Hard to believe, but the Trump administration is proposing yet another massive tax windfall for the rich.

It would be to reduce their capital gains taxes. Those are taxes on the increased value of their stocks and bonds, businesses, and other valuables, when they sell them. Trump would do this by eliminating whatever portion of that increased value was due to inflation.

Here are three reasons why reducing capital gains taxes would be another tax scam for the rich.

1. The people who’d get most of the benefits are already richer than ever and pay a lower effective tax rate than they have in decades. An estimated 63 percent of the benefits of this proposal would go to the wealthiest one-tenth of 1 percent of Americans, while the bottom 80 percent of us would get only 1 percent of its benefits, according to a University of Pennsylvania Wharton School analysis.

If anything, Congress should raise capital gains taxes, not lower them. The capital gains tax rate is already lower than the rate on ordinary income. Yet the wealthy now own most of the nation’s assets and enjoy most of the capital gains. In 2016 (the most recent date for which data are available), the richest 10 percent owned 84 percent of the entire stock market.

2. The cost of this change would be a whopping $10 billion a year, for the next 10 years. That’s just about the yearly cost of funding free lunches for 20 million poor kids. Yet the federal debt is already ballooning. Over ten years, this proposal would increase it by an estimated $100 to $300 billion.

3. Trump and his administration say they have the power to make this change by themselves without even being authorized to do so by Congress. Rubbish. Congress has already decided that capital gains taxes should not be indexed for inflation. That’s why, when the same idea came up during the George H.W. Bush administration, the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel stopped it cold.

It’s another big handout to the wealthy, another huge increase in the federal deficit, and it’s illegal. Don’t let Trump and his enablers get away with this tax scam for the rich.

Today’s financial malaise for pension funds, state and local budgets and underemployment is largely a result of the 2008 bailout, not the crash. What was saved was not only the banks – or more to the point, as Sheila Bair pointed out, their bondholders – but the financial overhead that continues to burden today’s economy.

Also saved was the idea that the economy needs to keep the financial sector solvent by an exponential growth of new debt – and, when that does not suffice, by government purchase of stocks and bonds to support the balance sheets of the wealthiest layer of society. The internal contradiction in this policy is that debt deflation has become so overbearing and dysfunctional that it prevents the economy from growing and carrying its debt burden.

Trying to save the financial overgrowth of debt service by borrowing one’s way out of debt, or by monetary Quantitative Easing re-inflating real estate, stock and bond prices, enables the creditor One Percent to gain, not the indebted 99 Percent in the economy at large. Therefore, from the economy’s vantage point, instead of asking how the banks are to be saved “next time,” the question should be, how should we best let them go under – along with their stockholders, bondholders and uninsured depositors whose hubris imagined that their loans (other peoples’ debts) could go on rising without impoverishing society and preventing creditors from collecting in any event – except from government by gaining control over it.

A basic principle should be the starting point of any macro analysis: The volume of interest-bearing debt tends to outstrip the economy’s ability to pay. This tendency is inherent in the “magic of compound interest.” The exponential growth of debt expands by its own purely mathematical momentum, independently of the economy’s ability to pay – and faster than the non-financial economy grows.

The higher the debt/income ratio rises, the more interest, amortization payments and late fees are extracted from the economy. The resulting debt burden slows the economy, causing defaults. That is what happened in 2008, and is accelerating today as debt ratios are rising for corporate debt, state and local debt, and student debt.

Neither legislators, academics nor the public at large recognize a corollary Second Principle following from the first: An over-indebted economy cannot be saved unless the banks fail. That means writing down the financial claims by the One to Ten Percent – in other words, the net debts owed by the 99 to 90 Percent. Wiping out bad debts involves writing down the “bad savings” that are the counterpart to these debts on the asset side of the balance sheet. Otherwise the economy will suffer debt deflation and austerity.

“Recovery” since 2008 has been much slower than earlier recoveries because debt deflation is siphoning off more and more personal and corporate income. To make matters worse, the bailout’s policy of Quantitative Easing to re-inflate asset prices has reduced rates of return for pension funds, insurance companies and employee retirement savings. This means that more state and local government income must be diverted to meet retirement commitments.

Something has to give, and it is not likely to be the savings of the donor class at the top of the economic pyramid. As a result, the economy at large is threatened with an exponentially expanding erosion of disposable income and net worth for most people and companies. Investment managers are warning of a financial meltdown, given today’s historically high price/earnings ratios for stocks and also for rental properties.

What is not acknowledged is that such a crisis is a precondition for today’s economy to recover from the rising debt/income and debt/GDP ratios that are burdening the United States, Europe and other regions. At least the United States has been able to monetize its budget deficits and subsidize banks to carry its rising debt overhead with yet new debt. The Eurozone has banned budget deficits of over 3 percent of GDP, imposing austerity that leaves the only response to over-indebtedness to be Greek-style austerity: depopulation, shrinking living standards, wipeouts of retirement income and pensions, mortgage defaults, shortening lifespans, and mass selloffs of public infrastructure to foreign financial appropriators.

None of this was spelled out in the September 15 weekend marking the tenth anniversary of Lehman Brothers’ failure and subsequent rescue of Wall Street. President Obama, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and their fellow financial lobbyists at the Federal Reserve and Justice Department are credited with saving “the economy,” as if their donor class on Wall Street was a good proxy for the economy at large. “Saving the economy from a meltdown” has become the euphemism for saving bondholders and other members of the One Percent from taking losses on their bad loans. The “rescue” is Orwellian doublespeak for expropriating over nine million indebted Americans from their homes, while leaving surviving homeowners saddled with enormous bubble-mortgage payments to the FIRE sector’s owners.

What has been put in place is not a restoration of traditional status quo, but a reversal of over a century of central bank policy. Failed banks have not been taken into the public domain. They have been enriched far beyond their former levels. The perpetrators of the collapse have been rewarded, not penalized for lending more than could possibly be paid by NINJA borrowers and speculators whose mortgage applications were doctored by systemic fraud at Countrywide, Washington Mutual, Bank of America, Citigroup and their cohorts.

The $4.3 trillion that could have been used to save debtors was given to the banks and Wall Street firms whose recklessness and outright fraud caused the crisis. The Federal Reserve “cash for trash” swaps with insolvent banks did not restore normalcy or the status quo ante. What occurred was a financial revolution by stealth, reversing the traditional responsibility of creditors to make prudent loans.

Quantitative Easing saved creditors and the largest stockholders and bondholders by lowering the interest rates by enough to make it profitable for new loans to inflate asset prices on credit. This revived the value of collateral backing bank loans and bondholdings. “Saving” the economy in this way actually sacrificed it. That is why our “recovery” is only “on paper,” a result of calculating GDP to include bank earnings and hypothetical homeowner windfalls as rents are soaring.

Among Democrats, the most extreme tunnel vision denying that debt is a problem comes from Paul Krugman: Writing that “The purely financial aspect of the crisis was basically over by the summer of 2009,”[1]he criticized what he called the “bizarre Beltway consensus that despite high unemployment and record low interest rates, debt, not jobs, was the real problem.”

This misses the point that 2009 was the real beginning for most of the nine million homeowners being foreclosed on and evicted from their homes. Consumers found themselves with less income “freely disposable” after paying their monthly FIRE sector nut off the top of their paycheck – housing charges, credit card charges, medical insurance, student debt, FICA withholding and tax withholding. Krugman says that he would have solved the problem by more deficit spending to pump enough money into the economy to enable debtors to keep paying the banks their exponential growth of interest claims.

We are still living in the destabilized, debt-ridden aftermath of such pro-bank advocacy. In the New Yorker, John Cassidy celebrates a book by Columbia professor Adam Tooze promoting the idea that “the economy” cannot exist without the credit (that is, debt) provided by the financial sector.[2]True enough, but does it follow that rescuing the economy must involve rescuing Wall Street and enriching the banks at the expense of the rest of the economy. That conflation is an Orwellian rhetoric of deception that has been introduced to the discussion of how the economy was “rescued” by locking in today’s Great Debt Deflation.

At the neoliberal/neocon Brookings Institution, Treasury secretaries Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner joined with the Federal Reserve’s Ben Bernanke to explain that the public simply didn’t understand how successful they all were in saving not only the banks, but non-bank financial institutions. Unlike Sheila Bair, they did not point out that behind these institutions were the bondholders, the One Percent of savers who held the rest of the economy in debt. Bernanke wrote a Financial Timespiece producing junk statistics purporting to show that there was no underlying debt or financial problem at all, merely a “panic.”[3] To paraphrase, he said: “The crisis was all in the mind folks. Nothing to see here. Keep moving on.” It is as if, as Margaret Thatcher liked to insist, There Is No Alternative.

Can this bailout without debt writedowns really bring prosperity? Can economies achieve growth by “borrowing their way out of debt,” by creating enough new credit to cover the interest charges out of capital gains from the asset-price inflation fueled by new bank credit. That is the logic that has guided the Federal Reserve’s net $4.3 trillion in Quantitative Easing, and the parallel credit creation by the European Central Bank under Mario “Whatever it takes” Draghi. Ellen Brown recently published a review, “Central Banks Have Gone Rogue, Putting Us All at Risk, noting that the ECB has become a major stock buyer.[4]The beneficiaries are the stockholders who are concentrated in the wealthiest percentiles of the population. Governments are not underwriting homeownership or the solvency of labor’s pension plans, but are underwriting the value of collateral backing the savings of the narrow financial class.

The GDP accounts report the widening gap between low government bond rates and the cost of credit to banks compared to the higher rates paid by mortgage borrowers, credit-card holders and student loan customers as “financial services.” What is extracted from the economy is added to the GDP statistic instead of being treated as a subtrahend. This absurd practice reflects the degree to which Wall Street lobbyists have captured economic statistics. The National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) have been turned into a vehicle for deception. What is celebrated as growth of the GDP since 2008 has been mainly the growth in financial extraction, along with the health-insurance sector profiting from Obamacare.

Glenn Hubbard, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under George W. Bush, uses Orwellian doublethink to pretend that “Debt is Wealth.” He concludes a Wall Street Journal op-ed: “An ability to recapitalize banks remains crucial and must be explained to a skeptical Congress and public,”[5] so that wealthy bondholders and speculators will not suffer losses.

On a brighter side, Adair Turner pokes fun at the “Authoritative experts such as the IMF [who] explained how increased securitisation and trading activity made the financial system more efficient and less risky.”[6] It was as if “options” and hedges can get rid of risk entirely, not shift them onto Wall Street victims such as the naïve German Landesbanks.

The aim of this week’s disinformation campaign is to prevent popular anger advocating what was done in classical antiquity. The ancients fought civil wars for land redistribution and debt cancellation. Today the demand should be for mortgage writedowns to bring their carrying charges in line with reasonable rent charges, limited to the former normal 25 percent of homeowner income – while rolling back the FICA wage withholding and allied taxes levied to bail out the creditor class.

An Athenian antecedent to today’s financial takeover

It is an old story, with a striking parallel in classical Athens. After losing the Peloponnesian war to oligarchic Sparta in 404, a Pinochet-style military junta – the Thirty Tyrants – was installed. During its eight months of terror its members killed a reported 1,500 democratic advocates whose land and other property they grabbed. Advocates of democracy took refuge in Thrace and other neighboring regions.

After the exiled democratic leaders reconquered Athens, they sought to restore harmony, going so far as to pay off all the debts that the oligarchic junta had run up to Sparta. To top matters, the subsequent 4^thcentury obliged Athenian jurors and indeed, mayors in some Greek cities to swear an oath: “I will not allow private debts (chreon idiom) to be cancelled, nor lands nor houses of Athenian citizens to be redistributed.”[7]

If no such pledge is needed today by public officials, it is because the financial administrators at the Treasury, Federal Reserve and other regulatory agencies already have shown themselves to be so tunnel-visioned from graduate school through their employment history that they can be trusted to find debt writedowns as unthinkable as enforcing laws against criminal financial fraud to punish individuals rather than their institutions. Academia joins in the deception that financial engineering can sustain a geometric growth in debt ad infinitumwithout imposing austerity.The bailout aftermath has demonstrated that corporations are not really  “persons” if they cannot be given jail time.

The key financial principle is that this self-expansion of interest-bearing debt grows to absorb more and more of the economic surplus. The solution therefore must involve wiping out the excess debt – and savings that have been badly lent. That is what crashes are supposed to do. It was not done in 2008. That is why the status quo was not restored. A vast giveaway to the financial elites occurred, setting the rest of the economy on a road to debt peonage.

It would have been nice to have read an article by Sheila Bair explaining the procedures that the FDIC had in place, ready to take over insolvent Citigroup and other banks in similar straits, saving all the insured depositors by taking over these institutions. No doubt as public institutions they would not have indulged in junk mortgages or, for that matter, takeover loans.

It would have been nice to hear from Hank Paulson and perhaps Barney Frank on how they tried to get incoming President Obama to write down bad mortgages whose carrying charges were as far above the debtor’s ability to pay as they were above the going rental value for similar properties. It would have been nice to hear a mea culpa from Mr. Obama apologizing for representing the interest of his campaign donors by standing between them and his voters with pitchforks. Even an article by Tim Geithner or Eric Holder on how lucky they felt at getting such high-paying jobs after they left office from the financial sector they had overseen and “regulated.”

What is needed now is to follow up the primary policy perception that today’s financially dysfunctional economy cannot be saved without a bank crash. That means rolling back the enormous gains that the FIRE sector has made since 1980 at the expense of the “real” economy.  Banks have ceased to be an “engine of growth.” They are not making loans to create new means of production. They are lending to asset strippers, not asset creators. It is not hard to show this statistically. (I drafted an attempt in Killing the Host, and am now working with Democracy Collaborative to prepare a larger study.)

At stake is whether the U.S. and Western European economies are going to end up looking like those of Greece, Latvia and Argentina – or imperial Rome for that matter. Neoliberals applaud today’s victorious finance capitalism as the “end of history.” One such end has already occurred once, at the close of Roman antiquity. It is remembered as the Dark Age. Progress stopped as the creditor and landowning class lorded it over the rest of society. Trade survived only among the lords at the top of the economic pyramid. Today’s “End of History” dream threatens to unfold along similar lines. It is all about relative power of the One Percent.

Notes.

[1] Paul Krugman, “Days of Fear, Years of Obstruction,” The New York Times, September 14, 2018.

[2] John Cassidy, A World of Woes: A global take on a decade of financial crisis,” The New Yorker, September 17, 2018.

[3] “Ben Bernanke pins blame for Great Recession on bank panic,” Financial Times, September 13, 2018.

[4] Ellen Brown recently published a review, Central Banks Have Gone Rogue, Putting Us All at Risk.” Public Banking Institute and Truthdig, September 13, 2018.

[5] Glenn Hubbard, “Bailouts Shouldn’t Be Only for Banks”Wall Street Journal, September 14, 2018. To be sure, Hubbard acknowledges that Republicans had agreed to but incoming President Obama nixed: “The government should have directed a mass refinancing of mortgages for primary homes in which the borrower was current in payments.”

[6] Adair Turner, “Banks are safer but debt remains a danger,” Financial Times, September 12, 2018.

[7] Demosthenes Against Timocrates (xxiv.149).

There has been a spate of articles recently on the ten year anniversary of the financial collapse. We wrote about this anniversary two weeks ago, describing the cause of the collapse and the reasons why we are still at risk for another one. Now, we look at how the aftermath of the collapse is shaping current politics, people’s views on the economic system and the conflict that lies ahead to create an economy for the 21st Century.

The Aftershocks Of The Collapse Are Still Being Felt

Jerome Roos of ROAR Magazine writes that the response to the 2008 crash – bailing out the banks but not the people – led to unrest across the globe, beginning with the Arab Spring, and a growing anti-capitalist sentiment. He goes on to say, “It has recently begun to consolidate itself in the form of vibrant grassroots movements, progressive political formations and explicitly socialist candidacies that collectively seek to challenge the untrammeled power and privileges of the ‘1 percent’ from below.”

The stagnant economy, austerity measures and resulting increased debt have opened a space for people to search for and try out alternative economic structures that are more democratic. They have also created conditions for a rise of nationalism on the right. Roos concludes that the “real confrontation is yet to come.”

In the United States, the economic conditions have revived populist movements on both the right and the left. Gareth Porter explains the Democratic and Republican parties are aware of the great dissatisfaction with their failed policies and know they need to try to appease the public by trying new policies, but they don’t know how.

He points to recent joint papers put out by the Center for American Progress, a Democratic Party think tank, and the American Enterprise Institute, a Republican Party think tank. One from May is called, “Drivers of Authoritarian Populism in the United States,” and the other from July is called, “Partnership in Peril: The Populist Assault on the TransAtlantic Community.” In the papers, rather than present alternative solutions, they attack Jill Stein of the Green Party and Bernie Sanders, a Democratic Socialist.

There is a battle inside the Democratic Party between progressives, some who call themselves socialists, and the dominant business-friendly corporatists. As Miles Kampf-Lessin writes, “An August poll shows that, for the first time since Gallup started asking the question 10 years ago, Democrats now view socialism more favorably than capitalism.”

But the Democratic Party has been deaf to the interests of its constituents for decades. At meetings organized by centrist Democratic Party groups this summer, lacking populist solutions, the best they could come up with was “the center is sexier than you think.” And while a few “progressives” in the Democratic Party won their primaries, they are not receiving support from the party. Instead, the party leaders are throwing their weight behind security state Democrats, who could make up half of newly-elected Democrats this November.

In the Republican Party, Donald Trump’s faux populism has shown itself to be a sham. The Republican Party is unable to handle Trump, who defeated a series of elitist candidates starting with the next heir of the royal Bush family, Jeb. A record number of Republicans have given up and decided not to run for re-election. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan saw the writing on the wall and said he wanted to spend time with his family.

The 2018 election will bring change as Republican control of both Chambers of Congress are at risk, especially the House, but this is unlikely to resolve the crises the country is facing. Democrats are more focused on going after Trump. We can expect a flood of subpoenas investigating all aspects of his administration and business, rather than solutions to the economic and social crises.

What The People Are Demanding

There is a growing anti-capitalist revolt, especially against the form it has taken in the United States, i.e. neoliberalism that privatizes everything for the profit of a few while cutting essential services for the many.  Anti-capitalism is so widespread that even corporate media outlets like Politico are taking notice, as they did in an article describing what socialism would look like in the United States. And President Obama this week discovered “a great new idea,” Medicare for all.

Of course, there has been a movement for National Improved Medicare for All for decades, and it is now gaining momentum. A new poll found even a majority of Republicans support Medicare for all, as do 85% of Democrats. Out of all of the ‘wealthy’ nations, the United States is ranked at the bottom, only above Greece, when it comes to the percentage of the population that has healthcare coverage. The third poorest country in our hemisphere, Bolivia, announced this week it will provide healthcare for all.

While polls indicate increased support for socialism, in the United States there is a lack of clarity on what that means exactly. Rather than a state socialism, most people are advocating for policy changes that socialize the basic necessities of the people. National Improved Medicare for All is one example.  There is also increased pressure for community-controlled or municipal Internet, taking this critical public service out of the hands of the much-hated for-profit providers.

Other demands include a living wage, free college education and affordable housing. There is also increased advocacy for a universal basic income and for public banks. All of these socialized programs can and do exist in capitalist countries.

Creating Economic Democracy For The 21st Century

The new economy is still taking shape and will likely result from a process of trying new practices out and gradually replacing current economic institutions with the new ones that gain support. The new institutions will need to be radically different than the current ones, meaning they are rooted in different values, if they are to change the current system.

In Policy Options, Tracy Smith Carrier urges using a human rights framework for the new economy. The human rights principles are universality, equity, transparency, accountability and participation. Rather than charity, which doesn’t solve the problems that brought people into a situation of need, her research team advocates for putting in place a poverty-reduction strategy that targets “the building blocks of society that reproduce poverty.”

This past week, we interviewed economist Emily Kawano of the US Solidarity Economy Network for our podcast, Clearing the FOG. The episode is called “So You Want To End Capitalism, Here’s How.” Like the human rights framework, the solidarity economy is built on a set of principles: democracy, cooperation, equity, anti-oppression, sustainability and pluralism. Kawano describes the formation of the solidarity economy using the analogy of a caterpillar’s metamorphosis into a butterfly – the various pieces of the economy are forming and finding each other and may eventually coalesce into a new system composed of old and new elements.

This week on Clearing the FOG, we will publish an interview with Nathan Schneider, author of “Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition that is Shaping the New Economy.” Schneider acknowledges that his generation is the first one that will fare worse than its predecessors. Out of necessity, people are creating more democratic economic structures. The Internet is a helpful tool in the process, particularly in creating ‘platform cooperatives.’

The economy needs to move from concentrated wealth to shared economic prosperity. In addition to requiring specific changes in policy that lead to greater socialization of the economy, systemic changes will be needed to establish a cooperative and egalitarian economy. Without far-reaching changes to the structure of the state, they are highly unlikely to succeed.

There will be another economic crisis in the near future which will present opportunities for rapid transformational change, if the movement is organized to demand it. JP Morgan issued a report on the tenth anniversary of the collapse warning of another collapse and mass social unrest like the US has not seen in 50 years. It is up to us now to prepare for that moment by developing our vision for the future and working out the types of institutions that will bring it about. The other option, if we are not prepared, could bring fascism and greater repression.

As Jerome Roos concludes, “…the political fallout of the global financial crisis is only just getting started. The real confrontation, it seems, is yet to come.”

North Carolina has been hit with a storm of biblical ferocity.

Florence has left at least 17 dead there, 500,000 without power, with flash flooding across the state from the coast to the western mountains. Landslides and infectious diseases are predicted to follow. North Carolina is not alone, of course.

We’ve witnessed the devastation wrought by Katrina in New Orleans, Hurricane Sandy in New Jersey, Hurricane Harvey in Houston and Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. Maria is now estimated to have taken 2,975 lives, nearly as many as died on Sept. 11, 2001.

As economics historian J. Bradford DeLong summarizes, the four storms — all in the past 15 years — are among the most damaging in U.S. history. No one storm can be attributed to any one cause. But repeated storms of greater force are the “predictable result” of catastrophic climate change, and they are a mild augury of what is likely to follow.

President Donald Trump has enforced climate denial in Washington. He has systematically sought to repeal even the inadequate steps the U.S. had taken to begin to address the problem. Last year he announced the U.S. was withdrawing from the Paris climate accord.

He’s geared up to repeal President Barack Obama’s executive orders on energy, climate and gas mileage. He’s opening up more public lands to mining and drilling and weakening environmental restrictions on coal, oil and natural gas, including most alarmingly, restrictions on the release of methane gas from natural gas pipes.

Web pages with climate change information have been removed or buried at the EPA and the Interior and Energy departments. The rest of the world vows to continue to deal with climate change, but with the wealthiest nation in the world scorning the effort, it is certain to be more inadequate than it already is.

Catastrophic climate change is a clear and present threat to our national security. The Pentagon realizes this. It is developing contingency plans for bases around the globe that will be threatened by rising waters and raging storms. Its intelligence agencies warn that climate change will be more destabilizing than terrorism across the developing world.

DeLong offers one snapshot of the threat. Two billion poor farmers toil in the six great river valleys of Asia. Their existence is dependent on the snow melt from the region’s high plateaus arriving at the right moment and in the right volume to support the crops on which the billions rely. Another billion depend on the monsoon arriving at the right time each year.

Now as the planet heats up, the sea levels rise, the polar ice caps melt, so too the snow melt will change dramatically, as will the monsoons and cyclones. The disruption will wreak havoc on billions, forcing dramatic migrations to who knows where. The same is predicted as Africa gets hotter and drier, and desertification continues to uproot long settled peoples.

The effects are already here, visible in the scorching heat experienced across the country, the fires in the West, the drought in the South and the storms in the East. We are seeing climate change with our own eyes. Yes, no one storm or heat wave can be directly attributed to global warming. But global warming guarantees that catastrophic weather events will get more frequent and more ferocious.

Some suggest it is too late. The carbon already in the atmosphere will take us beyond the warming levels that the international community suggested were manageable. We are headed into the unmanageable.

But denial is no answer. Continuing to do more of the same is simple madness. It is not too late to make the wholesale cuts need in greenhouse gas emissions. Professor Michael Mann of Penn State University notes: “It is not going off a cliff; it is like walking out into a minefield. So the argument that it is too late to do something would be like saying: ‘I’m just going to keep walking.’ That would be absurd.”

Trump’s chaos presidency is corrosive and divisive. His impulsive and uninformed decision-making is terrifying. Now on what surely is becoming the greatest threat to our security — indeed human existence, if not addressed — he and the Republican Congress that aids and abets him, are adding fuel to the fire.

Without vision, the Bible says, the people perish. Trump’s blind denial of the reality around us seems intent on demonstrating how true that is.

*Jesse Jackson is the founder of Rainbow/PUSH.

Former New England Journal of Medicine editor Marcia Angell had an oped in the NYT explaining how efforts to increase transparency had not ended the corrupting influence of money on medical research. Her piece describes various ways in which the researchers who get money from drug companies bend research to favor their benefactors.

While Dr. Angell suggests some reforms, there is an obvious one that is overlooked: take the money out. Drug companies have incentives to bend research findings because patent monopolies allow them to sell their drugs at prices that are several thousand percent above the free market price.

As every good economist knows, when the government puts in an artificial barrier that raises prices above the free market price it is creating an incentive for corruption. However, they are usually thinking about gaps like those created by Trump’s 10 or 25 percent tariffs that are supposed to punish our trading partners.

They usually don’t think about the corruption from patent monopolies that allow drug companies to sell drugs for tens of thousands of dollars that would sell for a few hundred dollars as a generic. But the same principle applies, with the incentives for corruption being proportionately larger.

The economist’s remedy would be the same in both cases: get rid of the artificial barrier. We could do this by paying for drug research upfront and make all findings fully public and place all patents in the public domain (discussed here and in Rigged chapter 5). This would allow all new drugs to be sold at generic prices. There would then be no more incentive to make payoffs to doctors to help promote drugs.

The average number of foreign workers registered with the Spanish Social Security system stood at 1,987,207 in August. Numbers have fallen this month by 1.64%, or 33,222 fewer workers. There is an increase of 7.51% on the same month last year or 138,879 more people registered, the highest figure since 2007.

The largest groups of foreign workers paying in to the Social Security system come from Romania (332,548), Morocco (231,066), Italy (117,345), China (103,660) and Ecuador (74,738). These countries are followed by Colombia (66,002), the United Kingdom (63,108), Bulgaria (59,507), Portugal (52,054) and Bolivia (51,646).

In month-on-month terms, the number of foreign contributors to the Spanish Social Security system rose in Cantabria (1.11%), Asturias (1.04%), Navarre (1.04%), the Canary Islands (0.78%) and Galicia (0.68%), while it fell in all the others, with the largest declines in the Region of Murcia (down 7.75%) Castile-La Mancha (down 7.54%), Extremadura (down 5.79%) and Aragón (down 5.16%).

Of the total number of foreign workers contributing to the Spanish Social Security system, 819,496 are from EU countries while 1,167,711 are from further afield.

The majority of foreign citizens are registered under the General Regime: 1,658,596 in total, a figure that includes the Special System for Agricultural Workers (186,469) and the Special System for Domestic Workers (176,498). This is followed by the Special Regime for Self-Employed Workers (323,507), the Special Regime for Seamen (5,014) and the Special Regime for Coal Workers (91).

Former Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak was arrested twice in two days — Sept. 19 and 20 — over the 1MDB scandal that caused U.S. investigative authorities to label Malaysia a kleptocracy.

It was another dramatic turn in the life of the 65 year old, once considered an untouchable political blue blood as both his father Abdul Razak and uncle Hussein Onn had served as prime ministers from 1970 to 1981.

Escorted by police as his supporters crowded outside the gates of the Kuala Lumpur court complex, Najib smiled and waved as he made his way into the courthouse on Sept. 20.

He pleaded not guilty to all 25 criminal charges filed against him for money laundering and abuse of power over his receipt, use and transfer of US$681 million into his bank account allegedly filched from 1Malaysia Development Berhad, the sovereign fund he set up.

Bail was set at just over US$850,000 in two sureties.

Retired Federal Court judge Gopal Sri Ram, who was hired by the Malaysian Attorney General’s Chambers to prosecute the case and is doing so pro bono, had objected to bail given the seriousness of the offenses.

He noted that U.S. attorney general Jeff Sessions had said that this was a case of “kleptocracy at its worst.”

“We object as the accused has, in 2015, interfered in the case,” Gopal said, noting that Najib had a “propensity” for interfering in the case and should not receive special treatment, especially as he had made statements on social media mocking the investigation.

He said if bail was granted the prosecution wanted the court to gag Najib from talking about the case in public.

Najib’s lead defense lawyer Muhammad Shafee Abdullah had argued for bail to be set at US$125,000.

The former PM was detained late on Sept. 19 and taken to Malaysia’s anti-corruption headquarters to be questioned further on the 1MDB scandal that sowed the seeds for the anger against his government that led to its ouster from office in elections four months ago.

After being detained overnight, Najib was arrested again on Sept. 20 in connection with the alleged deposit of US$681 million into his personal account. Najib has continued to claim that it was a personal donation from the late King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia.

Malaysian police chief Noor Rashid Ibrahim said police had listed 21 charges of accepting, using and transferring illegal funds to other entities amounting to $681 million under the Anti-Money Laundering, Anti-Terrorism Financing and Proceeds of Unlawful Activities Act.

“The charges include nine counts of receiving illegal money, five counts of using illegal money and seven counts of transferring illegal money to other entities,” he told the media.

The former prime minister has continued to strongly deny any wrongdoing.

The U.S. bishops’ conference has announced new accountability measures in response to recent clerical sex-abuse scandals. The reforms include the establishment of an independent reporting mechanism to receive complaints against bishops, and the development of a Code of Conduct for bishops.

A statement released Sept. 19 by the USCCB’s Administrative Committee said that the new steps being taken to combat abuse are “only the beginning,” and that consultations were underway with laity, clergy, and religious on how better to “repair the scandal and restore justice.”

The Administrative Committee’s statement announced four key policies.

The first is the creation of a confidential, third-party reporting mechanism to handle “complaints of sexual abuse of minors by a bishop and sexual harassment of or sexual misconduct with adults by a bishop.” This system, the statement said, will direct those complaints to the appropriate civil and ecclesiastical authorities.

The statement also said that the USCCB’s Committee on Canonical Affairs and Church Governance had been instructed to develop proposals for policies to address restrictions on bishops who have either resigned or been removed following “allegations of sexual abuse of minors or sexual harassment of or misconduct with adults, including seminarians and priests.”

The Administrative Committee also announced it has begun a process for developing a Code of Conduct for bishops regarding the “sexual abuse of a minor; sexual harassment of or sexual misconduct with an adult; or negligence in the exercise of his office related to such cases.”

Finally, the statement said, the committee supported a full investigation into the case of Archbishop Theodore McCarrick, including the allegations made against him concerning the sexual assault of minors, adults, seminarians, and priests, and the Church’s response to those allegations.

“Such an investigation should rely upon lay experts in relevant fields, such as law enforcement and social services,” the statement said.

Recognizing the widespread criticism of Church authorities in the wake of recent scandals, the committee said they “welcome and are grateful for the assistance of the whole people of God in holding us accountable.”

“This is a time of deep examination of conscience for each bishop. We cannot content ourselves that our response to sexual assault within the Church has been sufficient.”

The bishops also urged any victims of abuse to come forward, either to Church authorities or to civil law enforcement.

“To anyone who has been abused, never hesitate to also contact local law enforcement. If you don’t feel comfortable for any reason with the Church providing help, your diocese can connect you with appropriate community services. With compassion and without judgement, the bishops of the United States pledge to heal and protect with every bit of the strength God provides us.”

According to the statement, the committee met to discuss the proposals last week. The announcement also follows a Sept. 13 meeting between Pope Francis and senior U.S. bishops, led by Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, president of the bishops’ conference.

“Some bishops, by their actions or their failures to act, have caused great harm to both individuals and the Church as a whole. They have used their authority and power to manipulate and sexually abuse others. They have allowed the fear of scandal to replace genuine concern and care for those who have been victimized by abusers. For this, we again ask forgiveness from both the Lord and those who have been harmed. Turning to the Lord for strength, we must and will do better,” the statement said.

You are in a strange neighbourhood, your cell phone’s dead, and you desperately need to find the closest garage. A couple of people on the street chime in, each sending you in opposite directions. One person sounds like a local and speaks in a nonchalant manner, while the other uses a loud, confident voice but speaks with a strong accent. Who are you going to trust?

A recently published study shows that unless they speak in a confident tone of voice, you’re less likely to believe someone who speaks with an accent. And, interestingly, as you make this decision different parts of your brain are activated, depending on whether you perceive the speaker to be from your own “in-group” or from some type of “out-group” (e.g., someone with a different linguistic or cultural background).

Marc Pell, from McGill’s School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, the senior author explained the rationale for the study: “There are possibly two billion people around the world who speak English as a second language – and many of us live in societies that are culturally diverse. As we make decisions about whether or not to trust people who are different from us we pay a lot of attention both to visual cues and to a person’s voice. Here, we wanted to better understand how we make trust-related decisions about other people based strictly on their speaking voice.”

Overall, the researchers found that making trust-related decisions about accented speakers is more difficult due to our underlying bias favouring members of our own group. They also discovered that different regions of the brain are activated to analyze whether to believe speech from “in-group” and “out-group” members. Indeed, the brain needed to engage in additional processes to resolve the conflict between our negative bias towards the accent (don’t believe!) and the impression that the speaker is very sure of what they’re saying (it must be true!).

Confidence speaks volumes

Interestingly, what the researchers discovered was that when speakers with a regional or foreign accent use a very confident voice, their statements are judged to be equally believable to native speakers of the language.

“What this shows me is that, in future, if I want to be believed, it may be in my interest to adopt a very confident tone of voice in a whole range of situations,” said Xiaoming Jiang, a former post-doctoral fellow at McGill and now Associate Professor at Tongji University, who speaks English as a second-language and is the first author on the paper. “This is a finding that potentially has repercussions for people who speak with an accent when it comes to everything ranging from employment to education and the judicial process.”

Different accents mean different brain activation

Earlier research has shown that people are more likely to believe statements produced in a confident tone (voiced in a way that is louder, lower in pitch, and faster) than those spoken in a hesitant manner. The researchers wanted to see whether the same areas of the brain were activated as we made trust-related decisions about statements made in an accent that is different from our own.

When making decisions about whether to trust a speaker who has the same accent as us, the researchers discovered that the listeners could focus simply on tone of voice. The areas of the brain that were activated were those involved in making inferences based on past experience (the superior parietal regions). Whereas, when it came to making similar decisions for “out-group” speakers, the areas of the brain involved in auditory processing (the temporal regions of the brain) were involved to a greater extent. This suggests that as listeners made decisions about whether to trust accented speakers they needed to engage in a two-step process where they needed to pay attention both to the sounds that an accented speaker was producing as well as to their tone of voice.

How the research was done:

Study participants (who all spoke Canadian-English as their mother tongue) listened to a series of short, neutral statements spoken with varying degrees of confidence in accents ranging from the very familiar (Canadian-English) to the somewhat different (Australian-English and English as spoken by Francophone-Canadians). They were asked to rate how believable they found each statement. As participants listened, a brain imaging technique (fMRI) was used to capture areas of brain activation to see whether there were differences between the participants’ responses to “in-group” and “out-group” speakers” both in general, and depending on their tone of voice.

The latest report from the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) on forest fires shows the need to tackle climate change “to leave a healthier planet for those that follow”, as President Jean-Claude Juncker highlighted in his latest State of the Union Address. The report calls for stronger measures to prevent wildfires.

The JRC has published its annual report on Forest Fires in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa for 2017.

It shows that last year, wildfires destroyed over 1.2 million hectares of forests and land in Europe – more than the total surface area of Cyprus.

They also claimed the lives of 127 civilians and fire fighters and caused economic damage estimated at almost EUR 10 billion.

Karmenu Vella, Commissioner for Environment, said: “Extreme weather conditions – long lasting droughts and heat waves – exacerbate wildfires and make firefighting more difficult. Over 90% of all wildfires are started by human activities, which is why the EU is working closely with Member States on prevention, ensuring that citizens and decision-makers are more aware of the causes and risks of wildfires. We also need to invest much more in forest management to ensure best practice throughout the EU. As the summer of 2018 has shown us again, much work is needed on prevention and Europe must remain at the forefront in the fight against climate change.”

Tibor Navracsics, Commissioner for Education, Culture, Youth and Sport, responsible for the Joint Research Centre (JRC), said: “JRC scientists are continuously monitoring wildfires in Europe through the European Forest Fire Information System. The data from the past couple of years shows that fires are increasing in number and severity. I am proud that, by collecting and analysing this data, the JRC helps us better understand the changes and provides a basis for national authorities to improve both prevention and firefighting preparedness.”

Europe faces more and more severe fires

The latest report shows a clear trend towards longer fire seasons compared to previous years, with fires now occurring well beyond the dry and hot summer months (July- September). In 2017, the most critical months were June and October, when deadly fires swept through Portugal and Northern Spain.

The Mediterranean region remains the most affected area. However, unusually dry summers in central and northern Europe have recently led to large fires in countries such as Sweden, Germany and Poland, which have historically seen very few.

Finally, in 2017, over 25% of the total burnt area lied within the Natura2000 network, calling for increased efforts of EU countries to restore and manage protected habitats and their ecosystem services, including for the sake of forest fire prevention.

Wildfires can be prevented

Like in previous years, in 2017, most wildfires were caused by human activity. Unsustainable forest management practices, the degradation of ecosystems, as well as the planting of very flammable forest tree species facilitate fire ignition and favour the spreading of wildfires.

Prevention is thus key in tackling wildfires. Adequate forest management and land use practices can reduce fire risks and make forests more resilient to fires. In addition, the report shows that awareness raising and training of local communities, policy makers and stakeholders will increase their preparedness.

Member States and the EU institutions should continue to work hand in hand in providing guidelines on how to act in case of wildfires and how to increase our resilience, building on national experience and best practices.

By Anand Kumar*

China recently organized the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) summit in Beijing from 3-4 September 2018. The main objective of the summit was to intensify China’s economic relationship with Africa. This summit was held at a time when China is facing a trade war with the United States. Donald Trump has made his intention clear that he wants to rejuvenate the American economy. He thinks that one way of doing it is by imposing tariffs on Chinese goods which are able to come into America by “manipulation of currency” and are hurting American economy. Trump has also adopted similar measures towards his European and NAFTA partners. He has been quite successful in reviving the American economy but his restrictive policies have also increased concerns of his trading partners including China.

As the US remains China’s largest trading partner, any restrictive trade policy the former adopts is going to adversely affect the Chinese economy. China, which has the ambition of becoming the largest economy of the world at the earliest possible time, has to find a way to meet this new challenge. It appears that it is looking towards Africa as a possible alternative market.

China-Africa trade has grown from a mere USD 765 million in 1978 to 220 billion in 2014. However, it reduced thereafter, reaching USD 170 billion in 2017. Bilateral trade has now once again started picking up and in the first five months of 2018 it gained 17.7 per cent year on year to nearly USD 82 billion.

Nearly 30,000 Chinese companies are active in Africa out of which 300 are major corporations. Chinese companies are involved in a big way in infrastructure building in the continent, which suffers from a major deficit in this sector. China wants to capitalize on this opportunity. It appears that at present only China has either the appetite or capacity to carry out infrastructure building in the continent on a large scale.

Xi Jinping has called this a win-win partnership wherein Chinese companies get lucrative contracts and Africa gets the required infrastructure. There are, however, concerns about this growing Chinese engagement with Africa. Critics suggest that China is thereby engaging in ‘debt-trap diplomacy.’ It is also encouraging corruption and degrading the environment in the continent. But China refutes this allegation and says that this is a US attempt to constrain China by vilifying it.

The Chinese argue that their investments come with ‘no political strings attached.’ But this is also the reason why China is able to sell all kinds of projects at exorbitant prices to Africa. The costs of Chinese projects are under the scanner. It is believed that the Chinese are charging three times the cost of what a project actually costs. Moreover, while the Chinese may not be attaching political strings, they do attach economic strings.

To refute the allegation that it is following debt trap policy, China says that it is not a major creditor to Africa. The continent’s total debt burden is about USD 6 trillion. Most of this is owed to organizations such as the World Bank, the IMF and the Paris Club dominated by Western nations. Chinese loans are a small portion of the total loans disbursed throughout Africa. But it is also true that Chinese loans have been increasing in recent times. China plans to invest nearly a trillion dollars in the next twelve years in Africa.

To be sure, the way China Africa cooperation has played out has raised concerns about debt, corruption and environmental degradation. The problem of debt is acute in Zambia, Djibouti and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Often this debt situation is ambiguous and countries like DRC don’t even know how much money they owe to China. The president of DRC actually visited China just to know the amount of debt his country has to repay. Yet, a strong defence of Chinese economic engagement in Africa came from some top African leaders during the recent FOCAC summit.

Africa has a vast untapped economic potential which China wants to capitalize on. However, it will not be easy for China to grow its business and trade in Africa given the widespread political instability prevalent in some parts of the continent. At the same time, some African economies are doing very well and growing at the rate of six to seven per cent per annum. China is now trying to give more attention to the better managed economies like South Africa, Nigeria and East Africa.

China is quite concerned about its trade prospects with the United States given the economic policies of Trump. In August 2018, Wei Jianguo, former vice minister of commerce of China and current vice president of the China Center for International Economic Exchange, disclosed that in the next five years, China plans to increase the value of its exports to Africa to USD 500 billion annually, and thus use Africa to replace the United States as China’s largest export market. Similar intentions were also expressed by some Chinese officials during the latest FOCAC summit. In this way, China hopes to nullify the impact of Trump’s economic measures.

China may or may not succeed in transforming Africa into a substitute market. If it does, the bilateral trade relationship is likely to become more unbalanced and tilted in its own favour leading to greater exploitation of Africa. What is interesting is Africa has been persuaded to move down this path.

*Dr. Anand Kumar is visiting professor and chair (India Studies) in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration in the University of Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania

Views expressed are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the IDSA or of the Government of India.

By Michael A. Reynolds*

(FPRI) — The onset of fall finds American-Turkish relations undergoing the most severe crisis in their history. In August, the Trump administration slapped sanctions on Turkey and imposed tariffs on some Turkish imports. These steps sent the vulnerable Turkish lira tumbling in currency markets. In response, Turks from across the political spectrum, including President Recep Tayyıp Erdoğan, charged the United States with waging economic war on Turkey and vowed to resist. Turkey and the United States have cultivated close ties for over six decades. Today, not only is the possibility of a full break real, but some mainstream American foreign policy experts are advising Washington precisely to do just that: end the partnership.

Yet, as the current disarray in America’s Syria policy demonstrates, the consequences of a break with Turkey will be significant. In 2011, while a mass uprising was sweeping Syria, American President Barak Obama declared that Syria’s dictator, President Bashar al-Assad, must go. It was a directive, and Obama and his administration issued it with the expectation that they could oversee Assad’s ouster on the cheap, i.e. relying on proxies and covert action to overthrow the Assad regime without the direct commitment of U.S. forces. They miscalculated. Seven years later, despite the presence of U.S. military units inside Syria’s borders, Assad’s army, with the support of Russia and Iran, is preparing to launch an offensive against the remnants of the armed opposition, who are holed up in the city of Idlib in northwestern Syria. Victory in Idlib will cement the triumph of Assad and of Russia and Iran, who have outplayed and outhustled the U.S. in Syria. American policymakers can regard this outcome only as a decisive defeat.

As Dennis Ross, a fixture of American Middle East diplomacy, conceded in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on September 9, the U.S. now has no choice but to compromise with Russia in Syria. The U.S. can still attain a satisfactory outcome in Syria, Ross proposes, but warns that this is possible only if the U.S. can draw on support from Turkey and Israel. In what can only be described as an act of desperation, the Wall Street Journal, formerly known for its trenchant criticism of Erdoğan, opened its pages the very next day to an op-ed from the Turkish president calling for immediate coordinated action to halt the Syrian government from retaking Idlib. The desperation runs both ways. Erdoğan and his ministers in recent weeks have been verbally assailing America and representing it to the Turkish public as an enemy, yet now openly plead for cooperation in American newspapers.

Wellsprings of Discord

The current locus of tension in Turkish-American relations is the status of Andrew Brunson, an American pastor of a small church in Izmir, Turkey. In late 2016, Turkish authorities arrested Brunson and subsequently charged him with a number of violations, including being a member of the network of Fethullah Gülen, collaborating with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, or PKK), and assisting the attempted coup of 2016. In September 2017, Erdoğan publicly suggested that Turkey might swap one American pastor, Brunson, for another Turkish one, Fethullah Gülen.

Gülen fled Turkey in 1999 and took up residence in Pennsylvania, where he has remained. His followers over the course of more than three decades have established a global empire of schools, test centers, businesses, and organizations. More to the point, they have also been implicated in various forms of systemic financial and visa fraud in multiple American jurisdictions and far more serious crimes in Turkey, including the failed 2016 coup attempt.[1] The Turkish public, as well as the government, overwhelmingly desire his extradition and trial. American authorities thus far, however, have regarded as insufficient the evidence the Turks have presented.

If Erdoğan thought the seizure of Brunson might be a creative solution to the problem of obtaining Gülen’s extradition, he miscalculated terribly. The gambit created the impression that the Turks were attempting to coerce America via a hostage swap. It only hardened the attitude of the Trump administration, which in August 2018 took the unprecedented step of sanctioning two Turkish officials involved in Brunson’s detention. In the meantime, the lira’s fall against the dollar only accelerated, spurring the aforementioned belief that Turkey is a victim of an economic war. Given the stock both Trump and Erdoğan put in their personal images of dominance and the high profile of Brunson’s case in Turkey and the U.S., it is quite possible that both sides will now stubbornly refuse any compromise resolution and Brunson will remain in Turkish custody for years to come.

A plausible interpretation of this standoff would be that it is the product of a contest between two headstrong, bombastic, and mercurial heads of state. That would be a mistake, and not simply because such assessments underestimate the considerable political skills of Trump and Erdoğan. The wellsprings of discord lie deeper. The tensions driving Washington and Ankara apart are not new, but for a decade and a half now they have been outpacing the bonds of mutual interest that have held the two countries together. Washington’s desire for a reliable and pliant client in a part of the world it would prefer to forget has been clashing with Ankara’s aspiration to achieve full or total independence, i.e. the ability to stand wholly on its own without need for allies or partners. This goal is encoded in the Turkish Republic’s very DNA.

Security concerns have always been at the core of the Turkish-American relationship. The two countries began drawing nearer to each other in the waning days of World War II. Not only was it becoming increasingly clear that the Soviet Union would emerge from the war as the dominant power in Eurasia, but Stalin had already started making demands, including territorial ones, on Turkey. In response, the Turkish Republic’s second president and confidant of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, İsmet İnönü, began drawing closer to the Western powers, declaring war on Germany and Japan. For much the same reasons, he introduced a simulacrum of multi-party politics to Turkey 1946 and then in 1950 oversaw Turkey’s first openly contested elections, which his party lost decisively. Turkey’s moves toward the West culminated with its formal entry into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1952.

The U.S. and Turkey subsequently developed a close, albeit far from untroubled, security partnership. Over the course of the next six decades, however, they failed to build up other aspects of their relations to the same degree, and their relationship remained lopsidedly focused on security concerns. Ties in the spheres of economy and culture, for example, remained comparatively undeveloped.

Thus, at the end of the Cold War, many Turks feared that the disappearance of the Soviet threat that had motivated and sustained the Turkish-American partnership would precipitate the end of that partnership. That threat had guaranteed Turkey’s value as the guardian of the southern flank of NATO. Its evaporation, Turks anxiously concluded, would entail a waning of American interest in Turkey and inevitably Washington would discard its Cold War ally. They were mistaken. America’s standoffs with Iraq and Iran, as well as its compulsion to expand, not dismantle, NATO, led Washington to continue to assign value to Turkey through the 1990s and into the 21^st century.

Ironically, it was in Ankara where the more profound recalculation of interests occurred. The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the absence of a common border with Russia meant that Turkey, perhaps for the first time since the beginning of the 19^th century, had no pressing need for a great power patron to protect it. Moreover, the rise of the Justice and Development Party (AK Party), of which Erdoğan is a founder and member, in 2002 represented a sea change in Turkish politics as a rising class representing the Anatolian heartland displaced the old republican elites with roots in the Balkans and the Aegean coast.

The AK Party was, and remains, a comparatively mild Islamist party—it has not pursued anything like a sharia agenda and indeed the majority of its members neither want a sharia-based order nor have a concept of what that might even look like. Nonetheless, the crucial fact remains that its leaders and members do assign high importance to their identities as Muslims and conceive of that identity as distinct from, and often in opposition to, the West. The arrival of a Turkish elite that looks askance at the West represents less a rupture with the past than the ineluctable product of a process of evolution.

Although Turkish elites through the second half of the 20^th century qualified as pro-Western on the basis of their opposition to Soviet Communism, membership in NATO, commitment to secularism, and faith in the possibility of science and technology for the improvement of human society, an abiding ambivalence toward the West qualified their worldview. The founding narrative of the Turkish Republic is a story of the defiance of the Western imperial powers and their regional partners. It highlights the victimization of the Turkish nation at the hands of the European Great Powers and promises to deliver that nation from future exploitation by forging a state that will be able to stand on its own, wholly independent of outside entities, and defend its interests against the Great Powers. The ascent of a political leadership that was more confident and assertive in its non-Western identity was inevitable.

This political transformation coincided with two other novel developments. The first was a period of sustained economic growth that endowed Turkey with unaccustomed resources and confidence. The second was the opening of an exceptionally fluid environment in regional politics, made possible first by the withdrawal of Soviet power in the 1990s and then by the destabilization of the Middle East following the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. This new environment granted Turkey unprecedented scope for activity, allowing it in some areas to act on and pursue new regional ambitions (e.g., Qatar, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, and Somalia), and in others compelling it to act (such as with Iran, Iraq, and Syria).

In this new environment, Turkey’s interests and actions sometimes aligned with those of the U.S., while, at other times, they came into direct conflict. The clashes between Washington and Ankara varied in significance. Some of Ankara’s actions, such as accommodation of Iran and challenges to Israel, contradicted fundamental American policies, and Washington could not write them off easily. The scuffling gradually corroded mutual trust.

From the Turks’ perspective, the Americans have been, at best, cavalier about Turkey’s interests and even security. A great many Turks, whose numbers span both opponents and supporters of the government, suspect worse, namely that the Americans are deliberately subverting their country. The American intervention in Iraq did create severe headaches for Turkish security planners, particularly as the chaos began to spill out of Iraq and into Syria. The question of the future of Iraq’s Kurdish north, Iranian penetration into Iraq, and the intensification of sectarian warfare were intertwined, and all were necessarily of primal concern to Ankara. Some Turks came to believe that the Americans were stoking disorder in Iraq deliberately as a way to keep Turkey and other Middle Eastern states off balance and preoccupied. It was a baseless, even absurd, notion. But when, for example, ISIS acquired its formidable arsenal by taking possession of abundant amounts of captured American weapons, including M1 Abrams tanks (and Iranian militias also laid their hands on captured M-1 tanks), for some the belief that the Americans were playing double games became difficult to shake.

But the revelation that the American military was working closely with the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat‎, or PYD) in Syria was something that earlier only paranoid Turkish nationalists could have imagined. To the Americans planning the military campaign against ISIS, the militias of the PYD were natural, and perhaps essential, partners. In order to vanquish ISIS, the Americans needed allies on the ground, and those militias are disciplined, capable, and bitter enemies of ISIS. They possess both the necessary attributes and motivation to counter ISIS. But what the Americans overlooked, whether out of neglect or indifference, was the PYD’s status as a subsidiary of the PKK. The PKK is an organization that has been waging a sustained violent campaign against the Turkish Republic, utilizing tactics that have included suicide bombing, over the course of more than three decades. Indeed, in 1997, the U.S. Department of State designated the PKK as a foreign terrorist organization.

Turkey has no more dangerous or tenacious foe than the PKK, and the sense of betrayal that American collaboration with the PYD provoked is impossible to overestimate. Washington, however, has by all appearances regarded the matter as something akin to an inconvenience to Turkey. Moreover, in directing their outrage at Ankara for its backing of jihadist elements opposed to the Assad regime in Syria, American critics of Ankara too conveniently overlook both the cooperation with the PYD as well as American efforts to mobilize so-called “moderates” from jihadist ranks, including from groups affiliated with al-Qaeda.

American strategic myopia has unquestionably been a crucial factor compounding the disintegration of the Turkish-American relationship. As I have written elsewhere, American inattention facilitated Russia’s efforts to draw Turkey closer. Those efforts, while thus far falling short of pulling Turkey decisively away from the West, have been remarkably successful in stoking Turkish recalcitrance by feeding into Turkish delusions of having a viable strategic alternative to the United States. Coming after the sharp clash between Turkey and Russia over Syria that resulted in Turkey downing a Russian jet in 2015, the Russian success, and concomitant American failure, is all the more remarkable. Yet, there is no denying that Turkish ambitions, be they misplaced or sound, are the key driver in the unraveling of the relationship, and the salvaging of the relationship is not solely in Washington’s hands.

Emotional Breakdown

It is common, indeed stereotypical, for practitioners of international and security affairs proudly to forswear sentiment in favor of “cool” and “hard” reasoning and “logical” analysis. The reality, however, is that emotion is no less a factor in international politics than in any other form of politics. Emotion has exacerbated and deepened the sense of betrayal in America and Turkey alike. Turkish-American relations are unraveling against a background of grand foreign policy failures for both countries. These foreign policy failures and embarrassments color attitudes and thought processes in Washington and Ankara.

For nearly two decades, the Middle East has served as the focus of American foreign policy. Despite the expenditure of inordinate attention, exorbitant amounts of money, and considerable blood, American policy has yielded results precisely the opposite of what policymakers promised. Fiasco is perhaps the proper description.

Far from becoming a beacon of pro-Western democracy, Iraq became both a font of instability and a vassal of Iran. The Arab Spring, initially ballyhooed as the overdue democratic windfall from the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s Ba‘thist dictatorship, failed, and in doing so reinforced the cycle of government repression and Islamist opposition that American intervention was supposed to break. Al-Qaeda has not been vanquished. Indeed, radical Islam has proven resilient, making bids for power in Syria, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere and metastasizing into still more virulent forms, notably the Islamic State, powerful enough to dictate the course of U.S. policy. The rise of the Islamic State made shreds of Obama’s much-heralded pivot to East Asia. In Afghanistan, despite 17 years of fighting, all the U.S. can do is hold on to prevent the Taliban from triumphing.

Amidst this unfolding string of disappointments and failures, Turkey, formerly taken for granted as a pro-Western pillar of stability and a promising example of democracy in the region, emerged as a cantankerous and quarrelsome partner, or even rival. Turkey’s newfound defiance was yet another indication of a flailing American policy and flagging American power. Turkey’s diffidence in the face of Russia’s trouncing of Georgia in 2008 was one example. Although Georgia’s bid to reconquer South Ossetia was indisputably reckless, because Washington had already billed Georgia as a beacon of democracy and close ally, Ankara’s reticence to back the U.S. and Georgia was a telling indicator of a decline in American power. Similarly, Turkey’s collaborative effort with Brazil in 2010 to offer a nuclear fuel swap to Iran represented a brash challenge to American leadership and efforts to deter Iran from developing a nuclear weapons program. Turkey’s decision to sign a contract to purchase the Russian S-400 air defense system for $2.5 billion in December 2017 represented an unprecedented move by a NATO country and was a deliberate act of defiance toward the United States.

Turkey: Irreplaceable, but not Indispensable

After years of emitting a steadily increasing stream of complaints, criticisms, and expressions of outrage at Turkish policies, American policymakers and Turkey watchers are now calling to end the pretense that any meaningful partnership exists with Turkey. One forthright such call has come from Steven Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), who states flatly, “Turkey is no longer an ally or a partner.” This is not bomb throwing for effect or clickbait. The CFR is as centrist and sober as an American think tank can get. Indeed, the President of the CFR, Richard Haass, similarly declared the Western partnership with Turkey finished and is calling for America and Europe to adjust accordingly. Haass is not a Turkey-watcher, but a senior diplomat, prolific author, and president of the CFR, and his judgment is indicative of mainstream thinking. The aggrieved tone of his analysis betrays a powerful emotional undercurrent in American thinking.

That America can manage without Turkey is an unassailable proposition. Indeed, America can thrive without Turkey. What it cannot do without Turkey, however, is to continue to pursue the same policy goals in the Middle East, Eurasia, and Eastern Europe that it has been pursuing for the past decade and a half or more. The strategic value of Turkey’s geography is a cliché. And for good reason: it reflects a truth.

The adjective “strategic” is one of the most abused and overused in the English language. Among the common tasks that American commentators use that adjective to fulfill is to imbue remote, poorly understood, and “exotic” lands with significance. Commentators routinely tag Afghanistan, for example, as “strategic,” despite the fact that it is poor, landlocked, and near the center of the Eurasian landmass, remote from any appreciable center of power, and incapable of projecting any real power beyond itself. To be sure, Afghanistan neighbors “strategic” territories, such as Iran, Pakistan, and China, but its innate strategic importance to the United States is marginal.

The Ellipse of Instability and Its Center

Turkey is not Afghanistan. Here, the adjective strategic is meaningful and multidimensional. Turkey’s service as the guardian of the southern flank of NATO against Soviet invasion secured its importance in the Cold War, but it also supported U.S. efforts in the Middle East during that period. Ankara served as the headquarters of the Central Treaty Organization from 1958 to 1979. Following the Iranian revolution, Turkey hosted American and European listening posts expelled from Iran, and it lent its territory as a platform for the conduct of surveillance and other intelligence operations against revolutionary Iran, Iraq, and others in the Middle East. A partial list of the U.S. military operations and international flash points that have erupted in Turkey’s neighborhood since 1991 make clear Turkey’s strategic value: Yugoslav wars (1991-1995), Kosovo (1998-1999), Nagorno-Karabakh (1988-1994), Iraq (Gulf War, 1990-1991; Operations Supply Comfort and Northern Watch, 1991-2003; Operation Iraqi Freedom, 2003-2011), Syrian Civil War (2011-current), Russo-Georgian War (2008), and the Russian annexation of Crimea (2014). To have at the center of this ellipse of instability a resilient state and durable host of American military facilities has been a boon for American policy. The death of the Turkish-American partnership will reverberate throughout the regions that ring Turkey.

The containment of Iran, the containment of Russia, and the containment of radical Islam are three of the most pressing objectives of American foreign policy. Critics of Turkey are correct to question Turkey’s contributions toward these goals. Turkey’s intention to purchase the S-400 air defense missile system from Russia, the role of Turkish bankers in subverting sanctions on Iran, and Ankara’s collaboration with jihadists in Syria and sympathy for Hamas and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood illustrate how in recent years Turkish priorities have been at cross-purposes with American.

Washington is experiencing difficulty pursuing each of the three objectives named above. The rout of the Islamic State in 2017-2018 did represent a victory in the struggle against radical Islam, but there is no reason to believe that it represents a decisive blow to radical Islam, especially given the inability of the U.S. earlier to even anticipate ISIS. In addition, the U.S. and its allies were not alone in battling ISIS. It had picked fights with multiple local constituencies, and Russia and Iran contributed to its defeat as well. As for containing Russia and Iran, the successes that those two countries have achieved in Syria testify to the ineffectiveness of American policy there. Russia’s defeat of Georgia in 2008 and annexation of Crimea in 2014 cannot be considered American successes either. Israeli, Saudi, and Gulf state expressions of fear of Iran, as well as European alarmism over Russia, may be exaggerated and directed at extracting benefits from Washington, but the increase in expressions of anxiety sooner testifies to the erosion of containment than its fulfillment.

Breaking with Turkey may help clarify the diplomatic terrain. The stripping of illusions is always a prerequisite for sound planning and action. But such a break will not advance American efforts toward achieving the aforementioned three goals. Depending upon the nature of the break, it may so significantly impair American policies as to render those goals impossible to achieve. An actively anti-American Turkey could create multiple headaches for Washington in each of the three policy areas. Although Turkey’s relations with the countries of Western Europe are also strained, there is little reason to expect that the Europeans would follow the American lead and downgrade their relations with Ankara. This is particularly the case for Germany, which has a long and complex relationship with Turkey, one that is inherently contentious, but also robust and, unlike the American, multifaceted and more durable. Not least important, because NATO has no mechanism for expelling members, a recusant Turkey could sabotage and gum up Washington’s efforts to mobilize NATO. The failure of Western policy elites, and particularly American, to restructure NATO prior to pushing its expansion is one more indictment of their carelessness after the end of the Cold War. It may very well be true that Turkey has been an overrated, uncooperative, and at times even troublesome partner for the past five decades. But from this fact it does not follow that a hostile Turkey inside NATO will be incapable of working against U.S. policy effectively. This could deliver to Russia in particular enormous benefit. Undoubtedly, one of the motives for Moscow’s courtship of Ankara in recent years has been the chance to stoke dysfunction and friction within NATO. On the other hand, in the event such a scenario comes to pass, creative American policymakers perhaps could exploit it to create a new alliance system to supersede NATO.

If the loss of Turkey as a partner will force Washington to reconsider core foreign policy goals, a break with America will have still greater consequences for Turkey. Some will be grim. There is no other country that can replace the U.S. for Turkey. Although it is true that Russia does much larger volumes of trade with Turkey than does the U.S. and could also go far to supplant America as an arms supplier, a close partnership with Moscow would be difficult—and dangerous—for Ankara to sustain. Turkey is an energy poor country, and is among the world’s most dependent upon imports. Russia supplies over half of Turkey’s natural gas and is that country’s third-largest source of oil. Turkey is pursuing a nuclear power program precisely to lower its dependency upon imported gas and oil. The rub here is that Turkey has chosen Russia to supply the nuclear technology and expertise it needs. Russia is the lead partner in building the first Turkish nuclear power plant at Akkuyu on the Mediterranean coast.

Russia thus holds formidable leverage over Turkey in the area of energy. To be sure, it is true that economic dependency often runs two ways. If Turkey depends on energy from Russia, Russia needs the income generated by those sales. Yet, we already know that the Russo-Turkish relationship is asymmetrically structured in Russia’s favor. As Vladimir Putin demonstrated in the wake of Turkey’s shooting down of a Russian jet in 2015, Moscow can and will use economic leverage to bend Ankara to its will.

What is more, Russia has more than economic leverage at its disposal. Throughout the 19^th and 20^th centuries, Russia posed the greatest of military and political threats to Turkey. Although Turkey and Russia no longer share a border, Russia through its intervention in Syria is again in position to squeeze Turkey politically and militarily, including through the sponsorship of Kurdish separatism, a force that Russia began cultivating in the 19^th century. The future of the Kurds in Syria is one of the questions that awaits resolution, and, however it is decided, it will impact Turkey’s future prospects for civil peace and prosperity. The PKK in the past used Syrian territory as grounds for training and staging operations into Turkey. Although as of late Russia has seemingly been solicitous of Turkish concerns about the PYD in Syria, it can, of course, change its attitude. Moreover, should Russia in the future opt to play the Kurdish card, Turkey would find itself alone. However justly Turks might lament America’s recent cooperation with the PYD, it is a fact that the U.S. has a long record of backing Turkey in its fight against the PKK. Not the least illustrative example is the assistance the U.S. provided to make possible the tracking and capture of Abdullah Ocalan, the founder and leader of the PKK, in Kenya in 1999. A Turkey without America will be more vulnerable, not less, to subversion, chronic insurrection, and potentially even partition.

Is There a Way Out?

As discussed above, behind the current crisis in Turkish-American relations are the sharply differing worldviews of Turkish and American political elites. Although these worldviews are not so starkly divergent so as to dictate a breakup in ties—see the oscillation on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal—they do create a predisposition on both sides to magnify, rather than minimize, disagreement. Miscommunication, discoordination (particularly in Syria), and negligence on both sides have exacerbated those differences, contributing to what has become the most sustained and serious crisis in the history of Turkish-American relations.

One step that Washington could take that would advance U.S. interests and improve relations with Turkey while at the same time also bolstering the principle of the rule of law would be to take seriously the Turkish request for the extradition of Fethullah Gülen. Given the litany of documented crimes and subversive activities that Gülenists have perpetrated in Turkey, presenting a credible case for extraditing Gülen should not be impossible. Yet, by all reports, American authorities have deemed the evidence submitted by the Turkish government thus far as not sufficient for extradition. If the Turkish request is incomplete or incompetently presented, professional help should be rendered to remedy this situation. If the Turkish request for extradition is too tainted by legal and procedural irregularities to accept, there is the option of putting Gülen under investigation for the multitude of crimes and infractions he and some of his followers committed in the U.S. In itself, putting Gülen on trial will not repair Turkish-American relations, but it would send an important message that the U.S. understands the concerns of the Turkish public (not to mention the signal it would send to the American taxpayers defrauded by Gülen’s network). Given the current state of relations and the depth of suspicions, that message could spur both sides to step back and evaluate their mutual interests more dispassionately and to ask what unites them rather than dwell on what should divide them.

About the author:
*Michael A. Reynolds is a 2018-19 Robert A. Fox Fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Program on the Middle East and an Associate Professor in Princeton’s Department of Near Eastern Studies.

Source:
This article was published by FPRI

Notes:
[1] For more on Gülen, see my analysis for FPRI https://www.fpri.org/article/2016/09/damaging-democracy-u-s-fethullah-gulen-turkeys-upheaval/. See, also, Dexter Filkins’ New Yorker article, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/17/turkeys-thirty-year-coup; and the edited volume of M. Hakan Yavuz and Bayram Balcı, Turkey’s July 15^th Coup: What Happened and Why (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2018).

By Ryan McMaken*

America has been at war to transfer control of Syria over to the Saud family, who own Saudi Arabia; and America has been trying to do this ever since the first of the CIA’s coups against Syria failed in 1949. But only during the U.S. Presidency of Barack Obama did the United Nations become a tool in this American enterprise. Obama entered the White House in 2009 secretly hoping to be able to overthrow Syria’s Government; and when the CIA-assisted “Arab Spring” uprisings in the Arab world started flowering in 2011, the U.S. Government had the important U.N. operatives fully on-board assisting the U.S. Government to assist this overthrow — to hand Syria to the Sauds (the Sauds being America’s most important international ally, andthe world’s richest family) to control.

By the time of June 2011, the Obama State Department, under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was already deep into planning the overthrow not only of Syria’s Government (planning the international recruitment of jihadists to do that), but of Ukraine’s Government (planning international recruitment of nazis to do that).

Although the common view is that America’s main allies are European, that viewpoint is no longer true. Today’s America is allied mainly with the Sauds, and with Israel, which latter is the Sauds’ chief lobbying arm both in North America and in Europe, because Christian-majority populations are far more sympathetic to Jews than to Moslems. For a politician to be publicly sympathetic to Jews is much better for a politician than for him/her to be publicly sympathetic to Muslims. So, Israel carries the Sauds’ lobbying water, not only their own.

On 3 December 2011 (near the end of the year when the “Arab Spring” started), the independent investigative journalist Sibel Edmonds headlined “US Media: Distorters of Reality & Gravediggers of Truth”, and she reported:

Follow Up — The Continued Blackout on West’s Secret Training & Support Camp in Turkey for War on Syria

12 days ago, on November 21, here at Boiling Frogs Post, I reported on the ongoing joint US-NATO secret training camp in the US air force base in Incirlik, Turkey, which began operations in April-May 2011 to organize and expand the dissident base in Syria. I had received the information for that story from multiple sources including highly credible insiders in Turkey and government insiders here in the US. …

I immediately started checking our infamous US mainstream media sites — still nothing on this significant information. I then contacted one of my high-level sources and asked why he had come to me with his documented report instead of going directly to the big guys. With several credible insiders as his corroborators and a high-level official in Turkey, he would have no problem getting their attention. And his response? Well here it is minus a few expletives:

“Who said we didn’t go to MSM [Main Stream Media] first? We got them the info back in October. First they were interested and drooling. At least the reporters. Then, they disappeared.” …

I was the last resort. … This goes down as one more example of very many cases of intentional, willful censorship by the US mainstream media and their so-many-times-proven role as distorters of reality and gravediggers of the truth.

Keeping the “MSM” on-board was likewise something that went back as far as the CIA’s “Operation Mockingbird” had started in 1948 with the cooperation of all of the United States’ mainstream ‘news’-media, and of virtually all of the ‘alternative’ news-media. (The case against the latter, the ‘alternative’ media, was documented by Stuart Jeanne Bramhall here and here; and by me here; with both of us relying heavily upon the encyclopedic researches from Bob Feldman, who is the major historian of the corruptness of almost all of America’s ‘progressive’ ‘news’ media — the present medium being obviously among the few exceptions that actually is progressive, and this article is simultaneously distributed to all media, so all media have been invited to publish it.) (The corruptness of self-declared conservative ‘news’-media is virtually automatic, since their chief function is to aggrandize the aristocracy — doing that is what defines them; they are clearly doing what they are paid to do, whereas the non-conservative media need to use subterfuges to do it, in order for them to seem to be supportive of the poor, which conservative media don’t even pretend to support.)

Right and left, America’s ‘news’-media are loaded with rot — especially regarding foreign countries, including Syria. Here are a few CIA documents from 2012 showing how obsequiously American ‘journalists’ respect and adhere to their CIA minders.

Aristocrats everywhere do business internationally and have much more of a personal interest in foreign relations than does the average person; so, lying about international relations is especially important to them, in order to control the masses on these matters, matters which aristocrats are especially determined to control. The aristocracy are the people who determine which nations are “allies” and which nations are “enemies.” The public don’t control that.

This is why the CIA, which is an agency of the U.S. aristocracy, has at least all of the mainstream ‘news’-media trumpeting their lies on foreign affairs. Aristocrats control their country’s foreign policies. Their international corporations demand this control, and tell the politicians what to do in foreign matters. The ‘news’-media provide the back-up for the politicians’ lies. They’re all on the same team, the aristocracy’s team. They all are agents for the aristocracy, against the public — and not only against whichever foreign aristocracies are labeled “enemy” nations (i.e., as being suitable targets for the given aristocracy’s military — places where the U.S. aristocracy’s weapons-manufacturing corporations such as Lockheed Martin don’t sell their wares but instead upon which those wares are to be used, as targets, the opposite end of the international weapons-trade from the “allies,” which are themarkets-side, instead of the targets-side).

International relations is relations between aristocracies. The publics are ignored.

So, if democracy exists anywhere or at all, then it exists only in regards to domestic issues. However, studies have shown that even on domestic issues, the U.S. Government ignores the U.S. public — the U.S. is totally an aristocracy; it’s no democracy at all, not even on domestic issues, such asMedicare-for-all.

That’s the reason why Sibel Edmonds found herself to be a “last resort.” That was a euphemism referring actually to a dead-end for the important news — for the type of news that would have contradicted the Obama Administration’s infamous joyous lie-based “We came, we saw, he died!” (the Libya case), and now the follow-on invasion and destruction of Syria. (Trump continues Obama’s aggressions; he doesn’t end them. It doesn’t make much difference whom the occupant of the White House is, at least not regarding foreign relations, because the same aristocracy remains in control of U.S. foreign relations, even though that might be a different faction of this aristocracy — Obama representing the liberal billionaires, and Trump representing some of the conservative ones, but they are different segments of the same aristocracy; nobody in such a Government represents the public).

Here’s how psychopathic the U.S.-and allied aristocracies are:

A video shows at 2:18 that it was taken on “27/11/2012,” and it’s titled, “EMIR OF QATAR AND PRIME MINISTER OF TURKEY STEAL SYRIAN OIL EXCAVATORS – ENGLISH SUBTITLES”. Both Qatar’s Emir and Turkey’s Prime Minister are enormously wealthy individuals, but they wanted still more. Both were there using their being heads-of-state so as to assist not only their own wealth but America’s and Europe’s aristocracies to steal and sell oil and oil-well equipment from the Syrian public — from Syrians’ Government — for the benefits not only of those aristocrats but also of Al Qaeda and of ISIS (two jihadist groups trying to overthrow Syria’s Government). As Syrian News reported this, on 28 November 2012, “Emir of Qatar & Muslim Brotherhood Prime Minister of Turkey send their Al Qaeda FSA terrorists to Syria to destroy the country, kill the people and destroy whatever they can of its infrastructure so their companies would have jobs in the future to rebuild as they think they will win the war against Syria.”

Syrian News headlined on 5 September 2015, “What Did Syrians Do to Deserve the Hatred of the Whole World” and commented:

Syrians stood by each oppressed nation in the planet, all liberation movements from the colonial powers had their main offices in Syria, including South African anti-apartheid party…this is how the colonial powers revenge.

It is beyond kafkaesque to realize that virtually the entire world chants its enmity against the Syrian people, and their country, and that the rest have not even noticed.

On 2 September, “greatest psy op of the last century,” al Jazeera, degraded a photo of a drowned Syrian boy, into an emoticon, to use for a new round of imperial malfeasance against the SAR [that being an acronym for Syria’s Government]. It seems to be of no importance, that al Jazeera (renamed “al Khanzeera,” “the pigsty,” by Libyan patriots, during the destruction of their country), is owned by the absolute monarchy Qatar — “pronounced ‘gutter’”), the little Gulfie gas station that has spent over 3 billion dollars in looting and bombing Syria. Twenty-four hours later, a Google search of “drowned Syrian boy” yielded over 10 million ‘hits’ (a number which has jumped to over 14 million, 48 hours later), reports which neglect to mention there was no Syrian refugee crisis before the mass-murderers of the colonial powers, and their Levant and Gulfie rabid dogs decided to “arab spring” Syria. …

On Sunday, 23 August, the city of Damascus came under massive mortar and missile attacks by the Obama-Cameron moderate death squads. Seven days later, the Syrian Arab Army [Syrian Government’s Army] Facebook page posted the following:

“The city of Damascus had 4.5 to 5 million inhabitants in 2011. Today and due to the war there are over 8.5 million inhabitants in the city; most of which were forced outside of their homes by the “moderate rebels” backed by NATO in general specifically the U.S. Turkey and France; also backedand financed by the terrorist nations of the Gulf. …
The cacaphony of murderous silence among the Vichy [nazi] media and sham activists and NGOs [charities that are funded by U.S.-and-allied aristocracies] has increased, exponentially, in perverse rhyme, with the increase in the bombings of the villages of Kafraya and al Foua, in Idlib countryside. In mid-August, the Syrians of these villages had been the beneficiaries of more than 1,500 missile attacks — from moderate rebel mass murderers — that have destroyed 60% of their houses. …

The punishment of the Syrian people for refusing the Obama plan of regime change cannot be missed in this organized ongoing assault by NATO and stooges for the past 4.5 years. …
The punishment of the Syrian people for refusing the Obama plan of regime change cannot be missed in this organized ongoing assault by NATO and stooges for the past 4.5 years. …

On 28 February 2018, Syria News bannered “Deep State Hyenas Flaunt [Flout] Law, Ravenous for More Syrian Blood” and opened:

The globalist deep state hyenas have reached a new low in delirious frenzy against Syria. While screaming international law! they flaunt [flout] it, and flaunt their insatiable lust for Syrian blood. The mania of the terrorists in suits is so out of control that they appear to have abandoned their chemical conspiracy planned for Idlib. Instead, they scream in unison for the preservation of serial killers occupying eastern Ghouta.  Savages they would call by rightful names in western countries are converted to innocent women and children [in Western media]. These hyenas ignore more than 1,000 terrorist mortars and missiles fired by Ghouta terrorists into Damascus. They hold the Goebbels Big Lie proudly over their heads, knowing their elite club is one of destruction, that none of its members will speak the truth. …

The deep state hyenas introduced the foreign-armed, foreign-paid, and foreign takfiri [jihadists] of al Ghouta onto the world stage in August 2013. The stupid, inbred, savages accidentally slaughtered many of their own, and thus ratted out having been given chemical weapons by Prince Bandar, because he neglected to give them proper instruction on their use. The admission was of no matter to the perpetual warriors, including Nobel Peace Laureate cum war criminal, POTUS Obama. Nor was concern voiced by the humanitarian bastards that several of the dead Syrians were recognized as having been kidnapped in Latakia countryside (similarly, the hyenas were too sedated to report on the moment long awaited, when 58 Syrian women and their children abductees were released in exchange for imprisoned terrorists of al Qaeda). …

On 21 February, UN High Commissioner on Human Rights [sic] Zeid Ra’ad al Husseini frothed at the mouth over the “monstrous annihilation” in Eastern Ghouta.  He tossed words like international humanitarian law, and war crimes about [against the Government].

That article has a lengthy section which opens:

THE UN:  HYENAS LEADERSHIP

Animals running in packs require leadership.  Who is better qualified to lead beasts known to take advantage of other animals’ kills for easy prey, devouring every part including bones, than the well-manicured and polished diplomats of the United Nations?

All of that is true, and it even understates the reality. For example, though the article documents that Jordan, next door to Syria, is a key part of America’s effort to overthrow Assad, it fails to note that Zeid Ra’ad al Husseini, that cited high U.N. official on Syria, is a Jordanian Prince. He’s doing what the royal family of Jordan do. Otherwise, that article is an excellent description of the U.N. Administration’s extreme prejudices in favor of the U.S. game-plans for conquest, especially for their conquest of Syria.

However, on 3 March 2018, Syria News revealed that an even more important U.N. official on Syria has also been working secretly with the U.S. to assist overthrow of Syria’s Government. Headlining “Rotten, Secret Diplomatic Meeting that Launched UN Frenzy against Syria”, they reported that,

In possession of a diplomatic telegram [TD], Pan Arabic al Akhbar gave a detailed report 24 February on the nefarious, colonialist plot:

In a somewhat familiar but precise English, Benjamin Norman – a diplomat in charge of the Middle East at the British Embassy in Washington – reports in a confidential diplomatic telegram of the first meeting of the “Small American Group on Syria” (United States, Great Britain, France, Saudi Arabia and Jordan), held in Washington on January 11, 2018.

In this five-page TD, he reveals the details of the “Western strategy” in Syria: partition of the country, sabotage of Sochi, framing of Turkey and instructions to the UN Special Representative Staffan de Mistura who leads the negotiations of Geneva. A Non Paper (8 pages) accompanies this TD in anticipation of the second meeting of the “Small Group”. It was held in Paris on January 23, mainly devoted to the use of chemical weapons and the “instructions” sent by the “Small American Group” to Staffan de Mistura.

In fact, Trump is now protecting both Al Qaeda and ISIS in order to conquer Syria. And he has the U.N.’s backing in this. On Friday, 7 September 2018, America’s Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty headlined “UN Syria Envoy Warns of ‘Perfect Storm’ for Disaster in Idlib” and reported that:

The U.N. envoy for Syria warned Friday that all the ingredients exist for a “perfect storm” of a humanitarian catastrophe if the Syrian government, backed by Russia, carries out a large-scale military offensive on the northwestern province of Idlib.

“The dangers are profound that any battle for Idlib could be — would be — a horrific and bloody battle,” Staffan de Mistura told U.N. Security Council members via videoconference. “Civilians are its potential victims.”

As I have documented at the link here:

Idlib has consistently been showing as being, by far, the most-pro-jihadist of all of Syria’s Governates, in the annual polls that the British polling organization, Orb International, has taken since 2014, throughout Syria. Idlib has been showing there as being over 90% in favor of jihadists and of jihadism — and specifically in favor of organizations such as Al Qaeda and ISIS.

Staffan de Mistura and Prince Husseini refer to this matter as instead a “humanitarian catastrophe” if Syria, Russia, and Hezbollah, do what they will need to do in order to end the invasion of Syria by U.S., Saudi Arabia, Turkey, UAE, Kuwait, and Israel (and the jihadists they hire). The U.N. officials are treating this matter not as a thoroughly illegal invasion and military occupation of the sovereign nation of Syria, but instead as what will be a “humanitarian catastrophe” if Syria and its allies attack the area of Syria whose current residents are over 90% jihadists and supporters of jihadists. Syria and its allies are to be blamed for invading that jihadist cauldron, while U.S. and its allies are to be held immune from prosecution for their having used those jihadists, during the past 7 years — used them to invade and occupy not only Idlib but other parts of Syria.

Thus, the U.N. is not only holding U.S. Presidents and other international invaders above international law, but it is now positively assisting them under the fake rubric of “humanitarian” concerns, so as to support the U.S. alliance’s invasions and military occupations. The U.N., which was supposed to have been opposing international aggression is now assisting it when ‘the right leaders’ do it. This is no organization supporting democracy — it is the opposite: an international scheme to back the U.S. alliance’s invasions and military occupations. War is ugly. Apparently, the U.N. has become even uglier than that — supporting the invaders and military occupiers of a sovereign nation.

This is the reason why Syria and its allies have placed on-hold their planned elimination of the jihadists in Idlib and will create a DMZ between Idlib and the adjoining areas of Syria. Further details and context on that can be seen here. Perhaps now, the high U.N. officials who have been claiming that the elimination of those jihadists would produce a “humanitarian catastrophe” will change their tunes and publicly acknowledge that it would instead be a practical necessity.

*Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010.

Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) has announced that the LNG (liquefied natural gas) import terminal project in Ennore near Chennai in Tamil Nadu with the investment of over Rs.6000 crore would be commissioned by end 2018. This project has already been much delayed and as per original schedule, it should have been ready atleast 3 years earlier.

This LNG terminal of capacity 5 million tonne per annum can be fully utilized, only if the pipeline would be laid for evacuation of regasified natural gas, which should be ready by the end of 2018.

This is unlikely to happen.

At present, Indian Oil Corporation is laying pipeline from Ennore terminal to Manali Industrial belt for the distance of around 23 kilometer, as the first phase of the natural gas pipeline project,, where the companies like Madras Fertilisers Limited, Chennai Petroleum Corporation, Tamil Nadu Petro products and others would be utilizing the natural gas as feedstock and fuel to the extent of around 1.5 million tonne per annum, against the Ennore LNG terminal’s installed capacity of 5 million tonne per annum . The requirement of natural gas of Manali industrial belt would not be adequate to utilize the entire capacity of the Ennore LNG terminal.

In all, Indian Oil Corporation has to lay 1,385 Kilometer natural gas pipeline, originating from the Ennore terminal to Nagapattinam in Tamil Nadu via Puducherry with branch pipelines to Madurai, Tuticorin, Trichy and Bengaluru. For laying these pipeline across Tamil Nadu , geographical locations in districts in Tamil Nadu including Salem, Kanchipuram, Tiruvallur, Cuddalore and Nagapattinam have been identified by the Petroleum and Natural Gas Regulatory Board. These pipelines have to be divided into primary, secondary and tertiary network and the pipeline have to necessarily pass along roads including village road and state highway across Tamil Nadu. However, necessary infrastructure facilities are not there at present.

While IOC says that it would lay pipeline of around 1385 kilometer length in phases , full capacity utilization of Ennore LNG terminal can not be achieved , until the entire 1385 kilometre length of pipeline would be laid for full evacuation of the imported natural gas.

Protest even against first phase pipeline project

While it would be so, it is causing concern that even the first phase of pipeline laying project from Ennore terminal to Manali industrial belt of distance 23 kilometre is now facing opposition from the local people and the activists.

The pipeline between Ennore terminal and Manali industrial belt runs on a large stretch of Ennore creek wetland. The local fishermen are protesting against laying of the pipeline across the wetland of Ennore creek, that is said to have been ordered by National Green Tribunal to be cleared of fly ash and intermediates. Activists say that there is no permission to lay pipeline in this environmentally sensitive zone.

However, IOC says that it is not carrying out any work in the 600 metre stretch in the Kosathaliyar river, where the CRZ clearance is yet to be obtained. IOC further says that it is using the sophisticated tranchline technology under the river to lay the pipeline. It further says that utmost safety precautions have been taken and pipelines are designed as per stringent norms. Thickness of the pipeline would be increased depending upon the density of population in the area.

While IOC is providing the necessary clarifications and explanations, it is doubtful whether the protestors and activists would relent and they may continue the protest to prevent laying of the pipeline.

What fate awaits further pipeline project?

When IOC is facing so much problem in laying pipeline of even 23 kilometre length due to the protest by the activists, one wonder whether IOC would be able to lay down the pipeline to the length of around 1385 kilometres across Tamil Nadu that has to pass through village roads and highways.

In the recent past, the proposed natural gas pipeline from Kochi LNG terminal to Tamil Nadu to a length of around 300 kilometre have been suspended due to protest from agriculturists and activists in Tamil Nadu. They have refused to listen to the explanation given by GAIL authorities who are the pipeline contractors and it appears that this natural gas pipeline project in Tamil Nadu has virtually been given up. In the process, Tamil Nadu has lost investment opportunity of around Rs. 15,000 crore that would have been possible by utilizing the natural gas from Kochi terminal as feedstock for setting up several petrochemical projects and ancillary industries in Tamil Nadu.

Because of this protest in Tamil Nadu, Kochi LNG terminal with an investment of around Rs. 4000 crores is unable to evacuate the imported natural gas and has been operating at around 5% of capacity and is incurring huge losses.

Pipeline project from Kochi terminal to Karnataka forging ahead

While the gas pipeline from Kochi LNG terminal through Tamil Nadu have been stranded, the pipeline is now being laid from Kochi LNG terminal to Karnataka state and is now fast nearing completion. Due to availability of gas from Kochi LNG terminal, several thousand crore rupees of investment based on natural gas would happen in Karnataka in the near future.

In the circumstances, one cannot but be concerned that Ennore LNG terminal project should not meet the same fate as that of Kochi LNG terminal , which happened due to the protest from the activists against laying gas pipeline in Tamil Nadu.

In all probability, the politicians and media in Tamil Nadu will jump into the fray and the protestors and activists would intensify the protests against laying gas pipeline from Ennore LNG terminal, that may threaten the future of this Rs. 6000 crore invested vital project.

The US’ sanctions policy against Russia, China and other EU trading partners significantly affects Europe and makes Germany react to Washington’s actions, said German Minister of Foreign Affairs Heiko Maas in his speech at the annual conference of the heads of the German diplomatic missions abroad.

He reminded that the EU is working to develop institutions that are independent from the US, in particular the European Monetary Fund and the creation of a payment system that would make it possible to preserve business relations with Tehran.

Donald Trump winning the US presidential elections showed that “we do not know America as much as we thought,” he said stressing that Europe “needs a new, balanced partnership with the United States.”

According to observers, European politicians and experts have recently begun to speak more about the harm of US sanctions, which have negative impact on the bilateral relations between Brussels and Moscow.

For example, during the meeting with ambassadors and other diplomats in the Prague Castle on August 30, Czech President Milos Zeman stated that “the anti-Russian sanctions affect both sides.”

He expressed confidence that the European Council should not extend sanctions against Russia. Moreover, Czech President stressed that prominent politicians from Slovakia, Austria, Hungary and Italy have also spoken out against anti-Russian sanctions.

According to the German political scientist Andreas Maurer, for years of sanctions the European Union could not find a full replacement of Russia in the field of trade.

“The European countries never managed to find new markets or to develop markets other than in Russia in the same way. Economic sanctions first and foremost hit Germany, Spain, France and Greece. We see that agricultural products, especially cheese and vegetables from France were exported to Russia. Because of sanctions, the European market could not encash all these products at home,” the analyst told RT.

According to him, “the continuation of the sanctions policy can turn into a complete loss of Russian market for the EU countries” in the next five years.

“Europe can deprive itself of the opportunity to be present in Russia and earn money. It is clear that the issue of import substitution is developing in Russia, new projects are being developed. Now the Europeans, especially German and French companies, still have a chance to return to the Russian market. We know that Russia has a very positive attitude to French, German and Italian products, so the potential for the sales is very large. But if the policy of sanctions continues for the next five years, the chance to return to the Russian market for many European companies may disappear,” Andreas Maurer stressed.

Meanwhile, a number of media reported on a possible meeting between Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York, during which the parties plan to discuss the state of bilateral relations before Washington could potentially introduce a second round of sanctions against Moscow because of the so-called Skripal case.

Analyzing the current situation, Fernand Kartheiser, Luxembourg Parliament member for the Alternative Democratic Reform Party (ADR), pointed to serious contradictions in the political views of Western states.

“My feeling is that the West is so deeply split that nobody is able, for the time being, to take the lead on any issue. American initiatives are eyed suspiciously in Europe and European initiatives are not really welcome in Washington. There is no clear policy on anything for the time being, and the sanctions issue, even though important, is just yet another victim of this situation,” the politician told PenzaNews.

At the same time, the position of the Czech president, in his opinion, should not be left without attention of the leaders of the larger countries of Europe.

“The comments seem to be obvious under such circumstances. First, none of the larger European States has a strong government for the time being. Germany. France, Britain and Italy have all other problems that seem to be far more important than the sanctions issue. None has a really clear view about Russia and the developments in Eastern Europe. We are in a foreign policy lame duck scenario. Therefore the initiatives coming from smaller states are both important and welcome,” Fernand Kartheiser said.

In his opinion, the meeting between the Russian Foreign Minister and the US Secretary of State would be an absolute necessity in these circumstances.

“It would certainly contribute to a better climate. […] Overall, sanctions cannot replace diplomacy. Nowadays, they are used much too quickly, especially when there is no clear scenario how to get out of them. Instead of helping to resolve problems, sanctions increasingly become a problem for themselves. Maybe that is one of the consequences of a too large number of political summit meetings. If diplomats were given again a better chance to work on the issues quietly, we would probably see more solutions and less tension,” Luxembourg Parliament member explained.

In turn, Michael Geary, Global Fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington, noted that the majority of European and EU leaders are in favour of maintaining the current set of sanctions, and only those “with long-standing pro-Russia sympathies” have called for their removal.

“But we should not conflate those who are calling for a more measured approach to the latest round of US global trade policy changes and those sanctions specifically directed at Russia,” the expert said.

According to him, many European politicians have voiced concern about US actions in the area of international trade.

“The erratic trade policy currently being pursued, almost unilaterally, by President Trump, has a very nationalistic hue […] and has a major impact on exports of certain goods to the US from Canada, Mexico, Turkey, China, the EU and elsewhere. Trump’s goal of making America great again will be achieved through reshaping traditional trading relations between Washington and the wider world to the clear advantage of the US,” Michael Geary explained.

Turning to the sanctions on Russia, he expressed the opinion that “this is an issue that is better viewed through a security lens” because “Russia is seen by many, on both sides of the Atlantic, as a national security risk.”

The analyst also suggested that sanctions are likely to remain in place indefinitely because those calling for an end to sanctions are in the minority with limited decision-making power.

“The EU has recently renewed theirs and further sanctions are likely in the US linked to issues related to election interference. It seems unlikely that a bilateral meeting between the US and Russia top diplomats will change that,” Michael Geary said, adding that “Pompeo, himself a former member of Congress, will be under pressure from members of his own party, including those who sit on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.”

Meanwhile, Anton Friesen, Member of the foreign affairs committee and the committee on humanitarian assistance and human rights of the German Parliament, stated that sanctions are not in the interest of most EU-countries, especially Germany.

“Russia is the 13th biggest trade partner of Germany, with about 57 billion euros. In contrast the trade volume between Russia and the United States is only 24 billion US-dollars. You see, the United States has less money to lose in the matter of sanctions. By the way, the US itself is trading with Russia – just look at Russian LNG-deliveries to the US: there were already three this year. As I see it, the American sanctions are an example of economic warfare to harm trade relations between EU and Russia and to impose expensive US-gas on the Europeans,” the German politician explained.

In his opinion, sanctions are counterproductive.

“In the most cases they lead to nothing and destroy trust between countries. So, I strongly agree with Milos Zeman to remove the harmful sanctions against Russia. It’s not in the interest of Germany or many other member states of the European Union,” Anton Friesen said.

At the same time, commenting on the information about potential meeting of Russian and American diplomats at the UN General Assembly in New York, the Bundestag deputy stressed the need for dialogue between the two countries.

“In my opinion, it’s always positive, if all parties talk with each other to solve problems. But one meeting alone would probably not lead to a turnaround in the relation between Russia and the United States. On the other hand, Lavrov and Pompeo are good negotiators. So, at least there is hope for an improvement,” the politician concluded.

Source: https://penzanews.ru/en/analysis/65676-2018

US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un with the help of South Korean president’s special envoy Chung Eui-yong have exchanged written messages, the content of which was not disclosed, said South Korean Yonhap news agency on Thursday, September 6th.

“Kim Jong Un of North Korea proclaims ‘unwavering faith in President Trump.’ Thank you to Chairman Kim. We will get it done together!” Donald Trump wrote on Twitter.

However, earlier American experts accused North Korea of insufficient progress in the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, after which Trump canceled a visit to Pyongyang by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last month.

Commenting on the difficult situation, Bonnie Glaser, former consultant for US Departments of Defense and State, Senior Adviser for Asia, Director, China Power Project, Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that today US-North Korea relations are in a stalemate.

“The main reason is that their priorities and objectives differ, and the Singapore agreement did not provide a workable roadmap,” the expert told PenzaNews.

“Pyongyang wants a declaration to end the Korean War and other political steps. The US seeks concrete moves toward denuclearization, including a declaration of all nuclear and missile programs,” Bonnie Glaser explained, stressing that she’s pessimistic that the gap will be narrowed.

Michael O’Hanlon, Senior Fellow at Brookings University and an author of several publications for the National Interest magazine, shared the view that the negotiations are stuck but expressed hope that Pyongyang and Washington would still be able to reach agreement.

“North Korea wants to keep its weapons and only do enough diplomacy to get sanctions relief. […] But there is still a potential compromise,” the analyst noted.

“US and North Korea may delay the removal of actual North Korean warheads while first dismantling all of its nuclear and long-range missile and chemical weapon production capability, in return for suspension then lifting of some – but not all – sanctions,” Michael O’Hanlon suggested.

In turn, Jonathan Berkshire Miller, Senior Visiting Fellow at the Japan Institute of International Affairs, said the situation in the relations between Washington and Pyongyang was not surprising.

“It is not surprising that there have been setbacks in the discussions between the US and DPRK as there remain massive gaps on the crucial areas on contention. Namely, the Kim regime never explicitly or implicitly agreed to CVID at the Singapore meeting with Trump earlier this year – although the impression that the Trump administration is trying to frame is that this has been ‘agreed to,’” the expert explained.

According to him, the North Koreans “feel offended by the constant wording of CVID and the lack of movement on sanctions reduction.”

“The sequencing – who moves first – has always been an issue in previous US-DPRK talks and will continue to trouble future discussions as the trust deficit is so large and historical,” Jonathan Berkshire Miller added.

Meanwhile, Grant Newsham, Senior Research Fellow at the Japan Forum for Strategic Studies in Tokyo, with experience as a US Diplomat and US Marine Officer, expressed the view that the Kim regime sees no need to denuclearize.

“Especially now: the PRC has removed even the limited sanctions it had in place, and the Russians never had any to start with. Add to this, the ROK Moon administration’s eagerness to appease North Korea in order to somehow draw the North into a unified Korea,” the analyst said.

At the same time, in his opinion, Kim Jong-un has not given up his objective of a unified Korea – under North Korean control.

“The necessary prerequisite, from Kim’s point of view, is to get the Americans off the Korean peninsula. This isn’t going to happen tomorrow, but we’re seeing more friction between the ROK government and the United States than we’ve seen for a long time, if ever,” Grant Newsham said.

South Korean authorities also see the Americans as the problem that keeps Korea separated, he said.

“This does not bode well for future US-ROK relations if Moon Jae-in keeps at his efforts to play nice with Mr. Kim. But ROK politics, like US politics are not static. And Moon’s popularity is on a downslope, so maybe a less naïve ROK leader will come along next,” former US Diplomat suggested.

He also added that it’s hardly possible to restore impetus to the process.

“It would require a jaw-dropping concession from Mr. Kim, such as removing his artillery and missiles from out of range of Seoul. […] It’s hard to think what else Kim might do as a sign of good faith that would cause thinking people to believe he’s serious about denuclearizing and ‘turning over a new leaf,’” Grant Newsham explained.

In turn, Masashi Nishihara, President of Research Institute for Peace and Security (RIPS) in Tokyo, former President of National Defense Academy, expressed the view that North Korea fails to respect the talks between Trump and Kim Jong-un.

“North Korea wants to get US support for a declaration of the end of the Korean War before moving ahead for denuclearization. The US mistrust of North Korea is growing fast. The US is now shifting back to the military pressure by suggesting that the US may resume a large military drill,” the expert said.

Moreover, in his opinion, the summit of the US and the DPRK leaders was initially poorly thought out.

“Prospects for the future talks are dim. Both sides have expected different gains. […] The whole thing was ill-prepared. The Trump-Kim talks in Singapore were ill-prepared and should have been held after careful negotiations at lower level first,” Masashi Nishihara explained.

Meanwhile, Denny Roy, Senior Fellow, East-West Center, expressed confidence that there is no mutual understanding between the parties.

“Washington understood Kim Jong-un as wanting to make a radical change in his foreign relations, including denuclearization. Thus, during the Singapore summit Trump declared that the nuclear weapons problem was solved and emphasized that North Korea was about to enter an economic golden age. But we soon learned that what the North Koreans really wanted was not a radical change. Rather, they wanted economic sanctions removed, the danger of a US preventive military strike alleviated, and progress toward their goal of getting US forces off the Korean Peninsula. Consequently, the post-Singapore negotiations broke down when the disconnect become clear,” the expert explained.

“The Americans pushed for immediate and concrete steps toward removing the DPRK [nuclear] arsenal and its infrastructure. The North Korean position was they had already made a major concession by halting testing, and it was the Americans’ turn to make the next move, which should be a peace treaty,” Denny Roy added.

Future prospects for a real breakthrough are poor, he believes.

“The DPRK has already achieved its immediate goals: Washington is no longer talking about a preventive military strike, and China and South Korea are resuming economic cooperation with North Korea. Furthermore, the Trump Administration is resistant to publicly admitting failure, making it easy for the North Koreans to drag out the negotiation process without making significant or permanent concessions. Tensions on the Peninsula are much reduced, but North Korea’s possession of nuclear weapons is entrenched more deeply,” the analyst concluded.

Source: https://penzanews.ru/en/analysis/65661-2018

Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds the potential to vastly improve government operations and meet the needs of citizens in new ways, ranging from traffic management to healthcare delivery to processing tax forms. But many public institutions are cautious about harnessing this powerful technology because of concerns over bias, privacy, accountability, transparency and overall complexity.

The World Economic Forum, the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation, Thursday announced it will bring governments, businesses, start-ups and civil society together to co-design guidelines to empower governments to responsibly deploy and design AI technology for the benefit of citizens.

The United Kingdom is the first country to partner with the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution on this project. The partnership will involve sending a government secondee to the Centre in San Francisco to create these new guidelines.

“Governments’ significant buying power can drive private-sector adoption of these standards even for products that are sold beyond government,” said Kay Firth-Butterfield, Head of Artificial Intelligence at the World Economic Forum. “The future of AI needs government and businesses to work together. I’m thrilled to have the United Kingdom partner with the Centre on this project.”

“The UK has a proud history of stepping up and shaping the international rules and partnerships for new technologies,” said Margot James, Digital Minister, Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport. “Artificial Intelligence has huge potential benefits and it is right that the public sector is helping to lead the way. Our collaboration with the World Economic Forum on AI will keep the UK at the forefront of this revolutionary technology.”

The ongoing global turmoil headlined by the US-China trade dispute and turbulence in emerging markets such as Argentina and Turkey are a cause for concern, but there are also reasons for optimism, said panellists in a session on the global economic outlook on the closing day of the Annual Meeting of the New Champions.

For China, the trade dispute is an opportunity to further boost consumption to replace exports as the engine of economic growth, said Wang Tuanwei, Chief Financial Officer and Vice-President, China Minsheng Investment Group, People’s Republic of China. China’s large population and imperative to boost growth in rural areas, where living conditions are far worse than in its thriving cities, present an investment opportunity, he said.

This is unlikely to be easy, however, warned Lutfey Siddiqi, Visiting Professor-in-Practice at the London School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom, comparing what China needs to do to having to switch engines in a bus moving at a fast clip à la Keanu Reeves in the film Speed.

One corollary of the current dispute is that the dependence of the global economy on China-US trade dynamics will decrease, and China’s trade with the European Union and other partners will assume prominence, said Arun Sundararajan, Robert and Dale Atkins Rosen Professor of Business at the Stern School of Business, New York University, USA. He added that China would be well poised to assume philosophical leadership of multilateralism in trade. Other trading countries will find themselves caught in a pincer between the US and China, but this could provide a catalyst to the ASEAN countries to hasten their integration so as to benefit from improving the composition and balance of their trade with China, Siddiqi said.

China is also opening up more and more sectors to foreign investment – securities and insurance, for instance – and would do well to improve its social security system at this time, which would mobilize its massive savings by giving people the courage to spend rather than save, said Jing Ulrich, Managing Director and Vice-Chairman for Asia-Pacific at JPMorgan Chase & Co., Hong Kong SAR, China. However, she said, there would be reason for Asia and indeed the world to worry if the current dispute becomes protracted, creating a lose-lose situation for all concerned.

“China will not change its industrial policy due to external pressure,” Ulrich said, adding that China has a long-term plan to modernize and transform from an export-dependent to a consumption-driven economy, and to rapidly advance in the technological sphere, from which it will not deviate. “Negotiations will begin, but it will be a rough and bumpy road,” she said, adding, “The problem is in technology, where China and the US both want to lead in e-commerce, e-payments, artificial intelligence.” There might, however, be some resolution in the coming months if the US tempers its stance after its midterm elections, she said.

Nevertheless, the upcoming technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution are a cause for optimism for the global economy, said Sundararajan, and those who are cautious about investing in these technologies now will miss out in the long run. At the same time, Asian countries, as countries everywhere, must work to reduce technological inequalities and make their countries more inclusive. Various Asian countries have very different demographic realities, which will influence the speed at which they develop technologies. China, for instance, is ahead of the US in deploying mobile phones for a range of day-to-day activities. However, it will go slower than Japan in automation, because it has a vast labour force to think about, Sundararajan said.

More than $1.2 trillion will be spent on internet of things (IoT) solutions over the next four years, notwithstanding that three-quarters of IoT projects currently fail. New analysis released today by the World Economic Forum, the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation, aims to help governments and companies think more strategically about which IoT solutions can generate the greatest impact and return on investment.

The IoT and Connected Devices team at the World Economic Forum Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution and a community of experts analysed more than 200 case studies, and corresponding solution sets, of IoT technologies successfully tested and deployed around the world. IoT solutions in six thematic clusters were identified to be among the most impactful and scalable:

• Early warning and disaster prevention
• Worker safety, well-being and efficiency
• Health monitoring and patient treatment
• Transport of goods and people
• Crop and livestock management
• Management of finite natural resources (energy, water)

“IoT has the potential to unleash new economic opportunity and dramatically improve the quality of life of billions of people – but this future is far from guaranteed. Without a more strategic focus and roadmap, we risk squandering trillions of dollars in public- and private-sector investment in the years ahead,” said Jeff Merritt, Head of IoT and Connected Devices at the World Economic Forum. “By focusing attention on tried-and-tested solutions, we can reduce the risk associated with these new technologies and enable more consistent, positive impact.”

Robots won’t take all jobs

Contrary to growing concerns about the potential of automation to displace labour, the IoT solutions highlighted in the analysis focus on enhancing the productivity of workers, not replacing them. For example, in the healthcare sector, a shortage of doctors has prompted concern from India to the United States. IoT solutions that enhance preventive care and the early detection of health conditions are among the most impactful and scalable solutions to date. In agriculture, where food security remains an ever-present global challenge, IoT technologies can potentially help workers optimize the use of water and fertilizers, or manage livestock.

The bulk of highly impactful and scalable IoT solutions address pressing needs in China and the broader Asia region, notably with regard to a growing elderly population and rapid urbanization. According to United Nations data, East Asia is ageing faster than any other region of the world. From 1990 to 2017, the population over age 40 in East Asia grew from 28% to 48%. In parallel, Asia is witnessing an unprecedented move of population from rural to urban communities. In China, for example, the urban population has increased by 500 million people in the past three decades. These trends are placing increasing pressure on healthcare systems and urban infrastructure — areas where IoT has proven incredibly valuable. Not surprisingly given this finding, the Asia region currently leads the world in IoT spending.

Despite a proliferation of IoT technologies in smart cities and manufacturing, experts were divided on the potential impact and scalability of these solutions. Smart city solutions that focus on system-wide efficiencies – such as monitoring real-time electricity consumption to optimize power grids – appear to hold the greatest promise in the short term.

In the manufacturing sector, IoT technologies that improve worker well-being stood out above solutions that focus exclusively on enhancing system operations. These worker-centric solutions include using IoT technologies to optimize workplace conditions, including temperature, lighting and air quality, and the use of wearable technologies to monitor the health conditions of workers, thereby reducing the risk of accidents and helping to optimize the performance of employees.

“Having employees who are healthy both physically and mentally and can work energetically is an important competitive advantage for companies,” said Hiroaki Kawamura, Head of Digital Development at Suntory. “We applaud the World Economic Forum for this important work and are proud to contribute to this work through our partnership with the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”