UNSC to discuss potential threats of artificial intelligence to world peace

The meeting will include briefings by international AI experts and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who last month called the alarm bells over the most advanced form of AI "deafening," and loudest from its developers.

Guterres has announced plans to appoint an advisory board on artificial intelligence in September to prepare initiatives that the UN can take. / Photo: Reuters Archive

The UN Security Council will hold a first-ever meeting on the potential threats of artificial intelligence to international peace and security, organised by the United Kingdom which sees tremendous potential but also major risks about AI's possible use for example in autonomous weapons or in control of nuclear weapons.

UK Ambassador Barbara Woodward on Monday announced the July 18 meeting as the centrepiece of its presidency of the council this month.

It will include briefings by international AI experts and Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who last month called the alarm bells over the most advanced form of AI "deafening," and loudest from its developers.

"These scientists and experts have called on the world to act, declaring AI an existential threat to humanity on a par with the risk of nuclear war," the UN chief said.

Guterres announced plans to appoint an advisory board on artificial intelligence in September to prepare initiatives that the UN can take.

He also said he would react favourably to a new UN agency on AI and suggested as a model the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is knowledge-based and has some regulatory powers.

'Multilateral approach'

Woodward said the UK wants to encourage "a multilateral approach to managing both the huge opportunities and the risks that artificial intelligence holds for all of us," stressing that “this is going to take a global effort.”

She stressed that the benefits side is huge, citing AI's potential to help UN development programmes, improve humanitarian aid operations, assist peacekeeping operations and support conflict prevention, including by collecting and analyzing data.

"It could potentially help us close the gap between developing countries and developed countries," she added.

But the risk side raises serious security question that must also be addressed, Woodward said.

On June 14, EU lawmakers signed off on the world’s first set of comprehensive rules for artificial intelligence, clearing a key hurdle as authorities across the globe race to rein in AI.

In May, the head of the artificial intelligence company that makes ChatGPT told a US Senate hearing that government intervention will be critical to mitigating the risks of increasingly powerful AI systems, saying as this technology advances people are concerned about how it could change their lives, and "we are too."

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman proposed the formation of a US or global agency that would license the most powerful AI systems and have the authority to "take that license away and ensure compliance with safety standards."

Woodward said the Security Council meeting, to be chaired by UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, will provide an opportunity to listen to expert views on AI, which is a very new technology that is developing very fast, and start a discussion among the 15 council members on its implications.

Britain's Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has announced that the UK will host a summit on AI later this year, "where we'll be able to have a truly global multilateral discussion," Woodward said.

Scientists warn of AI dangers but disagree on solutions

Computer scientists, including Geoffrey Hinton, who is often dubbed "the godfather of artificial intelligence", speak out about dangers of AI, such as job market destabilisation, automated weaponry and dangers of biased data sets.

AP

Some experts are worried that hype around superhuman machines — which don't exist — is distracting from attempts to set practical safeguards on current AI products. / Photo: AP

Computer scientists who helped build the foundations of today's artificial intelligence [AI] technology have warned of its dangers, but disagree on what those dangers are or how to prevent them.

Humanity's survival is threatened when "smart things can outsmart us," the so-called "Godfather of AI" Geoffrey Hinton said at a conference on Wednesday at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"It may keep us around for a while to keep the power stations running," Hinton said. "But after that, maybe not."

After retiring from Google so he could speak more freely, the 75-year-old Hinton said he's recently changed his views about the reasoning capabilities of the computer systems he's spent a lifetime researching.

"These things will have learned from us, by reading all the novels that ever were and everything Machiavelli ever wrote, how to manipulate people," Hinton said, addressing the crowd attending MIT Technology Review's EmTech Digital conference from his home via video. "Even if they can't directly pull levers, they can certainly get us to pull levers."

"I wish I had a nice simple solution I could push, but I don’t," he added. "I'm not sure there is a solution."

Fellow AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio, co-winner with Hinton of the top computer science prize, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that he's "pretty much aligned" with Hinton's concerns brought on by chatbots such as ChatGPT and related technology, but worries that to simply say "We're doomed" is not going to help.

"The main difference, I would say, is he's kind of a pessimistic person, and I'm more on the optimistic side," said Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal. "I do think that the dangers — the short-term ones, the long-term ones — are very serious and need to be taken seriously by not just a few researchers but governments and the population."

Governments discussing AI risks

There are plenty of signs that governments are listening. The White House has called in the CEOs of Google, Microsoft and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI to meet on Thursday with Vice President Kamala Harris in what's being described by officials as a frank discussion on how to mitigate both the near-term and long-term risks of their technology. European lawmakers are also accelerating negotiations to pass sweeping new AI rules.

But all the talk of the most dire future dangers has some worried that hype around superhuman machines — which don't exist — is distracting from attempts to set practical safeguards on current AI products that are largely unregulated and have been shown to cause real-world harms.

Margaret Mitchell, a former leader on Google's AI ethics team, said she's upset that Hinton didn't speak out during his decade in a position of power at Google, especially after the 2020 ouster of prominent Black scientist Timnit Gebru, who had studied the harms of large language models before they were widely commercialised into products such as ChatGPT and Google's Bard.

"It's a privilege that he gets to jump from the realities of the propagation of discrimination now, the propagation of hate language, the toxicity and nonconsensual pornography of women, all of these issues that are actively harming people who are marginalised in tech," said Mitchell, who was also forced out of Google in the aftermath of Gebru's departure. "He's skipping over all of those things to worry about something farther off."

Bengio, Hinton and a third researcher, Yann LeCun, who works at Facebook parent Meta, were all awarded the Turing Prize in 2019 for their breakthroughs in the field of artificial neural networks, instrumental to the development of today's AI applications such as ChatGPT.


Bengio, the only one of the three who didn't take a job with a tech giant, has voiced concerns for years about near-term AI risks, including job market destabilisation, automated weaponry and the dangers of biased data sets.

But those concerns have grown recently, leading Bengio to join other computer scientists and tech business leaders like Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak in calling for a six-month pause on developing AI systems more powerful than OpenAI's latest model, GPT-4.

Bengio said on Wednesday he believes the latest AI language models already pass the "Turing test" named after British codebreaker and AI pioneer Alan Turing's method introduced in 1950 to measure when AI becomes indistinguishable from a human — at least on the surface.

"That's a milestone that can have drastic consequences if we're not careful," Bengio said. "My main concern is how they can be exploited for nefarious purposes to destabilise democracies, for cyberattacks, disinformation. You can have a conversation with these systems and think that you’re interacting with a human. They’re difficult to spot."

Fearmongering?

Where researchers are less likely to agree is on how current AI language systems — which have many limitations, including a tendency to fabricate information — might actually get smarter than humans not just in memorising huge troves of information, but in showing critical reasoning and other human skills.

Aidan Gomez was one of the co-authors of the pioneering 2017 paper that introduced a so-called transformer technique — the "T" at the end of ChatGPT — for improving the performance of machine-learning systems, especially in how they learn from passages of text. Then just a 20-year-old intern at Google, Gomez remembers laying on a couch at the company's California headquarters when his team sent out the paper around 3 am when it was due.

"Aidan, this is going to be so huge," he remembers a colleague telling him, of the work that's since helped lead to new systems that can generate humanlike prose and imagery.

Six years later and now CEO of his own AI company called Cohere, which Hinton has invested in, Gomez is enthused about the potential applications of these systems but bothered by fearmongering he says is "detached from the reality" of their true capabilities and "relies on extraordinary leaps of imagination and reasoning."

"The notion that these models are somehow gonna get access to our nuclear weapons and launch some sort of extinction-level event is not a productive discourse to have," Gomez said. "It’s harmful to those real pragmatic policy efforts that are trying to do something good."

Asked about his investments in Cohere on Wednesday in light of his broader concerns about AI, Hinton said he had no plans to pull his investments because there are still many helpful applications of language models in medicine and elsewhere. He also said he hadn't made any bad decisions in pursuing the research he started in the 1970s.

"Until very recently, I thought this existential crisis was a long way off," Hinton said. "So I don't really have any regrets about what I did."

 Elon Musk's move to temporarily cap how many posts Twitter users can read on the social media site could undermine efforts by new CEO Linda Yaccarino to attract advertisers, according to Mike Proulx of Forrester.

The “C” Word

By Scott Montgomery - 04 July 2023
HEALTH AND SOCIAL POLICY


It’s being called an “ethics crisis.” A new euphemism enters the lexicon of prestige media coverage of high U.S. officials. As we all now known, the “C” word is not used in America.

Let’s review a few of the undisputed facts anyway. These have emerged in 2023 by the publication ProPublica. The latest is the discovery that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito accepted an all-expense paid vacation to a luxury fishing lodge in Alaska, paid for by a hedge-fund billionaire, Paul Singer. During the next six years, this same hedge fund repeatedly came before the court in various cases, including one in 2014 where the fund claimed damages against the Argentine government. The Court ruled in its favor, which resulted in $2.4 billion paid to Singer’s firm. Justice Alito did not recuse himself from the case. After the story broke, he wrote a Wall Street Journal commentary accusing ProPublica of falsification, misrepresentation, and bias. The facts, he wrote, “would not cause a reasonable and unbiased person to doubt my ability to decide the matters in question impartially.”

Only a few months earlier, ProPublica had published similar revelations about another Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas. In this case (so to speak), following ethics protocol, Thomas first declared in 2004 gifts he had received from a major Republican donor, Harlan Crow, including a Bible once owned by Frederick Douglass. This was reported by the Los Angeles Times in that same year.

Over the next two decades, Thomas and his wife, Ginni, were treated by billionaire Crow to luxury trips, private resorts, and cruises on a “superyacht.” Crow bought the house where Thomas’ mother was living and upgraded it, and he also paid the tuition for a private school attended by Thomas’ grandnephew, whom he considered “as a son.” None of these gifts and benefits were ever reported. In the meantime, Justice Thomas cast a key vote in the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision that allowed nearly unlimited donations to political parties and campaigns, thus aiding Crow’s own goal to bolster Republican coffers.

There are two, fairly simple, take-aways from this information. First, the U.S. institution of government that is least accountable to any other entity, especially the people, is corrupt. The word rings. Such is not a condition into which American officials are supposed to subside, at least beyond certain peccadillos (an affair, a promised bill for donations, an attempt to overturn an election and incite an insurrection, etc.).

Yet, were the events described associated with an emerging or developing country—say, in Africa or Latin America—the “C” word would come out of the holster as smoothly, predictably, and unquestionably as if by reflex. Such high-level malfeasance happens all over the world—indeed, it is invoked as a fairly routine way to divide advanced from non-advanced nations. Here’s a nice, recent example from a trusted think tank (Council on Foreign Relations):

Latin America’s judiciaries are engulfed in corruption scandals. In Colombia a former Supreme Court member was arrested on charges of corruption and bribery. In Peru multiple judges stand accused of trading favorable rulings and shortened sentences for money and perks…Mexico created a new national anti-corruption system, explicitly outlawing bribes, embezzlement, and the failure to disclose conflicts of interest, and creating a dedicated prosecutor to go after perpetrators.

Mexico, in fact, may have a good idea here. U.S. Supreme Court justices answer only to each other. The Constitution does include a provision allowing them to be impeached and removed by Congress, but this has never happened. The only attempt came in 1804, when President Thomas Jefferson enlisted his supporters in Congress to impeach Justice Samuel Chase for allowing partisanship to dictate his decisions on the bench. Whether the irony of the attempt intervened isn’t entirely clear, but Chase was not convicted. No one involved in that ancient affair, however, could have imagined a court whose majority included Catholic extremists. Be that as it may, the unwillingness to view a Supreme Court Justice as anything other than beyond serious reproach has become an institution of its own. Those who decree the law of the land must be allowed to inhabit the clouds.

The second take-away point is different. It is easy to forget, in the search for simple evils, that corruption requires a minimum involvement of two parties. In the case of Supreme Justices Thomas and Alito, the other parties were both billionaires. These men understand very well the power of their wealth, how easily it can exceed, seduce, the authority of officials. It doesn’t sound likely that either justice put up much resistance to accepting gifts from obvious partisans.

Yet the billionaires also know how to pretend innocence. That a key Republican donor like Harlan Crow would befriend a conservative Supreme Court Justice, who then claims only “friendship” is involved when he and his family are slushed with luxurious generosity, including money itself, seems nothing less than an insult to common intelligence. Thomas clearly understood the problem, as he kept silent about it and rarely talked to the press. Alito evidently thought no problem existed.

All four men have since acted as if the appearance of impropriety is either trivial or irrelevant. Republicans won’t care, and Democrats don’t matter. They seem to have perceived the situation correctly. After their cozy relationship was revealed in April and calls from the Dems went out for “ethics reform,” the Court, in a rare response, signed a Statement on Ethics Principles and Practices, which was sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee and merely repeated the status quo. Translation: “Trust us. Nothing’s wrong, and none of your business.”

For now, the dust seems still in the air. The matter has left the pages of the prestige media, and the Court has continued to undo practices and promises to aid equality, the poorer members of society, and students with penalizing debt. Yet Senator Dick Durbin, Chair of the Judiciary Committee wants a new bill on behalf of transparency. He’s not quite satisfied, it appears, that members of the Court are happy to accept extravagant gifts while rejecting help to debt-burdened students. For the time being, however, corrupt members of the Celestial 9 can remain snug in “judicial independence” and an ethics-free lifestyle.

Volume 14, Issue 3, June 2023 | Global Policy Journal

Why innovation, exploration and safety must evolve as one

BY SARALYN MARK, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - THE HILL  - 07/04/23 

The logo for OceanGate Expeditions is seen on a boat parked near the offices of the company at a marine industrial warehouse office door in Everett, Wash., Tuesday, June 20, 2023. (AP Photo/Ed Komenda)


The world was transfixed by the harrowing saga taking place in a small, austere habitat that had limited stores of oxygen and heat now floating in a cold, dark extreme environment with no rescue ship on the way. The public had not been that interested in this mission since it was not the first. But, once an emergency was declared, it became the main focal point of news programs and kitchen table discussions for days. The occupants of this doomed ship survived a catastrophic explosion.

This might sound like last month’s catastrophic incident involving OceanGate’s Titan submersible vessel, but it’s actually the subject of a 1995 blockbuster film directed by Ron Howard that’s based on a true story of survival. John “Jack” Swigert, Jim Lovell and Fred Haise were astronauts on Apollo 13 destined for the third mission to land humans on the moon. The spacecraft was launched from Kennedy Space Center on April 11, 1970. But the lunar landing was aborted after an oxygen tank exploded in the service module two days into the mission, 200,000 miles from Earth.

Brilliant NASA engineers designed new procedures and protocols which included having the astronauts jury rig the vehicle to scrub rising carbon dioxide levels inside the spacecraft and the astronauts were finally able to return to Earth against all odds.

This was not the end of the space program or the Apollo program. There were four more successful lunar missions in the Apollo program. But the lessons from Apollo 13 have never been forgotten.

Tragically, the outcome of the OceanGate expedition to the Titanic, which launched the Titan submersible on June 18, 2023, resulted in the death of five explorers. While the investigation is underway, there has been much discussion among the public on the merits and risks of these types of high-priced adventures.

This disaster has become somewhat of a Rorschach test on what is acceptable, from safety standards to the value of these experiences for the individual and the world, to who should cover the costs of rescue and recovery. These are not novel questions, but the answers can accelerate innovation in this space.

Widely circulated quotes from the late CEO of OceanGate, Stockton Rush, focused on safety as well as innovation:

“You know, there’s a limit. At some point safety just is pure waste. I mean if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed. Don’t get in your car. Don’t do anything. At some point, you’re going to take some risk, and it really is a risk/reward,” he told a CBS News reporter.


Furthermore, In a 2019 blog, OceanGate said that the company’s “new and innovative designs” could not yet be judged by existing regulatory standards. “By definition, innovation is outside of an already accepted system.”

It’s this hubris, much like Icarus flying too close to the sun even after being warned, that is causing significant unease among those who want to see enhanced innovation in exploration while not compromising on safety. Though it’s true that nothing is totally risk-free, it’s essential to ensure that these experiences are conducted as safely as possible. Ironically, by improving safety, innovation can thrive.

For example, following high-profile car accidents — including the death of the actor James Dean — lap and shoulder seat belts became mandatory in the front seats of cars in 1968. Since that time, there have been improvements in the performance of this safety equipment where they can reduce the general risk for fatal injury by 60 percent in an SUV, van or pickup truck and by 45 percent in a car. Airbags and new designs which incorporate human factors and ergonomics are advancing safety parameters, but much more needs to be done to improve safety for everyone.


For example, in the transportation sector, automobile industry safety reports show that women were 47 percent more likely to suffer more severe injuries compared to men in car accidents. This is due to differences in female neck strength, musculature, seating posture and head restraint position. We can develop safer vehicles by acknowledging these issues exist and not minimizing or ignoring them. It’s time that companies address these concerns and develop innovative solutions which is the moral, ethical, legal and financially right thing to do.

I formed a nonprofit, iGIANT (impact of Gender/Sex on Innovation and Novel Technologies), an accelerator for gendered innovation and precision design, for this reason. Over the past week, as many have done, I’ve also questioned the risks and benefits of some of my adventures across this globe. While I have not participated in very expensive endeavors, usually they are the most economical (the cheap seats), they have significantly shaped and enriched my views on life. I have hiked and climbed mountains and rocks on every continent, rafted over waterfalls and in rapids, snorkeled with sharks and searched for scorpions in the Amazon jungle.America’s leading ‘realist’ keeps getting Russia wrongChina’s dangerous legal distortions

It was never my goal to be the first, nor to do something because it was extreme. It was done out of sheer curiosity and fascination with what is possible. But after near mishaps, I’ve also learned to ask better questions, to methodically check my equipment and to find programs and products that support and provide the safest experiences for all of their clients. By demanding more, we can catalyze innovation to meet our needs.

From the debris of this recent maritime accident to the embers of past fires and explosions reaching for the stars, innovation, as well as safety, will evolve. Humanity is destined to explore. Despite disasters, this “drive” is encoded in us.

Saralyn Mark, M.D., is the founder of SolaMed Solutions, LLC, host of the “Always Searching” podcast and founder of iGIANT (Impact of Gender/Sex on Innovation and Novel Technologies). She is the director of health innovation at Star Harbor and a former senior medical and policy advisor to the White House, the Department of Health and Human Services and NASA.

India Will Pay 70% Of Cost But Micron Will Own 100% Of Plant: A Curious Business Model – OpEd

 July 4, 2023 

By Prabir Purkayastha

The deal with Micron during PM Modi’s visit to the United States has made headlines as a major technological breakthrough and a new dawn for India’s electronics chip-making industry. Implicit in this hurrah for the Micron deal is that India has completely missed the bus on the key technologies involved in electronic chip making.

And for those who know technology would realize that the Micron deal is only for packaging of the chips, their assembly and testing, a relatively low end of the electronics industry. It does not touch the core technologies of designing and fabrication of chips, let alone the holy grail of chip-making technology: the lithographic machines that are central to chip fabrication.

The U.S.-India ties had hit a rocky patch, with India refusing to sanction Russia or aligning with the West and G-7 on a “rule-based international order.” Where the West makes all the rules. With Prime Minister Modi and President Biden both facing what could be difficult elections soon, they both urgently needed a reset in U.S.-India ties. For India, it is getting technology for critical sectors in India and declaring a new dawn. For Biden, India is part of its derisking and long-term plan to disengage its industries and market from China.

Late as it already is, the Modi dispensation is finally beginning to understand that technology is not something that, if you have money, you can buy from the global market. It is the closely-held knowledge of companies and countries. Today, it is electronics that drive everything: from the battlefield to artificial intelligence, from your lowly washing machines to the most expensive fighter planes. In the Ukraine war, a few dollars worth of chips are at the core of cheap drones to the most expensive aircraft and missiles. In war, tanks and artillery are also integrated with missiles and drones, shaping the modern battlefield, with radar and satellites providing real-time information to those running the battles. Modern electronic chips are the “brains” of all of this equipment, just as it is in almost any industry and device.

If India has to maintain its autonomy in global affairs, it has to start thinking about the future of its electronics industry. What sits at the heart of the electronics industry is the ability to make the latest generation of chips. If not today, then at least tomorrow. And we need to start today, as we missed the chip-making bus when we decided not to rebuild the chip fabrication plant—the SemiConductor Complex—we had built in Mohali. The plant, a critical component of our self-reliance in electronics, had mysteriously burnt down in 1989.

So what is the Micron deal? Micron is a major manufacturer of memory chips, and it is this realm of business that has made it one of the world’s leaders in the semiconductor industry. It would have the necessary credentials if it decided to set up a memory fabrication plant in India, unlike the Foxconn-Vedanta fabrication proposal greeted with a lot of fanfare, where Foxconn does not have any experience in chip-making.

But that is not what Micron is offering. It has offered to set up a plant in Gujarat to only “assemble, package and test” chips that Micron has fabricated elsewhere. Micron has such chip fabrication plants in the United States and also in China, whose products, the chips will be packaged and tested in India. So if chip-making was India’s goal, it would not be delivered through the Micron deal. What we are getting is the lowest end of the chip-making technology, assembling and testing chips that have been made elsewhere. We are not competing with the United States, China, South Korea, and Japan on chip making but with countries like Malaysia. Malaysia is already streets ahead of us in this area, with about 13 percent of the world’s in OSAT outsourcing market. Locating such plants in Malaysia and now India would be a part of the de-risking strategy of the U.S. companies, where they shift the low end of the chip production to countries like Malaysia and India while encouraging new high-end chip fabrication to the United States, such as Micron’s $100 billion mega-fab in Clay, Washington.

Let us look at the investments involved in setting up the Micron plant and who is footing the bill. The total cost of setting up the plant is estimated to be $2.75 billion, with the central government providing a 50 percent subsidy and the Gujarat state government throwing in another 20 percent. Micron is investing only 30 percent of the total capital! In other words, Micron will hold 100 percent ownership in a plant costing $2.75 billion, in which they would have invested would have invested only 0.825 billion! Even industry reports—e.g., eeNews Europe—calls this an “extreme level of subsidy.” In other words, to burnish Modi’s image, tarnished by BJP’s loss in Karnataka and the continuing riots in Manipur, this is a part of the public relations exercise that his team is doing. If we look at this deal for getting low-level technology—assembly and testing—we are “subsiding” a leading U.S. manufacturer so that we can assemble and test the chips built in Micron’s high-end plants in the United States and China.

India is not the only country providing subsidies for technology and setting up plants. So are the United States and China. The United States has a $52 billion government kitty for subsiding chip manufacturing and other core activities. China has a National Fund and another popularly called the Big Fund (National Integrated Circuits Industry Development Investment Fund), both investing $73 billion in China’s chip-making industry. But both these countries are funding the high end of the electronics tech stack, advanced chip making, devices, CAD tools, lithographic machines, etc., virtually nothing (only about 5 percent) in the assembling and testing of chips. Even when they do invest, they do much lower amounts and also as a fraction of the total cost. According to the South China Morning Post, quoted by Yahoo Finance, China gave $1.75 billion in subsidies to 190 Chinese firms, with China’s leading chip fabricator SMIC, receiving roughly about 20 percent of that amount!

There is no question that India, having missed the chip-making bus, needs to ramp up its ambitions and bootstrap a chip-making industry. To do this successfully, it has to have a plan, where to invest and how much to invest, and when to invest. Yes, it has to return to old-fashioned planning, dismissed by BJP-RSS ideologues as “socialism.” And yes, every country plans its science and technology, including how to develop people, the key to technology development. Not one-off shots and driven by which companies come and what they offer. Instead, what is our path forward, and what do we need? And paying 70 percent of the cost while offering our land, cheap labor so that a U.S. company can get 100 percent of the ownership, in a segment where countries like Malaysia are streets ahead of us, is not investing in technology. It is simply a PR exercise.

Source: This article was produced in partnership by Newsclick and Globetrotter.

Prabir Purkayastha is the founding editor of Newsclick.in, a digital media platform. He is an activist for science and the free software movement.

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Mexico’s old ruling party, PRI, fractures after election loss

Senators announced they will form a new group called "Congruence for Mexico"

Marco Ugarte/Associated Press

The doors of the headquarters of Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI, remain closed with chains in Mexico City, Wednesday, June 30, 2021.

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS |  PUBLISHED: July 3, 2023

MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s old ruling party fractured Monday, with four leading senators resigning amid internal disputes and the loss of the last major state the party governed.

The Institutional Revolutionary Parties held the presidency and almost all statehouses in Mexico without interruption for 70 years.

But the PRI, as the party is known, has been reduced to a shadow of its former self by the rise of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s Morena party, which won the governorship of the last major PRI bastion, the State of Mexico, last month.

Morena has seized on the combination of handout programs and nationalism that the PRI once espoused, and has largely replaced it.

On Monday, four leading PRI senators and dozens of supporters announced they are quitting the party. Senators led by former interior secretary Miguel Osorio Chong announced they will form a new group called “Congruence for Mexico.” The new group will not be able to compete in the 2024 presidential elections.

The PRI, which now governs only two sparsely populated states, is now Mexico’s fourth biggest party, trailing Morena, the conservative National Action Party and the centrist Citizen’s Movement.

Chong and the other senators had objected to attempts by current PRI party leader Alejandro Moreno to hold onto power.

The Unravelling Of The Anwar Myth – Analysis

Malaysia's Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim. Photo Credit: Malaysia PM Office

 July 4, 2023

By Murray Hunter

Seven months ago, Anwar Ibrahim became Malaysia’s prime minister amid a burst of messianic approbation. The 75-year-old Anwar was arguably a symbol of hope for a generation, widely expected in international capitals including Washington, DC to bring about Malaysia’s desperately needed reform, turn the tide on creeping Islamization, reinstall egalitarian multiculturalism, rid the nation of cronyism and kleptocracy, and end corruption.  

Little of that has taken place, tarnishing the prime minister’s image both domestically and internationally and dismaying his international allies. Many of the laws used against him and his allies during his years in the political wilderness remain in place. The Home Minister, Saifuddin Nasution, shocked followers at the onset by announcing that the Printing Presses and Publications Act is still needed. The Security Offences (Special Measures) Act 2012, known as SOSMA, which replaced the colonial-era Internal Security Act allowing for detention without habeas corpus, remains in place, as do the Sedition Act, the Official Secrets Act, the Communications and Multimedia Act and other draconian laws which admittedly are rarely used but haven’t been repealed. 

That and a host of other issues may cost the government in six state elections due this month which will play a major role in determining the direction of the country. There is rising concern that Malay-Muslim voters will constitute a green wave to the nationalist Perikatan Nasional coalition, whose leading component is Parti Islam se-Malaysia. 

Struggle to the top 

Anwar has arguably been on a quest to become prime minister for over 30 years. Soon after Mahathir Mohamed became prime minister in 1981, he recruited the youthful Anwar as a galvanic student activist and co-founder of the Islamic youth movement ABIM, to provide “Islamic credentials” to his government.

Anwar’s abrupt sacking from office in 1998, his two stints in prison under two prime ministers over the next 20 years, made him a martyr, celebrated as an International Prisoner of Conscience by Amnesty International over what a wide range of international human rights organizations deemed to be trumped-up charges. His 1998 sacking gave birth to the ‘reformasi’ movement, later forming into a fully fledged opposition coalition, which finally took power in 2018, while he was still serving a jail term. 

The crux of Anwar’s political troubles stems from the 2022 general election, when his Pakatan Harapan  coalition didn’t win enough seats in its own right to form a government. With the Malay nationalist Muhyiddin Yassin and Perikatan Nasional – with the rural Islam se-Malaysia its biggest component – looked like being able to form a government with the scandal-scarred United Malays National Organization, which had dominated politics since the country’s independence. 

However, UMNO president Ahmad Zahid Hamidi, who faced 47 charges of corruption, switched allegiance, enabling Anwar to become prime minister and form what has become known as the unity government in a devil’s bargain.  Anwar had finally fulfilled his deep ambition to become prime minister although at the price of tying his reform movement an indelibly venal UMNO, whose looting of the country treasury grew to new levels in the decade to 2018, when it was driven from power for the first time. UMNO’s leader and kingmaker, former Prime Minister Najib Razak, is serving 12 years in prison for his part in the biggest financial scandal in the country’s history and faces yet more charges.

Seven months into his prime ministership, is Anwar living up to the mythology? There is much concern over whether the criminal charges against Hamidi will be dropped after state elections due this month. Rumors coming out of the attorney general’s chambers indicate the charges could be withdrawn. His ongoing trial has already been inexplicably delayed for months. If that were to occur, it would make a total mockery of reform, and might even bring down the government.

Seven months at the helm 

Inaction over the economy is so far the biggest weakness of the government. “Even having a plan that didn’t work would give people some confidence, over not having any plan at all,” one source told Asia Sentinel. 

The Covid-19 pandemic, as elsewhere, left many behind as poor and vulnerable groups, including smaller firms, continued to struggle to regain their footing, according to the World Bank.  They have been hard hit by increases in food and energy prices, admittedly triggered by geopolitical developments.

But the government has shied away from the hard decisions to right the fiscal ship, straying away from the political third rail of a goods and services tax or other revenue-raising measures.

That hasn’t stopped his acolytes from portraying him as a success. They point to the signing of 19 MOUs in China, pledging RM170 billion (US$36.4 billion) in investment to Malaysia, was talked up through the media as an unprecedented success story. However, when journalists and economists examined the MOUs closely, they found unanswered questions about the integrity of the companies that signed in front of Anwar. Any number of leaders has left China boasting of investment promises, only to have them vanish. With the Chinese economy flagging, those promises are looking shaky.

Corruption campaign a mirage?

A major concern is his lackadaisical approach to what had been his lodestar —cleaning up corruption. The arrest of Muhyiddin Yassin on charges of abuse of power and money laundering over the dispersal of Covid-19 funds was publicly played up before the arrest and arraignment. Since then, there have been few other major arrests. There is much conjecture about whether the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) has been politicized and weaponized against Anwar’s political opponents. 

The reform government’s major announcement so far is the launching of “Malaysia Madani,” a slogan (“Civil Malaysia”) meant to encapsulate the essence of the unity government. But there has been no in-depth explanation about how Madani would be integrated into policymaking, or in fact what it is. The 2023 budget was hailed as a Madani budget. However, it appeared the Madani name was just cut and pasted onto the budget at the last minute, rather than signaling any new direction in policy. 

Anwar was also criticized for his ‘secret’ appointment of his daughter Nurul Izzah, as his economic adviser. This met with wide social media criticism after the news broke some 3 weeks after her appointment. 

Lack of policies but full of agenda

With the economy experiencing a drop of exports, a depreciating ringgit, negative capital outflow, a sluggish stock market, rising incidence of poverty, and rising cost of living, the government still does not have a policy toolbox to tackle these problems. This highlights the general policy vacuum, ironically with Anwar himself as finance minister. There have been no major announcements in either the health or education areas, while any legal reform is basically on hold. 

According to Mariam Mokhtar, Anwar has returned to his Islamization agenda started in the 1980s, while he was deputy prime minister. In May, raids on stores which carried rainbow coloured Swatches reached international news syndicates. Then in June, Anwar announced the Malaysian Islamic Development Department (JAKIM) would play a major role in economic and development policy, even though the organization had no economists on staff. This also made international news, as it was seen as a radical move away from traditional policy making. Ulama (religious scholars) will now be responsible for creating the economic development framework for Malaysia. 

There is a possibility that Anwar’s comments regarding JAKIM may have been ‘off-the-cuff’ remarks, aimed at winning Malay support in the coming state elections. However, if this initiative is rolled out, it would be impossible to reverse it. Both Muslims and non-Muslins in Malaysia have been highly critical of JAKIM, which itself has not been exempt from allegations of corruption in its responsibility for halal certification. 

Anwar the celebrity prime minister

Anwar has allocated a lot of his time in his daily routine to meeting the people. Although the intention is to portray him as a prime minister who cares for the people, some now refer to him as a ‘celebrity’. Some of these appearances have backfired. In a recent town-hall meeting with university students, Anwar attempted to instil humor by telling the crowd of students, if he was younger, he would ask an 18-year-old female student for her number, generating much anger on social media. 

Criticism and censorship

Although Anwar has said his government is open to criticism, the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) has requested the social media platform Twitter to take down critical tweets made by Salim Iskandar, who posted a series of critical tweets about Anwar. 

The government is using the defamation laws to censor critics who point out alleged corruption. Activists who exposed irregularities in the demolition of a stadium in suburban Shah Alam and replacement with a much smaller one and a commercial complex were sent writs of defamation, by the government’s joint venture partner, which acted as a proxy for the Selangor State Government. A number of online news portals, including FMT and NST were also included as co-defendants, effectually silencing criticism. 

Consequently, online news portals are now practicing very strict self-censorship in fear of potential defamation writs. One news portal, Malaysia Now, was blocked by internet service providers for a number of days. 

Communications and multimedia minister Fahmi Fadzil said on a live chat to those who criticized him not to be surprised if there will be a police car outside your home. 

Public sentiment 

Many within the Chinese-dominated Democratic Action Party and his own Parti Keadilan Rakyat, both senior components of the unity government have expressed disappointment but remain silent in fear of party retribution. There is also great discontent coming out of the administration’s political staffers. Press and political secretaries have not received their letters of appointment and thus haven’t been paid salaries since the commencement of the government’s term. They have been living off travel allowances. Many are contemplating leaving for work in the private sector.

Perhaps the most telling comment comes from a former minister in the last PH government. “Anwar’s performance is actually helping PAS come to power.” There are many undecided Malay voters who are not happy with what they see in Anwar. They may turn around and try their luck with PAS.  

Originally published in the Asia Sentinel

Murray Hunter has been involved in Asia-Pacific business for the last 30 years as an entrepreneur, consultant, academic, and researcher. As an entrepreneur he was involved in numerous start-ups, developing a lot of patented technology, where one of his enterprises was listed in 1992 as the 5th fastest going company on the BRW/Price Waterhouse Fast100 list in Australia. Murray is now an associate professor at the University Malaysia Perlis, spending a lot of time consulting to Asian governments on community development and village biotechnology, both at the strategic level and “on the ground”. He is also a visiting professor at a number of universities and regular speaker at conferences and workshops in the region. Murray is the author of a number of books, numerous research and conceptual papers in referred journals, and commentator on the issues of entrepreneurship, development, and politics in a number of magazines and online news sites around the world. Murray takes a trans-disciplinary view of issues and events, trying to relate this to the enrichment and empowerment of people in the region.