Joel Roberts Poinsett: Namesake of the Poinsettia, Enslaver, Secret Agent and Perpetrator of the ‘Trail of Tears’

BY LINDSAY SCHAKENBACH REGELE

 JANUARY 4, 2024
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If people know the name Joel Roberts Poinsett today, it is likely because of the red and green poinsettia plant.

In the late 1820s, while serving as the first ambassador from the U.S. to Mexico, Poinsett clipped samples of the plant known in Spanish as the “flor de nochebuena,” or flower of Christmas Eve, from the Mexican state of Guerrero. He then introduced it to the U.S. on a trip home from Mexico.

The plant has been named poinsettia ever since.

But much like the history of the U.S., Poinsett had a complex and troubling past.

An ambitious politician, financial investor and enslaver, Poinsett was a secret agent for the U.S. government in South America who fought for the Chilean army against Spain during Chile’s War for Independence in the early 1800s.

A confidant of President Andrew Jackson, Poinsett also served as U.S. secretary of war under President Martin Van Buren and oversaw the ignominy of the Trail of Tears, the forced relocation and deadly march of Cherokee people from the South to reservations in the West during the 1830s.

And yet Poinsett, an avid botanist who brought scores of other plants to the U.S., also helped found an organization that led to the creation of the Smithsonian Institution.

A privileged life

I came across his history almost by accident. I am a historian of capitalism in early America, and while I was on a research fellowship for my first book, “Manufacturing Advantage: War, the State, and the Origins of American Industry,” another researcher suggested I go to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania to check out the papers of a few War Department officials. Poinsett was one of those officials.

There, I found a large collection of his letters and other personal papers that spanned five decades of his life. I became so fascinated with his life that I decided to write a book about him. I detail his complicated life in another book, “Flowers, Guns, and Money: Joel Roberts Poinsett and the Paradoxes of American Patriotism.”

Born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina, on March 2, 1779, Poinsett was the son of a wealthy doctor and lived a life of privilege. He traveled throughout Europe and Russia in his early 20s before starting a military career.

In the 1810s, Poinsett traveled around South America as a secret agent of the U.S. State Department. His intelligence reports led in part to the drafting of the Monroe Doctrine.

That doctrine, written by Secretary of State John Adams and buried in President James Monroe’s address to Congress on Dec. 2, 1823, sought to prevent European colonization in South America and, in essence, claimed the entire Western Hemisphere for the U.S.

The doctrine also set the stage for two centuries of rocky relations between the U.S and Latin America.

In 1825, the Monroe administration appointed Poinsett as the nation’s first ambassador to Mexico. He arrived there in the spring of that year and almost immediately instigated a general distrust of American interference. He used his connections to secure favorable plots of land for himself and his friends and established a U.S.-based mining company to exploit Mexican resources for his own benefit.

It was on a trip to assess the profitability of some mines, in fact, that Poinsett admired the red and green plant and cut clippings to send to horticulturalists in the U.S. Exactly where and how these clippings were made and sent is not quite clear, but he remarked on the beauty of the plants he saw, which Franciscan friars in Mexico had been displaying at Christmas since the 1600s.

Several prominent horticulturalists in the United States later reported that Poinsett sent them plant samples. By the mid-1830s, agricultural reports described a plant with brilliant scarlet foliage, “lately referred to as the poinsettia,” as having been introduced by Poinsett in 1828.

Poinsett’s Latin America meddling

That same year, Poinsett also supported a coup in Mexico City.

During the Mexican presidential campaign in 1829, Poinsett supported Vicente Guerrero, whom he saw as more amenable to his and U.S. financial interests. When Guerrero lost to moderate Manuel Gómez Pedraza, Guerrero staged a coup with Poinsett’s approval that forced Gómez Pedraza to flee Mexico.

Because of Poinsett’s poor conduct during the election, the Mexican government requested Poinsett’s removal from his post. President Andrew Jackson instead allowed Poinsett to resign.

Poinsett left Mexico and went back home to South Carolina.

On Oct. 24, 1833, at 54 years old, Poinsett married a 52-year-old, wealthy widow from South Carolina who owned a rice plantation and almost 100 enslaved people.

Though he wrote that he enjoyed married plantation life, he was not done with politics or the military.

In 1837, Poinsett was named U.S. secretary of war and oversaw the execution of Jackson’s 1830 Indian Removal Act that the Cherokee people referred to as the Trail of Tears. That act saw the violent displacement of members of the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw and Choctaw nations from their homelands in the South to reservations in the West.

The creation of the Smithsonian

Based on his travels and experiences around the world, Poinsett believed that the U.S. should have a national museum to conduct scientific research and display the expanding government collections, including plant specimens.

In his retirement, Poinsett helped found in 1840 and became president of the National Institute for the Promotion of Science and the Useful Arts.

That organization later became part of the Smithsonian Institution, whose gardens now showcase thousands of poinsettias during the Christmas season.

Poinsett died on Dec. 12, 1851.

It remains unclear how long the plant that bears his name will remain known as the poinsettia. After years of controversy, the American Ornithological Society announced that it was going to remove all human names from as many as 152 bird species, including those linked to people with racist histories or people who have done violence to Indigenous communities.

Though no attempts as yet have emerged to rename plants, it’s my belief that Poinsett’s poinsettia may be the first.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

 

Saving Israel by Ending Its War in Gaza

The Israeli government argues that it is in a mortal fight for survival against Hamas, and therefore must take every measure, including the very destruction of Gaza, to survive. This is false.

by Jeffrey D. Sachs Posted onJanuary 04, 2024

Reprinted from CommonDreams with permission of the author.

When Congress returns in January, President Joe Biden will push the case to deepen American complicity in Israel’s war in Gaza through another US armaments package for Israel. Americans should raise their voice in a resounding no.

An arms package for Israel is not only against America’s interests but also against Israel’s interests. The only path to real security for Israel is peace with Palestine. The US can help bring this about by ending the supply of munitions for Israel’s brutal war and by promoting the two-state solution as called for by international law.

I spelled out the diplomatic path to the two-state solution in a previous column for Common Dreams. That path remains open. It is actively promoted by the Arab and Islamic countries and supported by nearly the entire world.

Israel’s brutality in Gaza is becoming a true threat to Israel’s survival. Because of Israel’s extraordinary violence, the world is uniting against Israel, while Israel is suffering massive military losses. Incredibly, some Israeli leaders are now openly advocating an even wider war in the Middle East, one that could well spell utter disaster for Israel.

The surging global opposition to Israel’s policies is not antisemitic. It is anti-genocide. It is also pro-peace, pro-Israel, and pro-Palestine. If Israel ends the genocide, it will end the global opposition it now faces.

Defeating Hamas is not Israel’s real aim in Gaza

The Israeli government argues that it is in a mortal fight for survival against Hamas, and therefore must take every measure, including the very destruction of Gaza, to survive. This is false. There is no ethical, practical, legal or geopolitical case for destroying Gaza – killing tens of thousands of civilians, and uprooting 2 million people – to protect Israel against the kinds of preventable and controllable threats that Hamas actually poses.

During the years 2008-2022, Hamas and other militants killed around a dozen Israeli civilians per year, while Israel usually killed at least ten times more civilian Palestinians. There was a spike in 2014, when Israel invaded Gaza, with 19 Israeli civilians killed versus 1,760 Palestinian civilians. Hamas launches many rockets, but almost all are intercepted or cause little damage. Israel responds with periodic massacres (as in 2014) and with more regular airstrikes. The Israelis even have a cynical name for their periodic killing, called “mowing the grass.” It is common knowledge inside Israel that Hamas long served as a “low-cost” political prop used by Netanyahu to “prove” to Israelis that a two-state solution is impossible.

In all the years of Hamas rule in Gaza after 2007, Hamas has never captured Israeli territory, much less remotely threatened Israel’s existence or survival. Simply, it couldn’t do so even if it wanted. Hamas has around 30,000 fighters, compared with more than 600,000 active and reserve personnel in the IDF. Hamas lacks an air force, armored units, a military-industrial base, and any geographic maneuverability outside of Gaza.

On October 7, Hamas fighters made a surprise incursion into Israel that lasted that horrific day. This did not reflect a new super-ability of Hamas to invade Israel but rather a shocking failure of Israeli security. Israeli leaders had ignored extensive warnings of an upcoming Hamas attack and had inexplicably left the Gaza-Israel border severely under-manned. Even more astoundingly, they did so just days after Israeli extremists had stormed the al-Aqsa Mosque complex, one of the Islam’s holiest sites. Hamas exploited Israel’s astounding security lapse by breaching the border in an attack that led to around 1,100 Israeli civilian deaths, and Hamas’ taking of 240 hostages, with an unknown number of the Israeli civilian deaths that day caused by Israeli aerial bombing and crossfire in the IDF’s counterattack.

By re-fortifying the border with Gaza, Israel has stopped further ground incursions by Hamas. Netanyahu has ordered the destruction of Gaza not to protect Israel from Hamas, but to make Gaza uninhabitable and thereby to fulfill his longstanding intention to impose permanent Israeli rule over the territory. Netanyahu gets the added bonus of clinging to power despite his grievous other failures.

The Israeli government’s more basic objective is to solidify its total control over “Greater Israel,” meaning all of the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Its objective with the incursion in Gaza is to push the population out of the territory. On October 10, Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant stated that “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.” More recently, Netanyahu spoke of “voluntary emigration” of the Gazan population – voluntary, that is, after Gaza has been laid to waste and Gazans told to evacuate. Metula Mayor David Azoulai declared that “the whole Gaza Strip needs to be empty. Flattened. Just like in Auschwitz. Let it be a museum for all the world to see what Israel can do. Let no one reside in the Gaza Strip for all the world to see, because October 7 was in a way a second Holocaust.” He later clarified that he would like to see the Gaza population “relocated,” not murdered. Most recently, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a self-declared fascist, called for Gaza’s population to be cut to 100,000-200,000 from the current population of more than 2 million. Israel aimed from the start of its invasion of Gaza to push the Gazans into Egypt, but Egypt adamantly refused to be a party to ethnic cleansing.

In the 1970s, the aim of dominating Palestine to create Greater Israel as a Jewish state was a fringe belief. Now it rules Israeli policy, in part reflecting the enormous political weight of hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

“Greater Israel,” defined as Israel of pre-1967-War borders, plus Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, is home to roughly seven million Jews and seven million Palestinian Muslims and Palestinian Christians. Israel can rule Greater Israel only by dominating seven million Palestinians, or by driving them out of their homes by war, violence, and extreme discrimination. The quest for Greater Israel in practice leads Israel to commit grave crimes against the people of Palestine. The ongoing crime is Apartheid rule, with its severe injustices and indignities. The graver crime is ethnic cleaning as Israel is attempting in Gaza. The gravest of all is genocide, witnessed in the thousands of deaths of innocent civilians occurring each week now in Gaza.

Israel’s turn towards extremism

The American people need to understand that Israeli politics has become dominated by extremists who mix religious fervor with murderous violence against the Palestinians. This ultra-violent side of Israel is readily apparent in Israel but is still largely unknown to the American public. Israeli brutality in Gaza comes as a surprise to many Americans, yet it has become par for the course in Israel itself, although some Israelis are no doubt in denial of the facts on the ground in the Occupied Territories. The Grayzone has put together a shocking compilation of Israeli soldiers and leading personalities celebrating Palestinian deaths.

Israel’s genocidal violence towards the Palestinian people appeals to much of the Israeli public for several reasons. First, always lurking in the shadows in Israel is the memory of the Holocaust. Politicians like Netanyahu have long stoked the terror of the Holocaust to argue crudely and falsely that all Palestinians want to kill all the Jews, so that the violent suppression of the Palestinians is a matter of life and death for Israel. Of course, as in any spiral of hatred, there is a self-fulfilling prophecy to Netanyahu’s rhetoric and actions, leading to counter-actions and hatreds from the other side. Yet rather than trying to solve those through dialogue, interaction, diplomacy, and peacemaking, the cycle of hatred is stoked.

Second, orthodox rabbis have expanded upon the security narrative by insisting that Israel has a sacred right to Palestine because God gave all the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean to the Israelites.

Third, with 700,000 Israeli settlers living in the Palestinian lands conquered in 1967, Greater Israel has become a fait accompli for a large part of the Israeli people, with a large voice in Israeli politics. These settlers moved into conquered territory and now fervently insist on defending their settlements. The UN Security Council (UNSC Resolution 2334) has unequivocally declared Israel’s settlements in occupied Palestine to be in flagrant violation of international law, yet Smotrich himself, in the inner cabinet, is a leader of the settler movement.

The emergence of this violent strand of Judaism dates to the early 1970s, just after the 1967 Six-Day War. The policy question in Israel after 1967 was what to do with the newly occupied Palestinian land. Drawing on the proposals of Yigal Allon, a leading Israeli politician, Israeli leaders decided to keep East Jerusalem and to establish settlements in the occupied West Bank and Gaza to put “facts on the ground” to protect Israel’s security. From the start, Israeli governments defied UN Security Council Resolution 242 (1967), which rejected Israel’s acquisition of territory by war.

What happened next was momentous. Ultra-religious Jews took up the cause of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories as part of a messianic calling to make Israel the “Earthly support of the Lord’s throne,”(here p. 69). In 1974, Gush Emunim was launched as an ultra-nationalist religious settler movement by followers of the father-son rabbis Abraham Isaac Kook and Zvi Yehuda Kook, whose teachings combined the land claims of the Book of Joshua, Talmudic law, Chassidic mysticism, nationalism, and political activism.

The religious motivation of Greater Israel is that God gave the Jews all the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. In the Book of Joshua, probably completed in the 6th century BC, God instructs the Israelites arriving from Egypt after 40 years in the desert to annihilate the nations of Canaan in order to take the land for themselves. God promises the land extending “from the Negev wilderness in the south to the Lebanon mountains in the north, from the Euphrates River in the east to the Mediterranean Sea in the west, including all the land of the Hittites. (Joshua 1:4, New Living Translation). With God’s backing, Joshua’s armies commit a series of genocides to capture the land.

This extraordinarily violent text and related parts of the Bible (such as the annihilation of the Amalekites in the Book of Samuel), have become crucial points of reference for right-wing Israelis, both religious and secular. As a result, today’s Israel pursues a 6th century BC messianic vision of securing all of Palestine for the Jews. Supporters of Greater Israel often label the opponents of this ideology as anti-Semites, but this is wildly off the mark, as the former Executive Director of the Harvard Hillel has eloquently argued. The opponents of Greater Israel are against extremism and injustice, not against Judaism.

The Jewish settler movement led to a murderous disdain of the Palestinian. In his book Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Prof. Israel Shahak draws attention to the religious zealotry of Rabbi Eliezer Waldman, a leader of the West Bank settlers:

“Let us say clearly and strongly: we are not occupying foreign territories in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank]. This is our ancient home. And thank G-d that we have brought it back to life … Our responsibility to Jewish faith and redemption commands us to speak up in a strong and clear voice. The Divine Process of uniting our people and our Land must not be clouded and weakened by seeming logical concepts of “security” and “diplomacy.” They only distort the truth and weaken the justice of our cause, which is engraved in our exclusive national rights to our land. We are a people of faith. This is the essence of our eternal identity and the secret of our continued existence under all conditions.” [2002]

In Jewish History – Jewish Religion (2nd edition, 2008), Shahak quotes the Chief Chaplain of the Central Regional Command of the Israeli Army in 1973: “In war, when our forces storm the enemy, they are allowed and even enjoined by the Halakhah (Jewish law) to kill even good [Palestinian] civilians, that is, civilians who are ostensibly good” (p. 76).

The tactic of using violence to provoke mass Palestinian flight has been part of Israel’s playbook from its inception. On the eve of Israel’s independence, during 1947-8, Jewish militant groups used terror to provoke the mass departure of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in a sordid process called nakba by the Palestinians (“catastrophe” in Arabic).

Netanyahu’s government aims to repeat the nakba in the Gaza war by forcing Gazans to flee to neighboring Egypt or other parts of the Arab Middle East. However, unlike in 1947-8, the world is watching in real-time, and is expressing outrage at Israel’s blatant attempt at ethnic cleansing. Egypt told Israel and the US in no uncertain terms that it would not be a party to Israel’s ethnic cleansing, and would not accept a flood of Gazan refugees.

The quest for Greater Israel is doomed to fail

Israel’s attempt to violently create a “Greater Israel” will fail. The Israeli Defense Forces are suffering massive losses in the brutal urban warfare in Gaza. While Israel has killed more than 20,000 Gazans, mostly women and children, it has not destroyed Hamas’s capacity to resist Israel’s invasion. IDF leaders say that the battle against Hamas will require many more months, but well before then, global opposition will likely become insurmountable.

In desperation, Israeli leaders such as Defense Minister Benny Gantz want to expand the war to Lebanon and probably to Iran. US hardliners such as Republican US Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina have dutifully and predictably chimed in, urging a US war with Iran. This Israeli gambit too will likely fail. The US is in no position to fight a wider Middle East war, after having drawn down its stockpile of munitions in Ukraine and Gaza. The American people too strongly oppose another US war, and their opposition will be heard in an election year, even by a Congress in the pocket of the military-industrial complex.

Israel’s diplomatic setbacks, unless reversed, will prove devastating. Israel has hemorrhaged political support worldwide. In a recent UN General Assembly vote, 174 countries, with 94% of the world population, voted in favor of Palestinian political self-determination, while just 4 countries with 4% of the world population – Israel, the United States, Micronesia and Nauru – voted against (another 15 countries abstained or did not vote). Israel’s hardline militarism has united the world against it.

Israel counts entirely now on its one remaining supporter, the United States, but US support is also waning. By a huge margin, 59% for and 19% opposed, Americans support a cease fire. Americans support Israel’s security but not its extremism. Of course, America has its own Christian and Jewish zealots who base their politics on biblical literalism/orthodoxy, but they are a minority of public opinion. American support for Israel depends on the two-state solution. Biden knows it and has reiterated US support for the two-state solution, even as the US supplies munitions for Israel’s war on Gaza.

While American Jews generally support Israel, they do not support Israel’s religious messianism. In a 2020 Pew Survey only 30% of American Jews believed that “God gave the land that is now Israel to the Jewish people.” 63% believed in the feasibility of peace between Israel and Palestine through the two-state solution. Only 33% believed as of 2020 that the Israeli government was making sincere efforts towards peace with the Palestinians.

Even Orthodox US Jews are divided on the question of Greater Israel. Some orthodox Jewish communities such as the Chabad are believers in the biblically motivated Greater Israel, while others such as the Satmar community (also known as Naturei Karta) are anti-Zionists and outspoken critics of Israel’s war on the Palestinian people stating that Judaism is a religion not a nation concept. The Satmar community believes that the revival of the Jewish homeland must follow God’s timeline, and not a Zionist timeline.

Supporting Israel’s extremism is not in America’s interest

The US has been providing the munitions for Israel’s brutal war. This complicity has led to a lawsuit by Palestinian plaintiffs charging the US Government with violations of the Genocide Convention. As part of this legal effort, the US-based Center for Constitutional Rights has methodically documented the genocidal statements by Israeli leaders here and here.

The US is also facing severe and costly diplomatic isolation as it defends Israel’s indefensible actions. In recent votes of the US Security Council and the UN General Assembly, the US has stood almost alone in backing Israel’s hyper-violent and unjust actions. This is hurting the US in countless other areas of foreign policy and global economics.

The US federal budget is also under tremendous stress from military-related spending, which will reach around $1.5 trillion in total in 2024. The American people have had enough of the bulging military spending, which has been a central factor in raising the public debt from around 35% of GDP in 2000 to around 100% of GDP today. With soaring debts and the rise in interest rates on mortgages and consumer loans, the public is resisting Biden’s calls for more deficit spending to fund the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and will vociferously oppose a wider war in the Middle East, especially one that would draw the US into direct combat.

Of course, US open-ended support for Israel has seemed to be unstoppable in American politics. The Israel lobby – a powerful constellation of Israel politicians and wealthy Americans – has played a huge role in building this strong support. The Israel lobby gave $30 million in campaign contributions in the 2022 Congressional election cycle, and will give vastly more in 2024. Yet the lobby is up against the public’s growing opposition to Israel’s brutality in Gaza.

The two-state solution remains Israel’s true chance for peace and it’s security

Israeli leaders and diplomats have to stop shouting that critics are all anti-Semites and listen to what the world is actually saying: Israel and Palestine need to live side by side based on international law and mutual security. The support for a two-state solution is support for the peace and security of the Jewish people in the state of Israel, just as it is support for the peace and security of the Palestinian people in their own state. To the contrary, supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza and inflaming anti-Israel (and anti-US) sentiment around the world, is antithetical to Israel’s long-term security and perhaps even its survival. The Arab and Islamic states have repeatedly declared their readiness to normalize relations with Israel within the context of the two-state solution. This goes back to the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative and includes the important Final statement of the extraordinary joint Arab Islamic Summit in Riyadh on November 11, 2023. The US and Arab countries should quickly agree on establishing a joint peacekeeping force to keep both sides safe in the context of implementing the two-state solution.

Many zealous religious settlers will strongly resist a Palestinian state, asserting their right to do so based on ancient biblical texts. Yet the point of Judaism is not to rule over millions of Palestinians or to ethnically cleanse them. The real point is not to provoke global opprobrium but to use reason and goodwill to find peace. As Hillel the Elder declared, “Whatever is hateful and distasteful to you, do not do to your fellow man. This is the entire Torah; the rest is commentary. Go learn.” The real point is to fulfill the ethical vision of the Prophet Isaiah (2:4), who prophesied that “nations shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” So may it be.

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has been advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the author, most recently, of A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism (2020). Other books include: Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable (2017), and The Age of Sustainable Development, (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.

Global Debt Is Beyond Control

BY MEL GURTOV

 JANUARY 4, 2024
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The Washington Consensus

The debt of developing countries is at “crisis” levels, the World Bank has just said. Supporting that view is a New York Times story December 16 headlined “The Debt Problem is Enormous, and the System for Fixing It is Broken.”

The article goes on to explain: “The foundational ideology — later known as the ‘Washington Consensus’ — held that prosperity depended on unhindered trade, deregulation and the primacy of private investment. Nearly 80 years later, the global financial architecture is outdated, dysfunctional and unjust.”

Indeed, the world is awash in government debt, led by the US, Japan, and China, which together account for about half the total. But great powers have many options for handling indebtedness. Small, economically weak countries do not.

What the Times account hints at, but never directly confronts, is the concentrated power of the Washington Consensus. It reflects American and European economic predominance—not just a consensus of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) leaderships, in which the US has always had sole veto power, but also the US Treasury Dept. and the global network of financial centers that stretches from New York and Chicago to Frankfurt and Zurich.

Predominance means the ability to dictate terms of loans. Over many years, World Bank and IMF decisions have aimed to condition loans to poor and middle-income countries on their openness to private investment, free trade, and deregulation of state-run agencies—roads, railways, banks, key industries.

Openness translates to opportunities for Western capital to penetrate developing-world economies, often resulting in the hollowing out if not elimination of local private and state-owned business.

Large borrowers must also deal with high interest rates. To ensure repayment, the World Bank and IMF preach austerity: Governments should slash social welfare programs to pay down the debt. Any family deeply in debt would understand the terrible choice facing governments here: Stay on good terms with the bankers by eliminating or reducing subsidies to the poor on food, health care, and fuel.

Consequently, António Guterres, secretary general of the United Nations, says in the Times article: “Even the most fundamental goals on hunger and poverty have gone into reverse after decades of progress.”

A Human Development Crisis

The global debt crisis is really not a new problem, just one that is surging again. As the Times explains: “Pounded by the Covid-19 pandemic, spiking food and energy prices related to the war in Ukraine, and higher interest rates, low- and middle-income countries are swimming in debt and facing slow growth.”

But the Times leaves out the China factor—the billions of dollars in loans to poor countries that cannot possibly be repaid. Sub-Saharan Africa, with about $140 billion in loans, stands out here: Of the top 15 countries that have received China’s loans, only one (Bolivia) is outside that region.

China proclaims that its loans, mainly under the Belt and Road Initiative, come without demands for austerity and with lower interest rates. The BRI has been well received in a number of countries.

But there is no free lunch here and—to mix metaphors—strings are attached, hence the “debt trap.” Recipients of Chinese loans may have to pay back with access to ports and rail lines, extraction of mineral and other resources, use of Chinese labor, damage to the environment, and adherence to Chinese policy views on (for example) human rights and Taiwan.

The debt crisis is one symptom of a development crisis, in which far too many countries do not have the financial resources to support decent conditions of living, from health and food security to environmental protection. Moreover, these countries often are the victims of rich countries’ behavior, as in the case of climate change.

As one source points out, the richest one percent of the world’s population, representing 80 million people, account for about half of global carbon emissions, while the poorest 50 percent, with 3.9 billion people, account for about eight percent of carbon emissions.

Top Down or Bottom Up Models?

For as long as I can remember, the typical solution to the debt problem has been to give developing countries seats at the table where decisions are made, and to convert loans into grants. A seat at the table might help if the major players, starting with the US, were ever persuaded to reduce their voting power.

Even then, it is the loan conditions—the amount of money available, the high interest rates, requirements of local regulations, and terms of repayment—that would still depend on the good graces of the major financial institutions. And those institutions, to put it mildly, don’t believe in being charitable.

As for providing grants rather than loans, well, that day is long gone and would be very difficult in today’s competitive environment to recover. Foreign aid from nearly all countries, particularly in the form of direct grants, has been on the downslide for many years.

The Times report is weakest in failing to report on bottom-up approaches to development in the human interest. Giving aid or loan relief means dealing exclusively with governments that may be corrupt, excessively bureaucratic and incompetent, dominated by the military, and authoritarian—in any of these cases, giving low priority to human security.

Channeling funds to NGOs with successful experiences promoting human development is far more likely to help than providing unworthy governments with debt relief. There are plenty of grassroots development programs that work—for example, in microfinance.

Kiva is one: It provides small loans at very low interest to villagers, usually women, who are eager to start small businesses. The real choice for international financial organizations comes down to this: Do you want to bail out governments or empower people?

Mel Gurtov is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Portland State University, Editor-in-Chief of Asian Perspective, an international affairs quarterly and blogs at In the Human Interest.

Nobel Peace laureate Muhammad Yunus's battle with the Sheikh Hasina government

Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi Nobel laureate, has been sentenced to 6 months in jail. Why do rights groups see this as a "politically motivated" case, and what is the reason behind the friction between Yusuf and the Hasina government?


Bangladesh Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus at the Trento Economy Festival in Italy in 2022. Critics of the government say it has tried to harass and vilify the economist. (Image: Getty)

Yudhajit Shankar Das
New Delhi,UPDATED: Jan 4, 2024 

Days before the general election in Bangladesh, Nobel Peace laureate and Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus was convicted and sentenced to 6 months in jail for violation of labour laws. Critics of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government allege this to be a case of government retribution towards an internationally recognised person. Others, however, see it as a legal case filed by workers.

Why is a simple case of labour law violation being perceived as one that is politically motivated, and what is the reason for the bad blood between Muhammad Yunus and PM Seikh Hasina’s Awami League?

On Monday, Yunus and three of his colleagues of Grameen Telecom were given a 6-month jail term, but the labour court also gave them bail for a month, allowing them time to appeal in a higher court. They have been accused of violating labour laws for failing to create a workers’ welfare fund in the company. Grameen Telecom is one of the several firms founded by Yunus.

YUNUS CASE EMBLEMATIC OF PROBLEMS?

In a country where the government is viewed with suspicion of trying to “throttle opposition voices”, the verdict against the 83-year-old Nobel laureate is being projected as another instance of “erosion of freedoms” and a “bid to silence government critics”. But is that really so?

Bangladesh is headed for an election on January 7, which has been boycotted by its main opposition party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP).

Supporters of Yunus, rights groups and activists have termed the verdict “politically motivated”. They blame the “unusual rush” to convict the renowned economist because he is perceived by the ruling Awami League party of PM Sheikh Hasina as a political rival.

“The conviction of Yunus is emblematic of the beleaguered state of human rights in Bangladesh, where the authorities have eroded freedoms and bulldozed critics into submission,” Amnesty International said, reacting to the sentencing of Muhammad Yunus on Monday.

Lawyers who fought for Yunus called the Grameen Telecom case “meritless, false and ill-motivated”. They said it was aimed to “harass and humiliate him before the global community”.

British business tycoon Richard Branson called it “A real miscarriage of justice, a politically motivated prosecution by a government determined to destroy Yunus and his legacy”. American lawyer and rights activist Kerry Kennedy called it "yet another example of the [Bangladesh] government's vendetta against its critics".

Not everyone, however, thinks this to be a politically motivated case.

"There is absolutely no politics in this court ruling and the government has nothing to do with it. This case was filed by workers of Grameen Telecom. The government doesn't have any role to play in it," Muntassir Mamoon, Bangabandhu Chair of Chittagong University, tells IndiaToday.In.

UNUSUAL RUSH TO CONVICT MUHAMMAD YUNUS?

Muhammad Yunus and his microcredit organisation Grameen Bank won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for their anti-poverty campaign.

He is considered to be a powerful force in a country that has seen extended periods of political flux and which is headed for elections on January 7 without its main opposition party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP).

Though some say that the prosecution and sentencing of Yunus was a purely legal process and the law took its course, Bangladesh watchers see it as part of a vilification drive against the Nobel laureate.

Professor Asif Nazrul of the law department of Dhaka University tells IndiaToday.In that Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus has been facing a relentless campaign launched by the Sheikh Hasina government for over a decade now. “There is a continuous attempt at character assassination and the abuses Dr Yunus has been facing are of the extreme level,” he says.

How could it be a case of political victimisation, as claimed by activists and the supporters of Muhammad Yunus, because the Nobel laureate has been convicted by a court of law?

Professor Asif Nazrul explains that the regime in Bangladesh has a tight grip over the judiciary. “Former Chief Justice of Bangladesh, SK Sinha, was ousted from the country for some anti-government verdicts. We have to see the Yunus sentencing from that angle,” he says.

Both the professor of law and Amnesty International pointed out the “unusual rush” to convict and sentence Muhammad Yunus. They questioned the “speed of trial” in the Yunus case.

Labour law cases otherwise move very slowly in Bangladesh. Even the Rana Plaza and the Tazreen Fashion cases, both of which gained international attention for the scale of deaths, are stuck in legal corridors, experts said. While over 1,000 people were killed in the Rana Plaza building collapse in 2013, 117 people died in the Tazreen Fashion inferno of 2012.

“Even in the cases where hundreds have been killed in factory fires, the owners are facing very few cases. But there are over 200 cases against Dr Yunus,” says Asif Nazrul.

Muntassir Mamoon doesn't see any rush in the Grameen Telecom case and says proceedings have been going on for a year now. He also cites the earlier cases in which Yunus got relief from higher courts.

WHY AWAMI LEAGUE CONSIDERS MUHAMMAD YUNUS A RIVAL

Why is Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and her government being vindictive as is being alleged?

“Muhammad Yunus was viewed by the Awami League regime as part of the 1/11 depoliticisation process,” explains Asif Nazrul.

‘One-Eleven’ refers to the process initiated on January 11, 2007, by which a military-backed caretaker government assumed charge in Bangladesh on the eve of the general election. For two years, it tried to work on what is referred to as the ‘Minus-Two formula’, getting rid of the top two political players -- Sheikh Hasina of the Awami League and Khaleda Zia of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP).

Muhammad Yunus is said to have been the prime choice for the prime minister’s job of the ‘Minus-Two’ participants. What has to be noted is that Yunus was offered the position of the chief advisor to the caretaker government, a role he didn’t accept.

In 2007, Yunus planned to float a political party and held public meetings but ultimately didn’t end up doing so.

Sheikh Hasina was placed under arrest and given the option to either leave the country or stay in prison. She chose to stay back. In the election that took place in 2008, she formed the government.

“Another reason believed to be behind the targeting of Muhammad Yunus by the Sheikh Hasina government is the charge that he was behind the cancellation of the World Bank funds for the Padma River bridge project,” says Professor Nazrul. He says the accusations were “ludicrous and could never be proved”.

Muntassir Mamoon, however, doesn't deny that the Awami League government reacts politically to Muhammad Yunus, a reference to the Nobel laureate's bid to launch a party during 'One-Eleven' and his political stance.

"The political reaction of the Awami League government is not because of his work as an economist or founder of Grameen Bank, it is a reaction to the political attitude of Yunus," says Mamoon.

The Hasina government started a series of investigations against Yunus and his organisations, including Grameen Bank, after coming to power in 2008.

In August 2023, 176 Nobel laureates and world leaders, including ex-US President Barack Obama, wrote a letter to the Hasina government over the “continuous judicial harassment” of Muhammad Yunus. They requested that cases against him be withdrawn.

Muntassir Mamoon says the image that Yunus pulled millions out of poverty is a false picture painted by western media. "On the ground in Bangladesh, there is no such feeling for Yunus."

Sheikh Hasina has called Yunus a “bloodsucker" and accused him of using force to recover loans from poor rural women as head of Grameen Bank.

The Grameen Telecom case against Muhammad Yunus might be a plain labour law case filed by workers, but that it is being perceived as part of a "witch hunt" says a lot about the political situation in Bangladesh.

Economic Leap: Croatia's Minimum Wage Doubles to 830 Euros

January 4, 2024, Thursday //



Croatia has ushered in a new fiscal landscape, as nine tax laws come into effect on January 1, boosting the minimum wage to 830 euros, as reported by Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic. Highlighting the significant financial strides made during his tenure, Plenkovic noted a noteworthy 100% increase in the minimum wage since 2016, emphasizing Croatia's economic growth and improved standards of living.

Plenkovic accentuated the government's achievements in enhancing social benefits, including amplifying allowances for hundreds of thousands and elevating salaries for an additional 35,000 individuals who were previously not covered by such benefits. The tax reform, a centerpiece of the government's agenda, has introduced comprehensive changes, setting a unique precedent in Croatia.


The package of nine tax laws is designed to bolster the economic and social well-being of Croatians, envisaging heightened social aid for the disabled and parents. Speaking on the impact, Plenkovic underlined that these alterations in wage structures are expected to materialize by April, subsequently enhancing the financial landscape for citizens. Additionally, Christmas bonuses have already surged from 232 euros to 300 euros, a tangible indication of evolving financial policies.

The tax reform's subsequent phases are anticipated to deliver on a critical aspiration for Croatians—augmented wages. Plenkovic pointed out the burgeoning prospects, signaling an impending rise in salaries over the next three months, building upon the momentum set by the recent tax reforms enacted in February. Croatia is witnessing a transformative phase aimed at fortifying its economic framework and uplifting its populace.