Halt the U.S. Drive to War with North Korea!

Posted by Nick Wright, July 15, 2017, https://21centurymanifesto.wordpress.com/2017/07/15/halt-the-u-s-drive-to-war-with-north-korea/

From the US Peace Council

US television news programs (CNN, MSNBC, and Fox) have been pounding the war drums in the last few weeks and days, since North Korea successfully launched a long- range missile. The long drift to war with North Korea[1] has seemingly become, overnight, a US drive to war with North Korea.

With his usual bluster and saber-rattling, President Trump on his recent tour of Europe continued to threaten “severe action” against North Korea. Trump has made matters worse by devolving authority to battlefield commanders who inflame tensions with their own incendiary statements. Example: the US commander in Korea, General Vincent Brooks, stated publicly “the only thing which separates armistice from war” with North Korea is “our self-restraint, which is a choice.”

Anyone is the US could conclude, quite reasonably, that the US is the aggrieved and threatened party; that North Korea obviously wishes to harm the US people; that the US confronts a new danger; that North Korea is the aggressor; that an innocent and remarkably patient US is the intended victim.

Such a conclusion — all of it — would be false. Almost nothing of what the US mainstream media says about North Korea is true. Only a grasp of the history and the broader context can shed light on this Korea Crisis.

A few key facts:

The US refusal to accept the legitimacy of the North Korean government (DPRK) is part of its long-term policy that any state in the world that follows an independent course is subject to being overthrown by the United States. Economic independence and sovereignty are considered by the US financial and corporate elite as an act of aggression. Therefore, the DPRK, Viet Nam, Cuba, the USSR and now Russia, Syria, Venezuela, China and others have all been targeted by the US politically and militarily. US policy insists that it has the right to curb independent states, to determine a country’s political leaders and socioeconomic system, and to use whatever means it takes – economic sanctions, sabotage, assassination, war — to achieve those goals.
• North Korea acceded to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1985.
• In 1994, the DPRK agreed to freeze its nuclear program in return for the US providing energy materials and generating stations. In January of 2002, President George W. Bush announced that the DPRK was part of the “Axis of Evil,” and subject to regime change and even nuclear annihilation by the US. By the end of 2002, the DPRK had essentially exited the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and began to develop nuclear weapons as a deterrent.
• The notion that North Korea poses a threat to the US is false and absurd. It would be national suicide for the DPRK to start a war with the US or South Korea, which have massively superior military capabilities. The DPRK has never threatened to start such a war, rather it has always asserted that it developed weapons of mass destruction in order to deter the US and its allies from an (often threatened) US attack such as those that decapitated Iraq and Libya. The constant denigration and demonization of the North Korean leadership (they are portrayed invariably as madmen, or clowns, or both) is a strategy to make the Big Lie of a threat from North Korea believable to an ill-informed and fearful US public.
• The DPRK has offered to freeze its nuclear weapons program if the US freezes its war practices targeting that country, actions aimed to precede negotiations. Russia and China have endorsed this approach. The US, however, refuses.

The US is Provoking the Crisis

North Korea would not have a nuclear weapons program if it were not under increasing threat from the US, which has been trying to force regime change in the North since 1945 by war, subversion, diplomatic isolation, and economic strangulation.

A recent article noted that:

1. As University of Chicago history professor Bruce Cumings [a leading US historian of the Korean War], writes, for North Korea the nuclear crisis [1] began in late February 1993, when General Lee Butler, head of the new US ‘Strategic Command,’ announced that he was retargeting strategic nuclear weapons (i.e., hydrogen bombs) meant for the old USSR, on North Korea (among other places.) At the same time, the new CIA chief, James Woolsey, testified that North Korea was ‘our most grave current concern.’ By mid-March 1993, tens of thousands of [US] soldiers were carrying out war games in Korea…and in came the B1-B bombers, B-52s from Guam, several naval vessels carrying cruise missiles, and the like: whereupon the North pulled out of the NPT.” [2]

2. It is the US that has been provoking the DPRK with its stationing of THAAD missile (“Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense”), a first-strike weapon, in South Korea over the last year. The US is now testing the THAAD missiles. US-South Korea practice military maneuvers, which used to recur several times a year, are now almost incessant.

3. Moreover, the US is further militarizing South Korea. Residents of the South Korean island of Jeju have strongly object to the South Korean military setting up a base on the island, with the possible deployment of the US Navy’s newest Zumwalt-class destroyer “to deter North Korean aggression.” At the end of World War II, after the Japanese Imperialists had been defeated, Jeju Islanders rose up against the US-installed colonial dictatorship of Syngman Rhee. The US responded by employing the former brutal Japanese military rulers to violently put down the protests.

It is the US that, again and again, has refused talks with North Korea’s leadership:
• In January [2017], North Korea offered to “sit with the US anytime” to discuss US war games and its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. Pyongyang proposed that the United States “contribute to easing tension on the Korean peninsula by temporarily suspending joint military exercises in south Korea and its vicinity this year, and said that in this case the DPRK is ready to take such responsive steps as temporarily suspending the nuclear test over which the US is concerned.”
• The North Korean proposal was seconded by China and Russia and recently by South Korea’s new president Moon Jae-in. But Washington peremptorily rejected the proposal, refusing to acknowledge any equivalency between US-led war games, which US officials deem ‘legitimate’ and North Korea’s missile and nuclear tests, which they label ‘illegitimate.” (Stephen Gowans, ibid.)
• Having partitioned Korea in 1945, the US permanently stationed about 40,000 of troops in South Korea after the end of 1950-1953 hostilities and the 1953 armistice. The U.S. still denies Korea a peace treaty, which the DPRK has insisted on. But peace was never the intention of US imperialism. US foreign policy sees Northeast Asia only through the lens of domination.
• The permanent occupation of South Korea was aimed at geopolitical control of the region, including elimination of the DPRK and moving US missile and military forces right up to the Chinese and Russian borders. The occupation was symbolized by the giant, yearly provocative military maneuvers by the US and its regional allies, such as South Korea. Such rehearsals for real war with the DPRK have stepped up dramatically in recent months.

Few Americans grasp the enormity of the trauma suffered by millions of Koreans in the war of 1950-53. The war devastated dozens of Korean cities. The US dropped over 428,000 bombs over the capital Pyongyang alone, and killed 1.2 million people. The US war on Korea included the use of napalm. The US war’s brutal and blatant violations of international humanitarian law remain unpunished.

The real nature of US policy to the Korean peninsula is neo-colonial domination, through occupation and partition. This has been so since 1945. The US has stooped to employ the same quislings that had run Korea as a Japanese colony. Prof. Cumings wrote in the London Review of Books:
• To shore up their [1945] occupation, the Americans employed every last hireling of the Japanese they could find, including former officers in the Japanese military like Park Chung Hee and Kim Chae-gyu, both of whom graduated from the American military academy in Seoul in 1946. (After a military takeover in 1961 Park became president of South Korea, lasting a decade and a half until his ex-classmate Kim, by then head of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, shot him dead over dinner one night.)
• After the Americans left in 1948 the border area around the 38th parallel was under the command of Kim Sok-won, another ex-officer of the Imperial Army, and it was no surprise that after a series of South Korean incursions into the North, full-scale civil war broke out on 25 June 1950. Inside the South itself – whose leaders felt insecure and conscious of the threat from what they called ‘the north wind’ – there was an orgy of state violence against anyone who might somehow be associated with the left or with communism.
• The historian Hun Joon Kim found that at least 300,000 people were detained and executed or simply disappeared by the South Korean government in the first few months after conventional war began. My own work and that of John Merrill indicates that somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 people died as a result of political violence before June 1950, at the hands either of the South Korean government or the US occupation forces. In her recent book Korea’s Grievous War, which combines archival research, records of mass graves and interviews with relatives of the dead and escapees who fled to Osaka, Su-kyoung Hwang documents the mass killings in villages around the southern coast. In short, the Republic of Korea was one of the bloodiest dictatorships of the early Cold War period; many of the perpetrators of the massacres had served the Japanese in their dirty work – and were then put back into power by the Americans.
• The most important new factor is the destabilizing THAAD missiles. According to the US peace organization, Global Network, an authority on questions of war technology, the US has recently deployed the THAAD “missile defense” system in Seongju, South Korea despite massive protests by South Koreans. It is claimed by US authorities that THAAD is there to intercept missiles from North Korea. But many experts believe China and Russia are the real targets, given the enormous range of THAAD radar, which counterproductively intensifies unnecessary military tension in the region. The US has also deployed other “missile defense” systems through the Asia-Pacific region, Europe and the Middle East to encircle Russia and China. “Missile defense” is a key element in Pentagon first-strike attack planning.

De-escalate Tensions Now!

The US Peace Council joins with other US antiwar organizations in demanding that:
• The US must reverse course. De-escalate tension now. No more provocations from the US. The United States and South Korea must immediately cease military maneuvers in the region, providing North Korea with an opportunity to reciprocate. The THAAD missiles near the North Korea-South Korea border must be de-activated and removed.
• The United States must engage in good faith, direct talks with North Korea. Such talks should include the perspective of a peace treaty to end the Korean War. A commitment to denuclearization should not be a precondition for talks with North Korea.
• The United States and all states in the region must stop military actions that could be interpreted as provocative, including such actions as forward deployment of additional military forces by the United States, and the testing or assertion of territorial claims by deploying of military forces in contested areas by any state. Withdrawing U.S. naval forces newly concentrated near the Korean peninsula would be an important confidence-building step.

Korea — all of it — has a right to its sovereignty and independence. The recently elected South Korean leader, Moon Jae-in, represents a break with the repressive and reactionary leaders of the past. He campaigned on a number of progressive ideas — more independence from the US; more engagement with the North. But he has had to contend with bullying by a U.S. Administration bent on heightening tensions. The U.S. has no right to enforce the partition of the Korean peninsula and to block steps to unity and social progress desired by the people of Korea, North and South.
War can still be prevented, but only if the antiwar movement compels the U.S. to reverse course.
_______________________

[1] More properly, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the DPRK. Here the terms will be used interchangeably.

[2] Stephen Gowans in “The Real Reason Washington is Worried about North Korea’s ICBM Test” (What’s Left, July 5, 2017 https://gowans.wordpress.com)

Urgently needed: a responsible US attitude to North Korea

Professor Martin Hart-Landsberg here gives details of US relations with North Korea, showing that the perverse state is not the North Korean entity but the US itself which has proven to be utterly unreliable and deliberately provocative in its dealing with North Korea…

The US government remains determined to tighten economic sanctions on North Korea and continues to plan for a military strike aimed at destroying the country’s nuclear infrastructure. And the North replies that it would respond to any attack with its own strikes against US bases in the region and even the US itself. What is happening is not new.

• The US began conducting war games with South Korean forces in 1976 and it was not long before those included simulated nuclear attacks against the North. That was before North Korea had nuclear weapons.
• In 1994, President Bill Clinton was close to launching a military attack on North Korea with the aim of destroying its nuclear facilities.
• In 2002, President Bush talked about seizing North Korean ships as part of a blockade of the country, which is an act of war.
• In 2013, the US conducted war games which involved planning for preemptive attacks on North Korean military targets and “decapitation” of the North Korean leadership and even a first strike nuclear attack.

The cycle of belligerency and threat-making is intensifying, and a miscalculation could trigger a new war, with devastating consequences. Even if a war is averted, the ongoing embargo against North Korea and continual threats of war are costly. They promote/legitimatize greater military spending and militarization more generally, at the expense of needed social programs, in Japan, China, the US, and the two Koreas. They also create a situation that compromises democratic possibilities in both South and North Korea and worsen already difficult economic conditions in North Korea.

An alternative that the US government is unwilling to consider, much less discuss is for the US to accept North Korean offers of direct negotiations between the two countries, with all issues on the table. The US government and media dismiss this option as out of hand. We are told:

1. the North is a hermit kingdom and seeks only isolation
2. the country is ruled by crazy people hell-bent on war
3. the North Korean leadership cannot be trusted to follow through on its promises.

None of this is true.

1. If being a hermit kingdom means never wanting to negotiate, then North Korea is not a hermit kingdom. North Korea has been asking for direct talks with the United States since the early 1990s. The North was dependent on trade with the communist countries and their fall to capitalism left the North Korean economy isolated. Since then, they have repeatedly asked for unconditional direct talks with the US in hopes of securing an end to the Korean War (it is still not over because no peace treaty was ever agreed) with a peace treaty as a first step toward their desired normalization of relations. They have been repeatedly rebuffed. The US has always put preconditions on those talks, preconditions that constantly change whenever the North has taken steps to meet them.
   

   The North has also tried to join the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB), but the US and Japan have blocked their membership. The North has tried to set up free trade zones to attract foreign investment, but the US and Japan have worked to block them. So, it is not the North that is refusing to talk or broaden its engagement with the global economy; it is the US that seeks to keep North Korea isolated.

2. The media portray North Korea as pursuing an out-of-control militarism that is the main cause of the current dangerous situation. But it is important to recognize that South Korea has outspent North Korea on military spending every year since 1976. International agencies currently estimate that North Korean annual military spending is $4 billion, while South Korean annual military spending is $40 billion. And then we have to add the US military build-up. North Korea has largely been responding to South Korean and US militarism and threats, not driving them. As for the development of a nuclear weapons program, it was the US that brought nuclear weapons to the Korean peninsula. It did so in 1958 in violation of the Korean War armistice and threatened North Korea with nuclear attack years before the North even sought to develop nuclear weapons.
   

3. North Korea has been a more reliable negotiating partner than the USA. Here, we have to take up the nuclear issue more directly. The North has tested a nuclear weapon five times: 2006, 2009, 2013, and twice in 2016. Critically, North Korean tests have largely been conducted in an effort to pull the US into negotiations or fulfill past promises. And the country has made numerous offers to halt its testing and even freeze its nuclear weapons program if only the US would agree to talks.
   

North Korea was first accused of developing nuclear weapons in the early 1990s. Its leadership refused to confirm or deny that the country had succeeded in manufacturing nuclear weapons but said that it would open up its facilities for inspection if the US would enter talks to normalize relations. As noted above, the North was desperate, in the wake of the collapse of the USSR, to draw the US into negotiations. In other words, it was ready to end the hostilities between the two countries. The US government refused talks and began to mobilize for a strike on North Korean nuclear facilities. A war was averted only because Jimmy Carter, against the wishes of the Clinton administration, went to the North, met Kim Il Sung, and negotiated an agreement that froze the North Korean nuclear program.

The North Korean government agreed to end their country’s nuclear weapons program in exchange for aid and normalization. And from 1994 to 2002, the North froze its plutonium program and had all nuclear fuel observed by international inspectors to assure the US that it was not engaged in making any nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, the US did not live up to its side of the bargain; it did not deliver the aid it promised or take meaningful steps toward normalization.

• In 2001, President Bush declared North Korea to be part of the “axis of evil” and the following year unilaterally canceled the agreement. In response, the North restarted its nuclear program.
• In 2003, the Chinese government, worried about growing tensions between the US and North Korea, convened multiparty talks to bring the two countries back to negotiations.
• In 2005, under Chinese pressure, the US agreed to a new agreement, in which each North Korean step toward ending its weapons program would be matched by a new US step toward ending the embargo and normalizing relations.
• Exactly one day after signing the agreement, the US asserted, without evidence, that North Korea was engaged in a program of counterfeiting US dollars and tightened its sanctions policy against North Korea.
• In 2006, The North Korean responded by testing its first nuclear bomb. And shortly afterward, the US agreed to drop its counterfeiting charge and comply with the agreement it had previously signed.
• In 2007, North Korea shut down its nuclear program and even began dismantling its nuclear facilities—but the US again didn’t follow through on the terms of the agreement, falling behind on its promised aid and sanction reductions. In fact, the US kept escalating its demands on North Korea, calling for an end to North Korea’s missile program and improvement in human rights in addition to the agreed-upon steps to end North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. And so…
• In 2009, frustrated, North Korea tested another nuclear weapon.
• The US responded by tightening sanctions.
• In 2012, the North launched two satellites. The first failed, the second succeeded. Before each launch the US threatened to go to the UN and secure new sanctions on North Korea. But the North asserted its right to launch satellites and went ahead.
• In 2013, after the December 2012 launch, the UN agreed to further sanctions and the North responded with its third nuclear test.

This period marks a major change in North Korean policy. The North now changed its public stance. It declared itself a nuclear state, and announced that it was no longer willing to give up its nuclear weapons. However, the North Korean government made clear that it would freeze its nuclear weapons program if the US would cancel its future war games. The US refused and its March 2013 war games included practice runs of nuclear equipped bombers and planning for occupying North Korea. The North has therefore continued to test and develop its nuclear weapons capability.

So, the history shows that whenever the US shows willingness to negotiate, the North responds favourably, and when agreements are signed, it is the US that abandons them. The North has pushed forward with its nuclear weapons program largely in an attempt to force the US to engage seriously because it believes that this program is its only bargaining chip. It is desperate to end the US embargo on its economy.

We lost the opportunity to negotiate with a non-nuclear North Korea when we cut off negotiations in 2001, before the country had a nuclear arsenal. Things have changed. Now, the most we can reasonably expect is an agreement that freezes that arsenal. However, if relations between the two countries truly improve it may well be possible to achieve a non-nuclear Korean Peninsula, an outcome both countries profess to seek.

So, why does the US refuse direct negotiations and risk war? The logical reason is that there are powerful forces opposing them. The tension is useful to the US military industrial complex, which needs enemies to support the build-up of the military budget. The tension also allows the US military to maintain troops on the Asian mainland and forces in Japan. It also helps to isolate China and boost right-wing political tendencies in Japan and South Korea. And now, after decades of demonizing North Korea, it is difficult for the US political establishment to change course.

The outcome of the recent presidential election in South Korea might open possibilities to force a change in US policy. Moon Jae-in, the winner, has repudiated the hardline policies of his impeached predecessor, Park Guen-Hye, and declared his commitment to re-engage with the North. The US government was not happy about his victory, but it cannot easily ignore Moon’s call for a change in South Korean policy toward North Korea, especially since US actions against the North are usually presented as necessary to protect South Korea. Thus, if Moon follows through on his promises, the US may well be forced to moderate its own policy toward the North.

US Americans and we, onlookers and passive supporters of this perfidy, have a responsibility to become better educated about US policy toward both Koreas, to support popular movements in South Korea that seek peaceful relations with North Korea, to progress toward reunification, and to work for a US policy that promotes the demilitarization and normalization of US-North Korean relations.

Professor Martin Hart-Landsberg is Professor Emeritus of Economics at Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon; an Adjunct Researcher at the Institute for Social Sciences, Gyeongsang National University, South Korea. His areas of teaching and research include political economy, economic development, international economics, and the political economy of East Asia. He is also a member of the Workers' Rights Board (Portland, Oregon) and maintains a blog, ‘Reports from the Economic Front’. Here he gives details of US relations with North Korea, showing that the perverse state is not the North Korean entity but the US itself which has proven to be utterly unreliable and deliberately provocative in its dealing with North Korea.

Recent History of Ukraine—Western Interference

Ukraine currently stands at the centre of a geo-political battle by the United States and the European Union to isolate and militarily surround Russia and China and minimise the wider influence of Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the Customs Union of Russian, Belarus and Kazakhstan. In this battle the United States and Germany have adopted somewhat different tactics and have somewhat divergent interests but were both deeply implicated in the February 2014 coup against the elected government of Ukraine and in the subsequent establishment of a regime in which openly fascist forces have a significant place. These notes seek to explain the background

In 1990 the Ukraine had the second biggest GDP in the SU after the Russia Federation. It specialised in metallurgy, coal, aircraft, motor production and space craft as well as agriculture. Its population grew from 38m in 1952 to 52m in 1991. In the ten years after the dismantling of the Soviet Union its GDP fell to 40 per cent of the previous level. Almost all sectors of the economy were privatised. The population has fallen sharply, to 45m in 2012. Living standards collapsed. Per capita income is now $6,700.

A multi-national country

The borders of Ukraine today were defined in 1945. Historically this geographical area had straddled the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russia empires and included Hungarians, Romanians, Poles, Slavic Ukrainians, Russians and Europe’s largest Jewish community. Kiev had been the historic base for Russian Orthodox Christianity and for the first Russian state.

In December 1917, a Soviet government was declared in Kiev. It was quickly driven east by pro-Axis forces of Germany and Austria and, after the Treaty of Brest Litovsk, into exile. After the defeat of the Axis powers in 1918 the revolutionary movement redeveloped and a Ukrainian Soviet Republic was formed in March 1919. In the wars of Western intervention that followed most of western Ukraine was absorbed into Poland and the south-west into Romania. The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic became a member state of the USSR in 1922, although western, mainly British, intervention sustained right-wing nationalist resistance into the 1930s.

In the late 1930s the Ukrainian nationalists in both Polish occupied Ukraine and the Soviet Ukraine switched allegiance to Nazi Germany and were heavily financed to undertake subversive activities. In June 1941 their leader Stepan Bandera established a quisling state and adopted an “elimination” policy against the very large Jewish population. Bandera was removed by the Nazis in December 1941 but reinstated in November 1944 to mobilise resistance to the advancing Soviet army. Under the Nazis about 3m Ukrainians were killed, most of them Jewish but including many non-Jews involved in the resistance. The great bulk of the population in Soviet eastern Ukraine, industrialised in the 1920s and 30s, opposed the Nazi occupation and fought with Soviet forces.

Post-Soviet Ukraine

In 1991, after Yeltsin’s dissolution of the Soviet Union, the previous third Secretary of the Ukrainian party, Leonid Kravchuk, became President, took pro-Western positions and initiated a process of rapid privatisation, creating powerful clans of industrial oligarchs. He was replaced in 1994 by Leonid Kuchma, whose power base was in Eastern Ukraine, and who followed a policy of closer alignment with Yeltsin’s oligarch government in Russia. He left office in 2004. All the contenders for political power in the period since served as ministers under Kuchma: Julia Timoshenko, Viktor Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovych. All head, or headed, oligarch clans. The Communist Party was re-formed in the 1990s. The party has a significant base in southern and eastern Ukraine, mainly among industrial workers. It has actively campaigned against privatisation and oligarch rule. In the 2012 parliamentary elections it secured 13.1 per cent of the vote.

The replacement of Yeltsin by Putin in 2000 saw the United States revising its policies in Eastern Europe and seeking to pull frontline states, Belarus, Georgia and Ukraine, into alignment with NATO. It gave active backing to Viktor Yushchenko and Julia Timoshenko in their bid to prevent Viktor Yanukovych succeeding Kuchma in the 2004 presidential election. Yushenko, a leading oligarch, had previously been a member of Bandera’s OUN. His wife, a US citizen, had worked in the State department and White House under Reagan and was Vice Chair of the US-Ukraine Committee.

The Orange Revolution was the result, with major mobilisations in the nationalist west forcing the annulment of the election and the holding of new elections which returned Yushchenko as president and Timoshenko as prime minister. In 2010 Yushenko awarded Bandera the title of “Hero of the Ukraine”. Ukrainian troops were sent to assist NATO forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The two oligarch clans of Yushenko and Timoshenko subsequently fell out, and this, combined with the impact of the 2008 economic crisis, allowed Yanukovych to return as president in the 2010 election on a policy of non-alignment. Yanukovych represented oligarch interests principally oriented towards trading with Russia but has pursued highly opportunist policies, playing off the EU and Russia for the best results. In October 2013, he won a vote in parliament allowing him to negotiate for associate membership of the EU. Only the Communist MPs voted against. Then in December he reversed his position to seek a closer relationship with the proposed Customs Union of Belarus, Russia and Kazakhstan. This resulted in mass protests and the occupation the central square and adjacent public buildings in Kiev, the Maidan. By January 2015 the occupation was dominated by right-wing nationalists and fascists.

The Communist Party of Ukraine

The party had approaching 100,000 members in 2014. In 2012 it secured 32 seats in the parliament. The party characterised the February events at the time as a coup which threatened civil war and the disintegration of the Ukrainian state. Since the February coup it has been the main target of right-wing and fascist violence. Its offices have been burnt, members killed and its deputies repeatedly excluded from the parliament. On 22 July, President Poroshenko signed into law a decree giving parliament the power to ban political parties from the Rada. On 24 July, the speaker of the Rada, Fatherland Party member, Turchynov, successfully moved a motion banning the party from Rada. The public prosecutor was ordered to set in motion court action to proscribe membership of the party. The court hearings began in July 2014. In February 2015 the judges collectively resigned claiming that they had been subjected to undue pressure to ban the party.

Although the CP Ukraine opposes any alignment with the EU, it had called in 2013 for a referendum on the issue. It also called for an end to the presidential system and the establishment of a parliamentary republic with a significant measure of federalism and elections based on proportional representation.

It points out that any free trade treaty with the EU would wipe out the Ukraine’s shipbuilding, motor and aircraft industries and only benefit those oligarch clans trading in raw materials and those who have seized control of Ukraine’s land resources.

In December 2013, it condemned the Yanukovych government’s handling of the protests but highlighted the level of US, German and NATO intervention and the degree to which there has been active support for extreme right-wing politicians. Senator John McCain shared a platform in December with the leader of the fascist Svoboda party, Oleh Tyahnybok, who shortly before had led a 15,000 march through Kiev in honour of the Nazi, Stepan Bandera. The Secretary General of NATO, Anders Rasmusen, described the proposed EU pact as “a major boost to Euro-Atlantic security”.

In the October 2014 elections the CP Ukraine secured just under 4 per cent of the vote, and failed to secure a place in the Rada after losing its main voting bases in the East of the country and Crimea.

The pro-coup forces

The main pro-coup forces were:

• Timoschenko’s Fatherland Party, based in the west and with 25 per cent of the vote in the 2012 election, historically looking back to Bandera and with strong US links.
• the pro-EU German-funded Democratic Alliance of “the boxer” Klychkov (13 per cent in 2012).
• the fascist Svoboda (9 per cent in 2012). The Fatherland Party and Svoboda fought the 2012 election in an electoral pact. Svoboda controlled several cities in Western Ukraine and had been erecting statues to Bandera and destroying Soviet war memorials.
• However, much of the street mobilisation was organised by even harder line neo-Nazi elements, Spilna Sprava (Common Cause), Trizub (Trident) and Right Sector.

US involvement

The US state department was closely involved in mobilising support for the Maidan protests and subsequent events. The official with primary responsibility is Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia. Previously foreign policy adviser to Cheney, she is married to Robert Kagan, co-founder of the Project for a New American Century. On 13 December 2013, she told an International Business Conference on Ukraine that the US was committed to defending democratic forces in Ukraine and had spent $5bn over the previous decade inside Ukraine to support them.

On 5 February, two weeks before the coup, she was recorded talking on the phone to the US Ambassador in Kiev. She described the need for urgent intervention to pull together a replacement government, and her discussions with Ban Ki-Moon, UN Sec Gen, to send an envoy to Kiev, the previous Dutch ambassador, to do so, and openly said “F..k the EU” which she accused of failing to act. She named Yatseniuk as the man the US backed as the new prime minister.

On 19 February , five days before the coup, the Wall Street Journal carried a feature quoting State Department sources calling for action. “Ceding Ukraine to Moscow could turn into a broader undermining of Western credibility”. The feature reminded readers of the active policy previously pursued by the Bush administration in containing Russia and expanding the sphere of Western influence in Eurasia. Support had been given to the Rose Revolution in Georgia, trade and military agreements made with the central Asian republics and backing accorded to the Orange revolution in the Ukraine in 2004. The Obama administration, it argued, had squandered these gains by concentrating on the domestic agenda, shifting its foreign policy focus to Asia and believing it could secure a detente with Russia.

Recently, however, perceptions had started to change. Outwitted over Syria, the State Department had hardened its position on Putin’s Russia and what it saw as the attempt to build a counterweight to the US in world affairs. More specifically the State Department saw the possibility of exploiting a “policy asymmetry” in Eastern Europe.

For the West the Ukraine was not itself of great economic significance. For Putin, by contrast, it was central. Any attempt to redevelop an economic and political bloc in Eastern Europe and Asia, depended for its credibility on the involvement of Ukraine. Belarus and Kazakhstan by themselves would not be enough. By intervening here, the West could land a major strategic blow on Russia at only limited economic cost. The US had therefore given full backing to the initiative of the European Union last year to offer “associate status” to the Ukraine in return for internal “economic and political reform”.

Poroshenko, War, NATO

In 1989-1992, Poroshenko used his position in the Kiev State University International Economic Relations Department to start international trading in cocoa beans. By the 1990s he had developed a monopoly control over Ukraine’s confectionary industry. Politically he supported Kuchma and added the auto-industry, shipyards and a major TV channel (Channel 5) to his holdings in the 2000s. He was associated with Yushchenko in the Orange revolution and became a member of subsequent governments. He faced a number of accusations of corruption and it was mutual accusations of corruption between Poroshenko and Yulia Timoshenko that led to the fall of her government. He became Foreign Minister under Yushchenko in 2009-2010 when he supported closer links with the EU and NATO. He gave financial support to the Maidan protest in December 2013 and used his TV Channel 5 to mobilise support. He represents a “centrist” or opportunist position in Ukrainian politics, not the ideologically nationalist right, and has close links with the EU.

The military action by the Kiev regime against the Eastern regions had by early 2015 resulted in over 5,000 deaths, many of them civilians, and the displacement of over 300,000 people as refugees. Some estimates put the number at closer to one million, if those moving to relatives in Russia are included. The spearhead of the Kiev forces was composed of “volunteer battalions” made of extreme right wing elements. The biggest, the Azoz battalion, uses the same emblems and flags as the Nazi SS in the last war.

In the final year of the Soviet Union, the US and the Soviet Union announced an agreement that the former SU territories would remain neutral and never become part of NATO—Baker Gorbachov agreement, 9 February 1990. Under GW Bush’s presidency the US adopted an aggressive strategy of NATO expansion in violation of this agreement. Russia has maintained its position that Ukraine should remain non-aligned.

On 29 August 2014, the prime minister Yatseniuk asked the Rada to annul Ukraine’s non-aligned status ahead of the NATO summit to enable a request for NATO membership. The NATO summit, in September 2014, announced the intent to take Ukraine into membership.

The US has taken the lead in introducing sanctions and pressurising the EU to follow. The US introduced sanctions against senior Russian political figures in March 2014. In August, EU/US discussions resulted in an agreement for joint economic sanctions. These mainly targetted financial institutions and became operative from 12 September. Russian gas, on which most EU countries rely, was excluded. In response, Russia has announced sanctions against imports from EU countries. The economic impact is likely to be far more severe for the EU than the US.

The ceasefire 12 point proposals agreed at Minsk, on 5 September, were pushed through by Poroshenko, an ally of Merkel, and opposed by Yatseniuk, closely aligned with the US and the far-right.

If adhered to, the Poroskenko 12 points offer most of what the Russian speaking districts want: federalism, local economy autonomy, amnesty, prisoner exchange. On 16 September, the Rada passed a law ratifying autonomy despite opposition from the Fatherland party and Yatsenyuk. However, the October 2014 election results, in which, in a very low poll, right-wing revanchist parties outperformed Poroshenko, could well presage further military action. (CPB Notes)

The US Garrison State

War has traditionally been seen as an evil by most people in every civilized country, but it has not stopped war in the past, and now by some curious transmutation of the human psyche, it is being accepted as necessary! Civilisation, Harold D Lasswell, proposed in 1937 is proceeding to evolve into the garrison society, and now that is getting more and more obvious that the so-called "Great Society" is doing it.

In the garrison state, the military state, all work is private yet is directed to the betterment of the ruling elite. Military discipline requires that no one can refuse employment. There is one choice only, to kow tow. Those who do not shall not be allowed the means of living. The garrison state becomes a military hive, with the drones supporting the "nobility", the wealthy and successful caste. It is a case of do your duty, accept corporate discipline, or die. Discipline is compulsory as an instrument of control in the garrison state. No discipline, no compensation and no welfare without working for it.

But when the rewards of contributing to society are negligible for everyone except the 1% and people have to work long hours for a pittance, then civilization was always impossible except for a restricted aristocratic one, and so it remains, or resumes. The 99% have to be sacrificed for the good of the few, and the lack of technical productivity of Labour has to be relieved by automation, a form of productivity which can add no value because no one is paid for it and which can therefore never add to the general betterment because no one except the mega rich have sufficient money to pay for luxuries.

In the old days of slavery and feudalism for there to be men with sufficient leisure for a mental life, there had to be others who were sacrificed—the slaves and the serfs. Of course, in the garrison state, this time has long passed and is no longer necessary because sensible socialist planning can ensure that everyone is provided for, but what is necessary is not the issue. What the ruling elite believe to be necessary for them is the issue, and that necessity means the 99% have to be sacrificed.

It would be possible now, in a wise economic system, for a few hours a day of manual work by everyone to produce as much as is necessary for the subsistence of everyone. And the central point, not appreciated by the rich is that it is natural for human beings to be satisfied once fear of starvation and insecurity is removed. The truth is that once people are content, no one in society should have the right to force them to labour for no significant additional reward. That is certainly what the 1% believe about themselves. Laziness is natural. Those who have no need of excessive labour to be content will not do it.

That is what the story of the Garden of Eden tells us. The earth has the fruits to feed us all, so long as none of us want more than our fellow humans. The point of the story is precisely that God does not reward greed. Those who were not content doing nothing in paradise were punished by God by having to work by the sweat of their brows outside it. Then the ruling class succeeded in enslaving the 99% so that the elite could live in their own paradise even outside Eden.

Most of the present day mega rich have not worked hard for their wealth. They have it from their ancestors who may have worked hard or more generally discovered a scam which they could use to rob those less well off, with the legal approval of their fellow billionaires. Now they retain their riches largely by employing people to look after it for them, and the dangerous people, those in the underclass are kept poor and dependent by punishing militarisation and inadequate pay.

Meanwhile most of the rich spend their time in mere amusement and pointless trivia such as trying to be celebrities, the money being inadequate for them because they also want approval. Indeed approval by their peers is all any of us should want. It is all any of us could get for 2 million years of primitive communistic society that preceded the agricultural society founded 10,000 or so years ago. And now the success of the capitalist class in defeating the socialist revolution seems to be leading to the permanent establishment of the militarised slave society—the garrison state—similar to those envisaged a hundred years ago by H G Wells.

The argument here is that there is nothing "natural" about this in the sense that we naturally evolved from hunter-gathering to being gardeners and farmers. Rather we are being forced in this direction by the concentration of wealth into the hands of a greedy elite class of mega rich who simply would rather see perpetual war than lose a cent of their riches.

What is curious is that these steps are taken in the name of democracy when democracy is the last thing this elite want. Political scientists and sociologists speak gratuitously of the “science of democracy” but it is only part of the kidology offered to the candidates for the gullible underclass. If any science needs to be applied to democracy as it is offered today, it is psychiatry. Ruling class pressure for the militarisation of the state and the apppreciation of everything in military terms is a mental illness driven by selfishness and greed. No science is needed for democracy. Democracy is not owned by a ruling caste, it belongs to everyone. We must take it. It is already ours

What has been appreciated by the leaders of the elite in their growing insanity is that an enemy common to the herd of subject people is no longer sufficient. People have been faced with Japanese threats, Nazi threats, Communists threats, Socialist threats, liberal threats, and now Muslim threats and the lesson learned is that a threat is not enough. There has to be a consequent war, and so we now don't just have threats, but the threat always become a war, even though mostly it is the US that starts and perpetuates the war. War scares that do not lead to violence lose their value. As Harold D Lasswell says:

This is the point at which ruling classes will feel that bloodletting is needed in order to preserve those virtues of sturdy acquiescence in the regime which they so much admire and from which they so greatly benefit.

What happens is that too long without a suitably violent “self-sacrifice” brings on feelings of guilt that people are enjoying themselves too much. It barely applies to those for whom the state is being structured but the news media direct it at the underclass of ordinary people. Factors in the garrison state justify a tendency towards sentimentality, repetitiousness, hardness and ceremonialization.

Those few veterans soldiers that have come to see through their indoctrination have recognised that the brutalisation of the training is meant to turn the soldier into an automaton. A simple but potent means of relieving fear is to be trained to carry out a routine at a word of command. Hence the reliance on drill as a means of disciplining men to obey unquestioningly without yielding to fear. Having been through some tough task repeatedly gives a soldier the confidence that it must be right for whatever has proved effective in maintaining self-control in previous trials will serve again. Ritual and ceremony is also a way of keeping distracted from fear. In the spider web of ceremony the ceremonialist finds an unacknowledged substitute for personal danger.

Trivial repetition and cermony are not the mains ones being relied upon though. That is the sacrifice of sons to war. The US have shed a lot of sweat in finding ways of using technology to reduce the sacrifice of the sons, our “boys”, the “heroes”, but the more effective it is, the less of a sacrifice it becomes! It is akin to the dilemma faced by certain parents in ancient Israel and Phoenicia told by the authorities that they were honoured by sacrificing their first born children to god. As Bertrand Russell put it:

The position of those parents who first disbelieved in the utility of infant sacrifice illustrates all the difficulties which arise in connection with the adjustment of individual freedom to public control. The authorities, believing the sacrifice necessary for the good of the community, were bound to insist upon it. The parents, believing it useless, were equally bound to do everything in their power toward saving the child.

But the power of ruling class propaganda and the right wing politics that it engenders has stopped most parents from complaining about the sacrifics of their sons. Quite the opposite most have again been persuaded it is an honour. Really, only when parents get immoveable about the wasteful sacrifice of their sons, and increasingly, their daughters to the Moloch of capitalist war will we be able to prevent being dehumanised by the elitist garrison state that threatens to overwhelm us.

The meaning of TTIP

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a free trade and investment treaty being negotiated in secret between the European Union and the USA. TTIP negotiations were first announced by President Barack Obama in his State of the Union address of February 2013, and negotiations between European Commission and US officials began that July. The talks are to be rushed through swiftly with no details entering the public domain, so they can be concluded before the peoples of Europe and the USA find out the scale of the TTIP threat.

Officials accept TTIP is not really to stimulate trade by removing tariffs between the EU and USA, as they are already minimal. Its aim, they admit, is to remove regulatory “barriers” which restrict the profits possible by both US and EU based transnational corporations, “barriers” that are actually standards and regulations important to us, such as labour rights, restrictions on GMOs and food safety rules, limits on the use of toxic chemicals, fracking, digital privacy laws, and financial and banking safeguards meant to prevent another bank-led financial crisis. TTIP also seeks to open public services and government procurement contracts to transnational corporations, threatening a wave of privatizations in sectors like health and education. These costs to us could not be higher.

Worst of all, TTIP gives investors a right to sue sovereign states, in customized private tribunals, for loss of profits from any of their governments' decisions that reduce corporate profits. This ISDS (Investor State Dispute Settlement) puts transnational capital on the level of national states, thereby challenging or destroying popular democracy in both the EU and USA, and instituting a corporatocracy as the NWO!

So TTIP is not a negotiation between trading partners, but an attempt by transnational corporations to deregulate markets on either side of the Atlantic. EU and US citizens are equally concerned at the threats posed by TTIP, and civil society groups, trade unions, academics, parliamentarians, and others are uniting to prevent pro-capitalist bureaucrats from signing away valuable social and environmental standards. Join this resistance in an existing union or local campaign, or by starting one.

Free trade is an ideology of the powerful and can be a very effective means of engaging in lobbying. Critics are right to seek to prevent TTIP. For the real danger of TTIP is beyond well-known headings such as chlorinated chicken, hormone-treated meat and GM food—the attempt of commercial lobbyists to establish undemocratic procedures which would give corporations substantial influence, on two continents and thus worldwide.

www.rosalux-europa.info

A Warning From Canada

The free trade agreement with Canada has been under negotiation since 2009 and has now been largely completed—but not published. The EU Commission probably fears that the text of the agreement will be met with so much public outrage that TTIP negotiations would fail immediately and permanently.

The EU Commission has already experienced twice how dangerous public outrage can be—the multilateral Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) was blocked in 2012, as was the international investment agreement MAI in 1996. Thus, the EU Commission is silent on what it has negotiated with Canada. Until now, all we have are rough summaries and some excerpts that have been leaked. But even this meagre amount of information is sufficient to alert experts.

A principal witness is the Canadian lawyer Howard Mann, who has been dealing with investor protection agreements for more than 15 years and has co-operated with more than 75 governments on issues of investment clauses. In December 2013, Mann was commissioned by the Canadian parliament to assess the free trade agreement with Europe. His assessment was devastating—This agreement was the most “investor-friendly” contract the Canadian government had ever negotiated.

It can thus only be concluded that we cannot trust the EU Commission’s assurances that it wants to restrict investor protection. Instead, it is presumably going to enter into agreements which go far beyond prior agreements.

The agreement with Canada is, however, not merely a blueprint of what could be expected from TTIP. It is worse. The German Macroeconomic Policy Institute (IMK) warned that TTIP would not even be necessary, should the agreement with Canada be ratified. For the US and Canada are both members of the NAFTA free trade zone. Put simply, a branch in Canada will be sufficient to rely on the investor protection clauses.

Nothing speaks in favour of free trade agreements, (http://www.rosalux-europa.info/userfiles/file/FreeTrade_UHerrmann.pdf) be it with Canada or the US. The risks are enormous, and the benefits minimal.

The US–EU Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP)

The US–EU Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) was agreed on at the G8 summit in Northern Ireland in June. It would be the world’s largest trade agreement, and Obama has declared it a priority for his administration, intended to be signed by the end of 2013. Over 98 percent of EU tariffs would be eliminated. The first round of the trade negotiations has now happened, and a further round will yet take place, but the earlier rounds were delayed by the US shutdown and the NSA spy scandal revealed by Edward Snowden.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked information showing the extent of US espionage on allies abroad. EU diplomats weren’t satisfied with the answers they received in Washington regarding the spying on EU leaders by the US. France and other EU members said there could be no trade negotiation unless the US guaranteed it would halt spying operations on EU allies. Germany threatened to be particularly tough after the revelations of US NSA special surveillance on 80 European leaders and embassies as well as Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone, and implied it would want data protection guarantees as a condition for signing the treaty. US Secretary of State John Kerry amazingly said he thought the trade partnership is “separate from any other issues”. Germany with Brazil submitted a draft resolution to the UN General Assembly calling for an end to excessive electronic surveillance, and data collection methods. But the US has given no guarantees it will curb spying on its allies.

Non-tariff barriers such as different standards and definitions increase the cost of business, and, as NASA’s mix up of metric and imperial showed, can be dangerous. A car, crash-tested in the USA, need not be tested again in Europe. But limiting health, safety and environmental regulations to boost trade will leave the ordinary citizens worse off in these respects. Glyn Moody, journalist and author, says the US and EU are “putting the corporation above the nation”. Giant corporations like Monsanto would use the new trade agreement to sue the EU for billions of dollars if they refuse to import their products like GMO.

The agreement is being sold as a huge boost to trade with the potential to boost economic growth by $100 billion per year in reduced tariffs, lifting employment on both sides of the Atlantic, and disposable income. The extended bilateral trade ties (the Pacific one as well) will cover about 50 percent of global economic output, 30 percent of global trade and 20 percent of global foreign investment. UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, said at the G8 summit the TTIP could add US$157 billion to the EU economy, over $125 billion to the US economy, and $133 billion to the rest of the world. The EU says (“Reducing Transatlantic Barriers to Trade and Investment”, March 2013) it means an extra $730 (€545) in disposable income for a family of four in Europe and an extra $875 (€655) per family in the US.

These figures however are largely conjectural. Moody rightly commented that people may not want to have their food less safe or environment polluted for the sake of more money. All that is certain is that transnational corporations will gain immensely in profits and in power to stop governments from regulating against them. Their profits are at the expense of ordinary workers, who will suffer a loss of quality as a result, and the supposed household gains, if they ever emerge, will soon disappear as the huge additional corporate power is used to squeeze wages as well as standards, leaving any gains to be accrued by the rich. Socialist legislation would be impossible, change would require revolution, and the country that took it on would then be treated as a pariah state like Syria is now, and will be forced into conformity. Menacingly, President Obama has called it the “economic NATO”.

In summary, Glyn Moody said that there would be fewer constraints and companies will benefit, but:

The public will pay in terms of regulation reduced protection and that is never calculated in these trade agreements. It’s always about the bottom lines of the big companies.

Tax the Rich!

The 1960 federal tax system was progressive even within the top percentile, progressing from an average tax rate of around 35 percent in the bottom half of the top percentile to over 70 percent in the top 0.01 percent. The super rich were heavily taxed, yet post-war the economy was booming. How was that possible when taxation of the rich, we are told, stops them investing in job creating ventures?

Well, the greater progressivity of federal taxes in 1960 compared with 2004 comes from reducing corporate income tax and estate tax. Corporate tax (taxation of capital income) collected about 6.5 percent of total personal income in 1960 but only around 2.5 percent today. Taxation of capital hit the top income groups because capital is concentrated in that tiny fraction of the population. Estate tax also decreased, from 0.8 percent of total personal income in 1960 to about 0.35 percent today. The decline in these two taxes has given the wealthy percentiles of the population a big boost over the forty years being considered.

Knowing that their capital income was being taxed meant it paid the wealthy in the long run to reinvest in the firm rather than taking income, but building for the future. Taxing the rich is better even for the capitalist. It makes them do what they are supposed to do—invest! Investment creates jobs!

Are Americans Sick Of War?

A poll by “Pulse Opinion Research” shows that 72 percent of likely voters in the US think that the country is fighting too many wars abroad. Operations continue incessantly overseas and new ones always arrive when old ones seem to be getting settled, like Libya after Iraq. The US people increasingly want to know when the military will finally listen to the people and step back.

Americans see the country deep in hock, and millions unemployed and underemployed, while millions more, even middle class people, worry about the possibility of getting the bullet—fired! Or their compensation slashed in some economy drive. Yet administrations always have plenty of money to fight foreign wars. Something Americans can do without in these allegedly hard times is their tax dollars wasted on useless wars.

With Americans wanting out, this administration is doing little. Yet Obama campaigned under the banner of “Change”, of which ending war was one prominent constituent part, but like Clinton he has broken every promise and spinelessly has bent over to the militarists and the armamaments manufacturers, introducing the US into more wars on his watch. Even a Republican presidential candidate, Ron Paul, thinks these wars “endless” and “unwinnable”.

Is Paul doing the same as Obama? Codding the voter? Elections in the USA are an utter fraud. It does not matter who wins, the same policies—aimed at keeping the military and industrial barons and their financiers in banking and insurance swimming in profits—are retained, and the professional lobbyists in Washington with their bucketloads of bribery dollars can always get their own way with grasping representatives. They all have their price, and it isn’t high for the filthy rich minority with enough megabucks to control the USA.

Yankees threw off the yoke of the English, but now they'll have to throw off the yoke of their home grown oppressors. The Brits had to do the same. They threw out the king in the seventeenth century, but kings returned. In the nineteenth century, they had to strike and riot to get the two reform acts passed that pulled the greedy rich into some order for a couple of centuries. Now the British will have to do it again, too!

Jane Hirschmann of “Jews Say No!” Says “No!” to Israel’s Gaza Policy

In November 2008, the ceasefire ended—Israeli soldiers broke it in a cross-border raid killing six members of Hamas. In response, rockets were launched into Israel, so Israel, fortified with American weaponry, attacked the people of Gaza. Approximately 1,400 Palestinians, mostly civilians, were killed compared to 13 Israelis. Gaza was pulverized. Judge Richard Goldstone and his team reported there was no doubt that the people of Gaza were disproportionally affected.

Right after the invasion in Gaza I became one of the organizers of “Jews Say No!” in New York City. We wanted to make clear that the Israeli government did not speak in our name as they claimed. I began reading about the occupation, settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the building of the separation wall, Jewish-only streets for Israeli settlers, special identity papers for Palestinian citizens of Israel—one step away from wearing a yellow star—and the other indignities endured by the people of Palestine on a daily basis. And I saw the total collusion by the US government—its unconditional support no matter what the Israeli government did, including giving them 30 billion dollars over a 10-year period for weaponry—F16s, Apache helicopters, white phosphorus, Caterpillar bulldozers used to destroy homes in Bedouin encampments—used ruthlessly against the Palestinians. This was intolerable for me.

I understand the fears and frustrations of Israelis being fired upon by rockets and the resultant deaths and injuries. But what about the thousands of Palestinians being killed and whose homes, schools, hospitals, farms, mills, factories and infrastructure are being destroyed? What about a people living under a brutal occupation who are being denied the right to live with dignity in their own homeland? The siege and blockade of Gaza continue. The Israeli government controls the land, sea and air of this small area (25 miles long and roughly six miles wide) where 1.6 million people live.

Lightly edited extract from Counterpunch. Jane Hirschmann is a member of “Jews Say No!” in New York City and one of the national organizers of the US Boat to Gaza. Hirschmann has been active in anti-war efforts for the past four decades. She is a psychotherapist and the co-author of three books. More information about the The Audacity of Hope is available at www.ustogaza.org.

Smug Gloating over the Murderous efficiency of the USA Bodes Ill

In the US, the killing of Osama Bin Laden seemed to have been everything that President Obama could have wished for with his battle for a second term on the immediate horizon. Raucous celebrations hit the US streets and Obama’s approval rating shot up by 9 per cent. A more reflective mood seems to be taking hold in the US at the cold blooded military execution of an unarmed and untried man.

Few people would want to defend Bin Laden, but anyone concerned with the application of proper democratic and civilized principles, especially in a violent cultural competition with those constantly accused of the opposite, his extrajudicial killing without trial by marines dropped illegally into a foreign country without permission are now starting to brood about the consequences of the operation. Slamming through anyone’s home shooting unarmed residents including women and children cannot advance the cause of law and justice. Even supposing the house had been under surveillance for some time, the marines could not have been sure whom they might have killed.

The initial infantile bogeyman propaganda soon began being revised into its opposite. Bin Laden did not use his wife as a human shield. She rushed spontaneously at a US gunman who shot her in the leg. The armed resistance of Bin Laden was false, he was unarmed and defenceless, as were everyone in the main building. The resistance came from a guard outside in the compound.

This execution has revived arguments about the illegality of the war on terror and has raised all the issues that made it such a controversial and unacceptable policy. Summary justice reflects the disregard for law that the US has shown in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Libya, at Guantanamo Bay, and continually with Iran, the Yemen, Pakistan and elsewhere. It is the conduct of a state that has no regard for the rights of others where its own interests are concerned.

The point of justice is that the evidence for and against someone can be heard, and people are judged by their peers, not their enemies. The USA nominally subscribes to that form of justice. Bin Laden was a human being and deserved the same right to justice as anyone else, a trial, establishment of identity, a plea, presentation of the evidence for and against, examination of it, and a fair judgement. Failure to follow the rules of law, the due process of law, is ultimately a danger to everyone. It damages our claims to be a superior civilisation to that of our enemies and detractors, the terrorists. The Nazis were surely far worse criminals than any modern terrorist but were accorded the right to defend themselves at Nuremburg. Besides sending illegal hit squads to assassinate people abroad, the rulers of the USA feel free to start wars of imperial conquest, to set up concentration camps, to torture people, and to murder of foreigners, most of whom are innocent, in distant countries by robot aircraft armed with missiles.

Eight missiles from a US Predator drone led to the destruction of a vehicle carrying “foreign militants” in Datta Khel in north Waziristan, Pakistan, killing 15 people as it approached a roadside restaurant, according to Pakistani intelligence officials. The restaurant and a nearby house were hit and at least one civilian was among the dead. Barack Obama’s administration has favored the use of CIA unmanned drones because no American can be killed or injured while feeding the dogs of war in the US. Nor does the US government publicly acknowledge its responsibility for these attacks though it is the only force able to deploy them. The US Brookings Institute estimates that the drones kill 10 civilians for every alleged terrorist killed. The Conflict Monitoring Centre says at least 900 Pakistanis were killed by drones in 2010, “the vast majority” of whom being civilians.

Another US drone fired a missile at a car in Yemen’s Shabwa province killing two brothers suspected of being Al Qaida militants, the first in Yemen since 2002. The Defence Ministry confirmed the deaths. Shabwa provincial officials identified the two as Abdullah and Mosaad Mubarak. The Yemeni foreign minister had already said the government would no longer allow missile strikes by pilotless aircraft because of the high rate of civilians killed and injured by them.

These were within days of the death of Bin Laden. The USA is beginning to sound worryingly Nazi itself! Where is the barrier to stop some administration from acting with equal arbitrariness at home. All they need is some suitable atrocity to blame on whoever they want to attack. The Nazis burnt the Reichstag building as an excuse to set up martial law. How long can the rule of law last in the USA when it is so easily abrogated elsewhere? The fact that there seems to be pretty general approval for the violation of law in the USA, and the added fact that few have the nerve to contest it, does not bode well. The USA is rushing like lemmings to their own destruction while gloating smugly over their power to destroy others.

Reporting, the UK Morning Star

Downturn in Housing—Nothing has Changed

Nothing has changed in the last two years. Bankers still get obscene bonuses, and the ordinary Joe is still being robbed by a system arranged to suit the rich. A report from the W P Carey School of Business at Arizona State University suggests a new downturn in the housing market.

Foreclosures had been held steady by foreclosure moratoria, but as these played out, it seems the rate of foreclosure is going up to where it would have been otherwise. In the last few months of 2010, foreclosures had fallen to 30 percent, but, in January and February 2011, it had risen again to 43 percent of recorded sales. Associate professor of Real Estate Jay Butler, who wrote the report, said:

January 2011 showed a re-emergence of troubled times, which continued through February.

Housing prices were also being influenced by foreclosure related activity. 40 percent of normal market sales were resales of previously foreclosed on houses. Adding these to the 43 percent of sold foreclosed houses means 66 percent of the market in January and February related to foreclosed buildings. That and the absence of a strong move up market, which is fundamental to a housing recovery, is restricting growth in home prices, leaving many home owners in negative equity.

The median price for the traditional market in February was $127,500, which is an improvement over the $125,000 in January, but down from $140,000 last year. The foreclosed properties in February had a median price of $141,385 in contrast to $143,580 for January and $153,695 for a year ago. Even expensive homes continued to be foreclosed, with 19 being over $1 million in February, so people who consider themselves middle class are being hit too.

The ones who are not being hit are the 0.1 percent of the population who rule the country, the mega rich, whose wealth equals that of the poorest half of Americans. Half of Americans is around 150 million! The mega rich, have as much money as 50 percent of all Americans and the proportion is rising each year. These people are never satisfied by however much they have.

The sad thing is that so many Americans are intoxicated by the American dream, that they can, somehow, be one of the mega rich. A dream is all it is for 99.9 percent of Americans.

Wise up, Yankees!

Who Would Want to be a Teacher in Walker’s Wisconsin?

Craig A Olson, a University of Illinois professor of labor and employment relations, and an expert in employment relations and labor economics, shows the salaries of Wisconsin teachers have fallen behind changes in the cost of living as well as wage growth in the private sector over the last 16 years.

By comparing public data from 1995 to 2009 of the earnings of an average college graduate employed in the private sector in the US versus the earnings of an average college educated teacher in Wisconsin, after accounting for inflation, and not counting fringe benefits, Olsen found:

1. in Wisconsin, the average teacher’s salary declined by 10 percent,
2. the average private sector college graduate’s weekly earnings increased by 10 percent.

In 1995, the average college educated private sector worker in the US earned 17 percent more than a Wisconsin teacher, in 2009, this gap had increased to 36 percent. Olson commented:

Not only did Wisconsin teachers not keep up with inflation, their earning power also fell behind their private sector counterparts.

Many teachers accept that they have some security of employment compared with many in private industry, and have school holidays—though they seem a much better perk than they are because the have to spend more time preparing for the academic semester than many onlookers think. So they are content not to be paid the same salary as their fellow graduates in the sometimes riskier private sector, but this work shows that their wages are getting progressively worse, with no added benefits to compensate for the decline.

Governor Walker argued that Wisconsin public employees should be required to pay higher premium co-payments to match the higher co-payments paid by employees in the private sector. In Illinois, the average inflation adjusted premium for a family health insurance policy for Illinois teachers increased from $5,758 to $10,905 from 1993 to 2008. Health insurance premium costs for the private sector also have risen sharply during that time, increasing from $5,742 in 1999 to $13,770 in 2010, adjusted to 2009 prices.

But typically, when premiums have gone up the most, teachers, through their local unions, accepted lower salary increases or agreed to higher teacher health insurance premiums when compared to districts that faced smaller increases in premiums. And Wisconsin teachers did protect their health benefits when premiums were rising rapidly… by accepting lower wage increases.

Olson thinks that Walker’s budget bill will have ill considered consequences. While these changes will save Wisconsin school districts some money in the short term, he thinks it will have an adverse impact on the quality of the state’s teacher workforce:

My rough calculations of the changes in employee pension and health benefit contributions required under the proposal suggest the changes will cost the average Wisconsin teacher about $5,000 in total compensation. This reduction in total compensation is equal to about 10 percent of the salary for an average Wisconsin teacher. Since salary increases under the bill are limited without a voter referendum to changes in the cost of living, teachers will have great difficulty negotiating higher pay to offset these higher contributions. Obviously, it will make it more difficult for Wisconsin to attract high quality young adults into teaching. What parent in Wisconsin would encourage their child to become a teacher given the trends of the last 16 years and Governor Walker’s proposal?

The cause of the Walker attack is supposedly the deficit. And whose deficit is it? Clinton had a virtually balanced budget, but the aim of Republicans is to stiff the poor to give the rich more wealth. Theft from the poor is the source of the deficit, most obviously the manufacture and sale of junk bonds and the accompanying accumulation of banking bonuses in the so-called banking crisis. Banks now are back to their old tricks, and so Joe and Jane Public are forever coughing up their hard earned moolah for the benefit of the already sickeningly rich. Hillary Clinton tells us the US is losing the information war. Without proper education, the country will nosedive into the trough. The pigs at the top already have already had their nose in it for the last thirty years. If many Arabs, every American’s favorite bogeymen of the hour, can evict their corrupt leaders, maybe it is time smart Americans did.

Powers of Persuasion—Marketing by Metaphor

Lera Boroditsky, an assistant professor of psychology at Stanford, says:

We can’t talk about any complex situation—like crime—without using metaphors. Metaphors aren’t just used for flowery speech. They shape the conversation for things we’re trying to explain and figure out. And they have consequences for determining what we decide is the right approach to solving problems.

Test subjects were asked to read short paragraphs about crime rates in the fictional city of Addison, including some startling figures about how much crime had risen, and then were asked to answer questions about the city. The researchers wanted to know how people answered when crime was described as a beast compared with when it was described as a virus. The subjects’ response depended on the metaphor used. 71 percent of participants called for more enforcement when they read:

Crime is a beast ravaging the city of Addison.

But only 54 percent wanted more enforcement when they read:

Crime is a virus ravaging the city of Addison.

Asked to say what part of the report had influenced them most in their decision, only 15 of 485 participants said the metaphor. Most of the rest else said it was the figures. Boroditsky said:

People want to believe they’re logical. They like to think they’re objective and making decisions based on numbers, but really they’re being swayed by metaphors.

As expected Republican participants were 10 percent more likely to suggest enforcement, but reading that crime was a beast swayed 20 percent more to suggest enforcement than reading that crime was a virus, whatever their political persuasion.

It explains why right wing politicians and their supporters like to be so doom laden and aggressive. When we are faced with Godless commies who eat babies, the poor dupes called the public are more ready to send their sons to fight foreign wars, and cut the unemployment roll. When we are faced with evil Moslem terrorists who want to destroy our civilization, we are again ready to send half educated country boys and black urban youths in uniform to fight for western freedom and Christianity.

These powers of persuasion are very well known in our capitalist society which uses them daily to mould our tastes, and influence the brands we prefer, and the places we go. It’s called marketing. Vance Packard wrote The Hidden Persuaders warning us against it half a century ago. By now, Joe and Jane Public ought to know all about it so that they are not so easily duped, but that is not what our leaders want. We are meant to be easily duped. The ruling caste would rather dupe us into fighting each other than fighting them, the real enemy!

A Better Presidential Electoral System than the US Electoral College

Americans do not elect a president. They elect representatives of their state to an electoral college totalling 538 of them distributed to each state according to the size of states’ congressional delegation, reflecting the population of each state. California has 54, New York has 33, the seven least populated states have 3 each. The District of Columbia also has 3. It is a uniquely American institution which then elects the vice president and president.

Isn’t this undemocratic? Why not have a direct election? The political controversy surrounding the Electoral College is as old as the republic. In 1969, Congress started to think so. Nixon had defeated Hubert Humphrey with a popular margin of less than 1 percent. Unlike the crookery of the hanging chads of 2000, the House of Representatives was so shocked that a successful candidate could actually be denied the Presidency that it moved a constitutional amendment to abolish the electoral college. The Senate also inclined to support the amendment, and lawyers of the American Bar Association said the US electoral system was…

…archaic, undemocratic, complex, ambiguous, indirect, and dangerous.

Electing the president by direct popular vote would be simpler and fairer. But the issue lost momentum. In 1976, Jimmy Carter’s narrow victory over Gerald Ford resurrected it. The League of Women Voters and a majority of Americans, according to pollsters, thought the electoral college should be abolished. In the Senate, although the bill had majority support, it died for lack of the two thirds majority needed to pass it.

In spite of recent contentious elections that raised the controversy to new heights, the debate is unlikely to reach a resolution given the compelling political considerations on both sides. But rarely if ever does the public debate on this subject take into account objective, mathematical considerations. Nevertheless, statisticians can make an important contribution to the debate, for mathematicians have made statistical calculations on voting issues since the 18th century, when the Marquis de Condorcet, a French philosopher and mathematician, applied probability theory to voting. In the 1990s, Will Hively, reported that a physicist, Alan Natapoff, had proved the electoral college is better than a simple, direct election, and indeed the success of US democracy depends on it:

Everybody gets this wrong. Everybody. Because we were taught incorrectly.

Alan Napatoff

But more recently, UC Berkeley’s Elchanan Mossel, an associate professor in the departments of Statistics and Computer Science and an expert in probability theory, begs to differ. He believes this system of electing the president is more likely to result in an erroneous election outcome compared to the simple majority voting system. Mossel’s analysis compares the Electoral College system with the simple majority voting system to test how prone to error the electoral system and whether it can change the outcome.

Originally the electoral college did not have to choose the winner of the popular vote. In 1888, Grover Cleveland got 48.6 percent of the popular vote and Benjamin Harrison 47.9 percent. Cleveland won by 100,456 votes. The college chose Harrison by 233 to 168. The representatives to the electoral college did not have to vote for Cleveland. They chose Harrison, so he was the winner. In 1824, Andrew Jackson beat his rival, John Quincy Adams, by more popular and more electoral votes—99 to 84. But 78 went to other candidates, so the House of Representatives picked the winner. They did not select Jackson.

In 1876, Samuel J Tilden lost to Rutherford B Hayes by one electoral vote, though he received 50.9 percent of the popular vote to Hayes’s 47.9 percent. An extraordinary commission awarded 20 disputed electoral votes to Hayes. In 1960, John F. Kennedy narrowly beat Richard Nixon in the popular voting, 49.7 percent to 49.5 percent, but Nixon won 26 more states to 24 for Kennedy and others. But Kennedy had won big states, and won the electoral ballot, 303 to 219. A close popular majority had turned into a big electoral college majority.

James Madison, chief architect of the US’s electoral college, wanted to protect the people against the tyranny of the majority—a built in majority for some bloc destroying tolerance so that minorities were no longer free. Madison explained in The Federalist Papers X that a well constructed union must break and control the violence of factionalism especially the force of an overbearing majority. J S Mill explicitly warned of the same thing in his later essay On Liberty.

In any democracy, a majority’s power threatens minorities. It threatens their rights, their property, and sometimes their lives. Madison and his colleagues, having won the war of independence, wanted an electoral college to avoid internal revolutions, so built a system which made representatives of each state intermediary voters. The representatives, they expected, would be responsible middle class people, like themselves, who would vote for a president like themselves, and so stability would be guaranteed. They were aiming to stifle the “popular will”—they distrusted the mob.

Nowadays, whoever wins the popular vote in any state (except in Maine) wins all the electoral votes in that state automatically, so whole states become blue or red ones, and the large states carry more weight. The representatives to the electoral college have no independence. They must vote according to their state’s popular vote. It means that the popular vote in a few states can overwhelm many others who might dissent. Actual representatives are superfluous. Each state gets a weighted vote for the presidency based on its weighting and the popular vote in it. If the Madisonian system had any original merit by requiring candidates to win states on the way to winning the nation, it has now been neutralized into a series of popular votes, many of which matter only when the large states balance themselves out. So, the votes in small states and states which go against the trend can only matter on the odd occasions when by chance the large states neutralize each other’s votes.

Natapoff looked into the math, and convinced himself, the US electoral system increases voters’ power. The same logic that governs our electoral system, he saw, also applies to many sports—which Americans intuitively understand. In baseball’s World Series, the team that scores the most runs overall does not get to be champion. To do that, a team has to win the most games. In 1960, the New York Yankees scored more than twice as many total runs as the Pittsburgh Pirates, 55 to 27. Yet the Yankees lost the series, four games to three. The Yankees won three massively (16-3, 10-0, 12-0), but lost four close games. Napatoff says:

Nobody walked away saying it was unfair.

Runs must be grouped in a way that wins games, just as popular votes must be grouped in a way that wins states. In sports, we accept that a true champion should be more consistent than the 1960 Yankees. A presidential candidate worthy of office, by the same logic, should have broad appeal across the whole nation, and not just play strongly on a single issue to isolated blocs of voters.

Napatoff argued that under a tyranny, everyone’s voting power is equal to zero. Equality of the vote is not enough. Mossel agrees:

Statistically, the most robust system in the world is a dictatorship. Under such a system, the results never depend on how people vote.

But since most people would prefer an alternative to dictatorship, the question is which democratic voting system will produce accurate results. To that end, Mossel compared different voting systems, including simple majority voting and the Electoral College system, both of which offer voters two alternatives to pick from.

A well designed electoral system might include obstacles to thwart an overbearing majority. But direct, national voting has none. In a democracy, as a nation gets larger, everyone’s voting power shrinks. So, the immense size of the US electorate means everyone’s individual vote is of negligible weight, and only counts a little more when the voting in the big states turns out to be tight. In large democracies, with massive electorates, each person’s voting power in direct elections is virtually zero!

Napatoff says people are less vulnerable to tyranny when their voting power increases, and individual voting power is higher when funneled through districts—such as states—than when pooled in one large, national, direct election. Anyone's vote has more chance to determine the outcome locally, in one's state, and thereby anyone has more chance to change the outcome of the electoral college, than when one's your vote is among the many more of a direct federal election. He concludes a voter has more power under the current US electoral system.

Under raw voting in a divided society, a candidate wants to woo a bloc large enough to be the majority. In a two person or two party situation, where each party represents blocs on the right and left respectively, given that neither can expect an overall majority only from its core supporters, then both have to woo the floating voter caught between the two, usually those in the center. Some think this makes for constancy and stability, but it makes for a lot of frustration on both wings., and that is being felt today as the US polarises.

The probability that anyone’s vote will turn the election is the probability that all the other votes balance out. In a small town with 135 citizens, the probability any vote will be decisive because the others are in balance can be calculated as 6.9 percent. The 1960 presidential race between Kennedy and Nixon was one of the closest ever. A deadlock would have been 34,167,371 votes for Kennedy and for Nixon. Kennedy got 34,227,096 to Nixon’s 34,107,646. The chance of one vote being decisive is minuscule.

Unfortunately, in such a case, the electoral college system has little or no advantage. Districting never boosts voting power in close elections, the time when you hope it might. It does not help any electorate of any size when the contest is perfectly even. Doing the math shows it slightly reduces individual power. Abolition of the electoral college as it now operates would improve democracy when the votes are close.

When one party or candidate has a landslide, the electoral college, Natapoff says, strengthens the individual vote a little. For a town of 135, the notional crossover point for voting power is about a 55-45 percent split in voter preference between two candidates. In any contest closer than this, voters would have more power in a simple, direct election. In any contest more lopsided than this, district voting will give individual voters more power—but it matters less, because the result is so lopsided it cannot be affected by one vote anyway! In that town of 135 citizens, when voter preference for one candidate is 55 percent, the probability of deadlock, and of anyone's vote turning the election, falls below 0.4 percent. The probability that one vote will matter keeps on falling, as a candidate pulls further ahead. For all that math, there is less chance of changing the outcome. Natapoff says:

If candidate A has a 1 percent edge on every vote, in 100,000 votes he’s almost sure to win. And that’s bad for the individual voter, whose vote then doesn’t make any difference in the outcome.

One can imagine an extreme case of district voting where every voter is in a district of their own. Plainly the district voting model becomes the same as a direct election. So extreme districting is no different from direct election, whether the voting is lopsided or close—districting cannot help when the election is heavily skewed, and, as we saw, it is no advantage when the election is close.

So, when one candidate gains an edge over another, a 1 or 2 percent change in the electoral college system hugely reduces anyone’s chance of changing an election with their solitary vote, and candidates have less incentive to keep the losers happy. We have what Madison wanted to avoid. The larger the electorate, the more telling a candidate’s lead becomes, so the best idea is not to allow large elections. That is an advantage of dividing the national election into smaller, state contests, but today the states themselves are mainly far too big for this to matter.

The United States is not a perfectly districted nation. States vary enormously in size. The more lopsided the contest, the smaller each district, or state, needs to be to give individual voters the best chance of a local deadlock. So in close elections, voters in larger states would have more power, in lopsided elections, voters in smaller states would.

Either the national electorate has to be divided into smaller sizes, preferably all nearer the same size, meaning large and intermediate states themselves have to be split into national voting districts about as big or smaller than the smallest states today, or the electorate must have a greater choice of responses. With a lot of small voting districts, the candidates have a lot more chance of losing and the voting pattern comes more into balance, and, of course, the votes count for more.

But a similar effect can be had in a single national vote by allowing voters to vote for more people, the list of candidates being opened up from just two, to several. By having an alternative vote or, better still, a single transferable vote, everyone can still vote for their preferred candidate, but they can also vote for the others in order of preference, their second and third choices, all the way down the list…or not, just as they wish. When no one has an absolute majority, the least popular candidate drops out and his second choices are redistributed, successively until there is an overall winner. The modern automatic telling machines now used in the USA makes transferable voting (STV) practicable, when once it would not have been.

Natapoff says, the point of districting is to reduce the death grip of blocs on the outcome. But small districts which the math says give a notionally better chance of a tie, so that the individual vote counts, also make it easier for a bloc of big enough size to form and dominate the election.

Mossel’s assumption is that any voting model is subject to error, meaning that the vote cast by a small number of voters in each election will end up being recorded differently from what those voters intended. This may be due to human error, hanging chads, or voting machines that flip some vote randomly.

In 1899, W F Sheppard found that majority voting has an error on a given vote of its square root. So, if the error—say a faulty voting machine—is 1 in 10,000, the chance that the result of the election will be changed is roughly the square root, or 1 in 100. In a landslide election such unfortunate occurrences make no statistical difference. But in a close election, such errors may wreak havoc, even without our knowledge. Mossel uses advanced mehtods like Gaussian analysis, and isoperimetric theory, but he finds that the answer is unequivocal:

We don’t have the best system. Isoperimetric theory tells us majority voting method is optimal. It is the most robust.

Put simply:

With Electoral College voting, in essence you’re doing majority twice. First you do majority in each state and then you do the majority of the majority, so you take the square root of the square root. So you take square root of 1/10,000 once and get 1/100, and then you take square root again and get 1/10.

The Electoral College appears to fail miserably based on the robustness to error criteria, and in comparison with direct elections. If the democratic ideal is for the outcome to reflect the intent of the voter as much as humanly possible, then the analysis suggests a change is needed. If Americans want the best electoral system, they should change the electoral college method to a direct election for president, and to try to achieve Madison's aims, should have multi candidate elections by alternative vote or preferably single transferable vote.