The west is gripped by Venezuela’s problems. Why does it ignore Brazil’s?

Reporters ask Jeremy Corbyn if he will condemn Nicolás Maduro. But the undemocratic abuses of Michel Temer aren’t flashy enough for the news cycle

Julia Blunck in The Guardian


 

‘Brazil has carried on as most stories about Latin America do: unnoticed and uncommented on.’ Riot police monitor protests against the government of Michel Temer in Brasilia, May 2017. Photograph: Evaristo Sa/AFP/Getty Images




Venezuela is the question on everyone’s lips. Rather, Venezuela is the question on reporters’ lips whenever they see Jeremy Corbyn: will he condemn the president, Nicolás Maduro? What is his position on Venezuela, and how does it affect his plans for Britain? The actual problems of Venezuela – a complex country with a long history that does not start with the previous president Hugo Chávez and certainly not with Jeremy Corbyn – are largely ignored or pushed aside. This is nothing new: most of the time, Latin America’s debates are seen through western lenses.

Of course, the situation in Venezuela is deplorable and worrying. But it’s easy to see that concern about Maduro’s undemocratic abuses don’t necessarily come from actual concern for the welfare of Venezuelan people.

Nearby neighbour Brazil has not been analysed or debated at length, even as it demonstrates similar problems. The country’s president, Michel Temer, recently escaped measures that would see him put to trial in the supreme court by getting congress to vote them down. The case against Temer was not a flimsy or partisan one: there was a mountain of evidence, including recordings of him openly debating kickbacks with corrupt businessman Joesley Batista. That a president put into power under circumstances that could be, at best, described as dodgy, manages to remain in power by buying favours from Congress, even as he passes the harshest austerity measures in the world should be enough to raise a few eyebrows internationally. But that has not happened, and Brazil has carried on as most stories about Latin America do: unnoticed and uncommented on.

Part of this discrepancy is of course the bias toward what is flashy. Stories about sordid Congress deals are not that interesting to foreign audiences, and even many exhausted and demoralised Brazilians felt this was simply another addition to a long list of humiliations that began in 2015 when the economy started to sink.

Meanwhile, Venezuela has human conflict, the thing that produces exciting photography and think-pieces, sparks debate and crucially, draws clicks. There’s only so much attention to be gained talking about Temer’s undermining of democracy as it happens without noise, through chicanery and articulation by Brazil’s traditional power: the “Bible, beef and bullets” caucuses in Congress. Venezuela’s situation, however, is urgent, with tanks on the streets and opposition arrests.

Yet there is a subtext to why Brazil’s democracy is not as interesting, and why even Temer’s introduction of the military on to Rio de Janeiro’s streets to address a crime wave has prompted little response. Temer’s rule is one of hard capitalism and an ever-shrinking state. He has established a ceiling on public spending, slashed workers rights, and imposed a hard reform of retirement age.

Temer’s rise to power came as it became clear to big business that his predecessor, Dilma Rousseff, would not go far with austerity. They financed and stimulated protests – largely by rightly angry middle-class Brazilians at what they saw as widespread corruption – while Congress blocked Rousseff’s bills or sabotaged her agenda in other ways.


Latin American suffering is being played out as a proxy for debates in the UK

While Temer did not seize power through a violent coup, and the alliance between Rousseff’s Workers’ party and his notoriously dishonest and chronically double-crossing party was a largely self-inflicted wound, it bears remembering that Rousseff was ousted on a technicality so that Temer could solve the economy’s woes by making “difficult decisions”, a platform for which he had no electoral mandate.

And yet the economy continues to sink, as the unemployment rate soars to 13%. That narrative isn’t very convenient, though, and nobody is interested in making Brazil the representative case of how capitalism is an undemocratic system doomed to fail. And that is quite right: capitalism cannot be exclusively defined by Brazilian failures. The same should be true of socialism in Venezuela.

Somehow, though, the conversation about Venezuela is actually a conversation about something else. Latin American suffering is being played out as a proxy for debates in the UK. As the rightwing media claim, Jeremy Corbyn might not care very much about the thousands going hungry by Maduro’s hand – maybe he too thinks it is simply a consequence of American meddling – but it’s hard to believe that the British right is sincerely committed to the region’s stability and democracy. There has been very little said about Temer.

The failures of Temer do not, and should not be used to, excuse Maduro’s. Nor should we equate the two men in brutality. Yet, if you live in Brazil where public servants are teargassed for not being paid for five months, where indigenous rights activists and others are killed by rich farmers in unprecedented numbers, where several states declare bankruptcy because of a crash in oil prices, where the army is called upon to tackle protesters, you may wonder when your situation will be worth debating.

The answer is whenever it becomes politically convenient. In the end, British commentators and politicians on both the left and right aren’t just opportunistic when it comes to Latin American suffering, they are glad when it happens: it proves their point, whatever that may be. Our lives are just a detail.

The India that says no

Tunku Varadarajan in the Indian Express

 Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressing during the International Solar Alliance in Paris on Monday. (PTI Photo)

These last days have seen a fascinating demonstration of righteous assertiveness by Indians. In Paris, Narendra Modi was at the world climate conference defending India’s right to burn coal, it being the cheapest and most profuse of the country’s present sources of energy, entirely mined at home (unlike oil, imported from the world’s volatile hell-holes, and over whose price India has little positive control).

Back in smoggy India, another leader, India’s Test cricket captain Virat Kohli, was defending the country’s repeated resort to slow, turning pitches in the series against South Africa, this type of pitch being the most reliable source of victory at home for the spin-focused Indian cricket team.

In both cases, what we were seeing was a species of indignant, nationalist pushback against standards set by the West, and Western expectations of “fair play” that work to India’s apparent disadvantage.

Modi was blunt and eloquent. Having “powered their way to prosperity on fossil fuel when humanity was unaware of its impact”, he wrote in an op-ed in the Financial Times, it was “morally wrong” of the industrialised West to deny India the right to use the same sources of energy today to pull its people out of poverty. “Justice demands that, with what little carbon we can still safely burn, developing countries are allowed to grow.”

The message embedded here was that the West is guilty of double-standards in seeking to deny India access to the very fuels that had served the occident so well for centuries — and for doing so just as India is primed for a Great Leap Forward.  In response to his assertion of India’s transitional developmental rights, Modi earned patronising lectures from the usual suspects, including the tirelessly sanctimonious The New York Times.

Double-standards were also the theme of the Indian cricket complaint. Responding to the barrage of English and Australian criticisms of the Nagpur pitch — where South Africa were spin-dried in just three days — the captain, manager and players of the Indian team took a leaf out of Modi’s book. Why are your standards the norm, they said to Western critics, and our standards — Indian standards — the aberration?

At issue is the belief, rife in English and Australian cricket circles, that green pitches that seam and bounce are fair and manly, the proper surfaces on which to play a game of cricket. These are the pitches one encounters in England and Australia because they are the natural products of local conditions. They also suit the style of play of teams from these countries, while cramping the style of visiting Indian players.

In contrast, Indian pitches are bereft of grass and turn early in a Test match. They are described by foreign cricket writers — often the loudest promoters of the too-much-spin-is-immoral school of thought — as Dust Bowls, conjuring images of famine, and of hardscrabble conditions unsuited to civilised cricket.

As foreign pundits took aim at India, the director of the Indian cricket team was quick to shoot back. “Which rule tells me the ball can’t turn on Day One?” said a mouthy Ravi Shastri. “Where does it tell me in the rulebook it can only swing and seam?” India has to sink or swim when playing abroad, so touring teams should expect no different in India.

As with cricket, so with carbon. “The lifestyles of a few must not crowd out the opportunities for many,” said Modi in Paris. Hands off our coal. And hands off our pitches. This is the India that can say No. 

The West and the Rest

Gautam Adhikari in The Times of India

What is it about the so-called West that so many in the Indian elite seem to hate? Not ordinary people, but the bureaucratic-academic-intellectual elite that dominates public as well as private discourse in the metropolises, particularly in Delhi and, less influentially, Kolkata and Mumbai. Too many members of that privileged class sneer at the West, especially America, and both right-wing ultra-nationalists and left-wing Lohiaite and Gandhian socialists want to build protective walls for the native masses against a tide of Western culture and values that they fear are out to sabotage India.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty that’s dysfunctional in Western societies, by which we mean the urbanised, modernised and, therefore, advanced economies that lie mostly in the Western hemisphere. But isn’t the aim today of every developing nation to achieve precisely that kind of urbanised advancement as best as feasible?

Swathes of India’s intellectual elite would apparently disagree. They conjure up visions of a bucolic, spiritually untainted, pristinely Indian and self-reliant utopia that can come about if only the Western model of growth were jettisoned once for all. There are several problems with this dream, to say nothing of the futility of searching for a tested model of such an ideal society. Walden Pond, Tolstoy Farm and Sabarmati Ashram are not examples anyone can recreate on a national scale.

Like it or not urbanised modernisation, with all its flaws, forms the only surviving blueprint that humankind has to improve the quality and durability of life. And, it so happens, the current phase of urbanised advancement the human race is passing through indeed began a few centuries ago in societies located in the West.

That by no means implies that the road to this unprecedentedly rapid phase of modernisation of the world began magically in the West. The bricks of that road had been laid gradually over centuries by many civilisations, though it was from Europe for a complex range of reasons that the path began to take the shape of a highway.

Hundreds of scholars and intellectuals, mainly Western, have written on how a 15,000-year-old agricultural system suddenly gave way to an industrial society, and thence to our globalised post-industrial world in the space of a few hundred years. Only, it wasn’t all that sudden, though the speed of change was truly phenomenal.

If you don’t trust Western scholars on the subject, there are non-Western options available. You can read Nayan Chanda’s ‘Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers and Warriors Shaped Globalization’. He is of pure Indian origin. His 2007 book traces the ever-growing interconnectedness and interdependence that began from the start of early human migration from Africa 50-70,000 years ago and remains ongoing in this intricately globalised phase of our history.

Much of the foundation of Western enlightenment, for instance, was based on ancient Greek philosophy and logic. Along with their own speculative philosophy, the Greeks were open-minded enough to borrow ideas that had germinated in China and India. The Romans borrowed wholesale from the Greeks and developed ideas to create social and legal systems that form a basis for many modern institutions.

Then came a lull in the area now known as the West for about a millennium. It is commonly called the Dark Ages in European literature but it was not dark at all for a rising Islamic-Arab civilisation, which thrived for much of that period to keep Greek thought alive while also developing Chinese inventions and Indian mathematics to spread ideas across a wide empire. The Arabs thus formed a crucial link in global civilisation.

Then, to compress a complex story, came the European Renaissance. As the name implies, it was a ‘rebirth’ of ideas and a socio-cultural reawakening that led in due course to the industrial revolution and to this extraordinary stage in civilisation that we inhabit. In sum, we live a life born of interconnectedness and interdependence.

To put it another way, what we call the West today is little more than a stage in the march of human history. In the intertwined world that has come about as a result of millennia of exchange between cultures, the West is a convenient geopolitical term that combines both a violently harsh as well as enlightened tale of interdependence.

So, get over it. Why try to reinvent the wheel?

Immigrants - Confusion of Unknown Origins

Interview with Tahir Gora on his book Rangmahal - a story of confusion among the Indian diaspora

Arming people and bombing them at the same time: that’s some strategy

By Mark Steel in The Independent

At last the West has developed a coherent strategy for Iraq. It goes, “No, hang on, maybe if we arm THESE blokes on the backs of trucks, make up THESE stories and bomb everyone on THIS side of the mountain, maybe THAT will work.”

There can’t be many people in the Middle East who haven’t been bombed by America for using the weapons given to them by America. Millions of people out there must be psychological wrecks, not because of shell shock but because when a Western army arrives, they don’t know if they’re going to be tortured with garden shears or given a palace and told they’re the new king.

The poor sods who ruled Iran must all need counselling, telling a therapist, “America kept saying it wanted to bomb me, now it says that when it told me I was a rabid, lying, filthy piece of squalid medieval vermin building nuclear weapons so I could destroy the universe and make flowers wear burkas, it was only being ironic. And if we really haven’t got any nuclear weapons they’ll lend us a couple, as long as we use them against the Islamic State people. I’m so confused I’ve started barking like a dog.”

We support anti-Assad forces in Syria, but some of them support Isis, who now call themselves Islamic State, so now we want to arm them and bomb them at the same time. If we can supply them with rocket launchers that they fire against Assad in the morning, then in the afternoon use them to blow themselves up, maybe that will keep everyone content. 

With similar skill we armed Osama bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein, and Colonel Gadaffi, and there must have been times when we’ve swapped sides during an air strike, between a bomb being launched and when it landed, so we’ve had to try and get all the armies on the ground to move round as we’re now on the side of the militia we were about to wipe out.

Former US presidential candidate John McCain is a master at this art. Since losing the election McCain has called for so many wars he’s been like those people who try to visit every football ground in the league,  aiming to call for every single country in the world to be bombed, ticking each one off as he goes. Eventually he’ll call for air strikes on Liechtenstein and the occupation of Barbados and he’ll be finished. 

In May of this year McCain went to Syria to pose for photographs with Syrian rebels who he insisted we supply with weapons. But the rebels he befriended are now part of Isis. This is a slightly unexpected turn for the right wing of the Republican Party – that it now supports holy jihad and the destruction of the West – but it’s a shrewd politician who knows how to move with the times.

It makes you realise if they hadn’t hanged Saddam and shot Bin Laden, they’d probably both be back on our side by now, and occasionally reviewing the papers on the BBC News Channel. There certainly seems to be nostalgia for Bin Laden, as politicians and commentators have insisted the current enemy is “far worse than al-Qa’ida. Because say what you will about the fundamentalist rascals, at least they were gentlemen, and the basements they made their videos in were always impeccably tidy, not like this lot you get these days”.

So a more efficient method of arranging our Middle Eastern wars might be to line everyone up when we get there, and pick sides, like with football teams at school. A general and a jihadist can take turns to select soldiers until there are only the useless ones left, then each side can wear yellow bibs so everyone knows who to fire at and who to call despicable savages that have to be stopped as we can’t stand by and do nothing.

To be fair there are some areas in which we’ve tried a more stable approach. For example, Saudi Arabia is always seen as a friend, and we’ve just agreed to sell them another £1.6bn worth of arms. But that can’t do any harm because at least they’re a modern nation with decent liberal values, like a little bit of Brighton in the desert. 

And Israel is always a close ally, with £3bn of arms a year from America, which goes to show if a country keeps its nose clean and doesn’t behave unpleasantly in any way it will be rewarded now and then with little treats.

That’s why one of the most confusing aspects of all is those people most keen to start another military campaign in Iraq, seem to dismiss the idea that the current mess has anything to do with the last military campaign in Iraq. And they may be right, because although we invaded the place on the insistence that there were weapons that didn’t exist, killing so many people we somehow made things even worse than they’d been under Saddam, we left there 18 months ago so I don’t suppose anyone still remembers that now.

So politicians will explain that we have to send our armies again, because these people are “pure distilled evil, the most appalling creatures, far worse than Satan”, before it’s pointed out to them that six months ago they invited them all to the White House for a barbecue and as a present gave them a flamethrower and a tank.

Iraq exposes the west’s hypocrisy in the Middle East

It’s right to take military action to protect Yazidi people. But the west’s record on who gets saved and who doesn’t is shameful

• 
• • Carne Ross
  • The Guardian, Monday 11 August 2014 20.30 BST

Kurdish soldiers keep guard on the outskirts of Kirkuk. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

A friend from Pristina once told me that the happiest day of his life was when he heard Nato cruise missiles over his home town. This was in 1999 when Nato intervened from the air to stop the Serb campaign to drive Albanians from Kosovo. Often military intervention is wrong, but sometimes it is right. It was right in Kosovo, and Libya in 2011, and it is right today in northern Iraq.

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Also read 

Muslim double standards abound

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I resigned from the British foreign office because my government lied about the reasons for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. My scepticism about western motives runs deep. But the evident suffering of the Yazidis and others, and the imminent threat to the hitherto stable region of Kurdistan, overcomes these doubts. The views of the Yazidis and the Kurdistan regional government are clear. Their views matter most.

But the intervention in northern Iraq highlights the hypocrisy that characterises western policies in the Middle East. Who gets saved and who doesn’t? In Egypt, the west supports an authoritarian dictatorship where thousands, from Muslim Brothers to secular democrats like Alaa Abd El Fattah, are incarcerated in appalling, torturous jails. In Palestine, the US resupplied bombs to Israel during its callous bombardment of Gaza. And in Iraq itself, the US chose currently embattledNouri al-Maliki as prime minister, and continued to support him even after his militias had scythed down Sunnis and imprisoned thousands for their ethnicity. The UK government gives its tacit support to all of this, with a calculated display of rhetorical hand-wringing.

The west has worked itself into a grotesque muddle in the Middle East, supporting dictatorships in some places, calling for others to end; condemning the killings of civilians in one place, in another condoning them. These are the double standards that will be exploited by extremists across the world; a fount of terrorism that will continue to haunt us.

For too long, western policy has been guided by abstract and invented notions of “interests” and “security”, arbitrary guidelines that long ago degraded into “our friends” and “their enemies”. A new doctrine is needed, based on clear principles: protection of civilians, promoting local solutions, consistent rewards and punishments, all included in a comprehensive approach.

As everywhere, the welfare of civilians should come first and guide all policy. This offers a clear signpost in Kurdistan but also Palestine, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. In cases of violent repression, this means giving populations the means for self-defence. In extremis, it might mean military intervention.

Since Sykes and Picot carved up the Middle East a century ago, the west has imposed its own simplistic designs on the complexities of the region. Instead, it must always facilitate local discussion, without assumptions such as that Iraq should remain as one state. If the Kurds want their own state, we should not be the ones to stop them. Our role should be to aim for a negotiated solution, with clear protections for minorities.

When John Kerry visits Cairo bringing attack helicopters for President Sisi, it cannot be a surprise that the regime pays no attention when he calls for the release of political prisoners. Rhetoric counts for very little. Criticism over the shelling of UN schools in Gaza doesn’t matter when in private officials reassure Israel that support continues. If a government abuses its population or fails to engage in inclusive political dialogue, it should be criticised, then condemned, then shunned and, if it continues, sanctioned. This applies in Saudi Arabia; it should apply in Iraq, but also in Israel.

Western policy does not connect the dots between the interconnected crises of the Middle East. Protecting civilians in Syria means giving the means of self-defence, such as anti-aircraft missiles, to the moderate opposition (which my organisation advises). This would have limited the rise of Isis in Syria, preventing the threat in Iraq and thus the necessity of military intervention. Pounding Isis in Iraq won’t stop the danger re-emerging from Syria. Condoning repression in Egypt will sustain the terrorist threat worldwide.

These principles highlight the mess of western policy. Following them would, in the longer term, help put it right.

Disarmament is for wimps. Go get your nukes if you can

S A Aiyer in The Times of India

All my life I have opposed nuclear bombs. I have argued that such bombs are basically unusable; that, instead of ensuring security, they risk escalation of small conflicts into disasters; and that they lead to undesirable macho foreign policies. Most Indians exulted after India’s nuclear tests of 1998, claiming India was now a great power on par with the US. I cautioned that India was merely on par with Pakistan and North Korea. However, after seeing Ukraine bullied by Russia, I have to revise my views. Nukes are not useless, and may be essential deterrents. 

Ukraine was one of a dozen new states created when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991. It emerged independent with a massive 1,190 nuclear warheads, more than the arsenals of Britain, France and China combined. 

But it mistakenly thought that the Soviet collapse heralded the end of Moscow’s domination. So, it agreed to give up all its nukes and send them to Russia for destruction. In return, the US, Russia, and Britain signed the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, pledging to safeguard Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty. This was greeted with universal applause. 

Today, Ukraine knows it made a terrible mistake: it can no longer deter its powerful neighbour. Last month, Russia sent troops to annex Ukraine’s Crimea province. Now Russia threatens to split the rest of Ukraine, converting Eastern Ukraine (where a quarter of the population is ethnic Russian) into a puppet state, just as it earlier used armed muscle to convert the Russian-ethnic regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia into puppet states. Armed Russian infiltrators have teamed up with local ethnic Russians to seize major cities in eastern Ukraine. Ukrainian troops and police are too fearful of Russian firepower to offer much resistance. How they regret giving up nukes! 

Last week’s Geneva talks proposed peace, but with no teeth at all. Neither the US nor the UK, both Budapest Memorandum guarantors, is willing to stop Russia militarily. They are reluctant to even impose stiff economic sanctions, since Putin could retaliate by slashing gas supplies to Europe and nationalizing Western investments in oil and gas. 

Western security guarantees to Ukraine have proved as empty as those given to Czechoslovakia before World War II. When Hitler demanded the right to expand into Czechoslovakia to “protect” ethnic Germans there — the same excuse used by Putin to move into Eastern Ukraine — the Western powers gave in. 

Putin’s words in a TV interview were straight out of Hitler’s book. “We definitely knowthat we should do everything to help these people (ethnic Russians) defend their rights and define their destiny . We will fight for this. The Federation Council (of Russia) gave the president the right to use military force in Ukraine. I hope very much that I don’t have to use this right.” 

Most Indians are uninterested in a far-away country like Ukraine. Anti-US Indians are happy to see Putin bash the West. Yet the Putin principle is monstrous. How would readers react to Pakistan wanting to take over Muslim-inhabited areas in India to protect Muslims there? Or to Bangladesh taking over Assam to protect Bangladeshi migrants there? 

India is militarily strong and so can resist any such threats. Ukraine, Georgia and most states cannot. The USSR once posed an existentialist threat to the West, which therefore took security guarantees seriously. But no more. The West will honour military commitments only when this is costless, or affects its core interests. Ukraine has taught the world not to depend on the promises of the mighty. 

One consequence will be more nuclear proliferation. Japan and Korea have long avoided nukes, and depended on a US security umbrella. After Ukraine, they will think again. I predict both will go nuclear in a decade. 

Saudi Arabia, fearful of Iran and Iraq, has long depended on US security guarantees, including steps to prevent Iran from getting an N-bomb . After the Ukraine fiasco, Saudi Arabia knows how hollow US assurances are, and will embark quietly on a nuclear plan. The US invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, and bombed Libya. Would it have done so if those countries had nuclear bombs? For an answer, look at North Korea. This country has violated the UN charter repeatedly, attacked South Korean ships, and poses a security threat to East Asia. But the US does not intervene because North Korea has nukes. 

Lesson for non-nuclear states: don’t depend for security on the big powers who will dump you when convenient. Disarmament is for wimps. Go get your own nukes if you can. More nuclearization will deter some invasions, but also increases chances of a nuclear clash or accident. It is not a panacea. But it is now inevitable.

Which will be the big economies in 15 years? It's not a done deal

Will China, Russia and Mexico, governed by extractive elites, really do so well? Is Europe such a write-off? And what about Britain?

• 
• • Will Hutton
  • The Observer, Sunday 29 December 2013

How will China fare as an economy in the next 15 years? Photograph: Martin Puddy/Getty Images/Asia Images

Here is a puzzle that preoccupies futurologists, business strategists, economists and the world's foreign offices. Who is going to do best or worst economically over the next 15 years out of the world's current top 10 economies? In 2013,  the US is comfortably number one, twice the size of China and two-and-half times the size of the number three, Japan. After Germany at fourth comes a cluster of countries with less than a trillion dollars of GDP separating them. France just pips Britain at sixth. Then follow Brazil, Russia, Italy and Canada with India, hurt by the collapse of the rupee, just outside the top 10 at 11. 

The conventional wisdom, informed by conventional economics, is clear, represented faithfully by the conservative-leaning Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) in its annual world economic league table released last week. The European economies, especially France and Italy, will sink down the league table, burdened by taxation, welfare and ageing populations. China is inexorably rising to take over the top spot, but in 2028, later than the CEBR thought last year. India will climb to number three. Russia will do well, as will Mexico and eventually Brazil. The UK, if it continues to shrink the state, keeps taxes low, deregulates its labour markets, continues to be open to immigration and disengages with Europe, may only fall one place in the 2028 ranking to seventh. But even though the UK and US will fare better than mainland Europe, the relative decline of the west will continue.

Britain's conservative press seized on the projections with glee, proof positive that George Osborne is on the right track and Euro-scepticism is triumphant. The Express trumpeted: "Booming Britain will be top dog as the rest of Europe stagnates", while one commentator in the Mail wrote of Britain's "renaissance":  the CEBR had handed the chancellor a "weapon with which to attack Labour's agenda of despond and false promises".

Hmm. Booming Britain? Renaissance? The problem is that the economic theory that supports these predictions is itself in crisis. By prioritising the role of low taxes, deregulation, the inevitable efficiency of markets and the accompanying inevitable inefficiency of the state as drivers of growth, it assumes that the last 30 years – and in particular the 2008 financial crisis – had not happened. These are the terms in which UCL's Professor Wendy Carlin, leading the programme at the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) to reframe the economics curriculum to include economics' new advances, describes the state of much current teaching and debate, exemplified by both the CEBR report and the reaction to it.

For the best economics now has much more sophisticated understanding of what drives innovation, investment, productivity and growth than the simple faith in low tax and loosely regulated markets. It criticises the refusal to understand the complexity of how economies and societies create and assimilate paradigm-changing technologies. Nor is there room for assessing the quality of a country's entire institutional nexus – from company organisation to the accountability of government – in building inclusive, value-creating capitalism rather than extractive, value-capturing capitalism. The best brains in economics are now working on how economies work in reality, rather than as prospectuses for rightwing politicians and newspapers.

For example, in Why Nations Fail, MIT's Daron Acemoglu and Harvard's James Robinson present the results of 15 years of research into the rise and fall of countries and their economies. It is a far cry from the CEBR analysis, arguing that what differentiates countries is the quality and effectiveness of their economic and political institutions. Capitalism has to be shaped and governed to allow the new continually to reshape and even destroy the old: it has to allow multiple runners and riders, lots of experimentation and harness whole societies into accepting and taking risks. This happens best when economic and political institutions do not fall into the hands of one party or a group of self-interested oligarchs who essentially extract value; they need to be open and inclusive, constantly pushing back against the wealth extractors.

Acemoglu and Robinson are right, although inclusiveness and accountability go well beyond the democratic political institutions on which they focus – and for whose lack they doubt predictions of China's continuing inexorable rise. It extends to the integrity and soundness of the financial system, how effectively governments accept the risk of investing in frontier technologies that private entrepreneurs  never undertake alone, how companies are prevented from falling into the hand of self-interested, overpaid boards and ensuring that workplaces are inclusive too. But they do recognise, along with the IMF and OECD, that growing inequality menaces vigorous societies. It is a proxy for how effectively an elite has constructed institutions that extract value from the rest of society. Professor Sam Bowles, also part of the INET network,  goes further. He argues that inequality pulls production away from value creation to protecting and securing the wealthy's assets: one in five of the British workforce, for example, works as "guard labour" – in security, policing, law, surveillance and forms of IT that control and monitor. The higher inequality, the greater the proportion of a workforce deployed as guard workers, who generate little value and lower overall productivity.

The CEBR does warn that the break-up of the UK,  if Scotland votes for independence,  would qualify its optimistic predictions. But it never asks why Scottish voters might be so disillusioned if the Euro-sceptic, low-tax, low-regulation world it paints is so rosy: perhaps the Scots understand better than conventional economists what is really going on. More of what the CEBR recommends as the route to future riches – placing  our faith in markets and individual incentives along with disregarding  inequality and the dysfunctionality  of our institutions –  could break Britain up.

It is also reason to be sceptical about most of its projections. Will China, Russia and Mexico, governed by extractive elites, really do so well? Is Europe such a write-off? After all, Mr McWilliams, the affable Euro-sceptic who runs the CEBR, warned more than two years ago that European leaders had a month to save the euro.

I also bet that the US, if the destructive Tea Party can be held at bay, will hold on to the top spot. Britain, it is true, could catch up with Germany, but only if it builds on the effective industrial policy the coalition is developing and consigns small-state conservatism to the dustbin. Above all, I doubt the endless rise of Asian and Latin-American autocracies. The west is not dead yet.

Mass murder in the Middle East is funded by our friends the Saudis

PATRICK COCKBURN in The Independent

Sunday 8 December 2013

 

World View: Everyone knows where al-Qa'ida gets its money, but while the violence is sectarian, the West does nothing

Donors in Saudi Arabia have notoriously played a pivotal role in creating and maintaining Sunni jihadist groups over the past 30 years. But, for all the supposed determination of the United States and its allies since 9/11 to fight "the war on terror", they have showed astonishing restraint when it comes to pressuring Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies to turn off the financial tap that keeps the jihadists in business.

Compare two US pronouncements stressing the significance of these donations and basing their conclusions on the best intelligence available to the US government. The first is in the 9/11 Commission Report which found that Osama bin Laden did not fund al-Qa'ida because from 1994 he had little money of his own but relied on his ties to wealthy Saudi individuals established during the Afghan war in the 1980s. Quoting, among other sources, a CIA analytic report dated 14 November 2002, the commission concluded that "al-Qa'ida appears to have relied on a core group of financial facilitators who raised money from a variety of donors and other fund-raisers primarily in the Gulf countries and particularly in Saudi Arabia".

Seven years pass after the CIA report was written during which the US invades Iraq fighting, among others, the newly established Iraq franchise of al-Qa'ida, and becomes engaged in a bloody war in Afghanistan with the resurgent Taliban. American drones are fired at supposed al-Qa'ida-linked targets located everywhere from Waziristan in north-west Pakistan to the hill villages of Yemen. But during this time Washington can manage no more than a few gentle reproofs to Saudi Arabia on its promotion of fanatical and sectarian Sunni militancy outside its own borders.

Evidence for this is a fascinating telegram on "terrorist finance" from US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to US embassies, dated 30 December 2009 and released by WikiLeaks the following year. She says firmly that "donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide". Eight years after 9/11, when 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, Mrs Clinton reiterates in the same message that "Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support for al-Qa'ida, the Taliban, LeT [Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan] and other terrorist groups". Saudi Arabia was most important in sustaining these groups, but it was not quite alone since "al-Qa'ida and other groups continue to exploit Kuwait both as a source of funds and as a key transit point".

Why did the US and its European allies treat Saudi Arabia with such restraint when the kingdom was so central to al-Qa'ida and other even more sectarian Sunni jihadist organisations? An obvious explanation is that the US, Britain and others did not want to offend a close ally and that the Saudi royal family had judiciously used its money to buy its way into the international ruling class. Unconvincing attempts were made to link Iran and Iraq to al-Qa'ida when the real culprits were in plain sight.

But there is another compelling reason why the Western powers have been so laggard in denouncing Saudi Arabia and the Sunni rulers of the Gulf for spreading bigotry and religious hate. Al-Qa'ida members or al-Qa'ida-influenced groups have always held two very different views about who is their main opponent. For Osama bin Laden the chief enemy was the Americans, but for the great majority of Sunni jihadists, including the al-Qa'ida franchises in Iraq and Syria, the target is the Shia. It is the Shia who have been dying in their thousands in Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and even in countries where there are few of them to kill, such as Egypt.

Pakistani papers no longer pay much attention to hundreds of Shia butchered from Quetta to Lahore. In Iraq, most of the 7,000 or more people killed this year are Shia civilians killed by the bombs of al-Qa'ida in Iraq, part of an umbrella organisation called the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), which also encompasses Syria. In overwhelmingly Sunni Libya, militants in the eastern town of Derna killed an Iraqi professor who admitted on video to being a Shia before being executed by his captors.

Suppose a hundredth part of this merciless onslaught had been directed against Western targets rather than against Shia Muslims, would the Americans and the British be so accommodating to the Saudis, Kuwaitis and Emiratis? It is this that gives a sense of phoniness to boasts by the vastly expanded security bureaucracies in Washington and London about their success in combating terror justifying vast budgets for themselves and restricted civil liberties for everybody else. All the drones in the world fired into Pashtun villages in Pakistan or their counterparts in Yemen or Somalia are not going to make much difference if the Sunni jihadists in Iraq and Syria ever decide – as Osama bin Laden did before them – that their main enemies are to be found not among the Shia but in the United States and Britain.

Instead of the fumbling amateur efforts of the shoe and underpants bombers, security services would have to face jihadist movements in Iraq, Syria and Libya fielding hundreds of bomb-makers and suicide bombers. Only gradually this year, videos from Syria of non-Sunnis being decapitated for sectarian motives alone have begun to shake the basic indifference of the Western powers to Sunni jihadism so long as it is not directed against themselves.

Saudi Arabia as a government for a long time took a back seat to Qatar in funding rebels in Syria, and it is only since this summer that they have taken over the file. They wish to marginalise the al-Qa'ida franchisees such as Isil and the al-Nusra Front while buying up and arming enough Sunni war-bands to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad.

The directors of Saudi policy in Syria – the Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal, the head of the Saudi intelligence agency Prince Bandar bin Sultan and the Deputy Defence Minister Prince Salman bin Sultan – plan to spend billions raising a militant Sunni army some 40,000 to 50,000 strong. Already local warlords are uniting to share in Saudi largesse for which their enthusiasm is probably greater than their willingness to fight.

The Saudi initiative is partly fuelled by rage in Riyadh at President Obama's decision not to go to war with Syria after Assad used chemical weapons on 21 August. Nothing but an all-out air attack by the US similar to that of Nato in Libya in 2011 would overthrow Assad, so the US has essentially decided he will stay for the moment. Saudi anger has been further exacerbated by the successful US-led negotiations on an interim deal with Iran over its nuclear programme.

By stepping out of the shadows in Syria, the Saudis are probably making a mistake. Their money will only buy them so much. The artificial unity of rebel groups with their hands out for Saudi money is not going to last. They will be discredited in the eyes of more fanatical jihadis as well as Syrians in general as pawns of Saudi and other intelligence services.

A divided opposition will be even more fragmented. Jordan may accommodate the Saudis and a multitude of foreign intelligence services, but it will not want to be the rallying point for an anti-Assad army.

The Saudi plan looks doomed from the start, though it could get a lot more Syrians killed before it fails. Yazid Sayegh of the Carnegie Middle East Centre highlights succinctly the risks involved in the venture: "Saudi Arabia could find itself replicating its experience in Afghanistan, where it built up disparate mujahedin groups that lacked a unifying political framework. The forces were left unable to govern Kabul once they took it, paving the way for the Taliban to take over. Al-Qa'ida followed, and the blowback subsequently reached Saudi Arabia.

If you think we're done with neoliberalism, think again

The global application of a fraudulent economic theory brought the west to its knees. Yet for those in power, it offers riches

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Monday 14 January 2013 20.30 GMT

‘The demands of the ultra-rich have been dressed up as sophisticated economic theory and applied regardless of the outcome.' Illustration: Daniel Pudles

How they must bleed for us. In 2012, the world's 100 richest people became $241 billion richer. They are now worth $1.9 trillion: just a little less than the entire output of the United Kingdom.


This is not the result of chance. The rise in the fortunes of the super-rich is the direct result of policies. Here are a few: the reduction of tax rates and tax enforcement; governments' refusal to recoup a decent share of revenues from minerals and land; the privatisation of public assets and the creation of a toll-booth economy; wage liberalisation and the destruction of collective bargaining.

The policies that made the global monarchs so rich are the policies squeezing everyone else. This is not what the theory predicted. Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and their disciples – in a thousand business schools, the IMF, the World Bank, the OECD and just about every modern government – have argued that the less governments tax the rich, defend workers and redistribute wealth, the more prosperous everyone will be. Any attempt to reduce inequality would damage the efficiency of the market, impeding the rising tide that lifts all boats. The apostles have conducted a 30-year global experiment, and the results are now in. Total failure.

Before I go on, I should point out that I don't believe perpetual economic growth is either sustainable or desirable. But if growth is your aim – an aim to which every government claims to subscribe – you couldn't make a bigger mess of it than by releasing the super-rich from the constraints of democracy.

 Last year's annual report by the UN Conference on Trade and Development should have been an obituary for the neoliberal model developed by Hayek and Friedman and their disciples. It shows unequivocally that their policies have created the opposite outcomes to those they predicted. As neoliberal policies (cutting taxes for the rich, privatising state assets, deregulating labour, reducing social security) began to bite from the 1980s onwards, growth rates started to fall and unemployment to rise.

The remarkable growth in the rich nations during the 50s, 60s and 70s was made possible by the destruction of the wealth and power of the elite, as a result of the 1930s depression and the second world war. Their embarrassment gave the other 99% an unprecedented chance to demand redistribution, state spending and social security, all of which stimulated demand.

Neoliberalism was an attempt to turn back these reforms. Lavishly funded by millionaires, its advocates were amazingly successful – politically. Economically they flopped.

Throughout the OECD countries taxation has become more regressive: the rich pay less, the poor pay more. The result, the neoliberals claimed, would be that economic efficiency and investment would rise, enriching everyone. The opposite occurred. As taxes on the rich and on business diminished, the spending power of both the state and poorer people fell, and demand contracted. The result was that investment rates declined, in step with companies' expectations of growth.

The neoliberals also insisted that unrestrained inequality in incomes and flexible wages would reduce unemployment. But throughout the rich world both inequality and unemployment have soared. The recent jump in unemployment in most developed countries – worse than in any previous recession of the past three decades – was preceded by the lowest level of wages as a share of GDP since the second world war. Bang goes the theory. It failed for the same obvious reason: low wages suppress demand, which suppresses employment.

As wages stagnated, people supplemented their income with debt. Rising debt fed the deregulated banks, with consequences of which we are all aware. The greater inequality becomes, the UN report finds, the less stable the economy and the lower its rates of growth. The policies with which neoliberal governments seek to reduce their deficits and stimulate their economies are counter-productive.

The impending reduction of the UK's top rate of income tax (from 50% to 45%) will not boost government revenue or private enterprise, but it will enrich the speculators who tanked the economy. Goldman Sachs and other banks are now thinking of delaying their bonus payments to take advantage of it. The welfare bill approved by parliament last week will not help to clear the deficit or stimulate employment: it will reduce demand, suppressing economic recovery. The same goes for the capping of public sector pay. "Relearning some old lessons about fairness and participation," the UN says, "is the only way to eventually overcome the crisis and pursue a path of sustainable economic development."

As I say, I have no dog in this race, except a belief that no one, in this sea of riches, should have to be poor. But staring dumbfounded at the lessons unlearned in Britain, Europe and the US, it strikes me that the entire structure of neoliberal thought is a fraud. The demands of the ultra-rich have been dressed up as sophisticated economic theory and applied regardless of the outcome. The complete failure of this world-scale experiment is no impediment to its repetition. This has nothing to do with economics. It has everything to do with power.

Why Kofi Annan had enough over Syria

The UN's special envoy and the Bric countries have got increasingly frustrated with the west's domineering consensus on Damascus

• 
• • Jonathan Steele
  • guardian.co.uk, Sunday 5 August 2012 21.00 BST

Free Syrian Army soldiers in Aleppo take a break from the fighting. Photograph: Goran Tomasevic/Reuters

When the history of Syria's catastrophic civil war comes to be written, 30 June 2012 will surely be recognised as the only true moment of hope. On that day in Geneva the five permanent members of the UN security council united behind a communique calling for a transition to a democratic system in Syria and the formation of a government of national unity in which opposition leaders and members of the current government would share power.

They called for a firm timetable for elections in a fair environment. And, with an eye on the chaos that followed the US-imposed scheme of de-Ba'athification in Iraq, said the continuity of government institutions and qualified staff in Syria's public services must be preserved. This included the military and security forces – though they must in future adhere to human rights standards.

They also called on the Syrian government and opposition groups to re-commit to a ceasefire. Sensible, detailed and constructive, the communique was also remarkable for what it did not contain. Although the call for a government of national unity meant Syria's authoritarian regime should be dismantled, the security council's permanent members did not mention the usual cliche of "regime change", which over-personalises complex issues by focusing on the removal of a single towering personality. There was no specific demand for Bashar al-Assad to resign, let alone as the precondition for negotiations between the government and its opponents, as western states and most Syrian opposition groups previously insisted.

In short, the communique appeared to move the US, Britain and France, as well as Turkey and Qatar, which also attended the Geneva meeting, to an even-handed stance at last. It marked Kofi Annan's finest hour as the UN and Arab League's special envoy.

A few days later, Russia circulated a draft resolution at the UN in New York to endorse the new approach. It urged member-states to work in the co-operative spirit of the Geneva text, extend the UN monitors' team in Syria and press for a ceasefire. Then came the spanner. Britain, France and the US proposed a rival resolution with the one-sided elements that provoked earlier Russian and Chinese vetoes – punishment of Assad if he did not comply, threats of new sanctions, no word of pressure on the opposition and veiled hints of eventual military force by referring to chapter seven of the UN charter.

The resolution was a disaster, and it is no wonder that in explaining his resignation (in a Financial Times article on Friday) Annan highlighted the security council's failure to endorse the Geneva recommendations. Annan remains too much of a diplomat to take sides openly but his disappointment with the big western states for their "finger-pointing and name-calling" of Russia and China over Syria is clear.

His frustration is shared by the new powers on the international stage that are increasingly angry with the domineering western consensus on many issues. When the UN general assembly debated a Saudi resolution last week that followed the west in calling for sanctions and Assad's departure, Brazil, India and South Africa all objected. In the west it is easy to pillory Russia for rejecting internationally imposed regime change by saying Vladimir Putin fears a "colour revolution" in Russia (even though there is no such prospect). China's democratic credentials can be sneered at. But when the three other Brics, which hold fair, orderly, and regular elections, object to the western line on Syria, it is time to take note. Indeed, the west did adjust. It got the Saudis to water down the draft lest it receive less than half the world's votes.

The retreat was only tactical. The Obama administration promptly announced it is "accelerating" its support to Syria's rebels by giving them intelligence and satellite data on troop movements. Annan's disappointment must be massive. Until he started work in February, the military pattern in Syria had been consistent for several months – occasional forays by rebels into urban areas followed by excessive reaction by government troops, with artillery, snipers, and mass arrests.

Since then, apart from a few days of relative quiet in April when a ceasefire partially held, Syria has seen a huge influx of arms to the rebels, growing involvement by foreign special forces, and the infiltration of al-Qaida jihadis and other Salafists. What began as a peaceful uprising and then became local self-defence has been hijacked. Under Saudi, Qatari and US leadership, and with British, French and Israeli approval, it has turned into an anti-Iranian proxy war.

This does not mean the democratic aspirations of Syria's original protesters should be abandoned, or that the Syrian government should not start to implement the Geneva principles for transition that Annan briefly persuaded the big powers to accept. The outlook is too desperate. As tens of thousands flee their homes, and the destruction of Aleppo – and perhaps soon of Damascus – looms ever closer, a ceasefire and political compromise have never been more urgent.