Watermelon Index launched to expose UK firms' 'complicity in war on Gaza'

Progressive International's Watermelon Index exposes over 400 UK companies complicit in Israel's Gaza war.

Sebastian Shehadi
21 November, 2024
THE NEW ARAB

Based on the findings of the index, Progressive International says that it is particularly interested in companies across technology, energy, logistics & shipping and finance & insurance.[GETTY]

Progressive International - a global alliance of activists, leaders, and organisations advocating for social justice - has unveiled the Watermelon Index, a live database exposing over 400 UK companies allegedly linked to Israel's war on Gaza and the occupation of Palestinian territories.

Described as a "tool for worker-led resistance against the occupation and genocide in Palestine", the index provides detailed evidence of corporate complicity across sectors such as military support, settlement production, population control, economic exploitation, and cultural entanglements.

The initiative envisions workers as key agents within these corporations who hold unique powers to disrupt supply chains, halt production, and challenge complicity with Israel's war on Gaza from within, in a crucial act of solidarity with Palestinians on a global scale.

"Israel's war machine is enabled by the financial, military, diplomatic, and cultural support it gets from companies around the world," Watermelon Index organiser, Kimia Talebi, told The New Arab.

"Workers in these companies hold the power to throw sand in the wheels of the war machine and many thousands of them are [doing so], like the Indian dock workers at 11 ports refusing to handle weaponry that could be used to kill Palestinians."


The index also seeks to empower consumers by offering transparency and actionable insights into corporate involvement in Israel's actions against Palestinians, such as highlighting Airbnb's alleged direct and indirect support for Israel via five categories: the military, settlement production, population control, economic exploitation, and cultural involvement.

It provides detailed evidence for each category, such as Airbnb's listings of accommodations in illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land. Notably, Airbnb's website advertises properties in 39 settlements in the occupied West Bank alone.

Based on the findings of the index, Progressive International says that it is particularly focused on companies - from corporate giants to smaller firms - across technology, energy, logistics, shipping, finance, and insurance.

Many have heeded calls from Palestinian trade unions to workers and labour groups around the world to stand up to their employers' complicity in Israel's crimes against the Palestinians, resulting in dockworkers in Spain, Italy, Belgium, Namibia, and India refusing to handle military cargo likely to be used in the war on Gaza.

Pressure from Japanese unions and protestors forced the corporate giant Itochu to end cooperation with Israel's largest private military company, Elbit Systems.

The Watermelon Index is seeking to support existing worker-led campaigns and foster new ones, according to Progressive International, which is comprised of over 100 political parties, trade unions, social movements, and activist groups.

"Please use the Index to find existing campaigns against corporate complicity or contact us to get support in setting up new ones," says Talebi.

"The time to act has never been more urgent — and the need for workers to reclaim their power has never been clearer.

Trump: Isolationist in Instinct, Unpredictable in Action

Selective engagement will replace liberal internationalism.

By Walden Bello

November 21, 2024

Source: FPIP


There are a number of certainties about the coming Trump administration. One is that it will be bad for the climate. Another is that it will be bad for American democracy. A third is that it will be largely bad for minorities and for women.

But when it comes to many other matters, like foreign policy, the key word is unpredictability, for Trump, as the world learned during his first term in office, is unpredictability personified. Observing this caveat when it comes to what to expect in terms of concrete actions and policies, one can nevertheless discern what are likely to be the fundamental thrusts of Trump 2.0. This is as much the case in the area of foreign policy as in domestic policy.
Liberal Internationalism as “Grand Strategy”

To use a common phrase these days, the coming Trump presidency will not only be an “inflection point” for U.S. domestic politics but for U.S. foreign policy as well. This should not be surprising since it is domestic priorities and domestic public opinion that, in the last instance, determine a country’s stance towards the outside world—what is called its “grand strategy.” The last time the United States experienced the kind of transformative event in foreign affairs that is coming on January 20, 2025, is 83 years ago when President Franklin D. Roosevelt brought the United States into World War II. FDR had a hell of a time overcoming isolationist sentiment and may well have failed had the Japanese not bombed Pearl Harbor and changed public sentiment overnight from isolationism toward global engagement.

The grand strategy that Roosevelt inaugurated can best be called “liberal internationalism.” Following the end of World War II and the beginning of the competition with the Soviet Union, that strategy was consolidated as “containment liberalism” by President Harry Truman, and it has been the guiding approach of every administration ever since, with the exception of the Trump administration from 2017 to 2021. The fundamental premise of liberal internationalism was best expressed by President John F Kennedy in his inaugural speech in 1961, when he said that Americans “shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” Another much quoted characterization of this outlook was provided by another Democratic Party personality, Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, when she said that for the maintenance of global order, the United States was “the indispensable country.”

Liberal internationalism had its hard and not-so-hard versions, the former often termed containment liberalism or neoconservatism. But whatever their differences when it came to rhetoric or implementation, the differences between liberal internationalism and neoconservatism were matters of nuance, not substance. The rhetoric was lofty but the subtext of the rhetoric of liberal internationalism was making the world safe for the expansion of America capital by extending the political and military reach of the U.S. state.
The Unraveling of Liberal Internationalism

The grand strategy of liberal internationalism, however, became mired in its own ambitions, its first major setback occurring in Southeast Asia, with the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. Toward the end of the twentieth century, globalization, the economic component of liberal internationalism, led to the unmooring of U.S. capital from its geographical location in the United States as American transnationals went out in search of cheap labor, resulting in the massive loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States and the building up of a rival economic power, China. Power projection, the military prong of the project, led to overextension or overreach, with the ambitious effort of President George W. Bush to remake the world in America’s image by carrying out the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq during Washington’s so-called “unipolar moment” in the early 2000s. The result was a debacle from which the United States has never recovered. Both the crisis of globalization and the crisis of overextension paved the way for the rebirth of the isolationist impulse that broke to the surface under Trump’s presidency in 2017-2021.

Only in retrospect can one appreciate how radically the isolationist, anti-globalist, and protectionist foreign policy of the first Trump administration broke with liberal internationalism. Trump, among other things, tore up the neoliberal Trans-Pacific Partnership that both Democrats and Republicans championed, considered NATO commitments a burden, demanded that Japan and Korea pay more for keeping U.S. troops and bases in their countries, trampled on the rules of the World Trade Organization, ignored the IMF and World Bank, negotiated the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan with the Taliban, and broke the West’s united front against North Korea by stepping across the DMZ to pat Kim Jong Un on the back on June 30, 2019. Some have said that his foreign policy was erratic or chaotic, but there was an underlying logic to his supposed madness, and this was his felt need to play opportunistically to an important part of his white, working-class and middle-class base that felt they had had enough of bearing the burdens of empire for the sake of the American political and economic elites.

But like Roosevelt in his efforts to break with isolationism in the early 1940s, Trump’s drive to break with liberal internationalism was plagued with obstacles, foremost of which were some of his appointees, who were open or covert adherents of liberal internationalism and proponents of globalization, and the entrenched national security bureaucracy known as the “deep state.” With Trump’s defeat in the November 2020 elections, these elements of the old foreign policy regime bounced back with a vengeance during the Biden administration, which proceeded to give full backing to Ukraine in its fight with Russia, expand the remit of NATO to the Pacific, and plunge the United States into full-scale military containment of China.

For Trump, there is a second chance to remake U.S. foreign policy beginning on January 20, 2025, and it’s unlikely he’ll allow partisans of the old regime spoil his efforts a second time. In this regard, one must not be fooled by the pro-expansionist or interventionist rhetoric or record of some of his cabinet picks, like Marco Rubio. These folks have no fixed political compass but political self-interest, and they will adjust to Trump’s instincts, outlook, and agenda.
Orban on Trump’s Grand Strategy

Probably the world leader that Trump admires most is Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban. Indeed, Trump and Orban form a mutual admiration society. Prior to the elections, Orban was channeling Trump to the world. On the question of America’s relations with the world under a second Trump presidency, Orban had this to say:


[M]any people think that if Donald Trump returns to the White House, the Americans will want to retain their world supremacy by maintaining their position in the world. I think that this is wrong. Of course, no one gives up positions of their own accord, but that will not be the most important goal. On the contrary, the priority will be to rebuild and strengthen North America. ..And America’s place in the world will be less important. You have to take what the President says seriously: “America First, everything here, everything will come home!”… For example, they are not an insurance company, and if Taiwan wants security, it should pay. They will make us Europeans, NATO and China pay the price of security; and they will also achieve a trade balance with China through negotiations, and change it in favour of the US. They will trigger massive US infrastructure development, military research, and innovation. They will achieve – or perhaps have already achieved – energy self-sufficiency and raw material self-sufficiency; and finally they will improve ideologically, giving up on the export of democracy. America First. The export of democracy is at an end. This is the essence of the experiment America is conducting in response to the situation described here.

Let’s parse and expand on Orban’s comments. For Trump, there is one overriding agenda, and that is to rejuvenate, repair, and reconstitute what he regards as an economy and society that has been in sharp decline owing to policies of the last few decades, policies that were broadly shared by Democrats and traditional Republicans.

For him, neoliberal policies, by encouraging American capital to go abroad, particularly to China, and free-trade policies, have greatly harmed the U.S. industrial infrastructure, resulting in loss of good paying blue-collar jobs, stagnation in wages, and rising inequality. “Making American Great Again” or MAGA is mainly an inward-looking perspective that prioritizes economic rejuvenation by bringing American capital back, walling off the American economic from cheap imports, particularly from China, and reducing immigration to a trickle—with that trickle coming mainly from what he would term “non-shithole countries” like Norway. Racism, dog-whistle politics, and anti-migrant sentiment are, not surprisingly, woven into Trump’s domestic and foreign policy rhetoric since his base is principally—though not exclusively—the white working class.

Foreign policy is, from this perspective, a distraction that must be seen as a necessary evil. The MAGA mindset, which is basically isolationism cum nationalism, sees U.S. security arrangements abroad, whether in the guise of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) or mutual defense treaties such as those with Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines, as obsolete commitments that may have been appropriate at a time that the United States was an expansionist power with tremendous resources but have since become bothersome relics for a power in decline, gaping holes that leak both money, manpower, and energy that would be better deployed elsewhere.

Trump is not interested in expanding a liberal empire via free trade and the free flow of capital—an order defended by the political canopy of multilateralism and promoted via an economic ideology of globalization and a political ideology of liberal democracy. What he is interested in is building a Fortress America that is much, much less engaged with the world, where the multilateral institutions through which the United States has exercised its economic power, NATO and the Bretton Woods institutions, would be much less relevant as instruments of U.S. power. Deal-making, like the one Trump conducted with Kim Jong-Un during his first term, would, instead, be one of the main methods of defending American interests. Unilateral military and economic actions against those outside the fortress that are seen as threats, rather than allied endeavors, will be the order of the day.
Selective Engagement and Spheres of Influence

Rather than isolationism, probably a better term for Trump’s grand strategy is “selective engagement,” to contrast it with the open-ended global engagement of liberal internationalism.

One aspect of selective engagement will be disengagement from what Trump denigrates as “shithole countries,” meaning, most of us in the global South, in terms of trying to shape their political and economic regimes via the IMF and the World Bank and providing bilateral economic and military aid. Definitely, there will be no more talk of “exporting freedom and democracy” that was a staple of both Democratic and Republican administrations.

Another aspect of selective engagement will be a “spheres of influence” approach. North America and South America will be regarded as being Washington’s natural sphere of influence. So, Trump will stick to the Monroe Doctrine, and maybe his choice of Marco Rubio to be secretary of state might reflect this, since Rubio, a child of Cuban refugees, has been very hostile to left-leaning governments in Latin America.

Eastern Europe will likely be seen as belonging to Moscow’s sphere of influence, with Trump reversing the post-Cold War U.S. policy of extending NATO eastward, which was a key factor that triggered Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

The European Union will be left to fend for itself, with Trump unlikely to invest any effort to prop up NATO, much less expand its remit to the Asia Pacific, as Biden has done. It would be a mistake to underestimate Trump’s resentment of the western allies of the United States, which, in his view, have prospered at the expense of America.

The downgrading of the United States as a central player in the Middle East will continue, with Washington’s confining itself to providing weapons for Israel and encouraging a diplomatic rapprochement between Israel and the reactionary Arab states like Saudi Arabia to stabilize the area against Iran and the wave of radical Islamism that direct U.S. intervention failed to contain. Needless to say, Trump will gladly turn a blind eye to Tel Aviv’s carrying out its genocidal campaign against the Palestinians.

Finally, in the Asia Pacific, there is a strong likelihood that while Trump will pursue the trade and technology war with China that he initiated during his first term, he will dial down the military confrontation with Beijing, mindful that his base is not going to like military adventures that take away the focus from building Fortress America. Concretely, he’ll raise the price for keeping U.S. troops and bases in Japan and South Korea. He’ll reengage Kim Jong Un in the dialogue he was carrying out when he crossed the DMZ in 2019—a dialogue that could have unpredictable consequences for the U.S. military presence in South Korea and Japan. He already gave an indication of this during his acceptance speech during the Republican National Convention when he said he had to initiate a dialogue with Kim owing to the fact that he “is someone with a lot of nuclear weapons.” Could the withdrawal or radical reduction of Washington’s military umbrella for South Korea and Japan be the price of a grand deal between Kim and Trump? This is the specter that haunts both states.

Trump is likely to cease sending ships through the Taiwan Straits to provoke China, as Biden did, and one can expect him to tell Taiwan that there’s a dollar price to be paid for being defended by the United States and that Taipei should not expect the same assurance that Biden gave it that Washington will come to Taiwan’s rescue in the event of a Chinese invasion. I think Trump knows that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan was never in the cards anyway and that Beijing’s strategy was always cross-straits economic integration as the means to eventually absorb Taiwan.

As for the Philippines and the South China Sea, a Trump administration is likely to tell Manila that there will be none of that “iron clad” guarantee promised by Biden of an automatic U.S. military response under the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty in support of Manila in the event of a major confrontation with China in the South China Sea, like the sinking of the Philippine vessel. Trump, it must be remembered, has gone on record saying that he would not waste one American life for what he called “rocks” in the South China Sea. The Pentagon’s push to build up the Philippines as a forward base for the military confrontation with China that Biden fully supported is likely to be reviewed, if not put on hold or abandoned.

In short, Trump is likely to communicate to Xi Jinping that the Asia Pacific is China’s sphere of influence, though this message will be delivered informally and covered up by rhetoric of continued American engagement with the region.

In conclusion, one must restate the caveat made at the beginning of this piece: that there are few certainties when it comes to an unpredictable figure like Trump. These few certainties are that Trump will be bad for the climate, for American democracy, for women, and for minorities. As for the rest, one can speculate based on past behavior, statements, and events, but one would be wise to always remind oneself that while his instincts are isolationist, unpredictability in policy and action has been and will continue to be the hallmark of Donald Trump.

Walden Bello is currently the International Adjunct Professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton and Co-Chairperson of the Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South. He is the author or co-author of 25 books, including Counterrevolution: The Global Rise of the Far Right (Nova Scotia: Fernwood, 2019), Paper Dragons: China and the Next Crash (London: Bloomsbury/Zed, 2019), Food Wars (London: Verso, 2009) and Capitalism’s Last Stand? (London: Zed, 2013).

 

Kiribati Has Benefitted from Abolishing Its Military

by Richard Westra / November 20th, 2024

David Swanson asked me to write about Kiribati after I wrote to him to point out Costa Rica is not the only “full-fledged and totally independent country to be entirely demilitarised.” Kiribati, and other small countries I suspect, have no military. In Kiribati’s case this was a deliberate decision taken by the first President and Government of Kiribati as it was becoming Independent in 1979. Like Costa Rica it has almost certainly benefitted from that foundational decision. Many other newly independent ex British colonies suffered from coups and military rule as a result of the British policy of promoting nationhood on the British model: Westminster type parliament, independent judiciary, and a military force. It was interesting interviewing Sir Ieremia Tabai, the first President and a leading campaigner at the time when it was an issue, stating that the motivation was heavily economic – we are a small country with very little money so we can’t go wasting it on buying guns. If only more leaders would adhere to such basic commonsense!

But first of all a bit of an introduction to Kiribati, as most people have never heard of us and even fewer know much about us. Kiribati sits right in the middle of the Pacific Ocean but tending to the Western side. It is the only country in the world with a claim to be in all four hemispheres, north, south, east and west, spanning as it does the Equator and the 180 meridian, the International Date Line. There are 33 islands spread over 3000kms from west to east along the Equator. The population is currently 130,000 and rising fast, with more than half living in the capital Tarawa. The population is over 90% ethnically homogenous Micronesian, I-Kiribati, with its own language and unique culture. Kiribati dance is a unique cultural form and is central in the culture, an integral part of every occasion from the opening of Parliament to weddings, birthdays, and public holidays. It is one of the main ways in which the culture preserves itself, the Kiribati diaspora using it as an excuse to come together wherever they are and teach it to the children.

Current revenue is predominantly from fishing licences for the right to fish in Kiribati’s vast Exclusive Economic Zone, mainly tuna. The country is very democratic with 45 MPs elected from all the islands who then choose Presidential candidates from amongst their number and these then go up for election by the whole country. The President, who sits for 4 years, barring a vote of no confidence, then chooses a Cabinet from amongst their supporters. The country is now on its fifth President in 45 years. Presidents can have a maximum of three terms. Despite being classified by the UN as a Least Developed State Kiribati has free universal education and health provision, a form of Universal Basic Income, state provision for disabled people, and a non-contributary pension scheme for all those over 60. While some of these benefits are well below the standards provided in more wealthy countries they all represeent advances on previous times. Kiribati has a sovereign wealth fund of $1.5 billion and receives foreign aid from countries such as Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan, Korea, the USA, Cuba, the UN, and the EU. The logistics of Kiribati ensure that it is never likely to become a developed state: the isolation and distances involved, and the consequent difficulties of providing services to tiny communities of only a few hundred people separated by thousands of kilometres ensuring that it continues to be underdeveloped, by world standards.

Isolation has not prevented Kiribati from suffering the depradations of colonialism, militarism, and capitalism. The islands were initially settled by various waves of settlement over the past few thousand years resulting in a homogenous culture and language developed over that timescale. Western Europeans started to arrive in the 19th century, particularly whalers operating out of America and elsewhere which started the first great exploitation, decimating the whale population which has not recovered to this day. This was followed at the turn of the 20th century by the beginning of phosphate mining on Banaba, or Ocean Island as it was called by the British. Banaba was mined to such an extent that its inhabitants were forced to resettle on another island which had been bought for them with their own money. It has been suggested that Banaba’s phosphate was used to subsidise the exponential growth of agriculture in Australia and New Zealand, Britain’s partners in exploiting Kiribati, to the tune of $800 million until the phosphate ran out in 1979, the year of Kiribati independence from Britain. Banaban phosphate royalties also covered the cost of Britain’s colonial administration of the Kiribati.

During WWII, the Japanese invaded Kiribati and fortified one island heavily which then became the site of one of the first major battles of the Pacific war when it was retaken by the Americans at the Battle of Tarawa. In the post WWII decades the British used Kiribati as a nuclear testing ground, doing atmospheric tests on Kiritimati Island in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The U.S. tested its bombs on Bikini and Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands immediately north of Kiribati, while the French tested theirs in Muroroa to the south, inflicting on Kiribati and its Pacific island neighbours what Western nations’ own populations refused to accept.

Whilst fishing revenues are now the basis of the Kiribati economy, it is also true that this is the main way in which the country is exploited as its fishing licence revenues are only a small percentage of the profits gained by foreign fishing companies fishing in its EEZ. Kiribati has had to work hard, along with other Pacific countries, Parties to the Nauru Agreement (PNU), to get even the comparatively small amount it gets in licences, gradually building on its success in forcing American fishing fleets to pay in the mid-1980s. Faced by the complete refusal of U.S. fishing companies to pay for fishing in Kiribati waters Kiribati sold the fishing rights to the Russians, exploiting their superpower rivalry so effectively that the following year the U.S. started to pay as prescribed by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea(UNCLOS) – a great example of a microstate manipulating two superpowers to achieve its own ends!

Although to date Kiribati has suffered little from climate change it is quite possible that this could provide an existential threat in the future if ocean acidification and temperature increases, sea level rise and weather pattern change combine to make life impossible and cause dispersal of Kiribati’s people, despite Kiribati having made minuscule contributions to the causes.

Kiribati has hosted visits from foreign warships from the U.S., China, Taiwan, Australia, France and others but these are courtesy visits often bringing medical and other teams to share their expertise. Kiribati benefits from the assistance of an Australian patrol boat to police its EEZ and has occasionally held fishing boats illegally fishing in Kiribati waters. It also benefits from New Zealand Air Force search and rescue teams assisting searches for missing fishermen.

Pacific countries generally, and Kiribati particularly, are seen by the United States and its allies as being stategically important in their geo-political rivalry with China – or their need to have an enemy in order to justify their military spending and safeguard the profits of the military industrial complex. Whenever Kiribati is mentioned in articles and programmes in the Western media it is usually accompanied by references to its strategic significance and the threat of it being taken over by China, particularly over recent years since 2019 when Kiribati returned its diplomatic recognition to China following recognition of Taiwan in 2003. The fear seems to be that Kiribati will allow China to build ports and airbases from which China would be able to attack the United States and disrupt trade, although neither Kiribati nor China has shown any inclination to do this, a case it seems of the pot calling the kettle black. The United States has multiple military bases in the Pacific, and indeed throughout the world, and seems to think that everyone else wants to waste money and resources in the same way. Following the switch from Taiwan to China in 2019 the U.S. has been keen to make connections in Kiribati but has been thwarted by the lack of a military it can entice with hardware and a shortage of land in the capital Tarawa where it could build an Embassy. Kiribati sees itself as a Christian country and is naturally culturally connected to the U.S. – its first missionaries were American. U.S. churches have a strong presence in the country. It was liberated by U.S. forces defeating the Japanese in World War II. It has benefitted in the past from Peace Corps volunteers. And its official language is English which makes it part of the Anglophone world. There is a Kiribati diaspora including communities in the U.S. At the same time, the people of Kiribati have no wish to be controlled by any foreign power, and resent any country that interferes with Kiribati’s independence. Experience has also taught Kiribati that it can exploit rivalry for its own benefit. The dangers for Kiribati in this are that should the rivalry escalate to war it is likely that rival powers would prefer to fight in somewhere like Kiribati rather than in their own countries.

Whilst thinking about writing this article it occurred to me that a major benefit of Kiribati’s lack of a military is the lack of guns in the country. I can’t remember anyone ever having been shot, and on asking around I found that no one else could either – hardly surprising as there are no guns to shoot with! This was not always the case. Early contact with Europeans, mainly whalers and traders, was characterised by a trade in tobacco, alcohol, guns, and metal — knives, pots and pans, nails etc. Various chiefs and factions acquired guns to gain an advantage over local rivals, which led to a number of conflicts on and between different islands in the latter half of the 19^th century. This came to an end however with the declaration of a Protectorate by the British in 1892 when HMS Royalist raised the Union Jack on all the different islands and rounded up all the guns at the same time.

It feels to me that Kiribati has much to teach the world. Its culture is very communal with an expectation that we should help each other, most strongly within the extended family but also on a wider level. Strangers and visitors are welcomed and treated very well. There are hundreds, probably thousands, of maneabas, communal meeting houses where everybody is welcome, often offering accomodation to anyone who needs it. The expectation is that decisions should be reached by consensus. Most houses are not locked and many are indeed open sided without walls. Kiribati clearly demonstrates the benefits of any people having their own space over which they have control and which they can call their own, without being dominated or subjugated by other ethnicities — a principle which if applied worldwide would lead to the break up of bullying superpowers and other countries that have usually been created through conquest. We could see hundreds, or indeed thousands, of states offering all peoples their own autonomy within a cooperative world framework. Many conflicts in the world are caused by the domination of one group by another within the confines of a larger state, whether that be the Palestinians in Israel, the indigenous peoples of the Americas within their colonised lands, the Rohingya in Myanmar/Bangladesh, the Uyghers in China, the Basques and Catalans in Spain, the Kurds within Iran, Iraq, and Turkey, the West Papuans in Indonesia, or innumerable ethnicities within the colonial imposed boundaries of Africa.

In conclusion, it is worth reiterating the main benefits of Kiribati’s lack of a military. Ieremia insisted that the rationale was wholly economic – we cannot afford to spend money financing a military as that will deprive far more essential services such as education and health of much needed resources. And who is going to attack us anyway out here in the middle of the ocean? The other benefits, which are difficult to be so sure about, include the political stability that has allowed peaceful development and the unchallenged primacy of the democratic electoral system without interference from unelected military officers enforced by soldiers. Then there is the lack of a gun culture leading to completely unnecessary deaths. It is difficult to imagine any advantages that would be gained by having a military!

Richard Westra is Designated Associate Professor, Graduate School of Law, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan. His work has been published in numerous international refereed journals. He is author and editor of 10 books including Confronting Global Neoliberalism: Third World Resistance and Development Strategies, Clarity Press 2010. Read other articles by Richard.

WALL ST.  DEMOC-RAT

Rahm Emanuel made alarming stock trades as ambassador to Japan: report

Jessica Corbett,

 Common Dreams
November 20, 2024

Rahm Emanuel (AFP Photo/Chip Somodevilla)

"Siri, what is insider trading?"

That's how one reader responded to Tuesday reporting by The American Prospect's Daniel Boguslaw that Rahm Emanuel, who is supposedly mulling a bid for Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair, made some concerning financial moves while in his current government job.

Emanuel is the U.S. ambassador to Japan. He was previously the mayor of Chicago, a Democratic Illinois congressman, and a key adviser to former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. While in the House of Representatives, he chaired the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and then the party's caucus in the chamber. He's also been an investment banker

As Boguslaw detailed Tuesday:
Periodic transaction reports filed with the Office of Governmental Ethics over the past two years suggest that Chicago's golden boy may be better served returning to his roots on Wall Street, given the six-figure trades he executed at highly opportune moments in U.S.-Japanese trade relations.

Among the millions of dollars of stock trades Emanuel conducted between 2021 and 2024 while serving as ambassador, one purchase jumps out. On September 29, 2023, Emanuel bought between $250,000 and $500,000 worth of stocks in CoreWeave, a leading AI cloud computing service.

Emanuel's purchase took place one day before the Japanese government announced a $320 million subsidy to Micron Technology to manufacture storage components that are essential to the Nvidia chips which CoreWeave relies on for its AI computation services.

Emanuel "purchased between $100,000 and $250,000 worth of Ocient stock on March 8, 2024, before the close of the firm's series B raise," after the Illinois "data analytics company's CEO Chris Gladwin traveled to Japan in October on a trade delegation mission," Boguslaw noted. "At the end of July, Rahm also purchased between $50,000 and $100,000 worth of stock in Monroe Capital, a Chicago-based middle-market lender that specializes in collateralized debt obligations, the Frankenstein financial product that crashed global markets in 2008."

While Emanuel did not respond to the Prospect's request for comment, Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project, declared on social media that it was a "MASSIVE STORY!"


Hauser told Common Dreams that "being ambassador to Japan is a big job, but normally owing to its importance to America's relationship with a key ally in a critical area of the globe, and not because of the access it apparently provides to actionable stock tips."

"Ambassador Emanuel's brain ought to have been focused on improving America's lot in East Asia, not maximizing his retirement account," he said. "We at Revolving Door Project have long argued that senior government officials should be limited to investing in diversified mutual funds rather than stock by stock. That Emanuel was making exotic investments in businesses he may have learned about on the government's dime only underscores the need for such reforms."

"If Democrats are to ever put a full and final end to Trumpism, they are going to need to develop a clear and consistent critique of why corruption by public officials is a bad thing. That would make Rahm Emanuel among the worst possible choices for DNC chair, especially since Sen. Menendez seems likely to be unavailable for the position," Hauser added, referring to Bob Menendez, a former Democratic senator from New Jersey who in July was convicted of taking bribes.

As Common Dreams reported last week, progressive critics of Emanuel have called his potential leadership of the DNC—after various devastating losses for the party on Election Day earlier this month—a "sick joke" and "the worst idea in the world."

Noting Emanuel's consideration of the job in an email to supporters on Tuesday, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said that "there is a disease in Washington of Democrats who spend more time listening to the donor class than working people. If you want to know the seed of the party's political crisis—that's it."

"The DNC needs an organizer who gets people," she asserted. "Not someone who sends fish heads in the mail."

Martin O'Malley, a former Democratic presidential candidate and Maryland governor, and Ken Martin, the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party chair and a DNC vice chair, have both formally launched their campaigns for the position.

Other potential contenders for the DNC post include Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler and Chuck Rocha, a political strategist for the latest campaign of Sen.-elect Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) and the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

Sanders, who caucuses with Democrats, said after the elections earlier this month that "it should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them."

According toCBS News:

Rocha said he's still waiting to see how the field develops before jumping in, and "if there's a better candidate that really stands for what I want to see done with the party."

But Rocha has set several action items he would take as chair: eliminate education requirements for senior DNC positions, mandating that state parties "be more inclusive" and diverse with consultant hiring, and to focus on building party infrastructure in all 50 states.

Asked about Martin's and O'Malley's campaigns, Rocha called them "names that are from the institution."

"I think we need somebody from the outside and a strategist to come in and rebuild the party," said Rocha, who noted that his non-college background and upbringing in East Texas could be an advantage as the party looks to reconnect with working-class voters.

Politico reported Tuesday that another Sanders ally, James Zogby, "expects to formally launch his campaign in the coming days."


A longtime DNC member and president of the Arab American Institute, Zogby told Politico that he was motivated to run by his anger over Republican President-elect Donald Trump's defeat of Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.

Zogby criticized Harris for campaigning with former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Okla.), said the Democratic Party was too "focused on suburban women and not on white working-class people," and called the decision to not invite a Palestinian American to speak at the national convention "unimaginative, overly cautious, and completely out of touch with where voters are."

Trump May Be Among the Most Vile of Anti-Immigrant Demagogues, But He is Not Original

Bruce Neuburger

 November 18, 2024
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Image by Greg Bulla.

Immigration to the U.S. southern border has long been subject to cold-hearted racial demagoguery. The Statue of Liberty may have welcomed some of the “huddled masses” from Europe at different times, but no such welcome was ever given to people from south of the border. There, a different attitude has prevailed.

Donald Trump’s MAGA hate speech includes such descriptions of non-European immigrants as “stone cold killers,” “immigrant criminals from the dungeons of the world,” “rapist,” “pet eaters” — or “invaders” from across the southern border. Some may find Trump’s words pleasing and others dreadful, but he is far from original.

The story begins in 1846 when U.S. President Polk— encouraged by the slavocracy eager for more land to expand their operations and by the merchant capitalists looking for a gateway to the Pacific — set about to rip off the northern half of Mexico from the rest of that country. Among the European Americans who followed their “Manifest Destiny” west to newly conquered lands after the war in 1848, there was debate about whether the new U.S. territories would be “slave” or “free.” But there was neither debate nor doubt about how to receive the non-white immigrants who made it to those promising lands.

In a Congressional hearing in the 1880s a member of the House committee on immigration questioned a representative from California: “Two years ago California came before this committee and stated herself in opposition to the Chinese and Japanese immigrant and in favor of Chinese and Japanese exclusion, stating that they wanted to develop a great big white State in California, a white man’s country; and now you come before us and want unlimited Mexican immigration . . . I cannot see the consistency.”¹

But there was consistency. Chinese and Japanese workers were among the first waves of non-whites whose labor would lay the groundwork for large scale agriculture and the California dream that would not be theirs. But as important as their labor was it came with a defect making them far from the ideal workers white employers desired: They were difficult to remove thus posing an unacceptable threat to white demographic dominance.2 Mexican labor, however, was close at hand and easily deportable, a quality that made it, by the early 1920s, the immigrant labor of choice.

The southern border became, not the firm line of defense of national sovereignty as our contemporary demagogues would have us see it, but the portal for the low wage laborers on whose backs an empire was being built. But the door was meant to be a revolving one and herein lay the conflict.

Through the years the southern border has been the scene of a schizoid dance of immigration. There were times when employers on U.S. farms, factories, and railroads, couldn’t get enough of those “hard working,” “uncomplaining” Mexican (or Central American) workers—think of the Bracero program during the World War II years.³ Then there were other times marked by furious nativist-driven campaigns to stop the flow and rid the land of “criminals,” “disease ridden delinquents,” “drug runners,” “ants,” “communists” or “terrorists”— depending on the era. Notable in this are the years 1930, 1954, and 1994.

In the early 1930s hundreds of thousands of Mexicans were deported or otherwise forced out of the U.S. having been made convenient scapegoats for a brutal Depression economy. The deportations were massive and indiscriminate and accompanied by a ferocious campaign of racial intimidation and threats so intense that many of those who left the U.S., did so on their own out of fear of violence. Forty to sixty percent of those deported or repatriated were U.S. citizens, and many were children.

1954 was the year of Operation Wetback, a militarized campaign of terror and mass deportation that resulted in the suffering and death of many immigrants. Operation Wetback was principally an ethnic cleansing campaign. Its goal was to reverse the “troubling” growth of Mexican and Mexican American communities in California and the Southwest. But the deportation campaign ultimately failed, not because it wasn’t well planned or brutally executed, but because the immigrant communities had become interwoven in the economic and social fabric of border states. After a military style mass deportation of more than a million immigrants which caused terrible suffering, American authorities appealed to Mexicans to return to the U.S.! The California and southwest economy could not function without them. ⁴

In the intervening years since Operation Wetback the structural dependence of U.S. capitalism on cheap, vulnerable labor has increased. At the same time, one of the foundations of white supremacist control and identity, the demographic dominance of white people, is more challenged than ever. What began as a labor system largely restricted to California and the southwest has now become a key part of the labor structure for the entire country. In places throughout the U.S., and especially in the cities, essential jobs from service to construction to meat packing, child care and elder care, are dependent on immigrant workers. And the countryside? Today nearly 90% of U.S. farm and dairy workers are immigrants, roughly half undocumented.

Walk the streets of major cities, go to the school rooms and work places and the demographic future greets you in all its multiplicity. This is what lies at the heart of the MAGA-fascist immigrant frenzy— a clash of demographics.

For the nativist who has bought into the notion that the U.S. is a “white man’s land” and must always remain so — this is the metastasizing of a nightmare. For those who view humanity through a broader lens, it is a twist of historical irony and the harbinger of a potentially better world.

The Crazy Dance

In the 1980s President Reagan tried to alter the crazy dance of immigration with an amnesty for what were then three million immigrants deprived of documents.⁵ Today, 38 years on, there are at least 11 to 12 million people with this status. Thirty-eight years have passed since there has been any viable path to the most basic “legal residency” for those millions. And the reason for this is no great mystery: No matter how much verbal fog obscures it, the U.S. economy depends on their labor, their cheap labor.

U.S. capitalism admits to no apartheid nor racial caste system, and yet it can’t function – and compete — without workers deprived of basic rights. The endless discussions and promises over the last decades about “comprehensive immigration reform,” have been so entangled in their own contradictions that one residing in Alice’s Wonderland would find it beyond the pale . . . with no end in sight.

Beginning in the 1990s we witnessed with Clinton, Bush and Obama, the border wall constructed, laws criminalizing immigrants enacted, a spectacularly cold blooded decision to drive refugees from NAFTA⁶ into the desert where many died, and an endless raging frenzy over “border security.” Meanwhile, beginning especially under Obama, immigrant detention centers sprouted like diseased deformities on the landscape. In the mid 1990s California’s conservative governor Pete Wilson tried to solve the state’s “demographic problem.” It was called Proposition 187, a draconian plan of ethnic removal that sought to enlist teachers and healthcare workers to its cause. The ballot measure passed easily but the plan failed. Massive resistance by teachers, medical workers, and youth from the immigrant communities, played an important role. The fight to defeat Proposition 187 was a watershed for California. It actually secured greater respect and rights for immigrants, much to the chagrin of the nativists and white supremacists. And they have not forgotten that defeat!

When campaigning for office the first time in 2016, Trump cited and praised Operation Wetback. He even mimicked Herbert Brownell, the Secretary of State in 1954 who, at the height of that Operation, threatened to shoot immigrants to discourage them from coming. Trump, not to be outdone in the verbal thuggery department, said at the time he would machine gun them. And we saw how those words aroused people to horrible actions in 2019 in places like the garlic festival in Gilroy, California and a Walmart in El Paso, Texas.⁷

And now in the Trump2 era, a more rabid fascist nationalism targets the broader non-white community, and non-white immigrants in particular, not only as inferiors, but overtly as racial enemies, and poisoners of blood!

Trump2 is better organized, with a more indoctrinated base, possessed with a histrionic passion for preserving white dominance, or white supremacy, and with the added zeal of racial animus and Christian fundamentalism. It is also linked to the more desperate moment as the U.S. empire confronts greater challenges to its global dominance. The MAGA fascists look to rouse the populace with a racial zeal for the imperial tests ahead.

The depth of Trumpite insanity was spoken to by the MAGA groupie Elon Musk in a conversation with Joe Rogan on November 4 when he referred to then upcoming election as an “existential” moment: “If the Democrats win the election they will legalize enough illegals to turn the swing states. And [then] everywhere will be like California. There will be no escape” (my emphasis)–“Everywhere will be like California.” Such is the vision of hell for the MAGA racial fanatics.

To be sure Trump’s MAGA fascism is more than an immigration and demographics project. It is the fervent vision of a U.S. returning to the unassailable heights of global domination. The glue that holds this MAGA project together bears a striking resemblance to its German counterpart in the 1930s. Racial demagogy, white (instead of Aryan) supremacy, (and misogyny) at its core. While not new, in the world of today, it’s a lunatic vision and its lust for a racial reckoning is more dangerous than it’s ever been.

Postscript:

The opposite of this MAGA vision sees defense of humanity as a whole as our sacred responsibility. And that includes the defense and preservation of this little, abused planet of ours. The MAGAites are going to have to be defeated if we are to succeed in uplifting our humanity. Along with that, the system out of which this MAGA nightmare has arisen will also have to go. Will the coming assaults on immigrants be a spark for a broader, more radical social movement?

¹ Stoll, Steven, The Fruits of Natural Advantage, UC Press, 1998 p.152

² Throughout the 1800s western nativists waged war on Asian immigrants. This included racist pogroms that literally burned down Chinese communities on the west coast. In 1882 the nativists succeeded in passing the Chinese Exclusion Act.

³ The Bracero program was a wartime measure begun in 1942 that brought millions of Mexican workers under contract to work in California and other states. Their contract stipulated that they had to return to Mexico after their period of contractual labor ended. The Bracero program ended in 1964 but the need for Mexican labor did not.

⁴ Operation Wetback was a militarized operation led by a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General. At least one million workers and their families were deported, sometimes deep into Mexico far from their homes. Some deportees were dumped inside the Mexican border without food or water. Hundreds of deaths resulted.

⁵ In 1986 Congress passed the Simpson/Mazzoli Act (Immigration Reform and Control Act or IRCA) that provided for an amnesty for 3 million undocumented workers to legalize their status. In addition a program for growers allowed for many additional legalizations. One of the aims of this amnesty was to assure employers of a more stable workforce. Simpson/ Mazzoli provided for sanctions for employers who continued to hire undocumented workers. This was meant to stem the flow of undocumented immigrants. But this provision was not enforced and following Simpson /Mazzoli the flow of undocumented immigrants into the labor force continued and increased.

⁶ The North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect in 1994. Among its effects were lowering tariffs on U.S. produced corn. The subsequent flooding of the Mexican market with cheap U.S. corporate grown corn caused corn prices to fall and hundreds of thousands of small Mexican farmers were ruined, a fact that the mainstream media has largely ignored. Many displaced farmers and rural workers, to survive, went north. But just at that time a border wall was constructed in such a way as to force them to make their way north through dangerous mountainous and desert terrains leading to hundreds and then thousands of deaths. According to one estimate at least 8,000 immigrants have died crossing the Mexico – U.S. border since the latter 1990s.

⁷ In August 2019 a mass shooter killed 23 people at an El Paso Walmart in one of the deadliest attacks targeting Latinos in modern U.S. history. This followed a shooting in Gilroy the previous month where three people were killed and eleven wounded. The shooters in both cases were white, those injured and killed, mainly Latinos.

Bruce Neuberger is a retired teacher and author of Postcards to Hitler: A German Jew’s Defiance in a Time of Terror.