It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Saturday, January 04, 2020
Latest Data Shows Protests Sucking The Life Out Of Hong Kong Economy
Kenneth Rapoza Senior Contributor Markets I write about business and investing in emerging markets.
Riot police stand against demonstrators during a protest in the Wan Chai district of Hong Kong, ... [+]NURPHOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES
Hong Kong started off the Western New Year in protest mode. Tens of thousands took to the streets again this week to call for universal suffrage, and freedom for protesters currently facing jail time. But it ended the year with a key driver of its economy — the consumer — in near total retreat.
If protests continue, 2020 is shaping up to be a disaster for the Hong Kong economy.
Hong Kong’s retail sector overall saw sales figures fall 23.6% in November compared to a year ago. It was the second largest drop on record, the South China Morning Post reported on Friday based on data from the Census and Statistics Department (C&SD) of Hong Kong. The number follows October’s retrenchment of 24.4%. C&SD said that further civil unrest does not bode well for the sector this year.
Luxury goods in the fashion segment primarily saw sales sliding 43.5% in November. Luxury beauty products, of which Hong Kong is a top market for international brands in Asia, fell by 33.4%.
General department store sales were off by 30% annualized.
HSBC to close ATMs in certain districts hit by protests.SOPA IMAGES/LIGHTROCKET VIA GETTY IMAGES Today In: Money
Annie Tse Yau On-yee, chairwoman of the 9,000-member Hong Kong Retail Management Association, told the Post that she expected more store closings in the city in 2020.
Financial Secretary Paul Chan Mo-po predicted this week that Hong Kong’s economy will shrink by 1.3% in 2020 due to both protests and the trade war.
Hong Kong slipped into a recession in the second half of 2019. its GDP contracted 3.2% in the third quarter on a quarterly basis and 2.9% annualized, the biggest contraction in a decade.
Fourth quarter numbers have not yet been released, but judging by November’s retail slump, positive numbers will depend on the four key sectors of the economy, namely financial services, tourism, and export trading.
At least one bank is issuing a warning that protests are hurting business.
On Friday, HSBC — the city’s largest bank — said it would shut down ATM service on weekend evenings and during public holidays in areas where protestors are most active. HSBC said the closings would impact 19 ATM locations at night “until further notice.”
Tourism hasn’t been this bad since disease outbreaks of 15 years ago.
Tourist arrivals in Hong Kong fell 56% year over year in November for a total of 2.65 million, not far off the 2003 levels that suffered from a breakout in severe acute respiratory disease, known as SARS, back in 2003.
An empty Hong Kong Airlines desk seen at Hong Kong international airport on December 20, 2019. SOPA IMAGES/LIGHTROCKET VIA GETTY IMAGES
Hong Kong’s four key industries accounted for roughly 57% of its GDP in 2018. Now that the biggest bank is shutting down ATMs and tourism is in trouble, investors will have to hope the trade variable remains favorable.
Seeing how President Trump opted against rising the December 15 tariffs, the trade war could be on ice for now.
Also, China has not involved itself in the law enforcement activities on the ground in Hong Kong. At least not overtly. The majority of Hong Kongers are in favor of the pro-democracy movement, but are not calling for a clean break from China. This is good for Beijing.
The U.S. threat of sanctions to remove Hong Kong’s special trading relationship is damaging to China but is more damaging to Hong Kong. Considering the region is already in recession, removal of that status would be a brutal and decisive blow to the very people Washington wishes to protect.
Barring greater and undisguised Chinese involvement in policing the Hong Kong protests, Washington’s age-old trading status with Hong Kong should remain in place this year. Removing it would be a worse case scenario, sending the Hang Seng into bear market territory.
The iShares MSCI Hong Kong (EWH) exchange traded fund managed to eek out gains of 12.5% last year. Investors in mainland Chinese equities did better. The Deutsche XTrackers China CSI-300 (ASHR) rose nearly 40% in dollars, with the MSCI China Index up 28%.
Jollibee, the flagship brand of Jollibee Foods Corp., ended the
decade with back-to-back milestone openings in Chandler,
the first in the state of Arizona in the US; and Regina,
the first in the province of Saskatchewan, Canada. The openings
were greeted by thousands of people in line, many of whom
camped out for as long as three days amid extremely cold temperatures.
Iris Gonzales (The Philippine Star) - January 5, 2020
MANILA, Philippines — Jollibee, the flagship brand of Filipino-owned Asian food conglomerate Jollibee Foods Corp., has expanded anew in the global market with openings in Chandler, the first in the state of Arizona in the US and Regina, the first in the province of Saskatchewan, Canada.
The two openings bring Jollibee’s total store count in the US and Canada to 50, and are part of the brand’s accelerated North American expansion plan.
JFC plans to grow its North American network to 250 stores or 150 branches in the US and 100 branches in Canada.
The Arizona store is located at 2800 E Germann Road, Chandler, AZ 85288; while the Regina store is located at 2830 Quance Street, Regina, SK, S4V 3B9.
As with other international Jollibee openings, eager customers had lined up days ahead for a first-hand experience of Jollibee in their countries.
“I waited in line for a long time for my son and niece because they have never experienced Jollibee. My mom and dad usually took me to Jollibee when I was younger, and I want my son to experience it. I’m very ecstatic, and with Jollibee, I feel like I’m back home again,” said Irene Ballesteros-Shields, the first customer of Jollibee Chandler, Arizona, who lined up three days prior to opening day, JFC said in a statement.
The Arizona line set a new record for Jollibee US openings as even non-Filipinos lined up.
Jason Marx, a Canadian, was first in queue in Jollibee Regina, Saskatchewan and lined up for 19 hours before the opening.
“I’ve known about Jollibee for a while, but without any stores in Canada at that time, it was hard for me to try it,” Marx said.
JFC is now one of the world’s largest and fastest growing Asian restaurant companies with more than 5,800 stores across 15 brands in 35 countries.
In 2019 alone, the brand more than doubled its store count in Canada. For 2020, the brand’s expansion in Canada will focus on Ontario, Manitoba, Alberta, British Columbia and Quebec.
At the same time, the brand’s areas of focus in the US will be in Florida, New Jersey, New York, Maryland, Texas, Nevada, California and Hawaii
JFC North America president Beth Dela Cruz thanked the customers who lined up for the new openings.
“Jollibee is a family brand so it means the world to us that members of the community linked up with their loved ones to come to our store and share in the joy that Jollibee brings.”
Loss of confidence in vaccines ‘turns back the clock’
Pia Lee-Brago (The Philippine Star) - January 5, 2020 - 12:00am
Dr. Otavio Cintra, head of scientific affairs and public health of GlaxoSmithKline Global Medical Affairs, speaks on the impact of vaccination as protection from life-threatening disease.
Pia Lee-Brago
WAVRE, Belgium – The loss of confidence in vaccination because of misinformation is “turning back the clock” from the gains made so far, and this has created a sense of urgency to restart after several years of establishing trust.
In the Philippines, the resurgence of polio after nearly two decades, a measles outbreak and low immunization coverage due to vaccine misinformation and hesitancy was one of the cases raised in a global vaccines media event here.
“It’s really sad to see something like this happening. They turn back the clock and you have to restart again,” Ivo Vojtek, of GSK Vaccines and Science and Global Medical Affairs, told journalists. “But the good news is that we have a lot of examples there on the roll where it did work.”
“The problem sometimes, it’s not factual. Sometimes, it’s emotional,” he said.
Vojtek cited the case of the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) vaccines in Denmark which was one of the first countries to introduce HPV vaccination. The successful HPV vaccination program had high coverage but reports about long-term side effects became a concern and the uptake plummeted to 40 percent.
Denmark managed to recover its vaccine coverage after a survey which found out the needs and concerns of people and patients and a campaign addressing those specific needs.
“They managed to recover the vaccine coverage but it takes dedication and effort,” he said.
Education, according to Vojtek, is the key step to understanding the safety and benefits of vaccines, as well as communication and partnerships with institutions.
“This is really the key step and a lot of what we do is focusing on education,” he added.
Dr. Otavio Cintra, head of Scientific Affairs and Public Health of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) Global Medical Affairs, said information about vaccines is more complicated now because of different platforms, like social media, through which people communicate.
“This communication about the risk and benefits, it’s a bit complicated because sometimes it’s not easy to understand, and then you’re in an emotional situation,” he said.
Cintra emphasized that vaccination is a continuous effort.
“The benefit of vaccine is not to be sick, and the benefit of medicine is to recover and be completely cured from a specific disease,” he said. “We want to prevent disease in healthy people, which is the idea of vaccine for large populations.”
In the last 20 years, Cintra witnessed the reduction in child mortality in a children’s hospital in Brazil because of an expanded vaccination program, one of the key interventions.
“We’re transparent with data we collect. The benefits clearly outweigh the side effects,” he said.
He explained that GSK monitors the safety of the vaccines it manufactures from the beginning and throughout.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), vaccine hesitancy is driven by complacency and a lack of convenience and confidence in vaccines. The spread of vaccine misinformation has greatly contributed to decreasing public confidence in the safety and efficacy of vaccines.
“Misinformation about vaccines is as contagious and dangerous as the diseases it helps to spread,” said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of WHO, in a statement, also referring to the role social media has played in spreading vaccine misinformation.
This was echoed by UNICEF executive director Henrietta Fore, who said misinformation and growing distrust on vaccines is as “dangerous as a disease.”
She added that “vaccinations save up to three million lives every year – that’s more than five lives saved every minute.”
However, more needs to be done because “20 million children are still missing out.
MANILA, Philippines — Workers' groups will launch more protests in 2020, labor alliance Pagkakaisa ng Uring Manggagawa, or Paggawa, said, claiming government inaction on labor issues.
Paggawa said these are in response to government policies that have been a burden to workers.
"Capitalists [have] made a lot of gains against labor last year – in the anti-contractualization front, in the rice tariffication battle, and in rate hikes in utilities," said Paggawa spokesperson and Bukluran ng Manggagawang Pilipino chairman Leody de Guzman in a statement on Wednesday.
"They will not sit on their laurels. Capital is insatiable and will push further in 2020 to intensify exploitation."
'Pro-elite president'
During his campaign for the presidency, Rodrigo Duterte committed to put a stop to contractual employment, a promise that labor groups said remains unfulfilled despite the Palace saying in 2018 that the executive branch has done what it can and that disallowing contractual labor is up to Congress.
Duterte vetoed the Security of Tenure bill, a measure that further regulated but did not ban contractual labor, in 2019 saying it "unduly broadens the scope and definition of prohibited labor-only contracting."
"Endo" is from "end of contract," from a practice of hiring contractual labor for periods of fewer than six months, which excluded workers from mandated work benefits as regular employees. The term and the call to "end Endo" has come to mean ending contractual labor altogether.
Employers' groups have said that some companies need contractual labor to meet seasons of higher demand.
“There is no longer any doubt that the so-called self-proclaimed ‘socialist' President is pro-elite. Workers who cling to hope that substantial reforms are still possible are in for bigger disappointments,” De Guzman said.
The Paggawa spokesperson ran in the 2019 Senate election under the tagline "Manggagawa Naman" and a platform strongly opposing contractualization and higher excise taxes from the Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion Law.
Towards the end of 2019, consumers were warned of another round of price hikes owing to the last tranche of the excise tax hike as part of the TRAIN Law. Gasoline prices will see another P1 increase, while P1.50 is added to diesel prices and P1 for those of kerosene.
Bayan Muna secretary general Renato Reyes on Wednesday also recognized that 2019 was marked by, among other issues, labor unrest as the numerous worker strikes taking place. According to Reyes, "almost all [were] brutally attacked by private goons and state forces."
“Workers are no longer defensive and defenseless, they are now rediscovering the potency of strike not only as a defensive weapon but also an offensive one,” De Guzman said.
'New crony capital?'
"In the event that tax reductions are in fact implemented, it will put the Philippines on a more equal footing with regional rivals and allow the island nation to capitalize on key assets such as its English speaking workforce," ASEAN Briefing wrote in 2016.
But lawyer Ernie Arellano, who chairs the National Confederation of Labor, warned that these factors were indicative that Duterte is rolling out a plan to gain financial support and political capital by extending favors to cronies.
“Right now the regime is already attacking the owners of Maynilad, Manila Water, ABS-CBN, and others, but his intention is not to empower the workers or the state vis-à-vis these oligarchs but only to replace them with his own set of oligarchs,” he said.
The three companies mentioned by Arellano have been in hot water with the chief executive for different reasons: the president has called out the two water concessionaires over allegedly onerous contracts that he said are "screwing" the Filipino people.
Broadcast giant ABS-CBN, meanwhile, drew the ire of Duterte much earlier after he lambasted them for airing anti-Duterte advertisements he said were paid for by his political rivals. He has repeatedly said that the network will not get its franchised renewed when it expires this year.
Duterte, in a speech in late December, told the broadcasting company to just give up and sell the network.
According to Arellano, the presence of “local capitalists who serve as dummies of financiers from Mainland China [providing] ready cash for take-overs” was emboldening the president to continue forcing the shutdowns of the aforementioned companies.
Duterte's foreign policy has maintained closer ties with China and Russia, marking a departure from longtime ally and former colonizer the United States.
Fishers federation Pamalakaya even slammed Duterte for what they said was his inaction in standing up for Filipino fishermen harassed by Chinese vessels in the West Philippine Sea.
Cherry-picked conclusions
The labor groups said that another front of the government's supposed cronyism was the use of false data to back up their pronouncements. They said that these were all part of a "multi-front assault" on their rights as workers.
Paggawa also slammed the government's earlier claim that poverty incidence had dropped off significantly under the Duterte administration, under which many people were no longer considered as poor, a claim House solons called "the most significant positive news in the first three years of the Duterte administration.”
“The way we measure poverty is ridiculous, if not insulting. No serious official can defend the poverty threshold of Php 10,727 for a family of five, or Php 50 per person per day for food and P21 per person per day for non-food needs,” said lawyer Jimmy Miralles of labor group Association of Genuine Labor Organizations.
The Philippine Statistics Authority defined the poverty threshold as "no less than P 10,481, on average, [which] was needed to meet both basic food."
On the contrary, the World Bank lists $1.90/day as its International Poverty Line since 2015. In 2019, that equated to around P96.45 per day or around P2893.50 a month and around P14,467.50 a month for a family of five.
In an earlier statement, Pamalakaya said they perceived this as a government claim "that a person with P80 in his pocket or her purse is not poor."
"This government attempts to claim accomplishment by downgrading the benchmark of poverty and disqualifyng the obviously poor. This is plain manipulation by the numbers," Pamalakaya chairperson Fernando Hicap said.
Similarly, a report by think tank Ibon Foundation in early December said that the methodology behind the state-run PSA's survey underestimated the plight of the poor.
The labor alliance also slammed the PSA's definition of employment: "a person of working-age who has worked at least one hour in the past seven days."
Conversely, the PSA's definition of unemployment adds that the unemployed must be "seeking work [or] had taken specific steps to look for a job or establish a business during the basic survey reference period."
“Imagine that! Just find a gig for an hour in the past week, and you are magically employed in PSA data. Combine [these] and you will really end up with bloated employment figures,” Miralles said.
The Philippines was included in the 2019 Global Rights Index of the International Trade Union Confederation's list of the world's worst countries for workers.
“All of these are meant to generate support from corporations, and send them a message that Duterte is here for you, and it will be here for you if you support his candidates in 2022,” De Guzman said.
India’s minorities and state governments lose out Modi’s next five years
thursday 2 january 2020
Narendra Modi’s new citizenship law has sparked protests across India, which have been met with brutality from the police. The law grants persecuted people of the Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Christian, Jain and Parsi religions eligibility for citizenship — while omitting Muslims. Over the next five years, the Hindu nationalist strongman will have to deal with a worsening economic situation for which his nationalistic policies have no solution. Tensions are likely to grow.
Narendra Modi’s BJP increased its majority in the May election. Now Modi has to deal with a worsening economic situation for which his nationalistic policies have no solution.
by Christophe Jaffrelot
BJP supporters celebrate Narendra Modi’s win in India’s
general election in New Delhi in May Javed Sultan · Anadolu · Getty
THE omens for an electoral victory were unfavourable, given Narendra Modi’s openly discriminatory policies against Muslim and Christian minorities and his dire social and economic record. Yet India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister was returned with an increased majority in May. In the parliamentary election, in which 900 million people (around a tenth of the global population) could vote, Modi and the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) won 303 of the 543 seats, meaning his government has no need of the other parties in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) coalition (see India’s election results).
During his campaign, Modi sidestepped awkward issues and diverted attention from India’s economy, currently at its most turbulent since the 1990s: unemployment is at a 40-year high and agriculture is in crisis; investment is down, as are exports despite a weakening rupee; inward direct investment has plummeted and consumption is depressed.
Modi’s 2014 manifesto had economic development at its core, but this year the emphasis was on security, including a promise to crack down on clandestine Bangladeshi migrants. He opportunistically made use of a terrorist attack in Pulwama (in the state of Jammu and Kashmir) in February in which more than 40 members of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) died. A jihadist group based in Pakistan claimed responsibility; Modi ordered retaliatory air strikes on Pakistan; Islamabad downed an Indian plane. This allowed Modi to portray himself as India’s defender, bragging about his unprecedented boldness. His bellicose, nationalistic election campaign prompted 150 veterans, including former generals and admirals, to call on him to stop using the armed forces for political ends (1).
Modi’s challenger, as in 2014, was Rahul Gandhi of the Congress Party, who failed to measure up despite a comprehensive programme that included a guaranteed basic minimum income for India’s poorest, anti-pollution measures (the government denies the severity of the problem (2)), and legislation to end the army’s immunity from prosecution over repression in Kashmir. Gandhi also campaigned against corruption and crony capitalism, as Modi did in 2014 (3). Most expensive election ever
Modi focused on perceived external threats and managed to keep attention on them rather than his own failures. He refused to take part in debates and press conferences where he might be challenged, confining himself to prepared interviews with friendly media whose proprietors are keen to stay on the government’s good side.
Money was the other big factor, as this election was the most expensive in the history of democracy, with parties spending a total of almost $9bn according to reliable sources (4). The electoral commission ordered the seizure of the highest number ever of small-denomination banknotes at the homes of candidates and party offices. The BJP broke all records for election spending (5). In 2016 the Modi government passed a law that allows businesses and individuals to donate to political parties anonymously — ‘legalising crony capitalism’, as former chief election commissioner Shahabuddin Yaqoob Quraishi put it (6). The huge sums that flowed in were spent on vote-buying — giving gifts on the eve of voting is a necessary but not sufficient condition for victory — and, more importantly, funded electoral propaganda.
Many Indians voted for Modi to keep a strongman in power or by default, although it is significant that Hindu nationalist rhetoric did not put them off
India has followed the trend that has made social networks the main means of political communication: politicians still hold rallies, but they use WhatsApp, Twitter and Facebook when they want to make an impact (7). The BJP invested massively in multilingual staff for disinformation and trolling campaigns online. Gandhi’s opponents portrayed him as a Muslim, using an old photo of him praying in a mosque as a child (he had accompanied his father to Peshawar for the funeral of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the great Pashtun leader and disciple of Mahatma Gandhi).
Modi and the BJP also shamelessly used the Hindu religion. Party president Amit Shah mocked Gandhi, falsely accusing him of standing in a Muslim majority constituency and claiming he couldn’t tell whether a photo of Gandhi’s supporters had been taken in India or Pakistan (8). Moreover, the BJP accepted the candidature of Pragya Singh Thakur, accused of terrorism as part of the far-right Abhinav Bharat (Young India) movement, which is suspected of involvement in four anti-Muslim attacks that caused scores of deaths in 2008; she had been granted bail on health grounds. Bharat praised Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin during the campaign. Hindu nationalists have always treated Gandhi as an enemy because of his doctrine of non-violence and religious pluralism.
Many Indians voted for Modi not out of nationalism but to keep a strongman in power or by default, because they distrusted the opposition, although it is significant that Hindu nationalist rhetoric did not put them off. For five years this ideology has been evident in attacks on Christian and Muslim minorities, including the lynching of around 40 people accused of eating beef or taking cattle to slaughter. India’s minorities will have trouble being heard in the Lok Sabha (lower house), dominated by the BJP, which fielded just a few minority candidates.
There are 25 Muslim parliamentarians (4.6% of the house), though Muslims make up 14.6% of India’s population. Women remain marginalised although they made some advances, with 78 representatives (14.3%) compared to 66 in the last parliament, and for the first time their participation rate in the election was equal to men’s. Dynasts returned
Demographically, the 2019 election confirmed the return of higher castes to parliament that began a decade ago and is a result of the BJP’s elitist composition. Out of 147 BJP candidates in India’s Hindi Belt (9), who represent almost half the BJP candidates elected to the Lok Sabha, 88 belonged to higher castes (12% of the population); 80 were elected: 33 Brahmins (the highest caste) and 27 Rajputs (a warrior caste just below the Brahmins).
The new parliament is also notable for the high numbers of scions of old political families. These ‘dynasts’, as they are called in India, have increased from 25% of members in the 2014 parliament to 30%, and in some states the figure is much higher: 39% in Karnataka, 42% in Maharashtra, 43% in Bihar, 62% in Punjab. This tendency has always been marked in regional parties, often handed down from father to son, but is present in national parties too: 31% of Congress Party candidates and 22% of BJP candidates were dynasts, though the BJP campaigned ‘against the dynasties that govern India’ and especially against the most prominent, the Nehru-Gandhis.
This proportion is surprising given the BJP’s expressed desire for new blood. Newcomers have replaced 100 members from the previous parliament, and their blood is new, but it is still blue, since presenting the offspring of political families is a guarantee of success. The presence of women on candidate lists is now a given but the opportunities tend to go to politicians’ wives, widows and daughters to maximise chances of success. That was the case with 54% of successful female candidates for the Congress Party and 53% for the BJP. MPs with criminal records
The last notable characteristic of the new parliament is the increased number of members who have been charged with a crime or have a criminal record. This is a result of the growing role of money in politics and the political protection sought by many criminals. Out of 539 MPs investigated by the Association for Democratic Reform, a respected NGO, 43% have faced or are facing criminal charges (compared with 34% in 2014). Eleven (five in the BJP) are accused of murder, 30 of attempted murder and 19 of violence against women. Of the total in trouble with the law, 119 are in the BJP and 29 in the Congress Party (10).
Modi’s second term cannot be a rerun of the first. There may be continuity in essentials, such as the concentration of power in Modi’s hands, but the scale of the economic crisis demands tough decisions. The most urgent concern is the agricultural sector, already in a poor state and about to suffer the effects of a bad monsoon. The government will probably have to raise agricultural prices, even if that means higher inflation and losing support among its urban electoral base, which will limit its room for manoeuvre.
Some tensions are likely to grow over the next five years. Relations between central and state governments run by opposition parties are turning poisonous (the most salient example is Mamata Banerjee, chief minister of West Bengal, a state that was long a Communist stronghold but which the BJP now has in its sights). Minorities may be under much greater pressure now that the right of the BJP is a major parliamentary force. The legislature may end the 30-year saga of Babri Masjid, the mosque destroyed in 1992 by Hindu nationalists, as a Supreme Court ruling is expected within months on whether Hindu nationalists can build a temple on this site, which they believe is the birthplace of Lord Rama. If the court says no, nationalists will probably organise huge demonstrations; if it says yes, young Muslims, who currently suffer many forms of discrimination in silence, may revolt.
Christophe Jaffrelot
Christophe Jaffrelot is a director of CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS. His publications include L’Inde de Modi: national-populisme et démocratie ethnique (Modi’s India), Fayard, Paris, 2019.
Today, the House of Representatives will vote on whether to impeach president Donald Trump. Trump faces two charges. First, he is accused of putting pressure on Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden’s part in firing the prosecutor looking into Burisma, a Ukrainian gas firm that paid Biden’s son Hunter at least 50,000 dollars a month. Second, he is accused of obstructing Congress’s impeachment investigation. If the vote passes, as is likely in a Democratic-controlled House, it will lead to a trial in the Senate, held by the Republicans. There, the two-thirds majority that would see Trump removed from office seems elusive. ‘For Democrats, Ukrainegate also poses self-defeating risks: just as Russiagate centred on the stolen Democratic Party emails that exposed malfeasance by the Democrats’ governing body, the DNC (Democratic National Committee) and its presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Ukrainegate draws attention to questions of corruption of another presidential candidate, Joe Biden.’ Despite the electoral weakness of Democratic insiders like Clinton, Biden is currently the favourite to be the party’s nominee.
Every single road leads to Ukraine
Will Donald Trump really be impeached?
US Congressional enquiries, which could lead to the impeachment of Donald Trump, now focus on what may have been a parallel White House foreign policy in Ukraine.
by Aaron Maté
What next? Representative Lee Zeldin at a press conference alongside House Republicans on Capitol Hill on 23 October
Alex Wroblewski · Getty
One day after Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s testimony put a permanent end to ‘Russiagate’, President Donald Trump gave new life to the Democrats’ impeachment hopes. In a phone call on 25 July, Trump asked the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to assist Attorney General William Barr’s ongoing review of the origins of the Russia probe which, Trump mumbled, may have ‘started with Ukraine’. Trump also requested help with a potential investigation of Joe Biden, the former US vice-president (2009-17) and potential Democratic 2020 presidential nominee, for his role in the 2014 firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company that was then paying his son Hunter at least $50,000 per month.
Trump’s conversation with Zelensky came shortly after he froze a military assistance package to Ukraine, and coincided with private manoeuvres there by his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani. All of this set off alarm bells for a group of White House and intelligence officials, who worried that Trump was seeking to leverage military aid to Ukraine for political help. They shared their concerns with a CIA whistleblower, whose subsequent complaint set off the current impeachment inquiry consuming Washington.
Ukrainegate shares several features with Russiagate. Once more, the national security state is the source of the anti-Trump grievance, and the dispute is again an intra-elite battle, pitting Trump and his Republican allies against powerful converging forces — Democratic leaders, mainstream media outlets, national security state officials, neoconservatives — who view the president as an inadequate steward of the global US empire. Cold war dogma is presupposed to be legitimate: in 2016 it was the Russians who had attacked the US to install Trump; in 2019 it is Trump who is now trying to stay in power while leaving our defenceless Ukrainian ally open to Russian attacks.
For Democrats, Ukrainegate also poses self-defeating risks: just as Russiagate centred on the stolen Democratic Party emails that exposed malfeasance by the Democrats’ governing body, the DNC (Democratic National Committee) and its presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Ukrainegate draws attention to questions of corruption of another presidential candidate, Joe Biden. And once again, this intra-elite battle is consuming political and media attention, overshadowing all others, including a spirited and substantive Democratic presidential primary.
‘Abuse of office for personal gain’
But Ukrainegate does have one clear difference. Unlike Russiagate, which was premised on uncovering a non-existent Trump-Russia conspiracy, this time it is clear that Trump engaged in unethical conduct. No matter whether the Biden family had unsavoury dealings in Ukraine, Trump has no business enrolling the country’s leader in an effort to find out. So the whistleblower’s concern that Trump attempted to ‘abuse his office for personal gain’ is worthy of investigation.
Whether that justifies an all-consuming impeachment inquiry is not so clear. For a start, the prevailing belief that Trump put pressure on Ukraine by delaying military aid in order to compel an investigation into Biden is far from established. Trump had frozen the aid by the time of his telephone call with Zelensky, but it did not come up during their conversation. The Ukrainian government did not even learn that the military aid had been held up until more than one month later. Democratic senator Chris Murphy, who met with Zelensky in early September, told CNN on 26 September that the Ukrainian president ‘did not make any connection between the aid that had been cut off and the requests that he was getting from [Trump attorney Rudy] Giuliani’. It will be difficult to prove that extortion occurred if Trump’s purported target was unaware of the plot, and the ransom.
The dispute is again an intra-elite battle, pitting Trump against powerful converging forces who view him as an inadequate steward of the global US empire
It is also unclear from the White House transcript of the call what exactly Trump wants Zelensky to do: its rambling leaves room for ambiguity. On the Biden front, Trump tells Zelensky that ‘whatever you can do with the Attorney General [William Barr] would be great’ and also asks him to ‘look into it’. But Barr says that he and Trump never spoke about investigating Biden or contacting Ukraine (1); Zelensky says that he did not feel any pressure to investigate Biden; and ‘look into it’ can be interpreted in different ways, from damning to benign.
Moreover, Trump’s foremost concern — and the object of the ‘favour’ he asks from Zelensky — is not Biden, but securing the Ukrainian president’s assistance with Barr’s review of the origins of the Russia investigation. As incoherent as he appears, Trump is within his rights to ask for Ukraine’s cooperation given that Ukrainian officials meddled in the 2016 election, with the explicit aim of hurting Trump’s candidacy, by leaking damaging information about his campaign manager Paul Manafort.
Biden ‘not a topic of conversation’
Leaked details of the testimony advance the case against Trump, but not as far as suggested. ‘I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign,’ Bill Taylor, the top US diplomat in Ukraine, wrote to colleagues on 9 September. But Kurt Volker, the US special envoy to Ukraine, who recently resigned, told lawmakers that Taylor was responding to media reports, not inside information. According to Volker, Biden ‘was never a topic of discussion’ in his dealings with his counterparts in Kiev, and the bid for a Ukrainian investigation of some kind was ultimately abandoned.
Taylor told Congress on 22 October that Ukrainian officials were informed at a meeting in Warsaw that they had to investigate Burisma in order to receive military aid. But as the Washington Post noted the same day, Taylor’s evidence was ‘second-hand’: he had heard from a US official, Tim Morrison, what another US official, Gordon Sondland, supposedly told a Ukrainian official. Sondland’s attorney responded that his client either rejected Taylor’s accusations or did not recall the Warsaw conversation that Taylor claims to have heard about. So the impeachment question may come down to which bit of hearsay from which US bureaucrat we choose to believe.
This leaves us with multiple scenarios: perhaps Trump intended to blackmail Ukraine, or perhaps he didn’t; perhaps he primarily wanted an investigation into Ukrainian interference in 2016, or into Biden, or both. If he wanted Ukraine to target Biden, that would be brazenly unethical; if he was more concerned with Ukraine’s role in the 2016 election, that would be a legitimate line of inquiry. If he tried to leverage military assistance — one that he was Congressionally mandated to deliver — that would be an abuse of power. But if he sought to leverage a coveted meeting — a White House prerogative — that could conceivably be more justifiable.
All of this raises the question of why Democrats have opted to pursue the most serious remedy — impeachment — on such a shaky foundation. And given how many immoral and destructive acts Trump commits daily, it is also worth asking why this one was deemed to be, in the words of Democratic representative Adam Schiff, the president’s ‘most serious misconduct thus far’ (CNN, 25 September).
The answer is not difficult. In Washington, elites generally face consequences for the harm they cause not to the general population but to other members of the club. The standard was laid bare in Watergate (1972-74), when Richard Nixon faced impeachment, not for mass murder in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, but for targeting the opposing elite faction and trying to cover it up. George W Bush could have been impeached for the Iraq invasion in 2003 had this crime not been carried out with bi-partisan support.
Whistleblower from the CIA
In the Trump era, prominent Democratic and media figures have shaped their ‘resistance’ around the imperatives of the national security state. That is what gave us Russiagate, with US intelligence officials suspecting Trump of being a Russian agent for breaking with bipartisan hostility towards Moscow. Ukrainegate also began with the national security state. Its whistleblower came from the CIA and his sources occupied nearby perches, including inside the White House. One of those key officials is neoconservative John Bolton, ousted from his position as National Security Advisor in September. According to the Washington Post, Bolton ‘went ballistic’ over Giuliani’s involvement in talks with Ukraine (2), and even ordered an aide to report his concerns to White House lawyers.
The concern this time is not just Trump’s alleged corruption but also, in the words of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, that ‘Russia has a hand in this’ (MSNBC, 27 September). The outcry presumes that Trump endangered Ukraine and emboldened Russia by pausing military assistance. In fact, President Barack Obama was concerned enough about a proxy war to resist pressure to provide that same military aid. Trump reversed Obama’s decision after facing the same Beltway pressure, with the added weight of allegations that he was not only soft on Russia but also its accomplice.
For Democrats to oppose Trump once again, via a militarist, cold war ‘scandal’, risks more danger for Ukraine, Russia, and the Democrats’ own 2020 prospects. We all know how the last scandal turned out: three years of innuendo, discredited ‘bombshells’, and an investigation that found no Trump-Russia conspiracy. It should now be clear what Russiagate means for the cause of defeating Trump in 2020. The media collusion hype not only took the focus off the harm Trump has done to the country and the world, but vindicated him when it collapsed.
Throughout Russiagate, the interests of national security state officials converged with those of neoliberal Democrats who lost to Trump in 2016. The unwavering focus on a conspiracy theory allowed Democratic elites to avoid the transformation that should have resulted from losing to a billionaire conman who posed as a working-class champion. Ukrainegate grants them yet one more extension: instead of a Democratic primary where issues like Medicare For All, education, climate change, immigrant rights, militarism and class warfare are addressed, the country risks another fixation with an intra-elite battle that relegates voters, and their concerns, to the margins. Democrats risk not only sidelining voters, but also their own best opportunity to reach them.
Aaron Maté
Aaron Maté is a journalist.
Original text in English
The story changes but hate remains The myth of Judeo-Bolshevism
The 20th century came up with the idea that Jews commanded the Russian and related communist revolutions, a version of the old global Jewish conspiracy plot, which has mutated yet again. by Paul Hanebrink
Antisemitism today: vandalised graves in the Jewish cemetery at Quatzenheim, Germany, February 2019 Frederick Florin · AFP · Getty
Robert Bowers left racist messages on social media explaining his actions before he murdered 11 Jews and wounded others at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on 27 October 2018. He believed Jews had conspired to bring Muslims and other unwanted immigrants into the US to ‘destroy white America’. This toxic brew of anti-immigrant racism and antisemitism circulates among far-right activists and white power zealots on both sides of the Atlantic.
The neo-Nazi marchers who gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 to defend Confederate symbols of white supremacy chanted a phrase borrowed from the far right in France, ‘You will not replace us’, and an antisemitic variation of their own, ‘Jews will not replace us’. In Europe, ‘identitarians’, from Scandinavia and the UK to Poland and Greece, blame the ‘Jewish media’ for creating a pro-migrant climate, and ‘cosmopolitan’ liberals for exploiting it to help migrants from the global South replace native Europeans.
A widespread contemporary version of the ‘plot’ casts Jews as promoters and cheerleaders of immigration, and as enemies of the timeless cultural values of nation and family on which western civilization supposedly rests. Over the years there have been different forms of the fears of a global Jewish conspiracy, and in the 20th century none was more potent or more destructive than the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism; this may seem paradoxical when the radical left is being accused of antisemitism.
‘Asiatic barbarians’
The myth held that communism was a Jewish invention, that Jews dominated the leadership of communist parties to further their own power, so Jews were responsible not just for communist crimes but also for the antisemitic backlash. After 1917, amid war, revolution and the collapse of empires in eastern Europe. the myth erupted into anti-Jewish violence. During the Russian civil war, pogroms caused the deaths of up to 180,000 Jews and left half a million (...) Full article: 1 806 words.
PAYWALL BUT THE POINT HERE THAT IS IN BOLD IS WHAT WE NEED TO KEEP IN MIND THE RIGHT WING HAS LINKED ANTISEMITISM WITH THE LEFT SUPPORT FOR PALESTINE. AS POOR JEREMY CORBYN AND THE BRITISH LABOUR PARTY LEARNED IN THE LAST ELECTION AFTER A FOUR YEAR CAMPAIGN BY RIGHT WING ZIONIST BRITISH JEWS CLAIMING THE PARTY SUPPORT OF PALESTINE MADE IT ANTISEMITIC.
A DECADE OF PROTEST LOTTA CONTINUAFrom Santiago to Paris to Beirut Protest is the new normal
The new global protests are both political and economic, since capital and global companies have long captured states and their governments. In France, December’s mobilisation came just one year after the gilets jaunes erupted onto the scene.
The Tunisian dictatorship has now fallen, but none of the uprising’s essential social demands have been met. The situation is no better elsewhere. It’s easy to understand why good news is valuable, and why people so easily assume the existence of an international conscience sympathetic to their own priorities when really there are only composite, unstable movements with little interest in building links.
Since 2000, people have regularly announced the death of capitalism, the convergence of struggles and the end of globalisation. The enemy has been repeatedly declared dead or dying, but keeps coming back in another guise. Forty years after Margaret Thatcher became prime minister, the enemy has triumphed again in the UK, and there’s no guarantee it will be defeated in the US in November. It is well to remember this, even if it’s more comfortable to turn away from a failure, or several failures (in Brazil, Greece, Bolivia, Italy), when fire breaks out somewhere else.
The root causes of rebellion are at once economic and political. Not only did the financial crisis of 2008 benefit those mostly responsible for it, but the major traditional parties of the left and right took turns to impose unfair choices on the people. The legitimacy of the ‘system’ suffered, and now it is worn out. But this failure can be interpreted in ideologically opposed ways. Some criticise the ‘system’ for serving the interests of the capitalists; others see it as giving undue protection to the less well off, foreigners or ‘benefit spongers’, and the privileges of the dominant class benefit from this resentment.
Emmanuel Macron’s French pensions ‘reform’ (see Retire later for the same money, in this issue) is presented as creating a ‘universal regime’ that will treat everyone the same, without exception. But it enshrines a generational divide where those born before 1975 will not be affected by the far less generous new system; it proposes, on the pretext of fairness, that senior management should no longer receive a pay-as-you-go pension above a given salary, to encourage them to invest in pension funds (1). Yet to defend its very peculiar claim to universality — including against the demonstrators — the government has decided to maintain the special pension regime that applies to the police — on the grounds that they ‘fulfil the regalian function of protecting the people’.
A man holds a smoke can during a demonstration in Nantes against France’s proposed pension reforms, December 2019 Loïc Venance · AFP · Getty
Increase in bullshit jobs
Despite these attempts to divide and conquer (elsewhere used against Sunni, Shia, Kabyle, Catalans etc), the world’s protesters remain united in the same demands and refusals: for the right to dignity and decency, against further cuts to social welfare and rising prices for vital services (transport, energy, communications). They refuse to accept claims that unemployment has fallen when the figures hide an increase in bullshit jobs (40% of new employment contracts in Spain are for less than one month) (2), especially as precarious jobs are often based in cities, where housing costs have soared.
The naked brutality of neoliberalism, which has broken down the division between state and capital, means that political demands have joined economic ones. Corruption and scandals are not limited to the minor affairs that get published (the parliamentary assistant who did political work, the president of France’s National Assembly who treated his guests to lobster dinners at the taxpayer’s expense) in a cycle of indignant tweets, serialised revelations and special broadcasts. Almost everyone now realises that corruption affects at a much more fundamental level a neoliberal state that destroys public services and so encourages the development of private interests, which benefit from every ‘reform’ (privatisations, taxes, pensions).
The word corruption also describes a political system that allows the global elites to appropriate, destroy or offshore national wealth through free trade and tax havens. It covers political leaders who fail in their duties when, as in Lebanon, they cannot ensure that cities choked with refuse are cleaned, worsening water quality and threatening the survival of local flora. It applies to governments that lose legitimacy when, as in Iraq, they fail in key missions by neglecting schools (the equivalent of twice Iraq’s GDP has vanished into the pockets of greedy politicians and entrepreneurs over the last 16 years) (3). And how can one describe French prime minister Édouard Philippe’s observation that public hospitals have ‘gone into a tailspin ... like a plane about to crash’. Will he be there next year to issue a statement on the accident, and comfort the families?
The Iraqis say, ‘We want a nation.’ Undeterred by 450 protester deaths, they reject foreign interference and call for solidarity, aiming to build an honest state worthy of the name (see Mobilising for a new political system in Iraq, in this issue). In Chile, where neoliberalism was christened in blood, repression by the Carabineros (more than 11,000 protesters wounded, 200 blinded in one eye, 26 dead) has failed to contain the protesters, who carry or wear the national flag. In Algeria millions, often waving the national flag, call for the armed forces to stop monopolising political power, oil and violence, and cease manipulating national symbols. In France, gilets jaunes brandish the flag to paper over internal political or electoral divisions among participants who had never met until their anger and demands brought them together on the roundabouts of their towns.
Nationalism looks better when it expresses rejection of individualism, of the predations of market forces and the divisions they create among their victims. And it looks better still when its supposed alternative, globalism, is represented by free trade agreements and IT giants that spy on our lives and hide their profits, or by investment banks preparing the next financial disaster (from which they will emerge unscathed). Or by the International Monetary Fund, imposing its drastic remedies on exhausted populations in Lebanon, Egypt, Ecuador, Haiti, Greece, Bolivia, Sudan and Argentina. Tax concessions to the rich
Globalisation does have one merit: it reveals how similar the political classes are in every country. One country has a young former banker as president, another a rich man in his 70s; they seem different in every way but both have given tax concessions to the rich. What do such people do after leaving office? French prime minister François Fillon, architect of a pensions reform in 2010 and advocate of a points-based system to reduce spending on pensions, now works for the French investment banking arm of Barclays, as does François Baroin, already presented by the media, which adore him, as a potential candidate for the right in the next presidential election. Meanwhile, Barclays have put him in charge of ‘advising foreign buyers in France’.
Macron's French pensions ‘reform' is presented as a ‘universal regime' that will treat everyone the same. But it enshrines a generational divide where those born before 1975 will not be affected by the far less generous new system
Former prime minister of Portugal and ex-president of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso chose Goldman Sachs; former digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes, from the Netherlands, was recruited by Uber. Facebook appointed former UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg as its director of public relations, with a reported salary of more than £4m, 60 times more than he earned as an MP. Are demonstrators paranoid when they ask which future employers their government already works for? And how were Chileans supposed to react last September when the finance minister chosen by billionaire President Piñera told crowds protesting over food prices that romantics could still buy flowers since their price had fallen?
Despite the end of the military dictatorship in Chile, and a democratic transition that has involved governments of the left, General Augusto Pinochet’s constitution, which prohibited nationalisation, has barely been retouched since 1980. Chile has preserved its neoliberal straight jacket designed to benefit financial interests: capitalisation pensions, tolls on urban motorways, private universities, the sale of shares in waterways. The Chilean movement, which has no spokespeople and attracts huge crowds, repudiates the leftwing opposition, often reluctant to scare people by fighting the ‘liberal’ right in earnest (see Chile, no peaceful oasis, in this issue). So ‘the united people advance without a party’ (El pueblo unido avanza sin partido). There are no political flags at the demonstrations, only the national flag and that of the Mapuche people, a target of repression. ‘You have to be organised’
But in Chile as in Arab countries, a problem remains. The demonstrators’ desire not to compromise themselves, and their refusal to designate leaders or representatives, come from long experience of disappointment, defeat and betrayal. But without political leaders, how can they avoid marginalisation and exhaustion? Ever-harsher judicial, police and military repression, and ever-closer ties between capital and state, mean this question cannot be dismissed as being of secondary importance. ‘You have to be organised and know where you are going,’ writes Frédéric Lordon, ‘because other people are organised and know where they are going’ (4).
For 30 years, neoliberalism’s key structural reforms of free trade, single markets, privatisation, financial deregulation, have not been challenged by new governments, while the popular movements of the past year have already achieved impressive successes. A regime has fallen (Sudan), prime ministers have been forced to resign (Lebanon and Iraq), an ailing president has been prevented from standing for re-election (Algeria), and new constitutions could soon destroy the old arrangements (Chile’s might get a complete rewrite).
A new generation, often burdened with student debt and condemned to a precarious existence, with only a much-reduced pension and a degraded environment to look forward to, has found that collective struggle and solidarity can lead to victory. The future is yet to be decided, but this experience means that tens of millions of demonstrators now feel stronger and more confident, and guarantees that no political system can reassure neoliberalism that things will eventually return to normal.
Serge Halimi
Serge Halimi is president and editorial director of Le Monde diplomatique.
