is not just Trump. A former top official for the Obama administration warned Moon that South Korea was not going to get anywhere with the North Koreans unless they have the “US behind them”.

Humiliating, that is like saying that Moon’s “button” is not as big as Kim’s. The metaphor is exactly how the Washington elite see South Korea: as Washington’s obedient eunuch. The official went on to say, “If South Koreans are viewed as running off the leash, it will exacerbate tension within the alliance”. Running off the leash! Now more humiliation, is South Korea a US poodle? Instead President Moon Jae-in is showing that he has teeth, and that South Koreans want their country back from US humiliating domination.

During the talks it was agreed for North Korea to participate in the Winter Olympics in February. The two countries will even march together under a common flag, and future talks between the two are planned to reduce tension. Trump continues to bluster, while the two Koreas have “engaged in the most substantive direct talks in years”. Neocons such as John Bolton are outraged that North Korea has proven once again that it is willing to come to the negotiation table. Bolton says it is a dirty trick and that North Korea is “taking advantage of a weak South Korean government”, adding more insulting humiliation. To Washington, South Korea talking peace is weak, running off the leash and going it alone without its US master.

The North using the peace option is seen as a provocation and propaganda that Washington will not tolerate. In retaliation the US sent more nukes to Guam, and put the state of Hawaii on a full alert that a “ballistic missile was inbound”. The nukes outbound to Guam are real; the ones inbound to Hawaii were fake, just like the ability of the billion dollar THAADS to shoot them down. Too conveniently the Hawaii false alarm comes just as the US and its vassals are readying for what the US plots to be a show of solidarity and unity on killer sanctions against North Korea. The US wants its chorus to perform the tragedy of telling North Korea to obey or watch 500,000 of their children die. As Madeleine Albright said about Iraq’s 500,000 dead children from US sanctions, “the price is worth it”. The US does not think the price of diplomacy is worth it though.

The US continues to block efforts at diplomacy, and express its contempt for South Korea’s elected President Moon Jae-in. He was elected on a peace platform by the South Korean people. Moon’s predecessor Park Geun-hye sang from the US hymnbook until she got caught with her hand in the cookie jar. In 2017 the South Korean people went to the street and demanded the granddaughter of former dictator Park Chung Hee be impeached, and now she is in prison.

Peace is not anything that Washington’s plutocrats want to hear, although the South Korean people like the sound of it, and elected Moon their president by a wide margin. The self-interests in Washington preferred the corrupt warmonger Park. She carried the US’s tune with perfect pitch, even (allegedly) conspired to assassinate the North’s Kim Jong-Un. The message of the humiliation from US apparatchiks is that if Moon does not change his tune the US will try to undermine South Korea’s democracy with a regime change project might be in his future. The US habitually meddles in other’s elections, and wants to keep tensions high on the Korean peninsula, keep the South Koreans in line, make North Korea a boogeyman, frighten the American people, station 30,000 US troops in South Korea with wartime operational control, buy more multi-billion dollar THAADS from Lockheed Martin, and divide the Korean people. Even at the risks of a nuclear war, which the US proposes making easier.

The establishment nearly went to war with North Korea in 1994 until Bill Clinton negotiated peace. The neocons in Washington and the mainstream media keep saying that North Korea refused to come to the negotiating table. Clinton’s decision to use diplomacy instead of threats proved the warmongers wrong again. It was the US all along that refused to talk, preferring belligerence and threats just as it does now.

Once Clinton showed a willingness to bargain, then a nuclear deal was struck. The deal was called the Agreed Framework. What North Korea wanted then for it to suspend its nuclear program was for the US to halt the massive military exercises on North Korea’s border, a non-aggression guarantee, compensation for abandoning its needed electric producing nuclear reactors, and relations with the US. Now the situation with North Korea is back to where it was in 1994. George W. Bush reversed the path of peace when he came into the White House. In 2001 he tore up the Agreed Framework, put North Korea on the Axis of Evil list in 2002, invaded Iraq in 2003, and hanged Saddam Hussein in 2006. Very predictably North Korea resumed its nuclear program for self-defense against a paranoid and unpredictable USA that sees enemies to attack under every bed.

Bush scrapped the Agreed Framework, and told then South Korean President Kim Dae-jung that future talks with North Korea were dead. Kim Dae-jung had come to visit Bush shortly after winning the Nobel Peace Prize for his Sunshine Policies of peace with North Korea. Instead of welcoming President Kim and his peace efforts, Bush humiliated him by shockingly calling North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-il a dwarf. North Korea predictably withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 2003 and resumed work on its nuclear program. A month later Bush called out North Korea to pay particular attention to Libya as an example of how a country is welcomed into the international community when it unilaterally gives up its nuclear defense program.

North Korea paid attention and it was listening when Muammar Gaddafi said in a 2008 speech that “one of these days America may hang us like they did Saddam “. In 2011 Gaddafi met a brutal death at the hands of US proxies; he was anally raped with a bayonet and left to rot on public display in a meat locker. Before Gaddafi’s corpse was even cold a hysterically glowing Hillary Clinton cackled “we came, we saw, he died”, hahaha”. Now fast forward to 2018 and the US is threatening war against North Korea again.

The US has been abusing Korea since 1871 when it first invaded it with an expeditionary force of Marines to forcibly open trade. Korea just wanted to be left alone, but the US forced Korea to sign an exclusive trade treaty in 1882 at the point of a gun. In exchange for that unequal trade agreement the US promised Korea protection. In 1910 the US proved that its promise was worthless.

Instead of protection, President Theodore Roosevelt stabbed Korea in the back by conspiring with Japan. Roosevelt had enthusiastically supported Japan in the Russo-Japanese War. Japan pre-emptively attacked the Russian fleet at Port Arthur in a sneak attack. Teddy congratulated Japan for their brilliance…in 1941 his nephew Franklin would call a Japanese sneak attack “a day of infamy”. After Japan and Russia ground down to a bloody stalemate, Japan secretly appealed to Teddy to open negotiations. Roosevelt acted as a (dis)honest broker in negotiating the Treaty of Portsmouth, for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Japan won the spoils of the war. Roosevelt had a secret deal that Japan could have Korea and the US would take the Philippines. In 1945 the US deceived Korea again. Instead of liberating Korea from the Japanese occupation, the US occupied Korea for 3 more years until 1948 and then blocked its independence.

The US was largely responsible for the division of Korea and backing dictatorships in South Korea until 1993. Americans do not know the US treachery, but Koreans do. Why would they trust the USA now?

In order to understand North Korea, one must start with the “anticolonial and anti-imperial state growing out of a half-century of Japanese colonial rule and a half-century of continuous confrontation with a hegemonic United States”, as Bruce Cumings writes in his book North Korea: Another Country. In order to understand South Korea one should take a similar approach.

The Japanese colonization of Korea in 1910 was greeted with cheers from the USA. Teddy Roosevelt encouraged Japan to have its own Japanese Monroe Doctrine for Northeast Asia. The Japanese were harsh rulers, and Koreans remember colonial times as a national humiliation. Under the Japanese the Korean economy grew rapidly, but Koreans will rightly argue that little of it helped the average Korean. Like the Korean “comfort women” sex slaves during World War Two, Koreans were forced to obey their Japanese masters. Some Koreans complied reluctantly, some willingly and some enthusiastically. Many, but not all of the enthusiastic collaborators came from the landed aristocratic class of Koreans known as the yangban.

Other collaborators were traitors that saw advancing their economic and social status by collaborating. After the division of Korea in 1945 many of the yangban class and collaborators fled to the South where they felt safe with the US occupation army, and for good reasons. The North was redistributing the yangban’s vast landholdings. Many of the yangban and collaborators were safer in the US occupied south. Some went on to achieve leadership in business and government in South Korea. For instance, the future South Korean dictator Park Chung-hee (from 1963 until his assassination in 1979) had collaborated with the Japanese as a lieutenant in the Japanese army in Manchuria fighting against the Korean resistance fighters.

Korea has a long history of thousands of years. It united as one people in the 7th century and remained so until after World War Two. The US had started planning for the occupation of Korea six months after Pearl Harbor, according to Bruce Cumings. The day after Japan surrendered a future Secretary of State Dean Rusk drew a line at the 38th Parallel where the US proposed that Korea be divided, and the Russian allies agreed. Thousands of Koreans protested in the streets.

They were told that a trusteeship was temporary until elections. Instead the US feared that the people would elect a communist government, and so they rigged a fraudulent election for a separate government in the South. The United Nations rubber stamped it. As in the South, the North then held separate elections for the Supreme People’s Assembly which then elected Kim Il Sung, a famous anti-Japanese guerilla resistance leader since 1932. The US and South Korean propaganda portray that North Korea was a puppet and satellite project of the Soviet Union. This is probably the US projecting its own imperial intentions. Cummings says that no evidence exists that the Soviets had any long-term designs on Korea. They withdrew all of their military from North Korea in 1948.

North Korea has experience with US brutality. During the Korean War the US bombed Korea for 3 years, wiped out 20% of its population and destroyed every city, village and vital structure. President Truman threatened to bomb them with the atomic bomb, and General Douglas MacArthur planned to use 30 nuclear bombs which were shipped to a US base in Okinawa. Truman fired MacArthur not because MacArthur wanted to use nukes, but because Truman wanted someone more loyal he could trust with them. Truman preauthorized MacArthur’s replacement General Matthew Ridgeway to use the nuclear bombs at his discretion. The US public is oblivious to US recklessness with nuclear bombs and is passive about what is done in their name. The Korean War (1950 to 1953) is called the Forgotten War because the US public has amnesia. Whatever propaganda they do remember is a flawed version of history put out by the US government. Oblivious, passive and amnesia are why all US wars of aggression are quickly forgotten as the US moves on to the next one.

After the US military occupation of South Korea from 1945 to 1948, South Korea was ruled by US backed repressive dictators until the first democratic election in 1993. The first despot that the US installed was Syngman Rhee in 1948. Rhee was a practically unknown in Korea because he had lived in the USA from 1912 until 1945, when he was flown back to Korea by the US military. The US pumped billions of dollars into South Korea to make it a showplace of US-style capitalism during the Cold War, but South Korea did not develop under either democracy or a free market, according to Ha-Joon Chang, the author of Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism.

For many decades North Korea outpaced South Korea in economic development and in their standard of living until the 1970’s. With the 1991 demise of its most important trading partner the Soviet Union, North Korea fell on very hard economic times. Then it suffered two floods and a drought in the 1990’s that resulted in famines. On top of that the US has imposed killer economic sanctions.

So now US propaganda constantly reinforces the belief that North Korea is an economic failure that cannot even feed its own people. While the US touts that South Korea is an economic miracle of democracy, capitalism and free markets. Little is ever mentioned about the economic collapse of South Korea in 1997, which the US had to rescue with a financial bailout package that reached $90 Billion. The package included IMF loans that came with humiliating conditionalities of austerity. The minister of finance Lim Chang Yuel went on TV, humiliated and begging for the South Korean people’s forgiveness.

Despite all the propaganda otherwise, North Korea is not only willing to sit down at the table with the US, but it has long been proposing negotiations to a deaf USA ear. What North Korea says it wants today are the same things that were negotiated with Clinton in the Agreed Framework: security, compensation, and economic relations with the US. There is nothing unreasonable that North Korea is asking for, and that is probably why the US refuses to negotiate. It does not want peace for its own insane naked imperialism reasons. Instead the US wants continued hostilities; otherwise if it wanted peace it would welcome diplomacy.

It is the US that is unpredictable. One day Secretary of State Rex Tillerson says that the US is willing to hold unconditional talks with North Korea. Then he says the US won’t. Trump says that he will destroy North Korea with fire and fury, and then he says he would “absolutely talk to North Korea’s Kim on the phone”. It is the US that is paranoid and finding enemies everywhere: Cuba, Afghanistan, Syria, Venezuela, Iran, and Russia to name just a few. The US enemies list has nothing to do with democracy, freedom and human rights. If it did the US would not be friends, allies, and benefactors to brutal kingdoms, monarchies, dictators, fascists and human rights abusers such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, Honduras, Haiti, and Ukraine, for example. US foreign policy is based on hegemony, empire, power, corporate interests, corruption and self-interests of the high and mighty, not democracy and human rights.

Who is paranoid? Compare how much of a threat the US is compared to North Korea. Since World War Two North Korea has not invaded anybody. The Korean War (1950 to 1953) was a civil war and authoritative historians such as I. F. Stone, Bruce Cumings, and David Halberstam agree that the South was responsible for instigating it too. Korea itself has not invaded anybody since the 16th century. The US has attacked at least 32 countries just since WW2.

North Korea has a defense budget of only $7.5 billion, compared to the US $1 Trillion. North Korea has developed nuclear weapons because the US has been threatening it with nuclear destruction since 1950, introduced nuclear weapons into South Korea in 1957 in violation of the armistice agreement and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The US keeps practicing regime change decapitation invasions and nuclear attacks against North Korea. North Korea has an estimated arsenal of 20 nuke bombs that are not a threat to the US’s 15,000 nuclear arsenal. Instead the US is an asymmetrical and existential threat to North Korea and every other non-compliant small country. North Korea has nuclear weapons because it does not want to humiliate itself by being a US poodle. When are the American people going to wise up to the US propaganda and false cries that the evil wolf is at the door again?

First published at the Greanville Post as US Humiliation of South Korea.

About the author:
 *David William Pear is a progressive columnist writing on economic, political and social issues. His articles have been published by OpEdNews, The Greanville Post, The Real News Network, Truth Out, Consortium News, Global Research, and many other publications. David is active in social issues relating to peace, race and religious relations, homelessness and equal justice. David is a member of Veterans for Peace, Saint Pete for Peace, CodePink, and International Solidarity Movement. In 2017 David spent 3 weeks in South Korea researching the Korean War of 1950 to 1953.  David has a Bachelor of Science degree in economics from the University of Maryland and attended classes at George Washington University for a degree as a Certified Financial Planner. He is a graduate of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania program for a degree as a Certified Investment Management Analyst (CIMA).

References:
“North Korea: Another Country”, by Bruce Cumings.
“The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia,” by James Bradley.
“Korean Mind: Understanding Contemporary Korean Culture”, by Boye Lafayette De Mente

Now that President Donald Trump has declared an outright and open war on international terrorism all around the world, joining forces with Russian President Putin and Chinese Premier Xi, and scores of other world leaders to combat this enemy of civilization, in order to absolutely decimate violent actors around the planet who use destructive and disruptive means and methods other than political discourse to settle their differences, so too must he begin to now do, with regards to internet terrorism, slander, libel, defamation, terrorist threats, incitement to violence, and targeted harassment online.

As President Trump knows only too well, as he is a prime target of the Deep State/Oligarch/Global Terrorist Network online, with their relentless attacks on him, his wife, his family and his administration, when he developed the term “Fake News,” he is also the only one who can finally find the balance between the U.S. Constitution First Amendment and terrorism carried out online.

Trump has repeatedly promised to “look at the libel laws,” but what he should specifically look at is how to hold websites, their hosts, and their advertisers responsible and liable for their egregious taking advantage of the broad based immunities and protections afforded by the Communications Decency Act of 1996 Section 230 (aka “CDA 230“), drafted and passed by U.S. legislators such as Ron Wyden and Christopher Cox, which literally opened the floodgates to trillions of dollars of damage to individuals, small and large business, domestic and global relationships, national security, and global cohesion.

True enough, freedom of speech is paramount, and essential to the American constitutional experiment – but after 20 years of this “wild west” of internet speech, we know and have learned many things.

Various organized criminal enterprises have sprung up all over the world, extorting and blackmailing innocent people and businesses to pay them exorbitant amounts of money to remove/challenge anonymous, cowardly, false, defamatory, slanderous, libelous, terroristic, and incitement to violent threats online, always hiding behind the immunity and protection afforded by CDA 230 to both their own mafia-like “reputation management” websites, their web hosts, and their advertisers.

Much has also been revealed about the “ties” by and between these “reputation management” websites, and the offending websites themselves, so that if one pays one of these extortionate websites for “arbitration” or “challenging offending posts,” one will suddenly find a dramatic increase in the exact same or similar postings on other offending websites, thus increasing damages, exposure, and of course, the “costs” attendant to getting these offensive and threatening posts off of the internet.

This is a classic racketeering enterprise, and each and every country has their own rules and laws governing such type of criminal activity, and in the United States, the most lax and forgiving of all of these types of crimes, it is called “RICO,” or the Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organization act.

This RICO law is a United States federal law that provides for extended criminal penalties and a civil cause of action for acts performed as part of an ongoing criminal organization.

The RICO Act focuses specifically on racketeering, and it allows the leaders of a syndicate to be tried for the crimes which they ordered others to do or assisted them in doing, closing a perceived loophole that allowed a person who instructed someone else to, to be exempt from the trial because they did not actually commit the crime personally.

Under RICO, a person who has committed “at least two acts of racketeering activity” drawn from a list of 35 crimes – 27 federal crimes and 8 state crimes – within a 10 year period can be charged with racketeering if such acts are related to an “enterprise.”

Those found guilty of racketeering can be fined up to $25,000 and sentenced to 20 years in prison per racketeering count.

In addition, the racketeer must forfeit all ill-gotten gains and interest in any business gained through a pattern of “racketeering activity.”

This statute could easily be used against most of the “reputation management” websites which, like the Mafia, literally aid and abet, if not “create” the online internet threats, targeting, harassment, incitement to violence, and terrorist threats in order to then charge a hefty “fee” to either “eradicate” or “combat” those self-created threats.

Indeed many business, banking, financial, communication, personal, and professional relationships can easily be discovered by and between these “reputation management” organized crime websites, and the other “offending websites” containing such illegal and unethical content.

The problem is that since at least 1996, the “Deep State” has successfully used the protections afforded by the CDA 230 to target their enemies online, discrediting and hobbling them at will, while simultaneously being able to weather the proverbial storm against themselves, because they are directly connected to the international central bankers with unlimited amounts of cash to survive personal or professional online destruction, while their targeted Deep State enemies are, by definition, “swimming upstream” against them, struggling barely to survive.

This is by no means a fair fight, and hundreds of millions of “dead” businesses and individuals have washed up on the shore in their wake, while Deep State connected individuals and businesses always seem to stay afloat.

So if President Donald Trump, arguably the greatest victim of the above referenced type of global online criminal activity on behalf of the Deep State, which is still relentlessly trying to destroy him, his family, his administration and his legacy, as well as average American individuals and businesses that he professes to care so much about, and if he is truly serious about “looking at the libel laws” as he has repeatedly stated/promised, then perhaps this is the best place for him to start.

An inventor in Togo invents a 3D printer from e-waste parts and dreams of expanding his nation’s industrial capabilities.

By Raluca Besliu*

In 2013, Togolese inventor Afate Gnikou built a 3D printer entirely out of recycled electronic waste. The 34-year-old had become consumed by the idea of creating his own version after seeing a 3D printer assembled at the inaugural edition of Fab Lab – a digital fabrication workshop-in Lome, the capital of Togo, in August 2012.

A small country in West Africa, with a population of about 7 million, Togo’s main industry remains subsistence agriculture, on which more than half of the Togolese continue to depend. Young Togolese under the age of 35, representing 75 percent of the population, confront a severe unemployment challenge. Unemployment rates for the entire country hover around 6.5 percent, but are near 10 percent for young adults. Under-employment is estimated at more than 20 percent. The Togolese economy is robust, reports the World Bank, but struggling due to a recent slowdown in neighboring Nigeria and a widening deficit. More than half the population lives below the poverty line.

In Togo and other countries struggling to develop, the latest technological advances are out of reach. Constructing new devices with bits and pieces from discarded units may not eliminate considerable poverty or the large amount of waste, but e-waste recycling could foster broader innovation, education and exploration, solving a plethora of socio-economic problems.

Workshops like Fab Lab offer both education and entertainment. Gnikou is a geographer by training and tinkerer in electronics and bricolage by necessity – experienced in putting together small electrical cars and car doors, as well as repairing cell phones for people in his neighborhood, all helping him earn extra income to survive. A friend urged him to attend the workshop featuring an entrepreneur from Europe who would assemble a new technology. Driven by curiosity, Gnikou attended the Fab Lab as an observer. The speaker put together a 3D printer during the workshop with an installation kit brought from France, including all required hardware and software that ensured the final device was operational.

Gnikou became enthralled, immediately envisioning the potential for his country where industry accounts for 5 percent of the labor force. Such a device could bolster technological innovation and creativity, allowing entrepreneurs to create affordable, professional and rapid prototypes to ensure that their inventions would function well and reliably. A 3D printer could enable consumers to purchase locally-made products tailored to their needs rather than standardized, imported commodities from either Western countries or China. Such printers could ultimately propel Togo into the technological markets of West Africa and eventually the globe. Gnikou also recognized that the printer would be environmentally friendly by increasing reuse of discarded electronics available in local dumps.

After the workshop, the 3D printer was displayed in an education center for the next year, though December 2013. Gnikou visited the display once a week studying the device and trying to figure out its assembly and how it operated. Installation kits were unavailable in Togo, and Gnikou was determined to replicate the 3D printer from scratch using readily available e-waste. He set up an open-air workshop in the small courtyard near his home, shared by several neighbors. His laboratory consisted of a large table and chair, the area protected from the scorching sun by a plastic cover tied to nearby trees.

Gnikou had several old desktop computers at home. He tore them apart to use some of the elements, including the overall frame and the electrical wiring. He spent six months of trial and error as well as reading instructions on the internet and watching YouTube videos until he eventually assembled his own 3D printer. The most difficult yet also exciting part, he confessed, was figuring out how to assemble the extruder, a key part of 3D printers that melts the material and moves back and forth, creating layers to mold the desired object. After extensive online reading about printers, the young inventor managed to create his extruder using old plastic copier gear.

His device attracted substantial international recognition, including the prize for technological innovation during the 10th International Conference of Fab Lab in Barcelona in 2014. He continued working to improve his device, producing several smaller, more robust and efficient models. By 2015, he created a second prototype, again using parts of discarded computers and printers mostly from the electronic waste market near Lome’s Port.

Many old consumer electronics arrive at this port, shipped from Western countries, sometimes illegally. Globally, more than 40 million tons of electronic waste are generated every year, comprising around 70 percent of total toxic waste. Tracking is imprecise, and government regulators in the developed nations concede that exporting used electronic devices, most to countries in West Africa and Asia with less stringent environmental regulations, can be less costly than discarding at home. With 85 percent of the e-waste generated at the regional level, West Africa faces a growing problem of its own making. Most of the e-waste is burned to prevent unmanageable stockpiles that contaminate the soil with hazardous substances like lead and mercury. The smoke from burning is equally dangerous, though, containing dioxin, heavy metals and other elements threatening human and environmental health. Despite this, only about 15 percent of e-waste is recycled globally. In December, the United Nations issued a report recommending greater global collaboration on e-waste.

Since creating his 3D printer, Gnikou has found multiple uses for the device. One of the first was printing inexpensive prototypes of designs by local entrepreneurs. For instance, his device helped print multiple prototypes for an anti-theft device created by three young Togolese men based in Lome. The prototype helped resolve production flaws and moved that invention to its final stages. That anti-theft product addresses a specific need for the many West Africans who rely on motorcycles for transportation. But the small vehicles are often stolen, and according to official statistics, more than 7,000 motos were stolen in 2015 alone. The anti-theft invention includes an integrated GPS system that tracks the stolen vehicle and allows owners to cut their vehicle’s engine.

While printing models and prototypes are helpful for emerging Togolese innovators, such work still did not provide Gnikou a living wage. So he shifted his focus to training others on how to create and use their own 3D printers. In December 2016, working with EcoTec Lab – an innovation center for ecology and integrated sciences – Gnikou co-organized the Togo MakerFest, a two-day do-it-yourself manufacturing event and led community sessions on building a 3D printer.

Gnikou is not giving up on inventing or Togo. He continues striving to define the role of the 3D printer for the Togolese market and make plans to improve its functioning. Among his upcoming projects is to produce the special plastic material needed for the 3D printer by recycling available plastic in Togo. In particular, he wants to recycle plastic bottles that end up covering the streets and beaches of Lome, often blocking sewage systems.

In a country where the literacy rate is below 65 percent, his efforts reaffirm of the value of technology, education and exploration and a can-do spirit.

*Raluca Besliu is a freelance journalist focused on women’s and children’s rights, refugee and human rights issues, and peace and post-conflict reconstruction. She graduated from the University of Oxford with an Msc in Refugees and Forced Migration after studying international affairs at Vassar College. She founded the nonprofit organization Save South Kordofan. Follow her on Twitter.