The Passing of the Father of India’s Green Revolution

But What Did the GR Really Do for India?

by Colin Todhunter / October 3rd, 2023

M.S. Swaminathan, widely regarded as the father of the Green Revolution in India, recently passed away (28 September) at the age of 98. An agronomist, agricultural scientist and plant geneticist, Swaminathan played a key role in introducing hybrid high yielding varieties of wheat and rice to India and in encouraging many farmers to adopt high-input, chemical-dependent practices.

The mainstream narrative is that Swaminathan’s collaborative scientific efforts with Norman Borlaug helped save India from famine in the 1960s. Following his death, tributes from high-ranking officials, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and commentators have poured in praising his part in (supposedly) saving India from Malthusian catastrophe.

However, there is another side to the story of the Green Revolution, which seldom emerges in the mainstream.

For example, farmer Bhaskar Save wrote an open letter to M.S. Swaminathan in 2006. He was scathing about the impact of the Green Revolution and Swaminathan’s role in it:

“You, M S Swaminathan, are considered the ‘father’ of India’s so-called ‘Green Revolution’ that flung open the floodgates of toxic ‘agro’ chemicals – ravaging the lands and lives of many millions of Indian farmers over the past 50 years. More than any other individual in our long history, it is you I hold responsible for the tragic condition of our soils and our debt-burdened farmers, driven to suicide in increasing numbers every year.”

We will return to this letter later.

To his credit, though, Swaminathan came out against genetically modified organisms in Indian agriculture. In a 2018 paper in the journal Current Science, along with his colleague P C Kesavan, he provided a wide-ranging critique of genetically modified crops to date, questioning their efficacy and need. Perhaps he had become aware that the introduction of technology without proper economic, social, health and environmental impact assessments would produce a domino effect, like the Green Revolution. Of course, he came under attack from industry mouthpieces and industry-backed scientists in the media for his stance.

In the paper “New Histories of the Green Revolution” (2019), Professor Glenn Stone debunks the claim that the Green Revolution boosted productivity and saved India from famine. Indeed, although the media in the mid-1960s carried stories about a famine in India, Stone sees no evidence of famine or an impending famine. Stone argues that all the Green Revolution actually ‘succeeded’ in doing was put more wheat in the Indian diet (displacing other foodstuffs). He argues that food productivity per capita showed no increase or even actually decreased.

Renowned campaigner and environmentalist Vandana Shiva says that the Green Revolution saw 768,576 accessions of indigenous seeds taken from farmers in Mexico alone. She regards the Green Revolution as a form of colonisation:

The ‘civilising mission’ of Seed Colonisation is the declaration that farmers are ‘primitive’ and the varieties they have bred are ‘primitive’, ‘inferior’, ‘low yielding’ and have to be ‘substituted’ and ‘replaced’ with superior seeds from a superior race of breeders, so called ‘modern varieties’ and ‘improved varieties’ bred for chemicals.

This is one aspect of the Green Revolution that is too often overlooked: capitalist penetration of (intact, self-sufficient) peasant economies.

Stone says:

The legend of the Green Revolution in India has always been about more than wheat imports and short‐stalked grains. It is about Malthusianism, with post‐war India supposedly proving the dangers of population growth outpacing food production. It is also about the Neo-Malthusian conviction that technological innovation is our only hope, capable of saving a billion lives when conditions are right.

He says that beneficiaries of the legend have bolstered it and kept it alive and well in our historical imagination. According to recent studies and literature, however, a coherent reinterpretation is emerging that, Stone says, knocks out virtually all of the pillars of this narrative.

We must also consider counterfactual scenarios. What would have happened if India had taken a different route? Stone notes that the influential Planning Commission (PC) was trying simultaneously to create a functional state (after centuries of colonial rule), to avoid becoming a prized Cold War client, and to shape the country’s agricultural destiny. India had plenty of rural labour and organic manures and the PC wanted to capitalise on these resources.

The PC was not opposed to chemical fertilisers but regarded them as highly expensive both to the state and to the farmer. It also believed that concentrated fertiliser use had ecological problems too: chemicals should only be used in combination with bulky organic manures to preserve tilth. What if organic ways of farming had received the funding and research and had been prioritised to the extent the Green Revolution had been?

For instance, in the paper “Lessons From the Aftermaths of Green Revolution on Food System and Health” (in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 2021) agriculture techniques, such as intercropping, Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) – with essential principles involving the enhancement of nature’s processes – and the elimination of external inputs, can be practised with excellent results. The state government of Andhra Pradesh plans to convert six million farmers and eight million hectares of land under the initiative of Climate Resilient Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) because of the impressive outputs obtained in the ZBNF impact assessments in the states of Karnataka and AP.

Moreover, the Green Revolution deliberately sidelined traditional seeds kept by farmers that were actually higher yielding and climate appropriate. Also, in a 2019 paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology and Agricultural Sciences, the authors note that native wheat varieties in India have higher nutrition content than the Green Revolution varieties.

Instead, we are left with a certain model of agriculture that was pushed for geopolitical and commercial reasons and are trying to deal with various deleterious aftermaths.

For example, according to Stone, post-war hand-to-mouth shipments of wheat from the US to India resulted not from Malthusian imbalance but from policy decisions. The ‘triumphs’ of the Green Revolution came from financial incentives, irrigation and the return of the rains after periods of drought, and they came at the expense of more important food crops. Long‐term growth trends in food production and food production per capita did not change in India. Stone concludes that the Green Revolution years, when separated out, actually marked a slowdown.

Much more can be said and has been written about the wider politics of the Green Revolution and how it became and remains enmeshed in modern geopolitics: the Rockefeller Chase Manhattan bank, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization have facilitated the structural adjustment of national economies and agrarian systems, intentionally creating food insecure areas and dependency for the benefit of Western financial, agricultural trade, seed, fertiliser and agrochemical interests.

For instance, many countries have been placed on commodity crop export-oriented production treadmills to earn foreign currency (US dollars – boosting the strength of and demand for the dollar and US hegemony) to buy oil and food on the global market (benefitting global commodity traders like Cargill, which helped write the WTO trade regime – the Agreement on Agriculture), entrenching the need to increase cash crop cultivation for exports.

In effect, what we have seen emerge is a model of agriculture that requires hundreds of billions of taxpayer subsidies annually to sustain the bottom line of big agribusiness. One of the not-so-hidden costs of the Green Revolution, of which there are many: degraded soils, polluted water, rising rates of illness, micro-nutrient deficiencies, less nutrient-dense food crops, unnecessary food insecurity, the sidelining of more appropriate indigenous seeds, the narrower range of crops that humanity now depends on due to changed cropping systems, the corporate commodification and pirating of seeds and knowledge, the erosion of farmers’ environmental learning, the devastation of rural communities, farmers’ debt, corporate-market dependency, etc.

So, with the passing of M.S. Swaminathan, let us return to Bhaskar Save (1922-2015) and his open letter, which touches on many of these issues. Save was not a scholar or an academic. He was a farmer, and his letter was a heartfelt call to action.

M.S. Swaminathan was at the time the chair of the National Commission on Farmers at the Ministry of Agriculture. Save wanted to bring attention to the devastating impacts of the Green Revolution and to encourage policy makers to abandon their policies of importing and promoting the use of toxic chemicals that the Green Revolution had encouraged.

Below is an abridged version of Bhaskar Save’s open letter.

To: Shri M.S. Swaminathan,
The Chairperson, National Commission on Farmers,
Ministry of Agriculture, Govt. of India

I am an 84-year-old natural/organic farmer with more than six decades of personal experience in growing a wide range of food crops. I have, over the years, practised several systems of farming, including the chemical method in the fifties – until I soon saw its pitfalls. I say with conviction that it is only by organic farming in harmony with Nature, that India can sustainably provide her people abundant, wholesome food.

You, M.S. Swaminathan, are considered the ‘father’ of India’s so-called ‘Green Revolution’ that flung open the floodgates of toxic ‘agro’ chemicals – ravaging the lands and lives of many millions of Indian farmers over the past 50 years. More than any other individual in our long history, it is you I hold responsible for the tragic condition of our soils and our debt-burdened farmers, driven to suicide in increasing numbers every year.

I am sad that our (now greyed) generation of Indian farmers, allowed itself to be duped into adopting the short-sighted and ecologically devastating way of farming, imported into this country. By those like you, with virtually zero farming experience!

For generations beyond count, this land sustained one of the highest densities of population on earth. Without any chemical ‘fertilizers’, pesticides, exotic dwarf strains of grain, or the new, fancy ‘biotech’ inputs that you now seem to champion. The fertility of our land remained unaffected.

In our forests, the trees like ber (jujube), jambul (jambolan), mango, umbar (wild fig), mahua (Madhuca indica), imli (tamarind) yield so abundantly in their season that the branches sag under the weight of the fruit. The annual yield per tree is commonly over a tonne – year after year. But the earth around remains whole and undiminished. There is no gaping hole in the ground!

From where do the trees – including those on rocky mountains – get their water, their NPK, etc? Though stationary, Nature provides their needs right where they stand. But ‘scientists’ and technocrats like you – with a blinkered, meddling itch – seem blind to this. On what basis do you prescribe what a tree or plant requires, and how much, and when.?

It is said: where there is lack of knowledge, ignorance masquerades as ‘science’! Such is the ‘science’ you have espoused, leading our farmers astray – down the pits of misery.

This country has more than 150 agricultural universities. But every year, each churns out several hundred ‘educated’ unemployables, trained only in misguiding farmers and spreading ecological degradation.

Trying to increase Nature’s ‘productivity,’ is the fundamental blunder that highlights the ignorance of ‘agricultural scientists’ like you. When a grain of rice can reproduce a thousand-fold within months, where arises the need to increase its productivity?

The mindset of servitude to ‘commerce and industry,’ ignoring all else, is the root of the problem.

Modern technology, wedded to commerce… has proved disastrous at all levels… We have despoiled and polluted the soil, water and air. We have wiped out most of our forests and killed its creatures. And relentlessly, modern farmers spray deadly poisons on their fields. These massacre Nature’s jeev srushti – the unpretentious but tireless little workers that maintain the ventilated quality of the soil and recycle all life-ebbed biomass into nourishment for plants. The noxious chemicals also inevitably poison the water, and Nature’s prani srushti, which includes humans.

Is it not a stark fact that the chemical-intensive and irrigation-intensive way of growing monoculture cash-crops has been primarily responsible for spreading ecological devastation far and wide in this country? Within the lifetime of a single generation!

This country boasted an immense diversity of crops, adapted over millennia to local conditions and needs. Our numerous tall, indigenous varieties of grain provided more biomass, shaded the soil from the sun and protected against its erosion under heavy monsoon rains. But in the guise of increasing crop production, exotic dwarf varieties were introduced and promoted through your efforts. This led to more vigorous growth of weeds, which were now able to compete successfully with the new stunted crops for sunlight. The farmer had to spend more labour and money in weeding, or spraying herbicides.

The straw growth with the dwarf grain crops fell drastically to one-third of that with most native species! In Punjab and Haryana, even this was burned, as it was said to harbour ‘pathogens’. (It was too toxic to feed farm cattle that were progressively displaced by tractors.) Consequently, much less organic matter was locally available to recycle the fertility of the soil, leading to an artificial need for externally procured inputs. Inevitably, the farmers resorted to use more chemicals, and relentlessly, soil degradation and erosion set in.

The exotic varieties, grown with chemical ‘fertiliser’, were more susceptible to ‘pests and diseases’, leading to yet more poison (insecticides, etc.) being poured. But the attacked insect species developed resistance and reproduced prolifically. Their predators – spiders, frogs, etc. – that fed on these insects and ‘biologically controlled’ their population, were exterminated. So were many beneficial species like the earthworms and bees.

Agribusiness and technocrats recommended stronger doses, and newer, more toxic (and more expensive) chemicals. But the problems of ‘pests’ and ‘diseases’ only worsened. The spiral of ecological, financial and human costs mounted!

With the use of synthetic fertilizer and increased cash-cropping, irrigation needs rose enormously. In 1952, the Bhakra dam was built in Punjab, a water-rich state fed by 5 Himalayan rivers. Several thousand more big and medium dams followed all over the country, culminating in the massive Sardar Sarovar.

India, next to South America, receives the highest rainfall in the world. The annual average is almost 4 feet. Where thick vegetation covers the ground, and the soil is alive and porous, at least half of this rain is soaked and stored in the soil and sub-soil strata. A good amount then percolates deeper to recharge aquifers, or ‘groundwater tables’.

The living soil and its underlying aquifers thus serve as gigantic, ready-made reservoirs gifted free by Nature. Particularly efficient in soaking rain are the lands under forests and trees. And so, half a century ago, most parts of India had enough fresh water all-round the year, long after the rains had stopped and gone. But clear the forests, and the capacity of the earth to soak the rain, drops drastically. Streams and wells run dry. It has happened in too many places already.

While the recharge of groundwater has greatly reduced, its extraction has been mounting. India is presently mining over 20 times more groundwater each day than it did in 1950. Much of this is mindless wastage by a minority. But most of India’s people – living on hand-drawn or hand-pumped water in villages and practising only rain-fed farming – continue to use the same amount of ground water per person, as they did generations ago.

More than 80% of India’s water consumption is for irrigation, with the largest share hogged by chemically cultivated cash crops. Maharashtra, for example, has the maximum number of big and medium dams in this country. But sugarcane alone, grown on barely 3-4% of its cultivable land, guzzles about 70% of its irrigation waters!

One acre of chemically grown sugarcane requires as much water as would suffice 25 acres of jowar, bajra or maize. The sugar factories too consume huge quantities. From cultivation to processing, each kilo of refined sugar needs 2 to 3 tonnes of water. This could be used to grow, by the traditional, organic way, about 150 to 200 kg of nutritious jowar or bajra (native millets).

While rice is suitable for rain-fed farming, its extensive multiple cropping with irrigation in winter and summer as well, is similarly hogging our water resources, and depleting aquifers. As with sugarcane, it is also irreversibly ruining the land through salinisation.

Soil salinisation is the greatest scourge of irrigation-intensive agriculture, as a progressively thicker crust of salts is formed on the land. Many million hectares of cropland have been ruined by it. The most serious problems are caused where water-guzzling crops like sugarcane or basmati rice are grown round the year, abandoning the traditional mixed-cropping and rotation systems of the past, which required minimal or no watering.

Efficient organic farming requires very little irrigation – much less than what is commonly used in modern agriculture. The yields of the crops are best when the soil is just damp. Rice is the only exception that grows even where water accumulates and is thus preferred as a monsoon crop in low-lying areas naturally prone to inundation. Excess irrigation in the case of all other crops expels the air contained in the soil’s inter-particulate spaces – vitally needed for root respiration – and prolonged flooding causes root rot.

The irrigation on my farm is a small fraction of that provided in most modern farms today. Moreover, the porous soil under the thick vegetation of the orchard is like a sponge that soaks and percolates to the aquifer, or ground-water table, an enormous quantity of rain each monsoon. The amount of water thus stored in the ground at Kalpavruksha, is far more than the total amount withdrawn from the well for irrigation in the months when there is no rain.

Clearly, the way to ensure the water security and food security of this nation, is by organically growing mixed, locally suitable crops, plants and trees, following the laws of Nature.

We should restore at least 30% ground cover of mixed, indigenous trees and forests within the next decade or two. This is the core task of ecological water harvesting – the key to restoring the natural abundance of groundwater. Outstanding benefits can be achieved within a decade at comparatively little cost. We sadly fail to realise that the potential for natural water storage in the ground is many times greater than the combined capacity of all the major and medium irrigation projects in India – complete, incomplete, or still on paper! Such decentralized underground storage is more efficient, as it is protected from the high evaporation of surface storage. The planting of trees will also make available a variety of useful produce to enhance the well-being of a larger number of people.

Even barren wastelands can be restored to health in less than a decade. By inter-planting short lifespan, medium life-span, and long life-span crops and trees, it is possible to have planned continuity of food yield to sustain a farmer through the transition period till the long-life fruit trees mature and yield. The higher availability of biomass and complete ground cover round the year will also hasten the regeneration of soil fertility.

The actual reason for pushing the ‘Green Revolution’ was the much narrower goal of increasing marketable surplus of a few relatively fewer perishable cereals to fuel the urban-industrial expansion favoured by the government.

The new, parasitical way of farming you vigorously promoted, benefited only the industrialists, traders and the powers-that-be. The farmers’ costs rose massively and margins dipped. Combined with the eroding natural fertility of their land, they were left with little in their hands, if not mounting debts and dead soils. Many gave up farming. Many more want to do so, squeezed by the ever-rising costs. Nature has generously gifted us with all that is needed for organic farming – which also produces wholesome, rather than poisoned food!

The maximum number of people can become self-reliant through farming only if the necessary inputs are a bare minimum. Thus, farming should require a minimum of financial capital and purchased inputs, minimum farming equipment (plough, tools, etc.), minimum necessary labour, and minimum external technology. Then, agricultural production will increase, without costs increasing. Poverty will decline, and the rise in population will be spontaneously checked.

Self-reliant farming – with minimal or zero external inputs – was the way we actually farmed, very successfully, in the past. Our farmers were largely self-sufficient, and even produced surpluses, though generally smaller quantities of many more items. These, particularly perishables, were tougher to supply urban markets. And so, the nation’s farmers were steered to grow chemically cultivated monocultures of a few cash-crops like wheat, rice, or sugar, rather than their traditional polycultures that needed no purchased inputs.

Colin Todhunter is an independent writer specialising in development, food and agriculture. You can read his new e-book Food, Dependency and Dispossession: Resisting the New World Order for free here. Read other articles by Colin.

 

The Profit Incentives Driving the American Police State

This Is Not Freedom, America

by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / October 4th, 2023

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

― Frédéric Bastiat, French economist

Pay no heed to the circus politics coming out of Washington DC. It’s just more of the same grandstanding by tone-deaf politicians oblivious to the plight of the citizenry.

Don’t allow yourselves to be distracted by the competing news headlines cataloging the antics of the ruling classes. While they are full of sound and fury, they are utterly lacking in substance.

Tune out the blaring noise of meaningless babble. It is intended to drown out the very real menace of a government which is consumed with squeezing every last penny out of the population.

Focus instead on the steady march of the police state at both the national, state and local levels, and the essential freedoms that are being trampled underfoot in its single-minded pursuit of power.

While the overt and costly signs of the despotism exercised by the increasingly authoritarian regime that passes itself off as the United States government are all around us—warrantless surveillance of Americans’ private phone and email conversations by the FBI, NSA, etc.; SWAT team raids of Americans’ homes; shootings of unarmed citizens by police; harsh punishments meted out to schoolchildren in the name of zero tolerance; drones taking to the skies domestically; endless wars; out-of-control spending; militarized police; roadside strip searches; privatized prisons with a profit incentive for jailing Americans; fusion centers that collect and disseminate data on Americans’ private transactions; and militarized agencies with stockpiles of ammunition, to name some of the most appalling—you rarely hear anything about them from the politicians, the corporations or the news media.

So what’s behind the blackout of real news?

Surely, if properly disclosed and consistently reported on, the sheer volume of the government’s activities, which undermine the Constitution and dance close to the edge of outright illegality, would give rise to a sea change in how business is conducted in our seats of power.

Yet when we’re being bombarded with wall-to-wall news coverage and news cycles that change every few days, it’s difficult to stay focused on one thing—namely, holding the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law—and the powers-that-be understand this.

As with most things, if you want to know the real motives behind any government program, follow the money trail.

When you dig down far enough, you quickly find that those who profit from Americans being surveilled, fined, scanned, searched, probed, tasered, arrested and imprisoned are none other than the police who arrest them, the courts which try them, the prisons which incarcerate them, and the corporations, which manufacture the weapons, equipment and prisons used by the American police state.

These injustices, petty tyrannies and overt acts of hostility are being carried out in the name of the national good—against the interests of individuals, society and ultimately our freedoms—by an elite class of government officials working in partnership with megacorporations that are largely insulated from the ill effects of their actions.

Everywhere you go, everything you do, and every which way you look, we’re getting swindled, cheated, conned, robbed, raided, pickpocketed, mugged, deceived, defrauded, double-crossed and fleeced by governmental and corporate shareholders of the American police state out to make a profit at taxpayer expense.

Not only are Americans forced to spend more on taxes than the annual financial burdens of food, education and clothing combined, but we’re also being played as easy marks by hustlers bearing the imprimatur of the government.

Examples of this legalized, profits-over-people, government-sanctioned extortion abound.

On the roads: Not satisfied with merely padding their budgets by issuing speeding tickets, police departments have turned to asset forfeiture and speeding and red light camera schemes as a means of growing their profits. Despite revelations of corruption, collusion and fraud, these money-making scams have been being inflicted on unsuspecting drivers by revenue-hungry municipalities. Now legislators are hoping to get in on the profit sharing by imposing a vehicle miles-traveled tax, which would charge drivers for each mile behind the wheel.

In the prisons: States now have quotas to meet for how many Americans go to jail. Increasing numbers of states have contracted to keep their prisons at 90% to 100% capacity. This profit-driven form of mass punishment has, in turn, given rise to a $70 billion private prison industry that relies on the complicity of state governments to keep the money flowing and their privately run prisons full, “regardless of whether crime was rising or falling.” As Mother Jones reports, “private prison companies have supported and helped write … laws that drive up prison populations. Their livelihoods depend on towns, cities, and states sending more people to prison and keeping them there.” Private prisons are also doling out harsher punishments for infractions by inmates in order to keep them locked up longer in order to “boost profits” at taxpayer expense. All the while, prisoners are being forced to provide cheap labor for private corporations. No wonder the United States has one of the largest prison populations in the world.

In the schools: The public schools have become a microcosm of the total surveillance state which currently dominates America, adopting a host of surveillance technologies, including video cameras, finger and palm scanners, iris scanners, as well as RFID and GPS tracking devices, to keep constant watch over their student bodies. Likewise, the military industrial complex with its military weapons, metal detectors, and weapons of compliance such as tasers has succeeded in transforming the schools—at great taxpayer expense and personal profit—into quasi-prisons. Rounding things out are school truancy laws, which come disguised as well-meaning attempts to resolve attendance issues in the schools but in truth are nothing less than stealth maneuvers aimed at enriching school districts and court systems alike through excessive fines and jail sentences for “unauthorized” absences. Curiously, none of these efforts seem to have succeeded in making the schools any safer.

In the endless wars abroad: Fueled by the profit-driven military industrial complex, the government’s endless wars are wreaking havoc on our communities, our budget and our police forces. Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $93 million per hour. Future wars and military exercises waged around the globe are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053. Talk about fiscally irresponsible: the U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on a military empire it can’t afford. War spending is bankrupting America.

In the form of militarized police: The Department of Homeland Security routinely hands out six-figure grants to enable local municipalities to purchase military-style vehicles, as well as a veritable war chest of weaponry, ranging from tactical vests, bomb-disarming robots, assault weapons and combat uniforms. This rise in military equipment purchases funded by the DHS has, according to analysts Andrew Becker and G.W. Schulz, “paralleled an apparent increase in local SWAT teams.” The end result? An explosive growth in the use of SWAT teams for otherwise routine police matters, an increased tendency on the part of police to shoot first and ask questions later, and an overall mindset within police forces that they are at war—and the citizenry are the enemy combatants. Over 80,000 SWAT team raids are conducted on American homes and businesses each year. Moreover, government-funded military-style training drills continue to take place in cities across the country.

In profit-driven schemes such as asset forfeiture: Under the guise of fighting the war on drugs, government agents (usually the police) have been given broad leeway to seize billions of dollars’ worth of private property (money, cars, TVs, etc.) they “suspect” may be connected to criminal activity. Then—and here’s the kicker—whether or not any crime is actually proven to have taken place, the government keeps the citizen’s property, often divvying it up with the local police who did the initial seizure. The police have actually being trained in seminars on how to seize the “goodies” that are on police departments’ wish lists. According to the New York Times, seized monies have been used by police to “pay for sports tickets, office parties, a home security system and a $90,000 sports car.”

By the security industrial complex: We’re being spied on by a domestic army of government snitches, spies and techno-warriors. In the so-called name of “precrime,” this government of Peeping Toms is watching everything we do, reading everything we write, listening to everything we say, and monitoring everything we spend. Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it is all being recorded, stored, and catalogued, and will be used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing. This far-reaching surveillance, carried out with the complicity of the Corporate State, has paved the way for an omnipresent, militarized fourth branch of government—the Surveillance State—that came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum. That doesn’t even touch on the government’s bold forays into biometric surveillance as a means of identifying and tracking the American people from birth to death.

By a government addicted to power: It’s a given that you can always count on the government to take advantage of a crisis, legitimate or manufactured. Emboldened by the citizenry’s inattention and willingness to tolerate its abuses, the government has weaponized one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers. The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands. Now that the government has gotten a taste for flexing its police state powers by way of a bevy of COVID-19 lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, overcriminalization, etc., “we the people” may well find ourselves burdened with a Nanny State inclined to use its draconian pandemic powers to protect us from ourselves.

This perverse mixture of government authoritarianism and corporate profits has increased the reach of the state into our private lives while also adding a profit motive into the mix. And, as always, it’s we the people, we the taxpayers, we the gullible voters who keep getting taken for a ride by politicians eager to promise us the world on a plate.

This is a far cry from how a representative government is supposed to operate.

Indeed, it has been a long time since we could claim to be the masters of our own lives. Rather, we are now the subjects of a militarized, corporate empire in which the vast majority of the citizenry work their hands to the bone for the benefit of a privileged few.

Adding injury to the ongoing insult of having our tax dollars misused and our so-called representatives bought and paid for by the moneyed elite, the government then turns around and uses the money we earn with our blood, sweat and tears to target, imprison and entrap us, in the form of militarized police, surveillance cameras, private prisons, license plate readers, drones, and cell phone tracking technology.

With every new tax, fine, fee and law adopted by our so-called representatives, the yoke around the neck of the average American seems to tighten just a little bit more.

All of those nefarious deeds by government officials that you hear about every day: those are your tax dollars at work.

It’s your money that allows for government agents to spy on your emails, your phone calls, your text messages, and your movements. It’s your money that allows out-of-control police officers to burst into innocent people’s homes, or probe and strip search motorists on the side of the road. And it’s your money that leads to Americans across the country being prosecuted for innocuous activities such as growing vegetable gardens in their front yards or daring to speak their truth to their elected officials.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is not freedom, America.

John W. Whitehead, constitutional attorney and author, is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. He wrote the book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015). He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Read other articles by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

 

Modi’s Cricket Ploy: Hindutva as Twelfth Man

by Binoy Kampmark / October 4th, 2023

This week, the International Cricket Council’s One Day International tournament will commence in India. The man who will take centre stage during the occasion will be Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, whose earthly attributes are fast becoming, at least in a political sense, celestial in dimension.

Commentators are already noting that the tournament will usher in a pre-election campaign extravaganza for Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), one lasting six weeks. Modi has positioned himself as all and everything, supreme self-referencing god head in a political strategy that eclipses rivals and dooms them to irrelevance. Like other authoritarians, he is keen to find solid footing in established popular rites and customs, appropriating the features he likes (Hinduism, good), and abandoning those he dislikes (Sikhism, Islam, Christianity, bad).

India’s national sport has not been spared the Modi touch. Nothing about the man speaks about the dash and panache of the Indian cricket team, but that hardly matters. Modi has previously run the Gujarat Cricket Association with his current Home Affairs minister Amit Shah. While India’s Board of Control for Cricket has a nominal presidential head in the form of the ineffectual Roger Binny, true power over the organisation lies with Shah’s son Jay, the body’s honorary secretary. With Ashish Shela as treasurer, the BJP stranglehold seems total.

The national team has become, in effect, an extension of the prime minister’s ambitions. All have come together, fused and meshed, none better illustrated than through the renaming of an enormous stadium – one of the world’s largest, in fact – after the PM himself. With a seating capacity over 130,000, the Narendra Modi stadium, based in the PM’s home state of Gujarat, will host the key events and matches of the World Cup.

Hard to miss in this dance is also the power of global cricket’s locus. Long straddling the England-Australia nexus, cricket’s hegemonic centre has moved with spectacular effect. The BCCI (Board of Control for Cricket in India) is unchallenged in its supremacy over purse strings and glitzy promotion, with the Indian Premier League being the game’s crowning, commercial glory. In its 2023 season, the IPL drew in over 500 million viewers, registering a growth rate of 32% from the previous season, while total revenues for the BCCI in 2021-22 came in at $771 million. As the Financial Times noted in July this year, the BCCI “dominates global decision making and takes a larger share of global revenues than England and Australia combined.”

Despite this, the governing body remains blighted. Overseas, it is accused of buying preferential treatment for the IPL over other cricketing schedules, seducing, if not strong-arming smaller nations into accepting its agenda.

The cricket body has repeatedly stifled such anti-corruption efforts as those mounted by the former Delhi commissioner of police, Neeraj Kumar. When Kumar’s A Cop in Cricket was published, it told an all too familiar story on spoliation wrought by wealth, fed by the lucre of the IPL, money laundering and rampant bookmakers. He also found that the enormous outlay of funds otherwise “meant for the promotion of cricket at the grassroots level is diverted and misappropriated by state association officials, who adopt every conceivable modus operandi of malfeasance to do so.” Little wonder that much of Modi’s own relations with the powerful agents of Indian public life reflect a broader, dark model of the Hindutva crony state, where funds are diverted in the name of special interests.

The sheer scope, exposure, and significance of cricket, and its dramatic modernisation by Indian sporting practice, has made it pure political capital. Salil Tripathi, author and board member of PEN International, explains the point. “The men’s cricket World Cup, to be staged in India from October 5, will put India, and Modi’s premiership, back on the global stage.”

Peter Oborne is none too happy with this. Having written extensively about cricket on the subcontinent, a keen student and admirer of its magical play and often tortuous politics, Oborne can only look at the Modi appropriation experiment with alarm. During Modi’s tenure, dissidents, Muslims and Christians have been targeted. In an article co-authored with Imran Mulla, some symptoms of this rule are mentioned. “Since May, Hindu nationalist militants have killed over 100 Christians in northeastern Manipur, destroying churches and displaying 50,000 people in a brutal campaign of terror.”

Oborne and his co-author do not shy away from warning that the Modi-Hindutva state is showing genocidal urges. “This is a moral emergency and thus far nobody seems to have noticed. US President Joe Biden, supposedly the leader of the free world, recently gave Modi a hero’s welcome in Washington.” Modi’s renaming of the stadium sent an ominous “message that the Indian cricket team represents his own political party – the Bharatiya Jana Party (BJP) – and not the nation as a whole.”

The authors pertinently contrast the tepid coverage leading up to the Cricket World Cup with the near surfeit of moral indignation expressed prior to the FIFA Men’s World Cup held in Qatar – albeit one eventually extinguished in the glow of the tournament. “The BBC decided not to broadcast the opening ceremony live, with its star presenter Gary Lineker lecturing TV viewers on Qatar’s human rights record and Labour leader Keir Starmer boycotting the event.”

Expect, on this occasion, no videos and clips of protest by any of the competing teams complaining about human rights violations, religious intolerance, barbaric practices or appalling working conditions. Ditto that of ingratiating British and Australian politicians. Modi’s Hindutva train of religious and ideological purity has gone unnoticed in most of the cricket world. The only question that will be asked of him at the tournament’s opening is simple: Will he be able to land the ball on the square?

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.

 

Pronatalism on the Rise to Counter Growing Push for Gender Equality

by Nandita Bajaj / October 4th, 2023

There’s an insidious new tactic emerging for selling Right-wing ideology to wider audiences, evident in last month’s Budapest Demographic Summit for “family-friendly thinkers and decision-makers,” the upcoming pro-birth Natal conference in Austin, Texas, and the recent film “Birthgap.” They all peddle pronatalism, a set of norms and policies that exhorts and often coerces women to have more children to raise fertility rates, often coupled with alarmism over alleged “population collapse.”

Pronatalism is on the rise to counter the growing push for gender equality, contraceptive access, and women’s educational and economic empowerment. It is connected to totalitarian policies dictating reproductive choices, the racist Great Replacement conspiracy theory, the religious anti-abortion movement, tech elite futurism. Elon Musk, for example, is an avowed pronatalist who donated $10 million to population collapse “research” and liked the idea of denying voting rights to childless people. He wanted to attend the Budapest summit, but couldn’t make it so he met last week in Texas with Hungary’s President Novák instead to draw attention to the “demographic crisis.”

Lately pronatalists are trying to pull a more appealing game face. The Budapest Summit says it wants to support the “psychological health and security of families,” so they can “plan for a secure future.” The Natal conference claims it “has no political or ideological goal other than a world in which our children can have grandchildren.” The Birthgap film purports to help cure an epidemic of “unplanned childlessness” and proposes “re-engineer[ing] our societies to reduce [it so] many more people would go on to have…children just like parents naturally do.” It conducts tearful interviews with regretful women who lament that their natural drive to have children was thwarted by society, and now it’s too late.

Who could object to standing up for families’ health and security, and for the right of people who want children to have them? Yet behind this innocuous-seeming family-friendly rhetoric lurk unsavory connections to Right-wing propaganda, manipulation, and straight-up lies.

The Budapest summit touts Hungary’s achievement of the “highest rates of marriage and childbearing in Europe, while divorce and abortion rates are falling,” a nice way of saying that its right-wing populist leader Viktor Orbán adopted and implemented the Great Replacement ideology, which motivated mass-shooters in the U.S., as state policy. “We do not need numbers, but Hungarian children,” he said. “In our minds, immigration means surrender.”

The Natal conference has demonstrable links to far-right eugenicists and racists. Birthgap filmmaker Stephen Shaw is feted by right-wing talk show hosts like Jordan Peterson, Neil Oliver, and Chris Williamson, and presented as a “renowned demographer” despite having no credentials in demography. Shaw and Peterson both gave keynotes at the Budapest summit.

But ad hominem objections to the people behind the conferences and the film aside, the assertions they make are discreditable and counterfactual. Decrying imminent “population collapse” while the global population grows by 80 million each year and is projected to hit 10.4 billion in the 2080s is absurd. To make depopulation seem like a threat, Birthgap resorts to lying about data on the reasons for declining birth rates. It cites a 2010 study (which it calls a “meta-analysis”) by Prof. Renska Keizer which the film says indicates that just 10% of women chose not to have children and 10% can’t have them for medical reasons, which “leaves a whopping 80% of women without children childless by circumstance” as opposed to by choice.

But that’s not at all what Keizer’s research says. The 2010 study Birthgap cites is not a meta-analysis, not quantitative, and does not indicate 80% of childless women didn’t choose to be so. In fact a 2011 study by Keizer et al. analyzed a 2006 dataset surveying women in the Netherlands who were childless at age 45, and found that 55% of them were childless voluntarily, while 45% were childless due to medical or other reasons. Other studies found similar results: 56% of those without children were voluntarily childless according to a 2021 Pew Research Center survey, 72% according to the CDC National Survey of Family Growth, and 74% according to a 2022 Michigan State University study. Researchers working on my organization’s fact-checking project Birthgap Facts found no credible data supporting the film’s claim that 80% of childless women were “childless by circumstance” as opposed to by choice.

What the data does show is that women exercising their right to choose if and when to have children results in delaying childbirth, smaller families, and a decline in teen pregnancy. Those outcomes are beneficial and should be celebrated, not stigmatized.

According to the United Nations, at least 12 million girls are married before they reach the age of 18 every year, and more than 650 million women alive today were married as children. Around 257 million women globally face unintended pregnancies due to lack of access to contraception, abortion care, and counseling.

At current levels of consumption, today’s population of eight billion is driving resource depletion, soil erosion, water shortages, species extinctions, and climate catastrophe. Over a billion children are already at “extremely high risk” from climate change. High fertility rates and population growth undermine climate resilience and complicate efforts to end poverty and hunger and ensure basic services and infrastructure.

These are the real threats to the future, not some imagined conspiracy to stigmatize reproductive choices and hold fertility rates down. They make Shaw’s proposal of “social engineering” to reverse the imaginary threat of depopulation all the more reprehensible. By distorting and lying about childlessness, he’s trying to manipulate young people and their governments into prioritizing procreation over education and career. This purports to avoid a dystopian future, yet it would actually usher one in.

Rather than manufacturing a crisis whose remedy entails “social engineering” to roll back progress on human rights and women’s control over their own lives, we should focus on the real crisis fueled by pronatalist pressures from family, religion, and governments that force millions into motherhood against their wishes, often by means of coercion and sexual violence. The rhetoric of the Budapest summit, Natal, Birthgap and their ilk claiming they’re simply trying to help families and alleviate the heartbreak of “unplanned childlessness” is insidious, and we should recognize and call it out for what it is: another arrow in the pronatalist quiver, another weapon wielded against hard-fought gains in gender equality and reproductive autonomy.

Nandita Bajaj is the Executive Director of the NGO Population Balance and an adjunct lecturer at the Institute for Humane Education at Antioch University. Her research and advocacy work focuses on the combined impacts of pronatalism and human expansionism on reproductive, ecological, and intergenerational justice. Read other articles by Nandita.

 

The Contradictions of Ronald Reagan’s America

by Dan Lieberman / October 5th, 2023

As the memory of President Ronald Reagan’s administration recedes, estimation of his deeds grows, and for good reason. A cursory look at his end-of-office stats impresses the casual observer — 67%  increase in GDP, from $3 trillion in 1981 to $5 trillion in 1988, net job addition of about 18 million, reduction in the unemployment rate from 7.5% to 5.5%, at that time, one of the longest peacetime expansions in U.S. history, and inflation rate falling from 13.5% to 4.1%. Reagan served with a Democratic Congress and it is difficult to determine whose actions and policies determined outcomes. Was he more a bystander than an active participant in the downfall of the Soviet Union? Statistics show that during his administration the United States started on its road to continuous monetary and trade deficits.

Placing Reaganomics in its realistic context displaces Republican rhetoric that extols the Great Communicator as the model for presidential performance. President Reagan had enviable accomplishments for which he deserves praise, the most significant being the dignity he brought to the office, the trust and stability he gave the American people, and his manner of communicating and connecting with the populace.

Reaganomics had four simple principles — reduce government spending, reduce income and capital gains marginal tax rates, reduce government regulation, and control the money supply to reduce inflation. Containing the Soviet Union and preventing the spread of communism dominated foreign policy.

Reduce Government Spending

The top graph shows federal debt increasing from $998 billion to $ 2.6 trillion during Reagan’s reign. The lower graph has total credit outstanding also almost tripling from $5 trillion to $14 trillion during the same period.

True, it was a Democratic Congress that initiated the federal deficit, but this occurred during his administration and he had some executive power to lower it.

Reagan’s administration’s fiscal policy directly opposed his stated objectives and those of the GOP. Credit throughout the nation and federal deficits started a fast rise in debt that determined America’s future economies.

Tax Reduction

The 40th president of the United States reduced income and capital gain taxes. Objectively, income tax rates determine the transfer of money between the government and taxpayers. Neither direction, taxes up or taxes down, adds or subtracts money to the economic system or allows more or less available spending to the economy; purchasing power stays the same, which means the total purchases of goods and services remain the same.

Individual workers and taxpayers benefit from tax cuts. Stimulating the entire economy with income tax breaks is a psychological phenomenon. The exaggerations, promises, and optimism generated by tax breaks fashion a more optimistic public that incorrectly assumes the cuts stimulate additional spending to an already combined consumer and government spending. Creeping into the debate are other false assumptions — those who have excess funds will purchase domestic goods, invest, and stimulate growth. Not considered is that individuals might purchase imports and invest in speculative ventures that only churn money, both decreasing available purchasing power in the domestic economy. Reagan’s tax cutters were also against government deficits and did not realize that the former leads to the latter.

New York Times, March 6, 2018, “In Blow to Trump, America’s Trade Deficit in Goods Hits Record $891 Billion.”

Money from the tax cuts helped Americans buy more imported goods than ever in 2018. In addition, to finance the tax cuts, the government needed to borrow more dollars, some of which came from foreign investors.

GDP has steadily grown, with a few bumps, and no relation to the lowering of taxes has been proven. A government report: Taxes and the Economy: An Economic Analysis of the Top Tax Rates since 1945, Thomas L. Hungerford Specialist in Public Finance, September 14, 2012, concludes:

The top income tax rates have changed considerably since the end of World War II. Throughout the late-1940s and 1950s, the top marginal tax rate was typically above 90%; today it is 35%. Additionally, the top capital gains tax rate was 25% in the 1950s and 1960s, 35% in the 1970s; today it is 15%. The average tax rate faced by the top 0.01% of taxpayers was above 40% until the mid-1980s; today it is below 25%. Tax rates affecting taxpayers at the top of the income distribution are currently at their lowest levels since the end of the second World War. The results of the analysis suggest that changes over the past 65 years in the top marginal tax rate and the top capital gains tax rate do not appear correlated with economic growth. The reduction in the top tax rates appears to be uncorrelated with saving, investment, and productivity growth. The top tax rates appear to have little or no relation to the size of the economic pie. However, the top tax rate reductions appear to be associated with the increasing concentration of income at the top of the income distribution. As measured by IRS data, the share of income accruing to the top 0.1% of U.S. families increased from 4.2% in 1945 to 12.3% by 2007 before falling to 9.2% due to the 2007-2009 recession. At the same time, the average tax rate paid by the top 0.1% fell from over 50% in 1945 to about 25% in 2009. Tax policy could have a relation to how the economic pie is sliced, lower top tax rates may be associated with greater income disparities.

To fund government programs, Reagan signed tax increases into law every year Huge increases in FICA and signing of the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act, the “largest peacetime tax increase in American history,” describe Reagan’s ambivalence to tax reductions. If the budget was balanced, then a reasonable conclusion could relate the growth of GDP to a cut in taxes. The economic stimulus due to deficit spending and credit, coupled with the reduction of oil prices and interest rates, probably played more significant roles in the GDP rise.

Note that the graph of GDP coincides with the previous curves of credit outstanding and government debt. All these parameters started their huge increases during the Reagan administration.

Deregulation

True to his word, Reagan offered some deregulation. Was it beneficial?
The Garn–St. Germain Depository Institutions Act of 1982, which deregulated savings and loan associations and allowed banks to provide adjustable-rate mortgages, contributed to the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s. William A. Niskanen, a member of Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers has written that deregulation had the “lowest priority” of the items on the Reagan agenda.” Reagan “failed to sustain the momentum for deregulation initiated in the 1970s” and he “added more trade barriers than any administration since Hoover.”

Inflation

Reagan’s policies for controlling the money supply to reduce inflation were contradictory. Paul Volcker, who chaired the Federal Reserve from August 1979 through August 1987, resolved the anomaly.

It always seemed to me that there is a kind of common sense view that inflation is too much money chasing too few goods. You could oversimplify it and say that inflation is just a monetary phenomenon. There are decades, hundreds of years, of economic thinking relating the money supply to inflation, and people to some extent have that in their bones. So I think we could explain what we had to do to stop inflation better that way than simply by saying that we’ve got to raise interest rates. It was also true that we had no other good benchmark for how much to raise interest rates in the midst of a volatile inflationary situation. Then in October [1982], or whenever it was, the money supply (by some measures) was increasing again rather rapidly. We had a tough explanation to make, but I thought we had come to the point that we were getting boxed in by money supply data that was, in any event, strongly distorted by regulatory changes and bank behavior. We came to the conclusion that it was not very reliable to put so much weight on the money supply any more, so we backed off that approach.”

Decreasing income taxes and increasing the money supply by lowering interest rates and running deficits are not the recommended means to reduce inflation. So, why did inflation get tamed — chalk it up to greatly lowered oil prices and cheap imports from rising Japan and the rejuvenated China.

Reduced Unemployment

We come to the most often cited success of Reagan’s policies; an increase of 18 million jobs, but where? All of them were in the non-manufacturing sectors. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, shown below, reports 11 million growth in the service industries, 4.5 million in wholesale and retail trade, and 2 million in the financial industry.

Any employment increase is welcoming and significant. Few of these industries are export industries and are, in effect, supported by the surplus income of manufacturing workers. Banks don’t normally lend to consumers to buy hamburgers, and going to a doctor doesn’t increase assets. Services, trade, and finance create intangible assets and not the tangibles that have defined prices.

This leads to Reagan’s greatest failure; during an era of global prosperity, and while Japan and Germany enhanced their export industries, America started its monotonically increasing deficit in its surplus account. The graph below shows that 1983 was a fatal year for the United States; the year it became a global debtor nation.

During the Reagan decade, Japan’s current account balance went from a record deficit of $10.7 billion in 1980 to a record surplus of $87 billion in 1987 before declining to $57.1 billion in 1989. Similarly, the Federal Republic of Germany, after experiencing deficits during 1979–81, had its current accounts balance rebound to about a DM 9.9 billion surplus in 1982 and increase to DM 76.5 billion in 1986.

While Reagan talked mellifluously, the world’s principal nations trade (including an emerging China) flowed with honey. Examine all the graphs and tables and the conclusion becomes obvious: Reagan’s administration policies increased federal and private debt at exponential rates, decreased manufacturing employment, and turned a positive current account into an ever-mounting negative.

Cold War

Reagan talked tough and acted tough — excoriating the Soviet Union, militarily challenging Moscow by greatly increasing the defense budget, and covertly helping Pakistan intelligence in supplying arms to the Afghan Mujahedeen. His 1983 NSC National Security Decision Directive 75 stated that” a central priority of the U.S. in its policy toward the Soviet Union contains, and over time, reverses Soviet expansionism.” The directive noted: “The U.S. must rebuild the credibility of its commitment to resist Soviet encroachment on U.S. interests and those of its Allies and friends, and to support effectively those Third World states that are willing to resist Soviet pressures or oppose Soviet initiatives hostile to the United States, or are special targets of Soviet policy.” None of these pursuits intended to overthrow the Soviet Union, all were long-term, and did not provide mechanisms to end the Cold War.

The Reagan administration approached the 1986 Reykjavik Summit meeting as an informal exploratory session with a limited agenda and found Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev proposing dramatic reductions in strategic arms. Gorbachev led the negotiations between the two governments and led the Soviet Union into disintegration. An end to the Cold War automatically followed. Reagan’s involvement in the proceedings was more as an observer who did not discourage Gorbachev and refrained from interfering rather than a direct participant who engineered the outcome. He was not in office when Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, on December 8, 1991, signed the Belovezha Accords with President Kravchuk of Ukraine, and Chairman Shushkevich of Belarus, “recognizing each other’s independence and creating the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) to replace the Soviet Union.”

Step away from Reagan’s relation to the decline of the Soviet Union and step forward to examine his policy of preventing communist expansion and his foreign policy initiatives appear troubling.

• Nicaragua ─ Use of the illegal sale of arms to Iran to fund the Contra rebels in Nicaragua was a major scandal.
• El Salvador ─ Despite the atrocities committed by the El Salvador governments, which Reagan never persuaded the Central American government to halt, he provided the Salvadoran government with substantial military aid and advisors.
• Guatemala ─ Reagan attempted to justify his shipments of military hardware to the repressive Rios Montt regime by claiming that Guatemala’s human rights conditions were improving. In May 2013, Ríos Montt was found guilty of genocide against Mayan Indian groups by a Guatemalan court. He was sentenced to 80 years in prison, 50 years for genocide, and 30 years for crimes against humanity.
• Grenada ─ Reagan misstated the construction of a civilian airport by Cuban laborers as a military airport for delivery of military hardware to Angolan rebels and used that as an excuse to invade defenseless Grenada and overthrow the leftist government. Casualties from the unnecessary invasion ─ 24 Cuban laborers killed and 59 wounded, the Grenadian Army suffered 21 killed and 58 captured, and 24 Grenadian civilians died during the operation. The United Nations General Assembly condemned the invasion as “a flagrant violation of international law” by a vote of 108 to 9.
• Angola ─ China originally assisted Jonas Savimbi and his National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), which espoused Maoist thoughts. A later UNITA modified itself and aligned with Western capitalism, bringing Reagan to militarily support UNITA in its struggle with the communist-oriented Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). U.S. support for UNITA prolonged the conflict and caused havoc.
• Afghanistan ─ Reagan’s CIA’s assistance to the fundamentalist insurgents through Pakistani intelligence, in a Civil war that was not part of the Cold War, and where the U.S. had no interest, proved fatal to America. Reagan’s assistance to Pakistani intelligence enabled the Taliban victory and the organization of al-Qaeda. Enough said.
• Philippines — The Reagan administration aligned itself with Dictator Ferdinand Marcos, through all his assassination of opponents, repression, corruption, and election rigging until military and government leaders abandoned Marcos.
• Libya ─ Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi did not ingratiate himself with Ronald Reagan, The tit-for-tat invectives and hostile actions exploded into Reagan ordering full-scale bombings by the U.S. air force of Libyan territory. By a vote of 79 in favor to 28 against with 33 abstentions, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution that “condemns the military attack perpetrated against the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya on 15 April 1986, which constitutes a violation of the Charter of the United Nations and of international law.”
• Beirut ─ President Reagan sent U.S. troops to Lebanon as part of a peace-keeping force, dispatched to assist Lebanese armed forces in the “departure from Beirut of armed PLO personnel and to assist in the transition of authority to the Lebanese government in Beirut.” Troubles for the American-backed regime of President Amin Gemayel led US warships to shell Syrian and Druze militia positions outside Beirut, which Reagan explained as a military intervention to prevent the Middle East from being “incorporated into the Soviet bloc.” Several months later a bombing of the U.S. barracks in Beirut killed 241 U.S. Marines. Four months later, after one of the biggest debacles in U.S. history, Reagan ordered all U.S. forces to leave Lebanon.
• Iran Air Flight 655 ─ On July 3, 1988, surface-to-air missiles, fired by USS Vincennes, shot down a scheduled passenger plane over Iran’s territorial waters in the Persian Gulf and killed all 290 people on board. Excuses of misidentification intensified criticism of Reagan’s orders that sent U.S. military into war zones where they were not wanted or needed. As usual, Reagan used the Soviet bogeyman as a superficial reason for sending a U.S. warship close to Iran’s shores. President Reagan said that “increasing the American naval force and protecting the tankers are necessary to defend the principle of free navigation and to prevent the Soviet Union, which is leasing tankers to Kuwait, from establishing itself as a gulf power.”

Conclusion

President Ronald Reagan had a vision that serves one sector of today’s Republican Party, a vision of self-reliance, limited government, stout defense, and world leadership toward freedom. His administration contradicted that vision, using big government to expand the economy, expand the defense budget, and engage in useless assistance to anti-communist tyrants who crippled their defenseless peoples and stained America’s image as a democratic and peace-loving nation. Federal debt and trade deficits gained impetus during the Reagan presidency. A pledge to balance the federal budget never materialized in any of his eight years in office.

The Gipper can take some credit for propelling an already declining Soviet Union into total decline. The most significant contribution to the political environment of the time was himself. The nation was more united during his tenure in office, exhibiting bipartisan cooperation and not displaying the antagonisms, adversities, and lack of cohesion that characterize 21stcentury America. He connected with the populace, performed with dignity, and portrayed an optimism that energized the public. The contradictions he personally displayed mirrored the contradictions of his policies ─ at times Ronald Reagan seemed disengaged and disenchanted with his surroundings, but his private notes, policy directives, speech writings, and alertness when the U.S. was challenged indicate he was deeply involved in governing the United States of America. Similar to Ronald Reagan, the results of the governing are contradictory and depend upon perspective.

Dan Lieberman edits Alternative Insight, a commentary on foreign policy, economics, and politics. He is author of the non-fiction books A Third Party Can Succeed in America, Not until They Were Gone, Think Tanks of DC, The Artistry of a Dog, and a novel: The Victory (under a pen name). He can be reached at: alternativeinsight@earthlink.net. Read other articles by Dan.

 

Anti-War Activists Arrested at Sit-In for Peace inside Sen. Bernie Sanders Office

by Codepink / October 4th, 2023

Washington, D.C. – A group of 50 activists and Vermont constituents staged a sit-in inside Senator Bernie Sanders’ office on Wednesday, demanding the senator to call for peace and diplomacy in Ukraine instead of more weapons and war. The sit-in resulted in the arrest of 11 activists, including an 89-year-old CODEPINK peace activist.

The group was joined by Green Party Presidential Candidate Dr. Cornel West in the Senate lobby for a prayer vigil before the sit-in. The prayer vigil and sit-in were part of a week of action that included an antiwar rally on Tuesday night featuring Dr. West, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary; Claudia de la Cruz, Co-Executive Director of The People’s Forum; Lee Camp, American comedian, writer, podcaster, news journalist; Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK and Global Exchange; and Eugene Puryear, American journalist, activist, and host on Breakthrough News.

“We need Bernie to provide leadership to put a stop to the US funding of the Ukraine war now. Use the money for healthcare, not warfare,” said Burlington resident James Marc Leas.

Crystal Zevon, an artist and CODEPINK peace activist from Barnet, VT, expressed her disappointment in Senator Sanders, who has voted for more weapons to Ukraine and even criticized Democrats who called for peace talks. “Yes, Bernie should condemn the Russian invasion, but he should also be calling for a negotiated end to this brutal war,” said Zevon.

The group carried signs in support of peace talks and negotiations, including one quote from the Senator himself in which he previously called for a diplomatic solution.

Jodie Evans, Co-Founder of CODEPINK, reminded Senator Sanders of his antiwar roots, “We are showing up to remind Bernie of the values he espoused that made his name what it is. And call on him to stand for peace, to call for diplomacy and to again lead for peace,” said Evans.

Medea Benjamin, Co-Founder of CODEPINK and author of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, expressed her disappointment in the lack of Democrats calling for peace talks. “I am appalled that NO Democrats are saying what the majority of American people are saying: We need peace talks, not more war. This is NOT a MAGA issue or a Republican issue but an issue of human survival to stop WWIII and possibly a nuclear war. We need Bernie to be with us on the side of peace,” said Benjamin.

The activists are urging Senator Sanders to call for the flow of weapons to stop and the leadership of Ukraine, Russia, and the US to sit at the negotiating table and end the horrific war.

Click here to see all the photos and video clips from all the actions.

Codepink is a women-led grassroots organization working to end U.S. wars and militarism, support peace and human rights initiatives, and redirect our tax dollars into healthcare, education, green jobs and other life-affirming programs. Read other articles by Codepink, or visit Codepink's website.