DESANTISLAND

Florida’s Conservative CFO Proposes State-Owned Public Bank

By Marco Rosaire Rossi

August 22, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Creative Commons Image via negativespace.co

On August 19th, public banking advocates found they have a surprising supporter. Florida’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Republican Jimmy Patronis, announced that his office requested that the Florida legislature consider creating a state-owned public bank. Dubbed the “Sunshine Freedom Bank” by Patronis, the bank would move Florida’s approximately annual $150 billion in revenue and assets away from out-of-state financial institutions mostly located in New York and into a single state-owned and operated institution in Florida.

To get the project off the ground, Patronis is requesting that legislators approve a feasibility study that would explore the practical requirements of establishing the Sunshine Freedom Bank, including the necessary regulatory framework, initial investment costs, technological logistics, and potential governing structure. 

Florida is one of many states that have proposed researching the creation of a state-owned public bank in recent years. In 2019, California’s legislature passed AB 857, the Public Banking Act. The law did not create a state-owned public bank, but instead enabled cities, counties, and joint powers authorities to establish their own public banks. Since then, Oakland, Berkeley, Richmond and Alameda County have agreed to a joint venture to create a public bank for the East Bay region, and the Los Angeles city council has voted to allocate funds to a feasibility study for its own public bank. Also in 2019, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy signed Executive Order No. 91, which created a Public Bank Implementation Board that was tasked with researching and designing a public bank for the state. Last year, representatives in Washington introduced a bill to create a public infrastructure bank for the state’s local, municipal, and tribal governments, while at the same time neighboring legislators in Oregon passed a bill to conduct a feasibility study for a state-owned public bank.

While all these legislative efforts have seemed promising, they have faced serious setbacks. In California, the local banks have faced regulatory hurdles which have dramatically slowed the process; many activists are anxious that they will not get a public bank off the ground before the end of the decade. In New Jersey, very little action has been taken to move the project forward, and it is only this year that the Public Bank Implementation Board finalized its report. Meanwhile, the public banking bill in Washington was killed in committee, and Governor Tina Kotek in Oregon vetoed the legislature’s plans for a feasibility study. 

Considering this reality, it is hard for public banking advocates to be too optimistic regarding Patronis’s announcement, despite the CFO’s enthusiastic support. Still, Florida presents a unique situation for the public banking movement.

First, while other states have faced—at best—passive support to public banking from their state’s treasurer or financial officer, in Florida it is the financial leadership of the state that is taking the initiative; furthermore, it’s doing so absent the type of robust social movement that is found in other states.

Second, while the other states considering public banking legislation are liberal bastions, with Democrats dominating state politics, Florida is another story. In the past two decades, the state has moved dramatically to the right and become a Republican stronghold. Indeed, while Patronis has emphasized the profitability of the Sunshine Freedom Bank, he also recognizes the institution as a means of promoting his party’s conservative values. During the announcement, Patronis decried investment plans that incorporate environmental and social governance or diversity, equity, and inclusion guidelines instead of focusing solely on maximizing returns. “Woke banks and regulators in New York, California and Washington, D.C. have been imposing their toxic ideology on hard-working Floridians by controlling their money, when they should be focused on core business functions and maximizing returns on our investments,” read the message from his office.

Still, while most activists in the public banking movement are leftwing progressives, the issue has elements that appeal to both ends of the political spectrum. While the left is drawn to public banking as an alternative to free market capitalism, the right sees it as an opportunity to ensure localized control of finances and a means to get capital to need areas—especially rural communities—without having to raise taxes. Afterall, it is North Dakota—a deeply conservative state—that remains the one state in the country that has a functioning state-owned public bank. And, despite being a creation of rural populists and urban progressives in the Nonpartisan League at the turn of the last century, the institution currently maintains strong support throughout the state.

What Patronis’ announcement does definitively indicate is that the public banking movement is growing. For a variety of reasons, different factions within American society have become alienated and frustrated with the country’s current banking model. More and more, people are recognizing the need to treat banking—and by extension control of the country’s money supply—as a public utility that demands public oversight and management, rather than a private endeavor that is mostly controlled by a handful of shareholders located in the country’s financial centers.   

Marco Rosaire Rossi is the Executive Director of Washingtonians for Public Banking and a part-time adjunct professor in political science. His previous articles on banking reform and public banking have appeared on the blog the Cascadia Advocate and in Real Change.

BDS Win: AXA Divests from Israeli Banks and Elbit Systems

In a resounding victory for the BDS movement, Palestine activists have forced French multinational insurance company AXA to divest from all major Israeli banks and the weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems.

By Michael Arria

August 22, 2024

Source: Mondoweiss


Palestine Action activists are removed from an Elbit Systems factory in Oldham, Greater Manchester, January 2022. Photo: Palestine Action

In a resounding victory for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, the French multinational insurance company AXA has sold its investments in all major Israeli banks and divested from Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems.

The news was confirmed by a new report published by the corporate accountability group Ekō, which is part of the coalition that’s been pressuring AXA to divest for nearly a decade.

“BDS pressure works. The confirmation of AXA’s divestment from all Israeli banks and Elbit Systems is a major milestone for the movement that follows years of strategic BDS campaigning,” said BDS Movement Europe Coordinator Fiona Ben Chekroun in a statement.

“Corporate criminals try to sear into our consciousness the impossibility of prevailing over them, but BDS works and we have prevailed over AXA and many other much larger companies,” she continued. “We surely can prevail in many more corporate accountability struggles in pursuit of freedom, justice and equality.”

According to the Ekō report, AXA held over 2.5 million shares, worth $20.4 million in Bank Hapoalim, Bank Leumi, and Israel Discount Bank until last September. However, the new data reveals the company “engaged in clear, fast, and intentional divestment from these complicit banks” and by June 2024, its shares in the banks had effectively dropped to zero.

In 2020 the UN Human Rights Council listed all three of those banks in the UN database of businesses connected to Israel’s illegal settlements.

Last year pro-Palestine protesters in Ireland occupied AXA offices in Dublin calling on people to boycott the company.

The AXA news comes just days after the Cambridge Day reported that Elbit Systems have effectively stopped operating its office in the Massachusetts city. The building has consistently been targeted by protesters for months.

“We will continue organizing until Elbit Systems leaves Cambridge. Should Elbit leave their current offices at 130 Bishop Allen Drive, we advise other local real estate companies that Elbit is a difficult tenant. Where Elbit goes, disruptive community protests follow, as Intercontinental Real Estate Corp. has learned over the past year,” said BDS Boston in response to the story.

“Two incredible wins to celebrate from Massachusetts to Paris thanks to BDS and Gaza protests,” tweeted journalist Rafael Shimunov.

The BDS National Committee celebrated the news in a press release, but noted that the campaign was not ending.

“AXA is not off the hook, though,” it reads. “Amidst Israel’s live streamed genocide in Gaza against 2.3 million Palestinians, the coalition will continue to monitor AXA’s investments to make sure it is not complicit in the ongoing genocide.”

“The BDS movement, with its intersectional partnerships worldwide, calls for intensifying pressure on all financial institutions profiting from oppression and injustice,” it continues. “Investing in apartheid Israel has always been unethical and illegal. With Israel’s economy in steady decline, it’s now also really reckless.”

UK

What the Anti-Immigration Riots Tell Us About Starmer’s Labour  Government

Labour strongly condemned the riots, but can Starmer’s faction confront its own dark history of race-baiting?

By Brian Chikwava

August 22, 2024

Source: African Arguments

The anti-immigration riots in Southport, UK, 5 August 2024. Courtesy: By StreetMic LiveStream, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=151177179



What we know is that the far-right riots in the UK were not a legitimate outpouring of anger about the stabbing of children because, even after their reasoning justifying their violence had collapsed in the face of facts, something else continued to drive the rioters to attack mosques, Muslims and black people.

It did not matter that the 17-year-old boy who stabbed the children was not a recent foreign arrival, as they had believed. It also did not matter that the boy was not a Muslim, as they had believed. Something else was driving them, but the British political and media classes could not name it.

The riots cannot have been about the raw deal that the average Brit has got out of the neoliberal settlement because, as ex-Labour MP Laura Pidcock noted, these bearers of “legitimate” anger were notable for their absence at sites where communities were fighting hardships. They don’t help at food banks, aren’t bothered by homelessness, and are absent at campaigns against government spending cuts, by Tories or by Labour. Their issues are not economic.

The riots cannot have been about the immigrant question in general, as the media tried to tell us, because if that were true, we would have seen Ukrainians, Eastern Europeans and Australians under attack. The riots were about a specific kind of immigrant: the Muslim. If you were black or brown, that made you a fair target.

We cannot trust the new Labour government to take an honest position on the problem because its leading lights got where they are by way of a strange relationship with the truth. For a while now, Westminster, Fleet Street and the BBC have operated in ways barely distinguishable from a psyop on the general public. We already saw some of this. When anti-fascist groups organised to meet a planned countrywide march on Thursday, 8 August 2024, Starmer’s government instructed Labour MPs not to join any anti-fascist marches. Yet as soon as it became clear that the anti-fascist groups had successfully deterred the planned countrywide marches by the far right, the government and the media were quick off the blocks to give credit to, erm, the good British people for seeing off the rioters. Neatly skipped over was the political identity of the people who came out on the streets to face down the far right, for they were none other than anti-fascists, pro-Palestine protestors and the usual anti-war groups. In short, the same people that Westminster and mainstream media were calling “hate mobs”, “terrorists”, or “antisemites” at the height of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government will avoid as much as possible answering any basic questions, such as: is Tommy Robinson a fascist? Is Nigel Farage far right? Are we racist? Labour is afraid and incapable of naming things; if it can’t correctly name Islamophobic riots, it cannot hope to find the correct solution. Even when Starmer condemned ‘far-right thuggery,’ it sounded dishonest to frame the people involved as a mindless fringe group of thugs whose appearance on the streets was irrational and puzzling when the evidence of recent years is clear: Islamophobia is Westminster’s last respectable bigotry. Eager to investigate antisemitism in the Labour Party, the Equality & Human Rights Commission has steadfastly refused to do anything about evidence of Islamophobia in the Conservative Party. The Forde Report found a racism hierarchy in the Labour Party.

In the aftermath of the riots, New Labour veteran Margaret Hodge came forward to say, ‘We’re too frightened to talk about immigration.’ Yet it’s impossible to find one subject that has consistently been at the centre of British politics as much as immigration. In 2005, Tony Blair was panicking over what to do with the high numbers of migrants from Afghanistan and Iraq and how that would impact Labour at the ballot box. In 2007, Hodge earned the applause of the far-right British National Party after talking about the “fear” triggered in her constituency by the sight of “different” faces in schools. Prime Minister Gordon Brown resurrected the National Front slogan “British jobs for British workers”; Labour’s 2015 election campaign featured explicitly anti-migrant coffee mugs, and in the most recent election campaign, Labour was competing with Tories over who could be the most horrible against immigrants. Talking about immigrants, particularly the sort that Boris Johnson called “letterboxes,” helped the Brexit campaign over the line in 2016.

Hodge is one of the reactionary Labour Party grandees who want a Labour Party that is essentially the Conservative Party Light. At the height of Blairism, these are the folks who claimed that everyone was middle class: “We’re all Thatcherites now”.

Blair is famous for “modernising” the Labour Party by dropping clause IV of the party’s constitution. This clause obliged it to represent the interests of working people. Labour is now ideologically incapable of offering working people a path to a place where their first point of identification is social struggle. Lacking a genuine political offer, Labour has chosen to follow Tories’ who are not shy to encourage people to identify along racial lines. A party that once belonged to working people but is now a vehicle of political careering by a group of liberals who can operate the party with a vanishing membership because they don’t need membership fees if the party can be funded by corporate lobbyists, city bankers and vulture capitalists presently waiting for Labour to start yet another round of stripping away public assets for a song. Starmer’s government is available to the highest bidder. And racists bid the highest in this country.

UK Prime Minister, Keir Starmer exuberant about Labour’s landslide, on 5 July. Courtesy: Keir Starmer social media.

Starmer’s clique came into government on the back of extraordinary duplicity, with the support of the liberal mainstream media, likely looking for the first opportunity to slip out of the sham and pretend they were not at all involved. The liberal commentariat for years encouraged people to “vote for the lesser evil.” They soon forgot that they chose evil, started defending evil, while self-describing as “sensible moderates.” Paid to mis-represent the world and how power shapes it, they threw their support behind the right wing of the Labour Party when it sabotaged Jeremy Corbyn’s party leadership. They pretended not to see the difference between people supporting Westminster’s most notable anti-apartheid campaigner and a far-right bloke who is eager to murder in order to assert preferred racial hierarchies. So, Jeremy Corbyn was routinely compared to a Nazi prison guard; the BBC broadcast General Sir Nicholas Houghton in full uniform saying the Army would be ‘worried’ about a Corbyn win, and no one raised an eyebrow; the BBC’s premier news programme, Newsnight, depicted Corbyn as Lord Voldemort, and army squaddies did target practice on an image of Corbyn.

If Brexit and its obsession with coming swarms of foreigners took the country halfway to where it is now, the political assassination of Jeremy Corbyn completed the journey. The signals were loud, public and unmistakable: the British voter had had enough of the foreigner, and the land’s rulers would not tolerate a redistributive agenda. A senior Labour figure allied to Starmer felt obliged to scream racist and sexist language at the first Black female MP, Diane Abbott, intent on breaking her.

Starmer’s Labour government is ill-suited for the task not because it lacks ability but because the party leadership earned its place by distortion and disinformation. They had to be really ugly to thwart Corbynism and the threat it posed to capital; if naked racism and sexism were required, that was fine. Eventually, they found the perfect weapon to decapitate Corbyn: antisemitism.

Here, they really shone as political ghouls. For their efforts they have been rewarded with a thundering parliamentary majority despite fewer people voting for them than did for the supposedly unpopular Corbyn-led Labour.

After the Equality & Human Rights Commission’s report over the Labour Party’s antisemitism row, when Corbyn failed to apologise for saying claims of rampant antisemitism levelled at the party under his leadership were exaggerated, Starmer and his mob leapt at the opportunity to start kicking Corbyn out of the party. It is worth remembering that in the purge that followed, Starmer’s Labour expelled left-leaning Jewish party members at such a blistering rate, that it became statistically more likely to be kicked out if you were Jewish.

Starmer claimed to be cleansing the party of the scourge of antisemitism. All the clever political editors, conduits of the antisemitism outrage, displayed a wonderful collective incuriosity about the satirical nature of what was unfolding. When the party was done processing a backlog of 10,000 antisemitism cases inherited from Corbyn and 183 party members were rightly expelled, the media again excelled with their disinterest.

187 individuals is, of course, 0.03% of peak membership during the Corbyn years. Way before Corbyn was party leader, the Campaign Against Antisemitism’s own political party surveys going back years had estimated antisemitism in the party to be at about 23 – 32% of the membership – an estimate still lower, it should be noted, than the figures for the Conservative Party. In fact, the Campaign Against Antisemitism’s survey had shown antisemitism going down under Corbyn. But since the antisemitism row was hardly a search for the truth, hard facts did not count.

The political and media figures behind the duplicity over ‘rampant antisemitism’ in Corbyn’s Labour Party have never had to account for anything. The media has responded to Al Jazeera’s shocking documentary, Labour Files, with mind-boggling silence. Everything they told us was true about Corbyn turned out to be the opposite. That is not a story the establishment is interested in. It’s also not a story that Starmer’s political outriders are interested in, and they most certainly will not want to be reminded about the Forde Report, commissioned by Starmer but now buried, its recommendations ignored because it gave the wrong answer.

Martin Forde KC found a racism hierarchy where he was expected to launder the antisemitism row. Look, a black barrister has said it: the Corbyn gang were irredeemable racists. The BBC unsuccessfully pressured Forde to change the report before publishing it to make it look more favourable. When the report finally came out in July 2022, the media ignored it entirely. The blackout perplexed Forde: by March 2023, he had not heard anything from the Labour Party. Neither had a single media outlet spoken to him.

Only when Forde spoke to Al Jazeera about the report, did he hear from the Labour Party: a legal threat saying he was “acting against the party’s interest.”

And this is why the Labour government will struggle to address the riots: it cannot tackle Islamophobia and racism in the country when it resolutely refuses to face up to the same poison within its own party.

The late David Graeber did not foresee Labour’s Islamophobia problem, but did predict that Starmer was going to lose the progressive left and fail to win over the right vote. This is already evident from the last general election. He also noted that when fascists start marching on the streets and the police vanish, as they often do in that hour, the people that Starmer’s Labour was eager to call antisemites will be the lot having running battles against the fascists.

As with Brexit, which was driven by Etonians and billionaires styling themselves as the resistance, we saw the riots being fanned by the same figures: Tories on various levels and even Elon Musk. As for Starmer’s lot, they are at home cutting deals with the establishment, avoiding the hard work of developing an intellectual framework against the beasts.

At this moment, luck favours the devil.

Brian Chikwava is a London based Zimbabwean writer.

Broken Promises: Western Hypocrisy in the Global Minerals Scramble

LIKE CANADA DOESN'T

Western governments need to enforce strong regulation that ensures responsible mining and holds accountable all companies involved in extracting and sourcing minerals.

By Alex Kopp

August 23, 2024

Source: FPIF

Anti-extractivist coalition actions in Quito, Ecuador in March 2024 

| Image Credit: @memed.act

Western governments have finally realized that the energy transition is happening—and that the resources needed are mostly in Chinese hands. Transition minerals, by some dubbed the “new oil,” are the key ingredients for renewables technologies like EV batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines that make the transition happen. A large share of those minerals are extracted in the Global South, but China controls their value chains to a large degree. China processes over 90 percent of rare earth elements, almost 100 percent of graphite, over 75 percent of cobalt and over 60 percent of lithium. China also produces around 80 percent of the world’s solar panels and makes between 60-80 percent of the world’s electric vehicles, wind turbines, and lithium-ion batteries.

Hardly a week goes by these days without Western governments announcing a new partnership or strategy to gain the upper hand in the minerals scramble. It’s difficult to imagine that just a few years ago an American company sold off one of the world’s biggest cobalt mines to a Chinese company. Resource nationalism has replaced the Western vision of a globalized free market for raw materials.

From the Spanish Conquista’s gold and silver plundering to the more recent minerals booms, those unfortunate enough to live on land bearing valuable resources have often been driven away and/or seen their land polluted. In policies and press releases Western governments vow that this time it’s going to be different with declarations about projects with “respect for human rights” using “responsible practices” and declare they will follow “high” and “rigorous ESG standards.” Yet, a closer look at recent policy decisions leaves much doubt whether Western countries live up to their promises.
Weak Regulation

The hastily negotiated Critical Raw Materials Act from last year is the basis for the European Union’s approach to better access key raw materials. The EU vows that supported projects shall be “implemented sustainably,” particularly with regard to the “prevention and minimization of environmental…and socially adverse impacts through responsible practices” but allows at the same time the fast-tracking of permitting processes and authorities to “override” adverse impacts on the environment.

With almost 70 percent of the world’s transition minerals extraction projects located on or near indigenous people’s or farmer’s land, their meaningful consultation is key to avoiding the environmental and social problems mining has caused in the past. And yet many mining projects are launched without properly informing affected communities, let alone obtaining their consent.

The United States doesn’t have sufficient regulation in place to hold mining companies accountable for their overseas operations. Instead, it relies largely on the industry’s self-policing through voluntary schemes that have often failed in the past. A prominent example is the Brumadinho tailings dam that broke in 2019, killing 272 people in Brazil despite an inspection having certified the dam’s stability just four months before.
Turning a Blind Eye to Corruption

The extractive sector accounts for one in five cases of transnational bribery. Bribes do not only deprive the often poor population in resource-rich countries of revenues, but the massive unearned income from natural resources can also undermine countries’ democratic institutions and rule of law, a phenomenon called the “resource curse.” Past commodity booms have unleashed large waves of corruption, which is why governments’ strong stance against corruption is particularly important at this moment. But the United States and UK have sent out opposite signals.

In December 2017, the United States sanctioned the Israeli businessman Dan Gertler for his corrupt deals in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) through which he is alleged to have siphoned off over $1.3 billion of public funds to his companies, which Gertler denies. In a sharp turnaround, the United States has now proposed to lift the sanctions if Gertler sells off his remaining stakes in giant copper and cobalt mining operations in the country, effectively allowing him to further profit an estimated $300 million from ill-gotten assets. The United States hopes that the deal will incentivize Western-leaning companies to better access the DRC’s minerals. Seventy percent of the world’s cobalt—a key ingredient for EV batteries—comes from the DRC. U.S. government officials also mentioned to the Wall Street Journal that Saudi Arabian mining companies are interested in buying stakes in Congolese cobalt and copper mines through which American companies would get some of the metals.

In August 2023, the UK dropped a 10-year investigation into the Kazakh mining company ENRC centered on suspected bribes for cobalt and copper mining contracts in the DRC, saying it had “insufficient admissible evidence to prosecute” after facing a wave of legal proceedings from the company, which vehemently denies wrongdoing. By signaling to the mining sector that it is not under a close watch, such decisions risk spurring further corruption.
Risky Finance

In their quest to catch up with Chinese competitors in accessing critical minerals, Western governments are willing to prop up mining operations with big sums of money. Through export credit agencies providing government-backed loans and insurance, Western governments support projects that investors may otherwise deem too risky. The White House senior adviser for energy and investment recently admitted as much when he said, in May 2024, that “the government has a real role here of incentivizing private capital by taking more risk.”

In the past, mining projects backed by public funds have destroyed unique habitats, used forced labor, fueled violent conflict, and heavily polluted the environment. As part of the Minerals Security Partnership, a U.S.-led coalition of allied governments, the U.S. Development Finance Corporation offered a loan of up to $150 million in November 2023 for a graphite mine project in Mozambique. It is located in a region of the country where it may have serious human rights impacts given a conflict between the government and an Islamist insurgency that has led to almost 5,000 deaths during the last five years .

The EU’s strategic partnership approach, designed to secure a steady supply of critical raw materials, provides finance for producer countries through the Global Gateway, the EU’s version of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. In February, the EU agreed on a partnership on “sustainable raw materials value chains” with Rwanda, which should raise major red flags. After having plundered 3T (tin, tantalum, tungsten) minerals directly in the DRC during the second Congo war, Rwanda has profited from taxing smuggled minerals, which have been connected to conflict ever since. The strategic partnership is being negotiated at a time when the Rwandan army has invaded the DRC and supports the armed group M23, which controls much of the smuggling from some of the largest coltan mines in the world. The European Commission proposes “traceability…at the core of the EU-Rwanda critical raw materials partnership,” supposedly to counter the risk of sourcing conflict minerals. Yet Global Witness has shown that the dominant traceability system for 3T minerals in Rwanda has laundered huge volumes of smuggled conflict minerals since it has been set up.
Investor Courts Undercutting Environmental and Social Regulation

Free trade agreements with producer countries are another common tool for Western governments to secure access to minerals from third countries. These often impose an untransparent investment protection system that allows investors to sue governments for billions of dollars for state action that may negatively affect their investments.

When the Guatemalan supreme court ordered a halt to a mining project for lack of consultation with affected indigenous peoples in 2016, the mining company Kappes, Cassiday & Associates (KCA) initiated a lawsuit against the government for over $400 million for not providing adequate protection to KCA’s investment against community protests, effectively claiming that the government did not do enough to suppress local opposition to the company’s mine.

Colombia faces 14 arbitration processes and eight more in pre-arbitration stage, many of which involve mining companies. Altogether, Colombia is being sued for an estimated $13.2 billion. By insisting on such investment settlement clauses in trade agreements, Western government are complicit in undermining protection for mining-affected people and land.
New Frontiers, New Destruction

While Western governments haven’t set targets to reduce materials use that could curb minerals demand, they support projects in new, high-risk territories that will likely have devastating environmental impact. The deep sea is one of the few areas that has so far been spared from destructive mining. Norway, however, is determined to change this, and among U.S. lawmakers support for deep sea mining is growing as well. As the seabed has scarcely been researched, it’s difficult to assess the precise effects that mining would have, but experts assert that it would lead to indefinite reductions in biodiversity and impacted areas wouldn’t recover for decades or even centuries.

As if these prospects weren’t dire enough, there are even greater risks looming on the horizon. With Western governments and allies forming clubs such as the Minerals Security Partnership against the Chinese market dominance, pressure on producer countries to align with one or the other side mount.

If the CEO of the world’s biggest EV manufacturer had his way, foreign interventions against governments who are unwilling to bow to Western conditions could soon be back. Reacting to a Twitter user’s allegation that the United States organized a coup against Bolivia’s president to access the country’s lithium, Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk wrote “We will coup whoever we want—deal with it!”.

Some analysts fear that we may see military escalation of the scramble for the “new oil” in the near future. The Arctic region, home to a large rare earth mine, is one area that has recently come into the crosshairs of geopolitical interests with Europe, the United States, Russia, and China struggling for influence.

Global superpowers must keep the quest for minerals within the boundaries of economic competition and refrain from using force. Western governments need to live up to their promises of a just energy transition by putting in place and enforcing strong regulation that ensures responsible mining and holds accountable all companies involved in extracting and sourcing minerals.


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Alex Kopp
Alex Kopp is a senior policy advisor on transition minerals for Global Witness.

The Politics of Water Under Occupation

It is as simple as drinking a glass of water, but not in Palestine

By M. Reza Behnam

August 22, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

"Severe problems with water supply in West Bank and Gaza, February 2014." Photo caption from source: "Elderly man fills water container at public multi-faucet sink of Khan Yunis Water Authority’s wastewater treatment plant." Muhammad Sabah, B’Tselem | Photo credit B’Tselem

The International Court of Justice released its historic advisory opinion in July 2024 just as I was finishing my essay on Israel’s theft and abuse of the water resources of Palestine.

The 80-page opinion, “Legal consequences arising from the policies and practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem,” unequivocally states that “the State of Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful” and should come to an end “as rapidly as possible.”

The “Exploitation of natural resources” section (V/B.4, 124-133) was of particular interest to me. In it, the Court confirmed what I had set out to disclose, that Israel has used, misused and abused its illegal control over the water resources of Palestine to gain a permanent hold over all of the land.

The Court concluded that the occupied West Bank (especially Area C), rich in natural resources, has been used by Israel to the exclusive benefit of its own population, while disadvantaging Palestinians and their communities. Area C covers 61 percent of the West Bank and is under the complete control of Israel.

Furthermore, the ICJ determined that Israel must relinquish control over all aspects of Palestinians’ lives, including its most vital natural resource, water.

The concept of water is deeply etched in the culture, politics, religion and mythology of the Middle East. For example, it is a tradition, in the extreme summer heat, to leave a jug of water outside the front door or gate in neighborhoods as an offering to the thirsty.

In Islam, water is a treasured resource. It played a central role in the birth of the new religion, in its narratives and rituals. Extreme drought may have been decisive in contributing to the upheavals in ancient Arabia and in the societal change from which Islam emerged in the early 7th century.

Water is central to the mythology of Islam. In Muslim lore, it was the bubbling waters of the Well of Zamzam in the Arabian peninsula that kept the young prophet, Ismael (son of Abraham and Hajar) alive. The well, located in the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, continues to miraculously generate water after 4,000 years. Water from the well is also distributed to the Prophet’s Mosque, Masjid al-Nabawi, in Medina, the resting place of the Prophet Mohammad.

Muslims in Gaza, much like the world over, stand prayerful in the direction of the two venerated mosques five times daily. However, Israel’s relentless bombing campaign since October 2023 has made access to ablution water impossible.

To fully understand the gravity and pain that Palestinians have endured it is essential to remember what they have lost.

Since European Zionist migration to Palestine in the early 20th century, life for its indigenous people has been changed.

Israel’s founders were mindful that their colonizing dream in Palestine was sustainable only if they secured hegemony over the water that flowed above and beneath the land.

At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, ending World War I, Zionist leaders stated that a future Jewish state depended upon dominion over the Naqab (Negev) Desert, Syrian Golan Heights, the Jordan Valley, Litani River in Lebanon and the West Bank.

The Mount Hermon basin—whose mountain range is located on the border between Syria and Lebanon—was seen as essential to their colonizing ambitions. It is in this basin that its streams and rivers merge to become the Jordan River.

In December 1919, Russian-born Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first president (1949-52), wrote to the British prime minister, Lloyd George, that “the whole economic future of Palestine is dependent upon its water supply for irrigation and for electric power, and the water supply must mainly be derived from the slopes of Mount Hermon, from the headwaters of the Jordan and from the Litany [Litani] River.” The Latani is the primary and largest watershed in Lebanon.

After seizing 78 percent of historic Palestine in the 1948 war, Israel moved quickly to implement its prepared plans to control the water resources of Palestine, which were nationalized and rationed in 1949.

The Arab-Israeli War of 1967 also had its origins over water. Israel began work in 1953 to build an elaborate water system, the National Water Carrier (NWC), to transport water from the Upper Jordan River in the north to the center of Israel and to planned colonies in the arid South. And in 1963, it began pumping water from the Sea of Galilee (Lake Tiberius) into the NWC, which posed a grave threat to Syrian, Lebanese and Jordanian water resources. As a consequence, Israel and the Arab states engaged in numerous clashes in what came to be known as the “War over Water” (1964-1967).

To thwart Israel’s scheme, in 1965, Syria and Lebanon implemented the Arab League plan to divert water from Jordan River sources (Banias and Hasbani Rivers) to their own territory.

In his memoirs, Israeli general and former prime minister (2001-2006), Ariel Sharon, revealed that the 1967 war was launched in response to Syria’s plan to reroute the headwaters of the Jordan. Israel attacked construction sites inside Syria that same year, leading to the war.

Completed in 1964, the National Water Carrier diverts 75 percent of the waters from the Jordan River to Israel, while Palestinians are prohibited from using any of it.

Israel’s military victory in June 1967, had the effect of placing much of the Mount Hermon basin, the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip under Israeli control. It then declared the water resources of the captured land to be property of the state, putting them under complete military authority.

When it illegally annexed the occupied Syrian Golan Heights in 1981, Israel secured direct dominance over the headwaters of the Jordan River, fulfilling its early Zionist designs.

Israel has also coveted and remains determined to seize the water of southern Lebanon—the Litani River and the Shebaa Farms. The Shebaa Farms area has abundant ground water that flows from the slopes of Mt. Hermon.

Historical records from the 1950s indicate that then chief of staff of the Israel “Defense” Forces, Moshe Dayan and others, favored conquering and annexing southern Lebanon up to the Litani.

For that reason, Israel invaded Lebanon in 1978 (Operation Litani) and again in 1982. The Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon continued until its forces were driven out by Lebanese Hezbollah in 2000.

Claiming that the Shebaa Farms are part of the Golan Heights, Israel annexed it in 1981. Hezbollah continues to battle for the liberation of this 16 square miles on the western slopes of the Hermon Mountain range.

The Occupied West Bank

Israel’s objective has always been to decrease the supply of water to Palestinians so that they will inevitably have to leave.

Tel Aviv’s apartheid water policies were set in motion by the interim Oslo peace accords of the 1990s, which gave Israel control over 80 percent of the West Bank’s reserves. Under the Oslo II Accords, division of water resources was designated as an issue for “final status negotiations.” Final status and a future Palestinian state were never reached, as Israel continued to illegally appropriate Palestinian land and water resources.

The 1995 accords, meant to last five years, have remained entrenched. As a result, Israelis have access to water on demand, while Palestinians receive predetermined allocations set out in the “peace agreement,” that do not reflect population growth, climate change or average daily water consumption needs.

As the occupying power, Israel has defined responsibilities under international human rights law to respect Palestinians’ right to safe, sufficient and accessible water. Israel has never ended its illegal occupation or lived up to its obligations.

Israelis consume ten times the amount of water than West Bank Palestinians. Israel and its colonies (settlements) consume 87 percent of the water from West Bank aquifers, while Palestinians are allocated just 13 percent. And while they do not have enough water to bathe their children, Jewish children splash about in community pools.

The national Israeli water company, Mekorot, has forced Palestinians to depend on Israel for their water needs. It has systematically tapped springs and sunk wells in the West Bank to supply its population, including squatters, with a continuous supply of water, while Palestinians receive water sporadically. The company routinely reduces the Palestinian supply and shamelessly, sells them their own water at inflated prices. To counter the chronic water shortage, 92 percent of Palestinians store water in tanks on their rooftops.

Since 2021, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Israeli authorities have demolished nearly 160 Palestinian reservoirs, sewage networks and wells across the West Bank and East Jerusalem. While Israel continues to dig more wells, it has denied Palestinians’ drilling rights and blocks them from harvesting rainwater.

The expansion of Jewish colonies, Israeli industrial and military zones have contributed to water contamination, which has severely undermined the Palestinian agricultural sector. As Palestinian farms wither from a paucity of water, Israeli farms receive unlimited amounts, often to produce such water-guzzling crops as tomatoes, oranges and cotton.

The Gaza Strip

The catastrophic water crisis in Gaza today predates the October 2023 war. Israel’s 16-year blockade contributed to severe water shortages. And potable water was hard to find after decades of Israeli invasions.

With no surface sources of water, the coastal aquifer, on the brink of collapse, provided 81 percent of the enclave’s supply. Three desalination plants and three Mekorot pipes provided the remainder. Families had to buy often questionable drinking water from street vendors at high prices. On 9 October 2023, Israel cut off the piped water it had been sending Gaza.

Since Israel withdrew in 2005, it has conducted five major wars on the small densely-populated Strip, destroying much of its infrastructure. And for years, Gazans have lived with depleted, contaminated and salinated water because Israel has restricted the entry of construction and other materials like cement and iron needed to repair, maintain or develop the enclave’s water infrastructure.

The United Nations currently estimates that 70 percent of Gaza’s water and sanitation plants have been destroyed or damaged, including all five wastewater treatment facilities, water desalination plants, sewage pumping stations, wells and reservoirs. Those remaining are short on fuel to continue operating. Tons of untreated sewage have seeped into the ground or has been pumped into the Mediterranean Sea.

According to the UN, 95-97 percent of the underground water is not fit for human consumption. Most people are now getting drinking water from private vendors who operate small desalination facilities powered by solar energy.

According to Euro-Med Monitor, Palestinians have access to just 1.5 liters of water per person per day for all needs, including drinking and personal hygiene. It is worth noting that the established international emergency water threshold is 15 liters per person per day.

The inability to dispose of garbage, treat sewage and deliver uncontaminated water, in sweltering 90 degree (Fahrenheit) heat, has produced disastrous health consequences, including Hepatitis A, cholera, typhoid, diarrheal and skin diseases, and a stench that has made Gazans ill. Crowded together in tent camps, Palestinians are finding it difficult to sleep because of flies, cockroaches and fear of scorpions and rodents.

Conclusion

Ten months of unabated bombing has ravaged the ecosystem of Gaza and its population.

The recent advisory opinion of the UN’s highest Court has unequivocally confirmed that Israel’s presence in occupied Palestine is unlawful and must end, that it must cease “settlement” expansion and evacuate all “settlers,” that reparations are owed Palestinians and that nations are obliged not to “render aid or assistance” in maintaining Israel’s presence in the territory.

Most UN member states honor their obligations under international law. There is little reason to believe that Israel and its chief enabler, the United States, will comply, since both have a history of disregarding UN resolutions, including an ICJ ruling in 2004 that Israel tear down a concrete barrier wall it had erected in the West Bank to separate itself from Palestinian cities and towns.

For half a century, Israel, with U.S. support, and the mercenary corporate media, has had free rein to expand and grow economically fat on the stolen natural resources of Palestine.

It is as simple as drinking a glass of water; so the saying goes. But not in Palestine, where the people have been imprisoned between birth and death—for now. There are finally signs, however, of an epilogue to the tragic Palestinian al-Nakba (the catastrophe).



Dr. M. Reza Behnam is a political scientist specializing in the history, politics and governments of the Middle East.

 

How Central Banks Can Use Credit Guidance to Force Capitalism to Stop Climate Change

Central banks should stop pretending to be neutral about saving the planet.

By Jason Hickel, Charles Stevenson 

August 22, 2024

Source: Foreign Policy

It is clear to everyone that decarbonization is happening far too slowly. Even the best-performing high-income countries are not reducing their emissions fast enough to achieve the Paris Agreement objectives—not even close. And one big reason is that even though renewables are now routinely cheaper than fossil fuels, they are still not nearly as profitable. Returns on fossil fuel investments are around three times higher than returns on renewables, largely because fossil fuels are more conducive to monopoly power while the renewable sector is highly competitive.

Commercial banks allocate capital on the basis of profitability, not social and ecological objectives. The result is that we get massive investment in sectors such as SUVs, fast fashion, industrial animal farming, private jets, and advertising—even though we know they are ecologically destructive and must be reduced—but we suffer critical underinvestment in areas that are clearly necessary for the ecological transition, such as public transit, agroecology, or building retrofits, because they tend to be less profitable.

Remarkably, there is currently no plan for phasing down fossil fuel investments. This is a structural problem, and we need to face up to it. Waiting for capital to speed up decarbonization in line with the Paris Agreement is a strategy that’s doomed to fail.

Fortunately, there’s a straightforward solution. Credit guidance is the key to aligning finance with the aims of the green transition. Central banks have the power to guide credit in more socially and ecologically rational ways. The idea is to limit the quantity of credit that commercial banks and other financial institutions direct to destructive sectors (say, fossil fuels and SUVs) while increasing credit flows to more beneficial sectors (such as renewables and other green technologies).

Credit guidance was used extensively in the post-war period. The policy helped states build up their industrial capacity, expand their welfare systems, and accelerate technological innovation in key sectors where rapid development was needed. It is a central pillar of any successful industrial policy framework. And with the ecological crisis, it is gaining renewed attention: A recent report produced by the University College London’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose shows how credit guidance can be used to accelerate an effective green transition.

This approach can also be used to offset inflationary pressure. In a scenario where we need to increase public investment in necessary social projects—such as health care, housing, and transit—credit controls can be used to reduce commercial investments elsewhere in the economy (again, specifically in damaging and unnecessary industries that we need to scale down), thus regulating aggregate demand. This is a much more rational strategy for inflation control than using broad-brush interest-rate policy, which can have a devastating impact on people’s livelihoods and on socially important sectors.

At a time when fighting inflation has become the primary focus of central banks, credit regulations are more pertinent than ever. The inflationary crisis that deepened following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine demonstrated the limits of current tools that central banks use to realize the standard 2 percent inflation target—namely interest-rate policy and the purchase or sale of financial instruments. Mainstream monetary policy is ill equipped to confront what the economist Isabella Weber calls “sellers’ inflation.” Conventional tools failed to pinpoint the price of oil as an inflationary pressure point rippling out across the economy. These instruments are blunt, in that they reduce demand in the economy as a whole without troubling to identify the specific commodities for which demand outstrips supply. Credit regulations, alongside other measures such as price controls, constitute a far more precise instrument for maintaining price stability.

There are many other benefits that a credit-guidance strategy can confer. For instance, it can be used to prevent debt bubbles, by setting conditions to limit lending to financially unstable entities. Had credit guidance along these lines been in place in the United States at the turn of the century, it could have prevented the subprime mortgage crisis.

Some economists balk at the idea of central banks picking winners and losers in the market—even if this is done through democratic processes. Independence remains a core mandate of modern central banks. Nonetheless, the commitment to market neutrality needs to be balanced with other responsibilities. Central banks also perform a macroprudential function in maintaining market stability. Perhaps the greatest threat to stability in the 21st century is the risk of ecological breakdown. Diverting finance away from the sectors responsible for this threat is justified based on established need for “precautionary policy action to prevent the emergence of potentially catastrophic risks.”

The mirage of central bank independence has dissipated since the 1990s. In the aftermath of the European debt crisis and again during the COVID-19 pandemic, the European Central Bank, among others, embarked on massive quantitative easing programs that benefit investors at the expense of savers. Asset purchases on this scale muddy the traditional distinction between monetary and economic policy. Central banks have evolved from institutions narrowly focused on maintaining price stability to ones acting as backstops for the financial system as a whole. Central bank mandates, by contrast, have never been adjusted to reflect this marked change in central bank policy.

If central banks are not in fact as independent and impartial as they seem—if they in fact tend to serve the interests of some at the expense of others—then it makes sense to align them more transparently with democratically ratified social and ecological objectives. The crises of the 21st century call for a reevaluation of the new role played by central banks in an era of fiat currency and high private debt. Rediscovering the power of credit regulations is key both to fulfilling central banks’ macroprudential role and to guiding our economies away from ecological breakdown and instead toward a rapid green transition.

The Hidden Trade-Offs of Climate Policy

Today’s green dogmas cannot deliver an energy transition that is fast, just, and sustainable—all at the same time.

Credit guidance is not a silver bullet, of course. It does not prevent companies—including big oil—from investing their own capital in damaging activities. It cannot substitute other necessary regulations, such as safety and labor standards. And it does not obviate the need for public investment mechanisms to provide necessary services that do not return a profit. But credit guidance does empower us to channel private capital toward the most urgent objectives we must achieve. It should be seen as a necessary complement to what John Maynard Keynes called the socialization of investment.

Industrial policy along these lines is no longer just a nice idea. It has become an existential necessity. We know we need to scale down fossil fuel output on a science-based schedule, while rapidly accelerating renewable energy development alongside other activities that are necessary for a green transition. Credit guidance can help us achieve these goals, and any forward-thinking government should take steps in this direction.

Jason Hickel is a professor at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Twitter: @jasonhickel

Charles Stevenson is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.