CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M
16-year-old among 13 arrested for alleged involvement in banking-related malware scams

The scammers also told the victims via phone calls and text messages to turn on accessibility services on their Android phones. PHOTOS: SINGAPORE POLICE FORCE

Fatimah Mujibah

SINGAPORE – Thirteen people, including a 16-year-old youth, were arrested for their suspected involvement in the recent spate of banking-related malware scam cases.

Preliminary investigations showed that 10 of the 13 suspects, aged between 16 and 27, had allegedly facilitated the scam cases by sharing their bank accounts, Internet banking credentials and/or disclosing Singpass credentials for monetary gains.

The rest – three men aged between 20 and 35 – are believed to have withdrawn money from some of the money mules’ bank accounts and handed the money to unknown persons.

They were arrested in an island-wide anti-scam enforcement operation conducted between June 26 and 30 by officers from the Commercial Affairs Department (CAD) and Police Intelligence Department (PID), the police said in a statement on Saturday.

Investigations are ongoing. Another 10 people – nine men and a woman, aged between 17 and 65 – are assisting in the investigations.

Since January, the police have received an increasing number of reports about malware being used to compromise Android mobile devices, resulting in unauthorised transactions made from the victims’ bank accounts even though they did not share any sensitive information regarding their bank or Singpass accounts.

The victims were instead found to have responded to advertisements for cleaning services, pet grooming and food items on social media platforms, such as Facebook.

The scammers later instructed the victims to download an “Android Package Kit (APK)“ from an unofficial app store to facilitate the purchase, leading to malware being installed on the victims’ mobile devices.

The scammers also told the victims via phone calls and text messages to turn on accessibility services on their Android phones.

By doing this, a phone’s security features are weakened, and allows the scammers to control the phone, such as being able to log every keystroke and steal banking credentials stored in the phone and allows them to remotely log in to the victim’s banking apps, add money mules as payees, raise payment limits and transfer monies out to money mules.

The scammers can further delete SMS and e-mail notifications of that bank transfer to cover their tracks.

The offence of acquiring benefits from criminal conduct carries a jail term of up to 10 years, a fine of up to $500,000, or both.

The offence of cheating carries a jail term of up to three years, or a fine, or both.

For disclosing their Singpass credentials, offenders are liable to a jail term of up to three years, a fine of up to $10,000, or both.

MORE ON THIS TOPIC

CPF login may require Singpass face verification to protect vulnerable members from malware scams

At least 2 Android users lose nearly $100k of CPF savings in June in malware-related scams

Between January and June, victims were reported to have lost about $8 million in more than 700 malware-related scams. At least eight of these scams involved CPF savings, with losses amounting to $124,000.

The police reminded the public to be wary of clicking on suspicious links, scanning unknown QR codes, or downloading mobile apps from third-party websites or unknown sources.

These unverified apps may contain malware, which can severely compromise the security of mobile devices.

Instead, the public should download apps only from official app stores. Before downloading any app, they should check the number of its downloads and user reviews.

The public should always be wary of any requests for banking credentials or money transfers and attractive offers that sound too good to be true, the police said.

Security settings should also be turned on, such as disallowing installation of apps from unknown sources, to help protect devices.

 

Golden Horde age mausoleum discovered near Astana

 29 June 2023 

Archaeologists of Astana are studying the traces of ancient civilization hidden under the earth. They are excavating a mausoleum belonging to the Golden Horde age, Azernews reports, citing Kazinform.

The burial dated to the 15th century AD was found on the territory of Korgalzhyn district of Akmola region, not far from Astana.

The archaeologists have already excavated several mausoleums in the area of medieval town in Akmola region. This is the third historical monument discovered in Korgalzhyn district.

The unique find is an octagonal structure. The length of each side slightly exceeds 1.5 meters, and the diameter is about 4.5 meters. The mausoleum was built of a burnt and half-baked brick, fastened with lime mortar. Once this area was the site of pilgrimage. There was a tomb opposite the mausoleum.

Code-named as «Uyaly Necropolis», the burial site consists of 5 objects. Due to the sowing works, the condition of the mausoleum's structures is estimated as poor. Besides, according to scientists, some burial structures were exposed to robberies, so there are no human remains in them.

Ancient Greek altar unearthed at archaeological site in Sicily

An ancient Greek altar for family worship dating back at least 2,000 years is pictured after it was found in the Sicilian archaeological site of Segesta, Italy on June 29.
PHOTO: Reuters

PUBLISHED ON JUNE 30, 2023 

ROME - An ancient Greek altar for family worship dating back more than 2,000 years has been found in the archaeological site of Segesta on the Italian island of Sicily, local authorities said on Friday (June 30).

Sicily's regional government said the altar was probably in use at the height of Hellenic cultural influence, just before the rise of the Roman empire in the first century Before Christ (BC).

It had been buried for centuries by a few centimetres of earth and vegetation in the area of ​​the Southern Acropolis at the Segesta site, which is in the western part of the island.

"The Segesta site never ceases to amaze us," said Sicily's regional culture minister Francesco Paolo Scarpinato.

"Excavations continue to bring to light pieces that add new perspectives and interpretations to a site where multiple civilizations are stratified," he said in a statement.

Segesta, renowned for its fifth-century-BC temple, was an ancient Greek city nestled between mountains.

Apart from the altar, archaeologists also dug out a similar-shaped relic that they believe may have been a support for a sculpture. Both finds are perfectly preserved, the regional government said.

‘Fragile’ ship that sank in storm 2,500 years ago needs to be rescued — piece by piece

Brendan Rascius
Fri, June 30, 2023 

Photo from UV Nautical Archaeology

Around 2,500 years ago, a small Phoenician ship sailing in the Mediterranean Sea got caught in a tempest.

The storm sent the wooden vessel to the seabed below, where the current buried it beneath the sand.

There — off the coast of modern-day Spain — the ship lay undetected until its discovery in 1995. It has enthralled archaeologists ever since.

The wreck is “nothing short of exquisite,” Deborah Carlson, a professor of nautical archaeology at Texas A&M University, told McClatchy News.

“On the one hand, it occupies a very important place in history — both chronologically and geographically, because it exhibits construction techniques that are associated with the Levant, where the Phoenicians originated.”

The Phoenicians were a seafaring civilization that ruled the Mediterranean before the Greeks and the Romans, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While based around modern-day Lebanon and Syria, they also inhabited cities in north Africa and southern Europe.

In addition to its historical significance, the wreck, named Mazarron II, is also “in superb condition,” Carlson said.

However, the remarkably preserved ship may soon face destruction if left exposed to powerful underwater currents, Carlos De Juan, an archaeologist at the University of Valencia, told McClatchy News.

“It’s in a complicated area where the currents are affecting the seabed, taking away the sand, so we had to make a decision,” he said.

The decision: haul the entire 25-foot-long ship to the surface.

The ambitious project will likely take over a year and require significant preparation, De Juan said.

The vessel, while well preserved, is not intact. The “fragile” hull, located under about six feet of water, is full of small cracks commonly seen in old wooden wrecks, De Juan said. So, it will have to be recovered piece by piece.

In preparation for its retrieval, De Juan and other archaeologists have spent hours underwater creating a detailed map of the ship’s remains. Their plan is to take advantage of the existing cracks, so that further dissection will not be required.

De Juan said the vessel is scheduled to be brought ashore in the summer of 2024. It will then be displayed in a museum.

But, even once the vessel is on dry land, maintaining its state of preservation will not be easy, Brendan Foley, a maritime archaeologist at Lund University in Sweden, told McClatchy News.

“The economic costs of long-term preservation after conservation are simply enormous, even for a comparatively small vessel like Mazarron II,” Foley said.

Preservationists will have to constantly fend off fungi, bacterial growth, and loss of structural integrity, Foley said. Additionally, a specific temperature and humidity will need to be maintained wherever the vessel is displayed.

“It’s one thing to bring up these hull remains, and quite another to care for them forever after,” Foley said

Egypt: A decade on, experts divided whether coup could have been prevented

President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi hesitated before the coup, but experts question whether Egypt's military could have been contained

Then-Egyptian Defence Minister Abdel Fatah al-Sisi attends a welcome ceremony at Almaza military Airbase in Cairo shortly before launching a coup, .22 May, 2013 (AFP)

By MEE staff
Published date: 30 June 2023

On the 10th anniversary of Egypt's coup, experts are split as to whether the ouster of President Mohamed Morsi was an inevitable outcome of tensions between democracy and the military, or if it could have been prevented.

On 3 July 2013, Egypt's military led by General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi removed Egypt's first democratically elected president from power. The day marked the beginning of a purge of Islamist and Muslim Brotherhood leaders that would morph into a wider crackdown on dissent targeting journalists, businesspeople and secular opponents of the military-led government.

The foremost cause of the collapse of Egypt's democratic transition was the military, Sharan Grewal, a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of a forthcoming book on Arab militaries and the Arab Spring, said. "It was aggrieved by democracy."

Grewal noted how Egypt's military actively stoked popular concerns about Morsi's tumultuous rule. Elected by narrow margins, the Muslim Brotherhood-backed leader was viewed with uncertainty by the country's secular opposition, some businesspeople and many in Egypt's sizable Christian minority.

The military has played a dominant role in Egypt since overthrowing the monarchy in 1952. Former presidents Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak were all army men.

"The mere presence of a politicised military like Egypt's made negotiations more difficult between the government and opposition," Grewal said. "For the secularists, why work with Morsi when you can work with the military and kick him out?"

"In Egypt… this empowered military… ultimately terminated the democratic transition," he said.

But David Kirkpatrick, a journalist with the New Yorker who served as the New York Times' Cairo bureau chief during the 2013 coup, challenged the notion that the democratic transition's fate was sealed.

"There was going to be conflict between the Egyptian military and a democratic transition. How that conflict gets resolved… I hesitate to say is anything but inevitable," he said at an event alongside Grewal hosted by the Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED) on Friday.
'Dismay and despair'

Kirkpatrick said the military was plagued by "fissures" over how to act in response to discontent with Morsi's presidency.

A telling case of the uncertainty in the months leading up to the coup, he said, was "dismay if not despair" in the ranks of Egypt's National Salvation Front - the united secular opposition to Morsi - that a coup might not take place at all.

'If Sisi and the generals didn't get a green light [from the US], they certainly got a yellow light'

- David Kirkpatrick, New Yorker Magazine

"From the moment of Mubarak's ouster up to the coup there were repeated attempts by the military to reassert their power, and time and time again they would back down," he said.

Sisi himself had secured the powerful position of defence chief under Morsi, and a transition to democracy wouldn't have been "totally unappealing" to him if it guaranteed his position and privileges, Kirkpatrick added.

Kirkpatrick said Sisi's hesitation to launch the coup even after he consolidated support within the army ranks puts a focus on the influence of external actors. "Had the Gulf not been tacitly offering an enormous amount of money, would Sisi have pulled off a coup? I have some doubts about that."

In the wake of the Arab Spring, Egypt was an epicentre in a battle between Gulf states for influence over the Middle East, with Qatar throwing its weight behind the Muslim Brotherhood and the UAE and Saudi Arabia looking to crush the movement.

The Gulf states have since moved to patch up ties. Qatar, along with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, has deposited billions of dollars in Egypt's central bank to aid Sisi's cash-strapped government. More recently, Gulf states have demanded a return on their investments.

'Conflicting US messages'

The US also sent mixed messages in the lead-up to the coup. The Obama administration's earlier decision to pull away from Mubarak as he faced popular protests was viewed as a betrayal by other Middle Eastern autocrats.

"Morsi was hearing from Obama some actual support for democracy and he naively thought that the US government was unitary," Kirkpatrick said.

How Tunisia’s defence ties with US endure despite aid cuts

Read More »

But Washington was torn whether to back the democratically-elected Morsi or Sisi, as some in the intelligence and defence agencies likely pushed for, particularly as protests against Morsi grew.

"Sisi and the generals around him were hearing two conflicting messages from the US. If they didn't get a green light, they certainly got a yellow light," Kirkpatrick said.

"It's not impossible to imagine that a different posture from the US might have had a different outcome," he added.

Egyptians flee across Mediterranean

When Sisi announced Morsi's ouster, he pledged to bring "national reconciliation" to the Arab world's most populous country. Instead of a promised roadmap to future elections and stability, Sisi has imposed an authoritarian rule that experts say surpasses anything Egypt witnessed under Nasser, Sadat or Mubarak.

Meanwhile, Egypt's economy is sinking. Surging inflation ‌and a currency crisis have thrust the middle class into poverty and more Egyptians are making the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean to Europe.

Egyptians were the most common nationality detected crossing the central Mediterranean in the first half of 2022, accounting for 20 percent of nationalities, according to the most recent data from the European Union's border agency Frontex.

The Greek boat disaster was caused by Europe's deals with dictators

Read More »

Sisi has tried to portray himself as reaching out to the opposition amid the economic crisis. He launched a national dialogue initiative widely decried by rights groups.

The government has hinted that presidential elections would be held later this year, but few expect them to be free or fair, with the family members of Sisi's only declared challenger arrested. Egyptian authorities have put an estimated 60,000 political prisoners in jail.

The anniversary of Egypt's coup comes as its neighbours see their own hopes for democracy erode.

In Tunisia, President Kais Saied has consolidated power in an authoritarian slide, courting the US-trained and funded military for support.

Meanwhile, Sudan's short-lived democratic transition has collapsed and Sudanese are trapped by brutal fighting between the army, led by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and a paramilitary force led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo.

10 years later: Why are Egyptian human rights ignored?

Cathrin Schaer
DW

Egyptian activists complain that the international community often talks about Egypt's crisis-ridden economy but says far less about its dreadful human rights situation. Why is one seen as more important than the other?

This week marks a decade since the coup that installed Egypt's current government. On July 3, 2013, Egypt's military removed the country's first democratically-elected president from power and set up an interim government.

At that time, with Egypt's politics and economy in turmoil, a senior general in Egypt's all-powerful military, Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, told his fellow citizens that the military had ousted Islamist President Mohamed Morsi because he failed to create "a national consensus." But, el-Sissi promised, the military had no interest in retaining political power and would facilitate a return to democratic civilian rule.

A decade later, el-Sissi is still in power. And in many aspects, the situation for ordinary Egyptians is worse than ever. The economy is in crisis, saddled with foreign debt, surging inflation and a currency that has depreciated by nearly half. An estimated third of Egypt's 105 million people live in poverty, and the most populous Arab nation is currently selling off or leasing government-owned assets, like Telecom Egypt, public transport or ports, in order to finance its foreign debt obligations.

The el-Sissi government has promoted national "mega-projects" critics say are unnecessary, like a whole new capital city outside Cairo

Image: Friedrich Stark/IMAGO

At the same time, el-Sissi has tightened his grip on power. Independent journalists and anti-government activists have been harassed or arrested. One formerly jailed Egyptian activist told the investigative journalism website, Coda Story, that they had seen military officers stop people on the street, check their phones and then arrest them after finding they had posted, liked or joked about the Egyptian government or military on social media.

Freedom House, the US-based democracy monitor, classifies Egypt as "not free" and the country's freedom rating with the watchdog, already meager, has slowly eroded over the past five years, going from 26 out of 100 in 2018, to 18 out of 100 this year.

For comparison, Morocco scores 37 out of 100, while Germany gets 94.

Egypt has become a world leader in capital punishment and new laws, including one that forces non-governmental organizations to register with the state, have seen space for civil society or activism shrink even further.

A balanced approach needed

Observers say that Egypt's regional neighbors and Western allies take an unbalanced approach to these issues. Egypt's economic issues are regularly mentioned while the country's rapidly worsening human rights record gets far less attention, they suggest.

In early 2022, over 170 members of various European parliaments wrote an open letter to their own top diplomats and ambassadors to the United Nations' Human Rights Council, asking that a special body be established to monitor the deteriorating human rights situation in Egypt. The letter came just before the annual meeting of the council.

"We are extremely concerned about the international community's persistent failure to take any meaningful action to address Egypt's human rights crisis," the politicians wrote. "This failure, along with continued support to the Egyptian government and reluctance to even speak up against pervasive abuses has only deepened the Egyptian authorities' sense of impunity."

But a year later, shortly before the next annual meeting of the council, seven human rights NGOs published another open letter, which found that there had been "no consequential follow-up ... despite the fact the human rights situation in Egypt has further deteriorated," the letter, signed by seven organizations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Reporters Without Borders, said.

 

Sanaa Seif has campaigned tirelessly for her brother's release — he's just one of hundreds of thousands

Image: Kin Cheung/AP/picture alliance

Visiting Germany last summer, Sanaa Seif made similar complaints. The sister of Egyptian dissident, Abdel-Fattah, one of the most high-profile political prisoners in the Arab world, Seif met politicians in Berlin while advocating for his release. She wasn't allowed to disclose who she met though. "It doesn't make sense to me when I see German politicians shy away from talking about human rights," Seif told DW at the time. "It's like they don't want to rock the boat."

How does Egypt get away with it?

There are a number of factors, says Timothy Kaldas, deputy director of the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy.

Located at the crossroads of Africa, Asia and Europe, Egypt is in a very strategically significant location and, with its large population and big military, has long been considered an important regional power. As such, Egypt also has a long tradition of playing different international allies off against one another.

"So when Egypt is pressured by the Gulf states, they could turn to the US, and when pressure came from there, they could turn to French," Kaldas noted. "This often comes up in meetings. If you go to meetings at foreign ministries or at international financial institutions and talk about conditionality [on human rights] somebody will say, 'well, what if they just go to that other place instead and we lose access?'"

An Egyptian frigate made in Germany: Arms sales to Egypt boosted Germany's weapons exports to record levels in 2021

Image: Joerg Waterstraat/picture alliance

Egypt has also been proficient at building bilateral ties by doing huge arms deals, Kaldas explains. An annual French report on weapons sales published in late 2022 shows that Egypt has been the top importer of arms from France since 2012. Egypt is also one of Germany's biggest buyers of arms. The volume of weapons exports to Egypt has increased under el-Sissi and made the country into the third-largest arms importer in the world.

Threat of mass, irregular migration

There are also other reasons, Kaldas adds. Despite el-Sissi's authoritarian ways, Egypt has been a comparatively stable country in the Middle East, especially when compared to places like Syria or Yemen — and its neighbors like it that way. "That makes it easier to justify injecting cash into the Egyptian state in the hope that it will maintain that stability," he explains. "Additionally, the other big factor is this: Egypt is a 100 million people on the Mediterranean."

For Europe, unremittingly haunted by the specter of irregular migration and the potential populist political reaction to it, "that is a very big deal," Kaldas said.

But none of those reasons are actually a good enough excuse not to say anything about human rights in Egypt, Kaldas and others argue. What is often missing in these debates is the existential connection between human rights, political stability and economic circumstances.

At the same activist Sanaa Seif was meeting German politicians behind closed doors in 2022, the Egyptian president was being feted in Berlin

Image: Michael Kuenne/ZUMA/picture alliance

"The problem is that, fundamentally, Western states often fail to appreciate the shortsightedness of their approach," Kaldas states. "It's not so much that they're getting stability in exchange for looking the other way on human rights violations. The human rights violations are actually contributing directly to Egypt's economic instability. Egypt's economic crisis is because [el-Sissi's] strategy of the last decade has been to leverage the Egyptian state recklessly to finance his consolidation of power and his patronage network."

"Available funds do not flow into productive investments for the future, but seep into economically ques­tionable infrastructure projects and serve, at least indirectly, to finance police-state repression," Stephan Roll, head of research into Africa and the Middle East at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, wrote in a December 2022 paper called "Loans for the President."

The Egyptian military has benefited most from this money, much of it from foreign lending, and has in fact grown larger and richer under el-Sissi. "This was a decisive factor in President Sissi's consolidation of power," Roll notes. "For him, the loyalty of the armed forces has been the most important pre­requisite for enforcing wide-ranging police-state repres­sion … Tens of thousands of political pris­oners and a dramatic number of death sentences and executions even by Egyptian standards are an expres­sion of this development."

Both Roll and Kaldas suggest a similar solution: Recognize the links between the money going into Egypt and the state's human rights abuses. "It's not the role of an external power to force Egypt to become a democracy," Kaldas concludes. "But the task is to just stop subsidizing the autocracy and making it easier for Egypt to be a dictatorship."

 

Robert Reich: Why I’m Not Running For President (Or Anything Else, Thank You) – OpEd

 June 30, 2023  0 Comments

By Robert Reich

Several of you have written asking if I might consider running for office. Well, I have an announcement to make. Brace yourselves. 

I’m not running — for president or anything else. 

I’ve run once before (for the Democratic nomination for governor of Massachusetts in 2002) and learned I don’t have what it takes. 

Before I ran, I thought I knew everything there was to know about getting elected — which made me think I could get elected, too. I’d been involved in dozens of campaigns. I’d advised candidates running for governor, senator, and president. I’d worked for three presidents. 

I was wrong. It takes several unique personality traits to successfully run for a major public office. I don’t have them.

First, you need to be sufficiently narcissistic to be able to sell yourself to voters (and anyone you need to help bankroll your campaign).

In 2002, so many Massachusetts residents urged me to run that I thought voters (and funders) would flock to me once I announced. 

But the moment I said I was actually running, the burden of proof instantly shifted onto me. Even my most ardent supporters wanted to know: What made me think I would be a good governor? Many of the people who I assumed would be generous with their dollars in support of my campaign became skinflints overnight. 

Sure, I could promote policy ideas — I’d done it all my life — but I was terrible at promoting myself. It felt excruciatingly embarrassing. Telling complete strangers why they should be enthusiastic about me made me want to crawl into a hole and disappear. Dialing for dollars was the most humiliating experience I’ve ever had. 

Donald Trump is a masterful self-promoter because he’s a pathological narcissist. He boasts about himself nonstop and has probably done so since he was an infant. No matter that his bragging requires dangerous lies, vile smears, law-breaking, and a grandiosity that would cause normal people to cringe; he does it all without moral constraint. It’s all he does. 

He’s the extreme. But you’ve got to be big on self-promotion to get anywhere in electoral politics. 

Second, you need to be wildly extroverted. 

By this I mean you get more energy out of every encounter with a total stranger — every handshake, pat on the back, morsel of conversation — than the energy you lose in such an encounter. So by the end of a day of such encounters, you end up more energized than at the start. 

Bill Clinton lived off this contact energy. If he didn’t get enough, he’d see people standing along the side of a road and order his driver to stop so he could get out and shake their hands and get more. Al Gore, by contrast, seemed to lose a bit of energy with each encounter, so by the end of a day of campaigning, he was depleted. 

I was drained after a few hours.

Trump is not a typical extrovert. He doesn’t get energized from just any contacts. He gets energized when he dominates and others are submissive. 

Third, you need to be a method actor.

You have to be able to will yourself into feeling whatever a situation demands, so you come off as authentic. 

Ronald Reagan was a master of method acting, presumably because it had been his career before politics. Clinton was almost as good. Barack Obama and Joe Biden, far less so. Trump is fairly good at this. Richard Nixon and George W. Bush were lousy method actors; even when they told the truth, they seemed to be lying.

I was awful at method acting. On St. Patrick’s Day 1992, I was supposed to give humorous remarks in several of Boston’s Irish enclaves, but the family pet had just died, and I came off as strangely somber. On another occasion, I wanted to show indignation about the war in Iraq, but my best friend was clowning around on the fringe of the crowd, and I burst out laughing. 

Fourth, you need a thick skin. 

Your political opponents and the media inevitably will find your vulnerabilities and go after them. Thick skins are a necessity. Joe Biden has one of the thickest; Trump, the thinnest. 

I thought I was impervious. After all, I’d been a Cabinet official at a time Republican lawmakers had turned into attack dogs. But I was wrong. When one of my opponents accused me of lying about getting Bill Clinton’s endorsement, I was livid. When another said I became a professor because I couldn’t make it in the real world, I was furious. I lost several nights’ sleep over these and other equally bogus accusations. 

You need to be respectful of the media and not become incensed by their “gotcha” reporting. 

I considered myself media savvy before I ran for office, but the moment I declared I was running, I was in the shark pit. 

It seemed like the only thing the media wanted to report about me was my short height.

I couldn’t give a speech without The Boston Globe running a photograph of me standing on a box so I could see over a standard-sized podium. The Boston Herald even ran a story headlined “Short People Rise Up in Anger Against Reich,” claiming vertically challenged people across Massachusetts were upset with me for making self-deprecating jokes about my height.

***

Needless to say, I didn’t become governor of Massachusetts. The experience taught me I was terrible at being a politician. 

Yet it also put me on the other side of a great divide separating those who have run for office from normal people. 

And it allowed me to understand something I had never understood before: It is impossible to shake thousands of hands at a bus stop, or to phone thousands of strangers asking for their support, or to knock on thousands of doors — and do it well — without being driven by a force beyond narcissism, beyond extroversion, beyond method acting, beyond the thickest of thick skins. 

To be good at running for office, you need to be driven by an ambition that’s both pathological and inspirational, grandiose and generative. It’s an ambition that, like Trump, craves attention and power — but also, unlike Trump, occasionally seeks the common good.

Robert B. Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies, and writes at robertreich.substack.com. Reich served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, for which Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. He has written fifteen books, including the best sellers "Aftershock", "The Work of Nations," and"Beyond Outrage," and, his most recent, "The Common Good," which is available in bookstores now. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, chairman of Common Cause, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning documentary, "Inequality For All." He's co-creator of the Netflix original documentary "Saving Capitalism," which is streaming now.

Our global culture of war means guaranteed profits for the arms industry


For the arms industry to flourish, it needs wars, preferably protracted, destructive stalemates in far-off places

Paul Rogers
23 June 2023, 5.19pm

A missile on display at a DefExpo 2022, a defence industry trade fair in India |
T. Narayan/Bloomberg via Getty Images

While most would agree there is no such thing as a ‘good war’, those taking a calculated view might argue that such a thing would mean a quick victory with minimal losses on your own side, with the other side so defeated as to present few problems in the future. A ‘perfect war’, then, might be one where there is capitulation and complete surrender without a shot being fired.

The world’s arms dealers will take a devastatingly different view. Their primary function, like that of any other industrial endeavour in a shareholder capitalist system, is to make money for shareholders while ensuring decent salaries and even more decent bonuses for the CEO and senior colleagues.

To them, a ‘perfect war’ is one that degenerates into a violent stalemate that creates an insatiable demand for arms and the replacement of worn-out equipment, while at the same time, each side constantly tries to improve its weaponry and tactics. Profit is placed over lives, though it is arguably better if the war has relatively low casualties so that public support remains high and the war – and the money it generates – can continue.

An even ‘better’ scenario for an arms dealer is selling arms to another country that’s engulfed in an everlasting war that their own country is not fighting, and better still if they are selling to both sides at the same time.

Now carry over this line of argument to the real world of the early 21st century, and we come up with some unusual and appalling results. The US-led coalition’s war in Afghanistan was long, and the 20 years of conflict certainly helped the armourers in many countries make plenty of money, as did the shorter eight-year war in Iraq.

Neither war, though, proved particularly popular back home and both came to a catastrophic end, with hundreds of thousands of people dead and two countries wrecked – but there were still plenty of profits for the armourers.

Iraq actually turned out to be a more complicated war, with ISIS emerging rapidly from the chaos left by Western forces. By 2014 it had taken control of much of northern Iraq and Syria. A US-led coalition was rapidly put together to organise an intensive air war across the two countries, with thousands of airstrikes and cruise missile attacks over a four-year period until ISIS was crippled.

According to AirWars, some 30,000 targets were attacked using more than 100,000 missiles and guided bombs, and at least 60,000 people were killed. Some of these will have been ISIS paramilitaries, but thousands will have been civilians of all ages. However, hardly any Western military personnel were killed apart from occasional accidents, there was little media coverage except when cities such as Mosul and Raqqa were taken, so there was little public attention paid to what appeared – from a Western perspective – to be a successful war.

Even its ‘success’ is debatable, though, as around a thousand US troops are still in northern Syria, many more are in Iraq, coalition forces still carry out air strikes in both countries, and ISIS is expanding its links with like-minded Islamist paramilitaries across the Sahel and on to the DRC, Uganda and even Mozambique. That war is still not over, so the profits still roll in.

For arms dealers, a ‘perfect war’ is one that degenerates into a violent stalemate that creates an insatiable demand for arms

Returning to today, there are many conflicts around the world that arms firms are looking at and seeing dollar-signs. Let’s start with the Indo-Pacific region, where there are plenty of new opportunities for arms marketing. Chinese manoeuvres towards Taiwan are combining with greater US military activity, stimulating a veritable arms sales bonanza across southeast Asia. Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines are all investing heavily, especially in new naval forces.

Further south, Australia is integrating its military posture closely with the United States and Britain in the AUKUS programme of new nuclear-powered attack submarines, while further west, a mini-arms race is developing between India and Pakistan as each invests in new generations of air-defence missiles. According to Jane’s Defence Weekly, Pakistan’s new weapons are centred on the advanced S-400 long-range ground-launched missile from Russia.

India, meanwhile, sees issues with China but is also concerned with what it views as rather too-close links between China and Pakistan. It, too, has bought into the S-400 system but is also buying Barak-8 medium-range anti-aircraft missiles from Israel.

As for China itself, people from its own version of a military-industrial complex have had little role in the national leadership until now, but that has changed in the wake of President Xi’s re-election for a record third term: five new members of the politburo are from the military sector. China may be a hybrid state-capitalist economy but individual corporations still look to business success and their own well-being.

Then there is Russia’s war in Ukraine, which is turning out to be both long and brutal, with many catastrophes and much loss of life. Three weeks into Ukraine’s offensive in the Donbas region, casualties on both sides are high and there are already signs that the offensive is unlikely to succeed in forcing Russia to agree terms.

The Russian military sector has proved more than able to continue producing large quantities of artillery and ammunition, and the leadership has learned from some of its early errors. Putin remains in firm control and though his position could change overnight, there is little sign of this happening.

Ukraine, meanwhile, is still receiving plenty of weapons, ammunition and materiel from NATO, though much of it is very slow in coming, especially the much-desired F-16 interceptors. The war may yet last years, not months – offering ideal conditions for arms’ companies to profit.

Many such arms industry leaders may choose to view themselves as patriotic guardians of their country. But the system in which they operate raises real ethical questions, which few seem to want to answer.

Meanwhile, as the conflict in Ukraine moves slowly towards a ‘perfect war’, more people will die, more towns and villages will be levelled – all of which will simply be seen as collateral damage in our global culture of war.

THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX 

AND 

THE PERMANENT ARMS ECONOMY TODAY

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=PERMANENT+ARMS+ECONOMY+

UK
Rishi Sunak admits oil-funded think tank helped write anti-protest laws


The PM confirmed Policy Exchange helped draft laws targeting climate activists, as first revealed by openDemocracy


Anita Mureithi

openDemocracy
30 June 2023

Just Stop Oil climate activists face police officers as they march in London on June 2, 2023 as part of their campaign calling on the UK government to end approval for exploring, developing and producing fossil fuels |
HENRY NICHOLLS/AFP via Getty Images


Rishi Sunak has admitted a right-wing think tank that received funding from US oil giant ExxonMobil helped the government write its draconian anti-protest laws.

It serves as confirmation by the prime minister of openDemocracy’s revelations that last year’s controversial policing bill, which became the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts (PCSC) Act, may have originated in a briefing from Policy Exchange.

While Policy Exchange keeps its donors a secret, our investigation found ExxonMobil Corporation donated $30,000 to its American fundraising arm in 2017.

Two years later, a report by the influential think tank titled ‘Extremism Rebellion’ said the government should implement new laws to target environmental protest group Extinction Rebellion (XR).

In a speech earlier this week at Policy Exchange’s summer party, Sunak confirmed Policy Exchange’s brief “helped us draft” the government’s crackdown on protests, according to Politico.

The government has been heavily criticised by civil rights groups over the act. When the law was first introduced then-home secretary Priti Patel was open in saying it was intended to target XR.

Sections of the bill appeared to be directly inspired by the think tank’s report, which called for laws relating to public protest to be “urgently reformed in order to strengthen the ability of police to place restrictions on planned protest and deal more effectively with mass law-breaking tactics”.

The legislation gave police new powers to restrict the duration and noise level of static protests, or shut them down if they cause a “serious disruption”. It also introduced a new public nuisance offence that could see people jailed for a maximum of ten years for obstructing the public.

Suella Braverman has continued to pursue this crackdown on civil disobedience as home secretary by pushing through changes to the Public Order Act.

Police have also been granted more powers to stop and search anyone they suspect of planning to cause disruption. The government has been clear that the new laws have been designed to tackle peaceful protest methods used by groups such as Insulate Britain, Just Stop Oil and XR.

We will continue to resist. The stakes have never been higher

A Just Stop Oil spokesperson vowed the group would continue to resist the government’s harsh laws, telling openDemocracy: "We see you Rishi Sunak. Now openly boasting that the most draconian set of anti-protest laws enacted in a liberal democracy anywhere were written with the aid of dirty oil company money.

“We will continue to resist. The stakes have never been higher."

Another report published by Policy Exchange in November said it is “imperative” that “protestors who repeatedly obstruct the highways and/or damage property are swiftly arrested, convicted and punished.” It also called for harsher sentences to be imposed on repeat offenders.

Over 2,000 Just Stop Oil activists have been arrested and 138 people thrown in prison since the implementation of the PCSC Act in April 2022. Among them are Morgan Trowland, 40, and Marcus Decker, 34 who were each handed sentences of more than two and a half years for scaling the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge – the longest sentences for peaceful climate protest in British history.

Meanwhile, it was reported that a total of 293 charges were brought against 117 of Insulate Britain’s supporters, consisting of causing a public nuisance, wilful obstruction of the highway and criminal damage. According to Insulate Britain the CPS has summoned a total of 56 activists for at least 201 charges of public nuisance.

An Insulate Britain supporter told openDemocracy that Sunak’s admission comes as no surprise. Sally Davidson, 35, a primary school teacher from south London said: “Our politicians and so-called leaders are not on our side.

“This week people marching from Just Stop Oil have had milk thrown at them. People are right to be angry but the anger should be directed at politicians and the think tanks who are actively destroying our communities, livelihoods and country by pushing for more fossil fuel projects in the full knowledge that we have already surpassed the ‘safe’ level of global warming.”

Davidson warned that civil resistance is “our only legitimate means to achieve the changes needed within the time frame we have”, and added: “Whilst governmental attempts to scapegoat the people fighting for their lives in the face of corporate greed and interest are nothing new, the scale of death and horror people around the world face right now is unprecedented.”

The hidden class politics of the UK’s immigration debate

Liberals preach cultural tolerance to the working classes while inflicting death-by-policy on migrants

Arun Kundnani
28 June 2023, 

Placards wait ahead of an anti-racism march in London, in which speakers expressed anger at the Illegal Migration Bill |
Mark Kerrison/In Pictures via Getty Images

Government ministers warned of an influx of migrants overwhelming public services. Newspaper headlines declared war on imagined armies of welfare cheats invading Britain through easily penetrated borders. Plans to build accommodation centres for asylum seekers were abandoned in the face of local hostility. The year was 2001, but the level of publicly expressed animosity towards migrants and asylum seekers was much like that of 2023.

Along with other activists, I travelled around Britain that summer as part of what we called a Civil Rights Caravan, aiming to counter the country’s latest anti-immigrant turn. On the Sighthill housing estate in Glasgow, tensions were especially high. A fifth of its 6,000 residents were asylum seekers, relocated there by a government ‘dispersal’ programme that sought to move them away from more expensive locations in London. With regular acts of racist violence perpetrated against them, asylum seekers were fearful of venturing out of their homes. Then, on a hot night in August, a local man, Scott Burrell, set upon Firsat Dag, a Kurdish refugee from Turkey living on the estate. Dag was chased and stabbed to death.

But local activists also recounted another story that, to them, held important lessons on how positive change can be brought about. They spoke about one of the young white men living on Sightill who was among those who regularly harassed the asylum seeker residents. Living in poverty and struggling to find work, he was irate that people from Africa, Asia and the Middle East could turn up, get housed, and be provided for – no matter how paltry that provision actually was. He was powerless to change the way the system worked but, at least on Sighthill, he and his friends held another kind of power – the ability to inflict violence on darker-skinned newcomers.

One day, he was walking across the estate and came across an asylum seeker sitting on a bench. In the activists’ account, he launched into his usual tirade of abuse: “You’re a scrounger! Go and get a job!” Fists formed, ready to punctuate these injunctions with punches. The asylum seeker seemed to have his hands in his pockets. But then he lifted his arms to reveal that both of his hands had been chopped off. “This is why I can’t work,” he said. “This is what the police in Turkey did to me.”

Suddenly a connection sparked between abuser and abused. Police violence was familiar to every white person on the estate, not an aspect of a strange foreign culture needing to be understood through some multicultural awareness initiative. The shared experiences of police brutality made possible a bond. This was the moment that a perpetrator of racist violence began to change. The young white man soon became an advocate for the rights of asylum seekers. According to local activists, this was the pivotal moment when harassment on the estate began to decline.

As with any story that is passed on orally, its accuracy is hard to verify. Its significance, though, is that it offers a different way of thinking about how to confront reactionary opinions on immigration. Unlike in the usual liberal defence, there was no celebration of the cultural differences immigration brings or highlighting the economic contributions of migrants. Instead, a transformation occurred through locals and migrants identifying on the basis of a shared grievance. They recognised in each other a common experience of having been discarded by society, forced to eke out the barest of lives on government handouts and seen as degenerate and dangerous by the agents of state violence. Even if the people I spoke to did not explicitly put it in those terms, what connected them was a sense of class struggle.

Liberals focus only on consumer choices to celebrate other cultures: what a wonderful range of foods is now available in shops!

Well-meaning liberals typically assume that the barrier to more progressive immigration policies is the nationalist values of the working class. They share with conservatives the view that political contestation on immigration is a culture war between pro-immigration liberal elites and anti-immigration working-class nationalists – seen as two political tribes with fixed and antagonistic values. While there is some basis for this division in polling, as an analysis of what shapes the politics of immigration this interpretation is doubly wrong. It not only caricatures working-class nationalism but misses how the wealthy uphold the cruelties of the immigration system.

Liberals who accept the culture war interpretation see themselves as virtuous opponents of lower-class prejudice, preaching the value of cultural diversity and the economic benefits of migration. But their celebration of other cultures is presented in terms of widening consumer choices: what a wonderful range of foods is now available in our shops and restaurants! This is of little value to those struggling to get by.

The argument that migration brings economic benefits is equally liable to miss the point. Liberals talk about positive correlations between increased immigration and overall growth in the economy. And they point out that new workers entering the country from elsewhere rarely compete for the same jobs as the existing population, so there is no reason to expect immigration to bring declines in wages. But growth in the economy as a whole does not carry through to improving standards of living for poor people, unless organised labour has political clout.

When pro-immigration liberals ignore these issues, their celebration of diversity can easily come across as the enforced values of an economic system in which working-class people have lost out. Neoliberal globalisation has gone hand in hand with a decline in the power of organised labour. From a class point of view, the real question is how patterns of migration link to the collective bargaining power of workers.

There is no denying that sometimes employers use migrant workers to try to weaken that power. Equally, there are other situations in which migrant workers revitalise a native labour movement by importing new modes of organisation and fresh political thinking. Yet pro-immigration campaigners rarely engage on this more pertinent level.

And for all their vaunted cosmopolitanism, neoliberal elites do not want a borderless world. The most important neoliberal intellectuals of the twentieth century believed in using border controls to prevent the entry into Europe of people seen as having different cultures. Friedrich Hayek, the economist who set out neoliberalism’s free-market principles, for example, might have been expected to support the free movement of people from one nation to another. But actually, he put these principles aside when it came to immigration, arguing that European governments should stop people coming who do not share with the West a “common system of basic moral beliefs”.

Borders block super-exploited workers from moving to obtain higher wages and create deportable workforces that are more easily exploited

In this century, wealthy self-styled liberals living in the English shires have regularly mobilised to keep asylum seekers out of their communities. In the early 2000s, for example, there was a wave of mass protests against plans for asylum seeker accommodation centres in Kent, Sussex, Oxfordshire, Hampshire, Dorset and Lincolnshire. A local campaign against plans to build an accommodation centre near Pershore, Worcestershire, reportedly won support from fashion designer Stella McCartney, who had a £1.3m farmhouse in the village, and ‘Songs of Praise’ presenter Toyah Wilcox. The Home Office cancelled its plans after hundreds demonstrated at the proposed site.

The neoliberal think tanks and the wealthy who gather at Davos are also at best divided on the extent to which immigration is desirable. The billionaire Koch brothers, for example – the world’s largest funders of neoliberal activism – have lavishly funded both pro-immigrant and anti-immigrant think tanks in the US. The belief, held by many on the left, that neoliberals “are completely for open borders” is mistaken.

Borders are profitable to capitalists for two reasons. They block the overwhelming majority of super-exploited workers in the Global South from moving north to obtain higher wages, and they create migrant workforces in the North that are highly policed and easily deportable – the better to exploit them. ‘Pro-immigration’ neoliberal think tanks are as committed to the infrastructures of border enforcement as those that oppose immigration – all of them are responsible for the seas of misery that borders produce.

No wonder that neoliberal politicians so often declare their pride in a Britain that is ‘open, diverse and welcoming’ (if only!) but then, in the next breath, claim that, reluctantly, nationalist sentiments must be honoured in policy-making as ‘genuine concerns’. How convenient that working-class nationalists provide an alibi for policies that our neoliberal leaders would choose to pursue anyway.

There is no culture war over immigration in the normally understood sense. Rather, there is a strange and hidden class war being fought out on the terrains of race and culture. At stake is the very definition of the working class: whether or not it can extend to a political refugee from Turkey – or anyone else from the Global South.

To win that class war requires understanding that working-class anti-immigrant sentiment is lodged in a misdirected sense of class interest, and it needs to be dislodged on those terms, rather than through appeals to cosmopolitanism or empty promises of economic betterment. And it means grasping that, in this war, the flags waved can be misleading: the neoliberals who preach cultural tolerance to the less wealthy are those most responsible for the death-by-policy we inflict on migrants and asylum seekers.

RIP

Remembering Arnest Thiaya, father of Kenya’s trans community

Thiaya started to live his authentic self in 1986, long before the country had a trans community

Arya Karijo
23 June 2023

Arnest Thiaya, the father of the Kenyan transgender movement |

Agnetta Asitwa

On Fathers’ Day, Kenya’s trans community was in mourning for the loss of our father, Arnest Thiaya. We lost him on 14 June, not long after the passing of Nakshy Saeed, the director of Pwani Trans, a Mombasa-based initiative that advocates human rights, social recognition and inclusion for the country’s transgender community.

Thiaya would have turned 52 this year, a feat for a Kenyan trans person. Our life expectancy is 50; multiple socioeconomic vulnerabilities contribute to our short lives.

He started living his authentic self as a trans man in 1986, way before there was any trans community in Kenya to speak of. Way before he even had the language to say what he was going through. He remembered walking into Kenyatta National Hospital and telling a doctor that he felt like his body was not his, that there was something terribly wrong. Fortunately for Thiaya he found medics who were open to making the journey with him, to venture into what was then seen as uncharted waters for medical practice.

Thiaya is of the generation of activists that never ever saw themselves as such. In his mind – and way of life – he was just a small business owner. Every day, he religiously opened his grocery retail shop in Nairobi's low-income Kasarani area. Even when he had important meetings to attend – government consultations or overseas trips such as his recent visit to New York – Thiaya made sure that someone opened his shop which sold dailies like bread, milk and oil. He also had a section on the outside that sold bags and jackets.

That his small business was important to Thiaya is obvious. He lost his first shop in Kibra, Kenya's largest low-income neighbourhood, amid the electoral violence of 2007, something he always spoke of with pain. Forced to restart from scratch, Thiaya found he was unable to access microfinance credit as he needed identity documents that matched his gender.

Thiaya, along with two friends, took the government to court, wanting to compel Kenya's Registrar of Persons to identify them by their correct names and gender markers on their national ID documents. They won the suit to change their names in 2017 with the ruling on gender markers still pending. In Kenya, the national ID document gives a person access to banking and government services, and is the reference document for all other government-issued documents, such as a passport or driver's licence.

The other two plaintiffs in the lawsuit were Audrey Mbugua and Maureen Munyaka, who co-founded Transgender Education and Advocacy (TEA), which works to defend and promote trans human rights. Like Thiaya, Munyaka is a small business owner and runs a hair and nail salon. Mbugua is best known for winning several legal fights that expanded trans rights in Kenya, not least forcing the national examinations body to change her name on her school certificates and compelling the NGO Board, which regulates non-governmental organisations in Kenya, to register the TEA.

As for Thiaya, he was on the board of three important transgender organisations in East Africa, but most local people will probably remember him best as the strict judge of the Nairobi ballroom on community days.

Every community member who met him will remember a ‘Thiayism’, his unfiltered pieces of advice, delivered with dry humour

Many will also remember his mental health work. He got so many young transgender Kenyans into therapy. Jinsiangu, a gender advocacy organisation on whose board Thiaya sat, employed a therapist and community members were allocated sessions with her. Thiaya would always call to check if you had kept your slot. He was also street-smart, using his knowledge of Nairobi to source and buy medication for those diagnosed with mental illnesses. Unlike many people of his generation he knew the importance of mental health wellness.

In Kenya, age earns you respect and many young intersex people in rural parts of the country, whose families were struggling to accept them, were receptive to hearing about gender diversity from the old man and his delegation. Thiaya tirelessly traversed Kenya to talk to these families.

Every community member who met him will remember a ‘Thiayism’, his unfiltered pieces of advice, always delivered with dry humour. To younger trans Kenyans he would say: “You people have the most information anyone could ever need but you are also the most confused.” He helped us understand our parents’ struggles with our gender: “You people expect too much from your old folks. These are the people who were toiling to feed you and put you through school that they didn't have an opportunity to discuss menstrual periods or sex with you. You had to go to a young aunty or elder sibling but now you want to go to them to come out.” Often, all of us would laugh at the logic, irony and hard truths of his words.

Thiaya always wanted to get away from the city. He often said: “I will buy a tiny piece of land, build a tiny house and change my phone numbers so that you can no longer call me with your mental health struggles and your relationship problems.” But we kept him here and we kept calling him. But now there is no one to take the call. Our father is gone.