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)
Thursday, December 23, 2021
Lavrov Advises SDC and Reminds them of Trump’s Decision
Thursday December 23rd, 2021 by AL-SOURIA NET (Opposition website)
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has advised the SDC to engage in dialogue with the Assad regime, warning that U.S. forces won't stay forever, according to al-Souria Net.
Lavrov has advised the SDC to engage in dialogue with the regime. Picture by North Press.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has advised the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC, Kurdish-led) on considering dialogue with the Assad regime.
This came during a meeting with the Russian channel RT, during which he passed messages to the SDC. In addition, he reminded them of the decision of former U.S. President Donald Trump, to withdraw from Syria, and to send politicians from Kurdish forces to Moscow.
“The Americans will eventually withdraw from Syria, and the Kurds should decide their approach regarding dialogue with Damascus,” Lavrov said.
“They, particularly their political arm represented by the Democratic Union Party and the SDC, have to decide their approach,” Lavrov said.
The Russian minister said that after Trump talked about the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria, “they (SDC) immediately raised demands to Russia, especially to help them launch a dialogue with the Government of Damascus. However, their interest in this dialogue disappeared after a few days, as the Pentagon stated that its military forces will remain in Syria.”
He said that U.S. forces will eventually withdraw, as they are “trying to impose their rules but are realistically unable to ensure the continuity of the work of these structures.”
Lavrov advised that the Kurds “take a principled position,” expressing his country’s willingness to help them.
Lavrov’s statements come against the backdrop of the failure of negotiations between SDC and the Assad regime under Russian auspices, said SDC’s Joint President, Ilham Ahmed.
“Russia’s role in trying to develop a dialogue with the Syrian government has not yet yielded results so far,” Ahmed said at a conference a few days ago.
This article was translated and edited by The Syrian Observer. The Syrian Observer has not verified the content of this story. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author.
A South Korean Company Said A Natural Gas Project Was ‘CO2-Free.’ It’s Being Accused Of ‘Greenwashing’
South Korea’s largest private gas provider SK E&S Co. is facing legal action from a climate activist group alleging that it falsely advertised the green credentials of a project in Australia.
Solutions for Our Climate said it’s bringing a claim against SK for labeling liquefied natural gas from its Barossa project off the northern coast of Australia as “CO2-free.” While SK claims to capture greenhouse gases produced while making LNG, it’s only partially removing emissions from the process and not doing anything about CO2 released when the gas is burned, which is where the vast majority of emissions come from, the group said.
SK will use carbon capture and sequestration to eliminate 60% of its share of the emissions from the project, which amounts to 4 million tons a year, and will grow forests to offset the rest, Kim Hyejin, communications executive officer at SK E&S, said by phone.
“As a major LNG supplier in South Korea, we’re trying our best to stay responsible by actively investing in clean technology such as CCS to help reduce emissions and be part of the transition toward net zero,” Kim said.
The action, which is the first claim in South Korea against a company on its emissions, comes as environmentalists across the globe are increasingly taking legal recourse against big fossil fuel suppliers. Earlier this year, Royal Dutch Shell Plc was ordered to cut emissions faster than planned, while Australia’s Santos Ltd. was challenged by an activist group for making a misleading net-zero pledge.
“There is no such thing as ‘CO2-free LNG,’” Oh Dongjae, a researcher at SFOC, said in the statement. “SK E&S has oversold its CCS technology as a silver bullet.”
Seoul-based SFOC said it’s taking the case to the Korea Fair Trade Commission and the Ministry of Environment, which will decide whether to go forward with an investigation.
TALK SHOP NOTHING BINDING US thanks Pakistan for hosting OIC summit on Afghanistan
Its a prime example of collective determination, says US Secretary
SAMAA | Samaa Web Desk - Posted: Dec 23, 2021 | Last Updated: 15 hours ago
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has appreciated Pakistan’s effort and thanked the country for hosting OIC’s Extraordinary Session on Afghanistan.
In a tweet on Wednesday, Antony Blinken said: “The OIC Extraordinary Session on Afghanistan is a prime example of our collective determination and action to help those most in need.”
He thanked Pakistan for hosting the vital meeting and inviting the global community to continue cooperating to support the Afghan people.
For the first time in 41 years ago, Pakistan has successfully hosted Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a major meeting of Islamic nations.
Afghanistan topped the agenda at the key meeting of the world’s second-largest organisation after the United Nations. It included the support of the international community and aid agencies to save the war-torn Afghan people suffering from poverty, famine, food crisis, and cold weather.
At the OIC summit, held on Sunday (December 19), Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi presented a six-point framework to resolve Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis. Turkish foreign minister also presented his proposal, while the Saudi foreign minister announced that his country had allocated one billion riyals for Afghanistan.
Abdul Haqim surveys his barren field where he used to grow wheat to feed his family of 18 people, in Hachka, Afghanistan, Monday, Dec. 13, 2021. Severe drought has dramatically worsened the already desperate situation in Afghanistan forcing thousands of people to flee their homes and live in extreme poverty. Experts predict climate change is making such events even more severe and frequent.
(AP Photo/Mstyslav Chernov) |
By ELENA BECATOROS
December 23, 2021
SANG-E-ATASH, Afghanistan (AP) - Fed by rain and snowmelt from mountains, this valley nestled among northwestern Afghanistan's jagged peaks was once fertile. But the climate has changed in the last few decades, locals say, leaving the earth barren and its people struggling to survive.
Many have fled, heading to neighboring Iran or living in abject poverty in camps for the displaced within Afghanistan as repeated droughts parch the land and shrivel pastures.
"I remember from my childhood ... there was a lot of snow in the winters, in spring we had a lot of rain," said 53-year-old Abdul Ghani, a local community leader in the village of Sang-e-Atash, in the hard-struck province of Badghis.
"But since a few years ago there has been drought, there is no snow, there is much less rain. It is not even possible to get one bowl of water from drainpipes to use," he said, as he observed the Red Crescent Society handing out emergency winter food supplies to farmers whose crops have completely failed.
The severe drought, now in its second year, has dramatically worsened the already desperate situation in the country. Battered by four decades of war, Afghans have also had to contend with the coronavirus pandemic and an economy in freefall following the freezing of international funding after the Taliban seized power in mid-August amid a chaotic withdrawal of U.S. and NATO troops. Millions can't feed themselves, and aid groups warn of rising malnutrition and a humanitarian catastrophe.
For many families in the Sang-e-Atash area, the Red Crescent aid is their only lifeline for the harsh winter. The organization's regional head for western Afghanistan, Mustafa Nabikhil, said 558 families had received the food over three days: flour, rice, beans, cooking oil, sugar, salt, tea and high-calorie, vitamin-fortified biscuits.
Badghis's farmers are particularly vulnerable as the region lacks an irrigation system, leaving them dependent on the weather, Nabikhil said.
If it rains, they will eat. If it doesn't, they won't. Their desperation is palpable.
"There is no solution, we are just destroyed," said Ghani. "We can't go anywhere, to a foreign country, we have no money, we have nothing. In the end we must dig our graves and die."
Necephor Mghendi, head of Afghanistan Delegation of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said drought is leading to "worrying food shortages, with around 22.8 million people - more than 55% of Afghanistan's population - experiencing high levels of acute food shortages."
Severe drought has affected more than 60% of the country's provinces, he said, "but there is no single province not affected since some are facing serious or moderate drought."
"If urgent measures are not taken, there will be a catastrophic humanitarian situation," he said. "It is arguably the worst humanitarian crisis in the world at the moment, and the saddest part is that early action and prompt action could have prevented it from escalating."
For many, conditions are already catastrophic.
"We have nothing," said 45-year-old Juma Gul, one of the many people displaced by drought sitting in a Red Crescent mobile health clinic just outside the Badghis provincial capital of Qala-e-Now. With nine children and a husband unable to find work, her family was surviving on loans from shopkeepers. But even those have dried up, she said.
"Sometimes we find food and sometimes not. We eat only dry bread and green tea. We can't buy flour or rice, it's too expensive."
In the village of Hachka outside Qala-e-Now, farmer Abdul Haqim surveyed his barren field, the icy wind sweeping across the fissures of cracked earth. It used to grow wheat and sustain his family of 18. Now, there is nothing.
"There is no rain, there is drought," he said. Many people in his village, including three of his adult sons, have left for Iran and he's considering sending a fourth, although the boy is only 12. It's the only way his family can survive.
"My friend, people are leaving this region. Some people even leave their children (behind) and go," he said.
Experts predict climate change will make droughts even more frequent and severe. They have been ringing the alarm bell over Afghanistan for years.
"Climate change in Afghanistan is not an uncertain, 'potential' future risk but a very real, present threat - whose impacts have already been felt by millions of farmers and pastoralists across the country," said a 2016 report by the World Food Program, United Nations Environment Program and Afghanistan's National Environmental Protection Agency. The current drought is the worst in decades.
"The effect of climate change and global warming in Afghanistan is very clear in multiple ways," said Assem Mayar, a water resource management expert and PhD candidate at the University of Stuttgart. Over the last two decades, 14% of the country's glaciers have melted, he said, while the frequency of drought has doubled compared to the last decades of the 20th century.
Flood frequency and severity has also increased, while there has been a shift from snow in the early winter to rain in the spring. This disrupts the water balance in the country as snow, by its very nature, remains for longer than rainwater, which runs out of the country in 2-14 days, Mayar explained. Afghanistan also lacks water reservoirs, which are 10 times smaller than those of neighboring countries.
The previous government drew up a drought risk management strategy, Mayar said, but with the change of government in August, everything has stopped.
Deputy Minister for Water Mujib ur Rahman Omar said at a news conference Wednesday that the government had a policy for managing the drought, including projects to build irrigation canals, dams and check dams - small, sometimes temporary dams in waterways - in Badghis province.
"Our technical and experienced colleagues are busy in this," he said, adding that all projects depended on the availability of budgets.
The new deputy governor of Badghis, Taliban special forces fighter Mohibullah Asad, is well aware of the severity of the problem.
"The drought is obvious all over Afghanistan, and it has a greater negative impact on Badghis province," he recently told the AP in the regional governor's building in Qala-e-Now, flanked by an entourage of Taliban fighters.
Although drought has been a problem for years, he said, this year it was particularly severe, affecting about 80-85% of the local population.
His administration was meeting frequently with aid organizations, Asad said, adding that the government itself had no funds to deal with the situation as the previous government had left nothing.
Mayar, the water management expert, said humanitarian investment should focus on small- and medium-scale water projects to reduce the effects of drought.
"The international community should not restrict climate and natural disaster-related funds due to sanctions," he said. "Because climate change continues its effects on Afghanistan."
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Abdul Qahar Afghan in Sang-e-Atash, Afghanistan and Rahim Faiez in Islamabad, Pakistan contributed.
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Follow Becatoros on Twitter on: https://twitter.com/ElenaBec
Palestinian president receives US national security adviser Mahmoud Abbas and Jake Sullivan discuss relations, political developments
News Service December 23, 202 Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (R) meets US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan (L) in Ramallah, West Bank on December 22, 2021.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas hosted US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan on Wednesday in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, where they discussed the latest political developments.
During their meeting, Abbas reiterated that Israel must end its occupation of the Palestinian territories and stop expanding settlements, the Palestinian news agency WAFA reported.
Abbas added that Israel must respect Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third holiest site, and stop the evictions of Palestinians in neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, which he reminded are "against the law."
Israeli policies undermine the two-state solution, Abbas stressed, while also underlining the importance of strengthening US-Palestinian relations.
Sullivan, for his part, reiterated his country's commitment to the two-state solution.
Sullivan this week traveled to Israel and Palestine joined by Brett McGurk, Deputy Assistant to President Joe Biden and Middle East and North Africa Coordinator, and the State Department’s Acting Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs, Yael Lempert.
Sullivan yesterday met with Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.
How the US abortion rights battle is affecting women across the world
ANALYSIS
US anti-choice groups are supporting local agencies in countries across Africa and are spreading stigma and false information about sexual and reproductive health, often putting women’s lives at risk
A client of MSI Reproductive Choices meets with Safietou Seck, an MSI sister, at the youth centre in Saint Louis, Senegal (Photo: Arete/Randa Osman/MSI Reproductive Choices)
As the US Supreme Court prepares to rule on what would be the greatest abortion rights rollback since Roe v Wade enshrined access to terminations in law in 1973, the effect of its decision could send shockwaves across the world.
While the effect of US abortion policies overseas is not a new phenomenon, it’s likely that any move to constrain or repeal Roe v Wade would have an unprecedented chilling effect on abortion rights globally.
As a safe abortion and reproductive health provider, many of our country programmes have felt the full force of Trump’s Global Gag Rule, a US policy that blocked US federal funding for abortion overseas and helped to further legitimise anti-choice movements outside of the US.
While Trump left office nearly a year ago, and the Global Gag Rule has been reversed by President Biden, the anti-choice movement is sustained by attacks on abortion rights in Texas and Mississippi, both home to organisations that fund anti-choice movements across the world.
In Africa particularly, we are seeing funding and playbooks being exported by US anti-choice groups who are supporting local agencies in countries including Uganda, Zambia, and Nigeria.
This is helping to spread stigma and false information about sexual and reproductive health, often putting women’s lives at risk. Just as the war on abortion rights in America rages on, the global anti-choice movement is more emboldened and more vociferous than ever.
The anti-choice movement is well-funded, reaching almost every country on the planet. According to the European Parliamentary Forum, around £530m has been spent on anti-gender equality funding between 2009-2018 in Europe alone, including from wealthy individuals and religious extremists close to the previous Trump administration.
This ensures anti-choice activists can continue harassing women and pregnant people outside our UK clinics, while influencing heavily restrictive abortion bills in Poland and Hungary.
The effect of this well-resourced movement stretches into Africa, Asia, and Latin America, too. Open Democracy estimated last year that right-wing Christian organisations in the US spend on average $280m every year attacking abortion and LGBTQIA rights.
Wherever we work, harassment and intimidation of our providers and clients is common. Online attacks that shut down our Facebook or WhatsApp pages – as experienced recently by our Mexico team – are on the rise.
Around the world, anti-choice mystery shoppers, who pose as women seeking help, contact our clinics weekly, wasting time and resources. In some countries this dark money funds networks of pregnancy crisis centres that target women seeking abortion with misleading promises of help.
In countries where abortion is legally restricted, stigma is massive and mortality from unsafe abortion high. Misinformation from social media, and a lack of access to reproductive health and family planning information and services contribute to attitudes that block access to essential, and in some cases, life-saving medical procedures.
Women, wherever they are, will always seek access to abortion services. Globally, around a third of all pregnancies, or 121 million end in abortion.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), around 45 per cent of all abortions are unsafe, and most of these are in low-income countries where legal restrictions, stigma, and health system challenges force women to risk their lives.
We know that restricting abortion does not reduce its prevalence. In countries that restrict abortion, the percentage of unintended pregnancies ending in abortion has increased by 14 per cent over the last 30 years, and abortion rates are higher than in countries where it is more accessible.
If women have access to abortion services, it is likely they will also have better access to information and be more empowered to make their own choices.
With anti-choice groups in the US buoyed by any potential victory in the Supreme Court, it’s likely that organisations funding the global fight against abortion rights will redouble their efforts, with potentially deadly consequences for women.
However, despite the efforts of a vocal minority that wants to limit women’s reproductive rights, every day we see growing public support for reproductive rights.
This year, abortion has been either decriminalised or legalised in countries with a vocal opposition including Benin, Thailand, San Marino, Gibraltar and Mexico. These acts of hope and solidarity inspire our teams to do all they can to make choice possible for women.
Sarah Shaw is Head of Advocacy at MSI Reproductive Choices
Shutdown – How Covid Shook the World Economy by Adam Tooze
Adam Tooze has a new book out, Shutdown. Tooze is the liberal left’s current favourite historian. His previous book, The Wages of Destruction, won the Wolfson Prize for History and the Longman-History Today Book of the Year Prize. He has taught at Cambridge and Yale and is now Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University. He is a prolific writer of articles in the elite press; a mine of information and data on his Twitter account and his Chartbook site. And of course, he is on SubStack.
I reviewed his last best-selling book, Crashed. After singing the praises of Tooze’s account of the global financial crash and the ensuing Great Recession, I made the point that “Crashed provides us with the most granular and fascinating account of the crash and its aftermath. It powerfully shows what happened and how, but in my view does not adequately show why it happened. But maybe that is not the job of economic history, but that of political economy.”
There are two critiques there. The first is Tooze’s historical method: he decries ‘historicism’ as such and aims to provide a history of ‘the moment’, as it happens. That can offer an excellent survey of who does what and when, but it does not serve well to understand why. And second, although Tooze is an historian of events ‘as they happen’ (or immediately after), this approach has a false ‘neutrality’ in its analysis. For Tooze is not ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’ at all – and after all, nobody can be where social interests and viewpoints are often contradictory.
So beneath the ‘history of the moment’ lies an analysis of events that is really based on what Tooze calls ‘liberal democratic’ ideals, politically and on Keynesian theory and policy, economically. Tooze sees himself as offering a viewpoint “of a left-liberal historian whose personal loyalties are divided among England, Germany, the “island of Manhattan” and the EU.” (Tooze, ‘Tempestuous Seasons’, London Review of Books, 13 September 2018, p. 20.) Also: “the political intellectual tradition, which I personally feel attached to, which is left liberalism of the British variety.” And more:“I’m a confirmed liberal Keynesian in my broad politics, and my understanding of politics and the way expertise ought to relate to it, and the operations of modern democracy.”
On the whole, Tooze sees, for all her faults, that the US is on the side of the angels along with Western Europe, in defending the ideals of ‘democracy’ against the forces of authoritarian rule from the likes of Russia, China, Turkey etc. Perry Anderson (Anderson-NLR-119-1.pdf points out that Tooze’s book, Wages of Destruction argues that Hitler saw America as the main enemy of Nazi Germany ie the US was the force for democracy against fascism. And yet all the evidence suggests that Hitler’s main ambition was to crush the Jewish Bolshevik conspiracy and, from the start, looked to invade and defeat Stalin’s Russia.
When it comes to the economics, in Crashed, we are asked to accept that, even though the actions of the US administration and the EU were full of holes, in the end they delivered in shoring up the system and avoiding a meltdown into a deep depression. Yes, the draconian measures imposed by the Troika on Greece were terrible, but Tooze says nothing about Syriza’s capitulation to the Troika. For him, there was no alternative but to ensure the survival of the EU as part of the liberal democratic order. As he wrote: “Left-wing hostility to the pro-market character of the EU and nationalist hostility to Brussels’ united to deliver a profound shock to Europe’s elite. ‘Whatever the rights and wrongs of the constitution, popular democracy had asserted itself’. Really? Have the ECB and the EU Council mended their ways?
In Shutdown, Tooze examines the unprecedented decision of governments around the world to shutter their economies in the face of pandemic. “The virus was the trigger,” writes the author. But other elements were at play, including a serious slowing of global economic growth, a rise in nationalist and authoritarian regimes around the world, and what, in effect, was a new cold war with China. In other words, the agents for destabilization were myriad well before Covid-19 arrived. Tooze calls this ‘polycrisis’, to describe this multipronged series of failures of imagination and governance.
Tooze moves fluidly from the impact of currency fluctuations to the decimation of institutions–such as health-care systems, schools, and social services–in the name of efficiency. And he shows how no unilateral declaration of ‘independence” or isolation can extricate any modern country from the global web of travel, goods, services, and finance. No country is an island when it comes to a virus, trade and supply chains – as we currently see.
The crux of Tooze’s message is that at the onset of the Covid-19 crisis, governments found themselves ‘flying blind’: none of the economic and political theories that purported to be guides for public policy proved to be of any use and were rapidly abandoned. Instead, driven by the need to “do something”, and be seen to “do something”, governments innovated.
Tooze recounts what public figures said in the very early stages of the pandemic. On February 3rd 2020, Boris Johnson, Britain’s prime minister, warned of the danger that “new diseases such as coronavirus will trigger a panic”, leading to measures that “go beyond what is medically rational, to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage”. Within two months, he had locked down the British economy. On February 25th 2020, Larry Kudlow, an adviser to President Donald Trump, said that “we have contained this”, cheerfully adding: “I don’t think it’s going to be an economic tragedy at all.”
Tooze confirms what this blog and other analyses both from health and economics have shown: that decisive government action, such as lockdowns and prudent and socially responsible behaviour by citizens, reduced mortality and economic damage, the behavioural balance between these being roughly one-third governmental and two-thirds at the level of citizens.
The politicians may have been disastrous, but the institutions of the liberal democratic order compensated. Whereas the financial crisis of 2008 showed the weakness of the world banking system, Tooze writes, the shock of the pandemic spoke to the weakness of asset markets as a whole, requiring entities such as the US Treasury to assemble “a patchwork of interventions that effectively backstopped a large part of the private credit system.” Apparently it helped that Steven Mnuchin, “the least ‘Trumpy’ of the Trump loyalists,” led those Treasury efforts. It is strange that Tooze has a good word for this hedge fund multi-millionaire, who said in April 2020: “This is a short-term issue. It may be a couple of months, but we’re going to get through this, and the economy will be stronger than ever,”
Tooze also has kind words for the central bankers. They were quick to grasp the implications of the disease. “In 2008 there had still been a note of hesitancy about central-bank interventions. In 2020 that was gone,” he writes. “Governments ended up backing this monetary stimulus with fiscal policy. The $14trn-worth of support they had provided by the end of 2020 was much larger than the stimulus they had offered in the wake of the global financial crisis.”
The business community also responded to the central bankers by apparently rejecting the policies of austerity. So when Joe Biden assumed the presidency, he pushed for big-dollar measures, which corporations supported, to jump-start the economy —with the proviso, Tooze notes, that Biden dropped his push for a $15 minimum wage.
It is an odd conclusion to reach about the policy response to the pandemic. Did central banks act to save people’s jobs or to shore up financial markets just as in 2008?; will the supposed fiscal largesse introduced in the 2020 slump be sustained in the rest of this decade?: are austerity policies really over? In the UK, the current Chancellor has already cut back subsidies to workers and businesses and is preparing regressive new taxes to fund government spending. In the US, Biden’s supposedly large infrastructure programme has been cut back by Congress and anyway will be financed by significant tax rises over the next five years. Keynesianism is not really making a comeback.
Yet Tooze’s instant history goes through the prism of Keynesian theory. Tooze is explicit about this. In a review of Geoff Mann’s excellent demolition of Keynesianism, In the Long Run We Are All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy and Revolution (2017), Tooze defines the distinctive virtue of Keynes’s outlook as a “situational and tactical awareness’ of the problems for liberal democracy inherent in the operations of the business cycle in a capitalist economy, requiring pragmatic crisis management in the form of punctual adjustments without illusion of permanency.”
He even argues that China’s huge state-led investment during the Great Recession, amounting to over 19% of China’s GDP, was an example of Keynesian policies in action and commands Tooze’s unstinting admiration. “This was the largest Keynesian operation in history, a mobilization of resources on a scale that Western economies had only ever achieved under the pressure of war. Its global impact was decisive. ‘In 2009, for the first time in the modern era, it was the movement of the Chinese economy that carried the entire world economy”.
I have argued elsewhere that this claim for Keynes is not supported by the evidence: China’s state investment, run and operated by state banks and state enterprises, bears no relation to Keynesian macro policies. Moreover, China’s avoidance of a slump did not ‘save capitalism’ in 2008-9; the Great Recession remained the widest and deepest slump in capitalism since the 1930s – until the pandemic slump of 2020.
In Crashed, the global financial crash was the result of the deregulation of the banking system, financial greed and incompetent authorities. For me, all these were just symptoms or immediate catalysts of the underlying causes in the capitalist economy. In Shutdown, we are again offered same Keynesian solutions to the pandemic slump: fiscal and monetary largesse.
As Tooze says in an interview with Tyler Cowan, the neoclasscial mainstream economist, “Keynesianism, classically, of course, is a liberal economic politics. It believes in a multiplier, and the multiplier’s the be-all and end-all really of Keynesian economics because what it suggests is that small, intermittent, discretionary interventions by the state — relatively small — will generate outside reactions from the economy, which will enable the state to serve a very positive role in stabilizing the economy but doesn’t require the state to permanently intrude and take over the economy”.
Thus, there is nothing in Shutdown about needing to end the failure of markets in the pandemic. The banks and the tech and social media giants that have made trillions out of the pandemic slump are to remain as they are, while hundreds of millions globally have been driven into poverty. It is not part of Tooze’s instant history agenda to “take over the economy”.
Shutdown – How Covid Shook the World Economy by Adam Tooze
Published by Allen Lane
ISBN: 978-0241485873
“Civilian Casualty Files” documents the barbarism of US imperialism in Iraq and Syria
On Sunday, the New York Times published a major investigative account, the Civilian Casualty Files, accompanied by hundreds of confidential Pentagon documents, revealing that US airstrikes in Iraq and Syria have killed thousands of civilians, and the military has systematically covered this up.
The Civilian Casualty Files are evidence of extensive war crimes. They reveal that the US military, under the Obama and Trump administrations, deliberately killed civilians, including children. The Pentagon documents manifest a contempt for human life that is chilling.
The lead author and investigator, Azmat Khan, an assistant professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, spent five years uncovering the story. She filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for the reports of the Pentagon’s internal review process. When these requests were denied, she filed lawsuits against the Department of Defense and U.S. Central Command, demanding the release of the documents.
An Iraqi boy carries heavy belongings through the rubble, May 15, 2017. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)
When the US military receives an allegation from an external source that civilians were hit in an airstrike, a formal review process is launched and a final report issued. There were 2,866 reports issued for airstrikes in Iraq and Syria between September 2014 and January 2018. Prior to the Civilian Casualty Files, “little more than a dozen” had been published. The Times was given 1,311 reports, of which hundreds have now been published.
Khan checked the reports against on-the-ground witness testimony, traveling to over 100 sites where civilian casualties had been reported in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan to interview survivors. She found that “many allegations of civilian casualties were erroneously dismissed ... [and] even when civilian deaths were acknowledged, they were often significantly undercounted.”
Her investigation found, for example, that more than 120 civilians were killed in a single airstrike in July 2016 in the hamlet of Tokhar in Northern Syria. The US military claimed it was targeting ISIS, but confronted with evidence that the victims were farmers, it admitted to killing 24.
The military report on the slaughter at Tokhar found “no evidence of negligence or wrongdoing” and that “no further action” was necessary. No payment has been made to any of the survivors. This is the pattern with all of the reports, which taken together amount to a massive coverup.
Not a single report contained a finding of wrongdoing or a recommendation for disciplinary action. In many instances, “the unit that executed a strike also ended up investigating it.” A drone footage analyst, who spoke with the Times anonymously, reported that “superior officers would often ‘tell the cameras to look somewhere else’ because ‘they knew if they’d just hit a bad target.’” In many cases, reports indicated that “equipment error” meant that no footage was available at all.
The Times reported that they uncovered “the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children.” The data in the Pentagon reports claimed that children were killed or injured in 27 percent of air strikes that resulted in civilian casualties; Khan’s on-the-ground verification found the number was 62 percent.
Khan summed up her findings: “What emerges from the more than 5,400 pages of records is an institutional acceptance of an inevitable collateral toll. In the logic of the military, a strike, however deadly to civilians, is acceptable as long as it has been properly decided and approved—the proportionality of military gain to civilian danger weighed—in accordance with the chain of command.”
Put more bluntly, the reports reveal that the US military deliberately chooses to kill civilians, including children, and employs a brutal tactical calculus that they put on paper in each report. Each report reveals in a combination of bureaucratic acronyms and grunt vulgarities that Washington views the people of the Middle East as detritus in the path of empire.
Buildings and vehicles are assessed to have a “slant,” e.g., “bldg slant 4/1/3” is a building containing four men, one woman and three children. Those who flee a bomb site are called “squirters,” often hunted down by drones and fired upon.
A log of the chat communications of operators flying drones in Mosul records that when they fired on a building that they knew contained children, they asked how much “play time” their drones had left, because the place was really “poppin’.” Eight civilians in three families were killed.
These logs are then written up in opaque bureaucratic acronyms: “A CIVCAS incident occurred.” Each report has three possible findings, with accompanying checkboxes: “The casualty report is credible, conduct further investigation”; “It is credible, however, I direct no investigation”; and “It is not credible.”
A report selected at random reads, “I conclude that the number of civilians killed was 25.” The finding? Credible, no further investigation.
A report deemed “not credible,” chosen at random, shows between six and 10 civilians were reported killed, including children, in Raqqa on August 16, 2017. The page and a half report dismisses the claim. Too many airstrikes had been conducted on that day to narrow down an investigation, and it was therefore declared unreasonable to make an assessment of credibility.
Working through the Pentagon reports reveals that the US military employs a calculus of murder by which they assess how many civilians they are willing to kill for any particular target.
On March 20, 2017, Washington bombed a factory in a dense residential neighborhood in Tabaqa, Syria, knowing that it employed children. The report reads “The TEA [Target Engagement Authority] determined that the anticipated military value of striking this target warranted a casualty threshold of [redacted] given the target’s function. ... derived from population density table predictions ... assessed that collateral damage of up to [redacted].” The redacted tolerable death toll was determined not to exceed the unspecified “Non-combatant and Civilian Cutoff Value (NCV).” There were at least 10 civilian casualties, including children.
The choice to kill civilians is not simply a matter of estimated average death, however. The reports reveal that the US military deliberately chose to drop bombs on children they saw on camera. In a particularly powerful segment of her article on the “human toll,” Khan describes how the US military knowingly bombed children playing on a roof, killing a family of 11. There was no ISIS presence.
One gets a sense from the Civilian Casualty Files of the immense barbarism of US imperialism. Thousands upon thousands of civilians have been killed, families and households wiped out in airstrike after airstrike.
US bombs started a fire in an apartment complex north of Baghdad killing 70; Khan interviewed an elderly woman in a “displaced persons camp” who reported that her three grandchildren, ages 3, 12 and 13, died in the fire. White bags of “explosives” proved to be cotton from a gin; nine workers were killed. An airstrike killed a man reported to be carrying an “unknown heavy object,” but this was later revealed to be “a person of short stature,” which is how the Pentagon describes a child carried by their father whom they have incinerated. An airstrike on a vehicle of a family fleeing from ISIS killed seven; the mother was “burned into the seat, still holding her infant son in her lap.”
Qusay Saad’s wife, four-year-old son and 14-month-old daughter were among eight civilians killed when the school where they were sheltering was targeted with a precision air strike in Mosul in January 2017. He told the Times, “What happened wasn’t liberation. It was the destruction of humanity.”
The reports released by the military are for Iraq and Syria, and none for Afghanistan have yet been provided. It took the ignominious exit of the US military from Afghanistan for Khan to be able to begin ascertaining civilian casualties there. She writes, “America’s longest war was, in many ways, its least transparent. For years, these rural battlefields were largely off-limits to American reporters. But after the Taliban returned to power in August, Afghanistan’s hinterlands opened up.” In one village alone she found “On average, each household lost five civilian family members. An overwhelming majority of these deaths were caused by airstrikes.”
President Barack Obama boasted in 2016 “we’re conducting the most precise air campaign in history.” There is some truth to this. Washington’s slaughter of thousands of civilians in the Middle East is not the result of a technical imprecision in targeting. It expresses, rather, the coldly calculated willingness to kill anyone—even children—if they obstruct the tactical objectives of US empire.
The Civilian Casualty Files are the most significant exposure yet published of Washington’s wars in the Middle East as an uninterrupted series of war crimes. It demonstrates that the barbarism first brought to light by Julian Assange is in fact the foundation of US empire. Assange’s principled courage in documenting this has been repaid with persecution and imprisonment. The very criminals he exposed seek to extradite him to the United States.
The material published in the Times is sufficient grounds for war crime charges to be brought against Obama, Trump, and their top military commanders, and to free Julian Assange to public acclamation as a hero.
The shocking numbers in the Civilian Casualty Files remain, however, a gross underestimation, only able to document a fraction of the death toll. The rubble produced by US bombs in Syria and Iraq has covered the corpses of far more civilians than the thousands exposed in this report.
The Times report has been greeted with near total silence. There has been no call for a Senate investigation. The American ruling class can no longer muster even the pretense of shock; they are actively overseeing mass death within the United States.
There is a direct connection between the decades of Washington’s homicidal policies in the Middle East and the utter indifference of American capitalism to human lives within the United States. The same barbaric calculations are at play. In less than two years, 800,000 people have died of COVID-19 in the United States, but neither Trump nor Biden will do anything to halt the pandemic’s spread. The scientifically necessary measures—closures of all nonessential workplaces and schools, mass subsidies to provide for the population—would jeopardize the production of profit.
Like the military brass who prosecute their interests, the capitalists tally up acceptable casualty counts and target children. Mass death is acceptable to the ruling class, they will even welcome it, so long as it ensures the uninterrupted growth of the financial markets.
The Pentagon’s 20-Year Killing Spree Has Always Treated Civilians as Expendable
Top U.S. officials want us to believe that the Pentagon carefully spares civilian lives while making war overseas. The notion is pleasant. And with high-tech killing far from home, the physical and psychological distances have made it even easier to believe recent claims that American warfare has become "humane."
Such pretenses should be grimly laughable to anyone who has read high-quality journalism from eyewitness reporters like Anand Gopal and Nick Turse. For instance, Gopal’s article for The New Yorker in September, "The Other Afghan Women," is an in-depth, devastating piece that exposes the slaughter and terror systematically inflicted on rural residents of Afghanistan by the US Air Force.
Turse, an incisive author and managing editor at TomDispatch, wrote this fall: "Over the last 20 years, the United States has conducted more than 93,300 air strikes – in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen – that killed between 22,679 and 48,308 civilians, according to figures recently released by Airwars, a U.K.-based airstrike monitoring group. The total number of civilians who have died from direct violence in America’s wars since 9/11 tops out at 364,000 to 387,000, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project."
Those deaths have been completely predictable results of US government policies. And in fact, evidence of widespread civilian casualties emerged soon after the "war on terror" started two decades ago. Leaks with extensive documentation began to surface more than 10 years ago, thanks to stark revelations from courageous whistleblowers and the independent media outlet WikiLeaks.
The retribution for their truth-telling has been fierce and unrelenting. WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange is in a British prison, facing imminent extradition to the United States, where the chances of a fair trial are essentially zero. Former US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning spent seven years in a military prison. Former US Air Force analyst Daniel Hale, who revealed murderous effects of US drone warfare, is currently serving a 45-month prison sentence. They had the clarity of mind and heart to share vital information with the public, disclosing not just "mistakes" but patterns of war crimes.
Such realities should be kept in mind when considering how the New York Times framed its blockbuster scoop last weekend, drawing on more than 1,300 confidential documents. Under the big headline "Hidden Pentagon Records Reveal Patterns of Failure in Deadly Airstrikes," the Times assessed US bombing in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan – and reported that "since 2014, the American air war has been plagued by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and imprecise targeting and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children."
What should not get lost in all the bold-type words like "failure," "flawed intelligence" and "imprecise targeting" is that virtually none of it was unforeseeable. The killings have resulted from policies that gave very low priority to prevention of civilian deaths.
The gist of those policies continues. And so does the funding that fuels the nation’s nonstop militarism, most recently in the $768 billion National Defense Authorization Act that spun through Congress this month and landed on President Biden’s desk.
Dollar figures are apt to look abstract on a screen, but they indicate the extent of the mania. Biden had "only" asked for $12 billion more than President Trump’s last NDAA, but that wasn’t enough for the bipartisan hawkery in the House and Senate, which provided a boost of $37 billion instead.
Actually, factoring in other outlays for so-called "defense," annual US military spending is in the vicinity of $1 trillion. Efforts at restraint have hit a wall. This fall, in a vote on a bill to cut 10 percent of the Pentagon budget, support came from only one-fifth of the House, and not one Republican.
In the opposite direction, House support for jacking up the military budget was overwhelming, with a vote of 363-70. Last week, when it was the Senate’s turn to act on the measure, the vote was 88-11.
Overall, military spending accounts for about half of the federal government’s total discretionary spending – while programs for helping instead of killing are on short rations for local, state and national government agencies. It’s a destructive trend of warped priorities that serves the long-term agendas of neoliberalism, aptly defined as policies that "enhance the workings of free market capitalism and attempt to place limits on government spending, government regulation, and public ownership."
While the two parties on Capitol Hill have major differences on domestic issues, relations are lethally placid beyond the water’s edge. When the NDAA cleared the Senate last week, the leaders of the Armed Services Committee were both quick to rejoice. "I am pleased that the Senate has voted in an overwhelming, bipartisan fashion to pass this year’s defense bill," said the committee’s chair, Sen. Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island. The ranking Republican on the panel, Jim Inhofe from Oklahoma, chimed in: "This bill sends a clear message to our allies – that the United States remains a reliable, credible partner – and to our adversaries – that the US military is prepared and fully able to defend our interests around the world."
It’s a long way from their glassed-in office suites to the places where the bombs fall.
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author of many books including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions. Solomon is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.
