U.S. Arms Fuel Asian Tension

February 11, 2013 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

Richard Heydarian

MANILA, Feb 11 (IPS) – After a year of intense diplomatic standoff and territorial brinkmanship among disputing states in the South and East China Seas, the U.S. military ‘pivot’ to the region appears to be in full swing – a move that could further aggravate an already combustible regional dynamic.Against the backdrop of Chinese territorial assertiveness, the year started off with the bang of big-ticket U.S. arms sales to treaty allies and strategic partners across the region, including an expanded package of sophisticated military hardware featuring state-of-the-art anti-missile systems and warplanes. On top of this, Washington has also stepped-up its joint military exercises with Asian allies perched on the forefront of ongoing territorial spats.

Building on its earlier promise of greater commitment to the freedom of navigation in the Western Pacific, an artery for global trade and energy transport, Washington aims to improve its allies’ military capabilities in a bid to rein in Beijing’s strong-willed territorial posturing.

Facing a stubborn economic downturn at home, the dramatic boost in U.S. defence sales to the region underlines Washington’s growing emphasis on a primarily military-oriented (as opposed to trade-and-investment-driven) approach to re-asserting its position as an ‘anchor of peace and stability’ in the region.

Among the biggest beneficiaries of growing U.S. military commitment to the region is the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA), a massive trade group that includes top Pentagon suppliers such as Lockheed Martin Corp, Boeing Co and Northrop Grumman Corp. It underscores the extent to which the U.S. ‘pivot’ has energised the American industrial-military complex, further dimming the prospects for a peaceful resolution of the ongoing disputes.

"(The pivot) will result in growing opportunities for our industry to help equip our friends," says Fred Downey, vice-president for national security at the AIA.

Since the formal commencement of the U.S. pivot, after U.S. President Barack Obama’s fateful speech to the Australian Parliament in November 2011, Washington has come under tremendous pressure to reassure troubled allies such as Japan and the Philippines against Beijing’s assertiveness. In response, the U.S. has beefed up its rotational military presence across the Pacific, while expanding joint exercises – focusing on maritime defence – with and military aid to Pacific partners.

To calm China’s fears of a U.S.-led regional containment strategy, Washington has also focused on deepening economic integration within the Pacific Rim, specifically through the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trading agreement, which aims to facilitate the flow of investments and goods among partner-nations. In addition, the U.S. has also – at least in principle – underlined its support for diplomatic resolution of ongoing territorial disputes in the South and East China Seas.

However, the U.S. pronouncements have failed to appease regional partners and deter Chinese assertiveness. Beijing continues to accuse Washington of staging a concerted effort to deny China its (perceived) legitimate interests, while allies have raised doubts as to Washington’s ability – given its dire fiscal woes – to maintain regional ascendancy.

Reflecting on fragile U.S. finances, Ken Lieberthal, director of the Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institute and former president Bill Clinton’s top China adviser, has stated, "The most important single element to our (U.S.) success in Asia will be whether domestically we get our house in order, whether domestically we’re able to adopt and integrate a set of policies that will effectively address our fiscal problems over time."

Given TPP’s failure to gain traction among major Pacific economies, and in the absence of any substantial American investments and economic aid to strategic partners, Washington seems to have instead opted for a full military pivot. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) inability to forge ahead with an effective diplomatic mechanism to settle the disputes has only encouraged this trend.

Since 2011, the U.S. worldwide military sales have hovered above 60 billion dollars. In 2011, India alone accounted for a 6.9 billion dollar acquisition deal, underscoring New Delhi’s growing anxieties with China’s massive naval buildup, especially in light of its substantial energy-related investments in South China Sea. Last year, overall sales to Pacific partners topped 13.7 billion dollars.

Building on its earlier arms bonanza, the U.S. defence industry has started off the year with a large package of flashy, cutting-edge arms sales to key partners in Northeast Asia: a 5 billion dollar Lockheed Martin radar-evading F-35 Joint Strike Fighter aircraft deal with Japan, a 1.85 billion dollar Lockheed Martin-led retrofitting of Taiwan’s 145 F-16A/B fighters with advanced radars and electronic warfare suits, and a 1.2 billion dollar Northrop Grumman high-flying RQ-4 "Global Hawk" spy drone deal with South Korea.

Beyond propping up allies’ military capabilities to deal with a wide array of challenges, including China, Washington has also encouraged further self-reliance and inter-operability among regional allies, creating a so-called “inversed wall of China" across the Western Pacific.

As a result, the newly-elected Japanese government, under the hawkish Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, has supported Washington’s call for a more assertive Japanese regional role. Mr. Abe has pushed for revitalised defence ties with Asian partners, enhanced inter-operability with major naval powers in the Pacific such as Australia and India, and expanded military aid to countries such as the Philippines. He has also pushed for a so-called Asian "security diamond”, bringing together likeminded Pacific powers concerned with a perceived Chinese “threat”.

With Japan locked in a brewing conflict with China over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands in the East China Sea, Washington has conducted a series of high-profile joint naval exercises with Tokyo. In November, 47,000 Japanese and American military personnel took part in the biennial Keen Sword exercise off Okinawa islands, which was originally planned to act out the re-capture of disputed islands off the southern coast of Japan. This was followed by a five-day joint air exercise in January, just days after Japanese jets fended off Chinese aircraft surveying the disputed islands.

Overall, the U.S. seems to be gradually passing the buck to Asian partners, prodding them to bear a growing share of defense costs vis-à-vis China’s perceived expansionism. Meanwhile, there is little indication of a renewed push for a diplomatic resolution of the territorial disputes.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2013.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Asia, Geopolitics, United States Tagged With: , ,

"Pregnant, Chained to a Wall and Starved", One of 136 Terror War Stories

February 6, 2013 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

bush_cheney

“We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world,” said then Vice President Dick Cheney (left) in 2001. “A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quickly, without any discussion."

George Gao

NEW YORK, Feb 06 (IPS) – Shedding new light on a chapter of the U.S. "war on terror" that has largely remained shrouded in secrecy, the Open Society Justice Initiative released a report Tuesday detailing the cases of 136 individuals who were extraordinarily rendered or secretly detained by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).Entitled “Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition”, the report confirms that the CIA held suspected terrorists in undisclosed prisons, known as “black sites”. The agency also carried out “extraordinary renditions” – defined by the report as the illegal transfer of a detainee to the custody of a foreign government for detention or interrogation.

According to the Justice Initiative’s report, CIA detainees were tortured and abused in detention sites around the world. Some were wrongfully detained, and others were never charged for a crime.

“That’s the thing with these cases, each one is quite disturbing,” Amrit Singh, author of the report and senior legal officer at the Open Society Justice Initiative’s National Security and Counterterrorism programme, told IPS.

Take the case of Fatima Bouchar, one of 136 individuals whose experience the report documented. In 2004, the CIA and Thai authorities abused Bouchar at an airport in Bangkok. She was chained to a wall and starved for five days, before being rendered to Libya. Bouchar was four and a half months pregnant at the time.

“Part of the reason why this report was written is because it’s really important to tell the stories of what happened to these victims,” said Singh.

The report argues that along with its illegality, torture produces faulty information. It cites the case of Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who was extraordinarily rendered by the U.S. to Egypt in 2002. Under the threat of torture, al-Libi fabricated information about Iraq, Al-Qaeda and the use of biological and chemical weapons.

In 2003, then Secretary of State Colin Powell cited this fabricated information in his speech to the U.N., while advocating for war in Iraq.

The report was written in the context of post 9/11 U.S. counterterrorism policies. Its opening epigraph draws from a 2001 television interview with Vice President Dick Cheney, conducted by Tim Russert for “Meet the Press” on NBC News.

“We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world,” said Cheney. “A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quickly, without any discussion."

The report also lists 54 complicit “foreign governments” that participated with the CIA in various ways: by hosting CIA. prisons on their territories; by capturing, transporting and torturing detainees; by providing intelligence, etc.

“It really speaks to the power that the U.S. wields over the world,” said Singh. “In this case, the U.S. has power essentially recruit partners in committing human rights violations in the name of countering terrorism.”

Checks and balances and extrajudicial killings

In 2002, Maher Arar was detained by U.S. authorities at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport. The CIA flew him out to Amman, Jordan, where he was abused by Jordanian guards. Then he was extraordinarily rendered to Syria, locked in a grave-like cell for 10 months, beaten with cables and threatened with electric shocks.

Arar’s lawyer Maria LaHood, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, told IPS that they sued the U.S. government officials who sent him to be tortured. But their case came up short.

“Basically, the defendants (the U.S. government) came back with the same arguments as they always do, saying even if what (Arar) says is true – that the U.S. sent him to Syria to be tortured – the officials can’t be held liable,” said LaHood.

She said that when U.S. government officials associate their actions with “national security”, it is nearly impossible to prosecute them. “The judiciary cannot touch it.”

“Even though there’s constitutional violations here, there’s no remedy,” she added. “(Arar) couldn’t go anywhere with his case in the U.S. He hasn’t gotten an apology. He’s still on the watch-list.”

LaHood told IPS about similar challenges in prosecuting extrajudicial killings. She noted an ongoing case Al-Aulaqi v. Panetta in which the families of three U.S. citizens – who were killed in U.S. drone strikes – are suing the U.S. executive branch.

“The defendents – Panetta, Petraeus and a couple of others – have moved to dismiss the case, arguing that the judiciary can’t adjudicate the case,” she said.

When asked about the balance of power between the executive and judicial branches of the U.S. government, LaHood said, “(The) executive power has grown and grown, and that’s in part because the executive is increasing its own power, and in part because the judiciary is deferring to it.”

Philip G. Alston, a professor of law at New York University School of Law and a former U.N. Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, told IPS, “The executive branch is effectively given carte blanche by the judicial branch.

“The latter has particularly abdicated its responsibility to uphold the rule of law in any matter that involves the CIA,” he added. “The result is that it is left to make its own decisions, subject only to pro forma Congressional oversight – which, as far as can be judged from the public record, is little short of cheerleading.”

Singh told IPS, “There’s no doubt that there are serious terrorist threats today in the world, and they must be dealt with in an appropriate an lawful manner, but the fact that these threats exist does not constitute grounds to deviate from established domestic and international law.

“U.S. courts have largely denied victims of torture their (compensations). U.S. courts have not acted as a constraint on the abuse of executive power, which is how they should conduct their business,” she said.

Meanwhile, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) released a statement in response to a controversial U.S. Department of Justice white paper, entitled “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen who is a Senior Operational Leader of Al Qa’ida or An Associate Force.”

“The parallels to the (George W.) Bush administration torture memos are chilling,” said Vincent Warren, executive director at CCR, of the white paper. “Those were unchecked legal justifications drawn up to justify torture; these are unchecked justifications drawn up to justify extrajudicial killing.”

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2013.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Human Rights, Justice, Lead, Security, United States Tagged With: , , ,

Think Tank Urges “More Ambitious” U.S.-Mexican Agenda

February 6, 2013 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

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Border leading into the desert at the Mariposa port-of-entry. Credit: Jeb Sprague/IPS

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Feb 06 (IPS) – The electoral and political stars are aligning in ways that offer the United States and Mexico major opportunities to substantially deepen their cooperation, particularly on trade, energy, and immigration, according to a report released here Wednesday by a special commission of the Inter-American Dialogue (IAD).With Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto taking office at virtually the same time as Barack Obama begins his second presidential term, the two leaders have four years to address some of the most difficult and longstanding bilateral challenges, according to the report, entitled “A More Ambitious Agenda”.

Like a longer one on the same subject released two weeks ago by the Mexico Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars here, the IAD report comes at a particularly auspicious moment, given both the strong performance of the Mexican economy and the apparent willingness of long-resistant Republicans in Congress to make key compromises on immigration reform.

These include finding ways to legalise the status of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S., more than half of whom are believed to be Mexican.

“There is an enormous amount of optimism right now in the bilateral relationship, and the reason of that is because there’s an idea that this is a new beginning,” said Duncan Wood, co-author of the Wilson Center report, entitled “New Ideas for a New Era”.

“There’s optimism about the Mexican economy and the real potential for immigration reform in the United States,” he told IPS.

“So you have the opportunity for a much more positive dialogue, particularly when you compare it with what we saw during the (Felipe) Calderon administration, when the primary focus was on security, violence and death. There’s now an opportunity to reframe the relationship, and I would say the economic issues lead that.”

The IAD report highlights Pena Nieto’s proposed reforms of Mexico’s energy sector which, among other things, could result in the exploitation of its huge deposits of shale gas and oil. This would not only assure the country’s status as a major oil producer, but also “bring North America closer than ever to energy independence".

In addition, the “decisive role” played by the Latino vote in the November elections here has propelled immigration reform to the top of the U.S. political agenda for the first time in a generation, according to the commission which was co-chaired by former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo and former U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills.

Hills also serves as IAD’s co-chair, along with former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet.

“(T)he prospects are better than they have been in decades for a sensible reform of U.S. immigration policy – which should produce significant economic gains for both nations while easing a long-standing source of bilateral tension and mistrust,” the report concluded.

While opportunities for breakthroughs may be less obvious with respect to their approaches to fighting drug cartels and the violence that has killed an estimated 60,000 people in Mexico over the last six years, the cooperation between their security and police agencies has reached unprecedented levels.

“This is the right time to reassess the (U.S.-backed) Merida Initiative, reinforce efforts to shrink U.S. drug use, and stop the flood of weapons (from the U.S.) into Mexico,” according to the report.

It also noted the Obama administration’s willingness to discuss alternative approaches to the “war on drugs”, as well as recent initiatives, both within the U.S. and Latin America to consider legalising the production, sale and use of marijuana.

Since the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1992, bilateral trade has expanded by some 500 percent, making Mexico Washington’s third largest trading partner amid predictions it could overtake Canada for the top position within a decade. At the same time, Mexican-Americans now make up more than 10 percent of the U.S. population and seven percent of its electorate.

The report calls for the two nations to pursue three “high-priority goals. On the economic side, the two countries should work to make their shared labour markets more efficient and equitable; create a more-coherent North American energy market; and co-ordinating with Canada in negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership with selected South American and East Asian nations.

“There’s a perception that the Pena Nieto government can get things done,” said Wood, who noted that his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled the country for 71 years, “knows how to reach a consensus” in contrast to Cardenas’s National Action Party (PAN), whose 12-year reign ended in December.

On the immigration front, the U.S. should implement an expanded and predictable temporary labour programme for both professional and low-income workers, ensuring a larger flow of legal migrants whose homes would remain in Mexico.

In addition, immigration legislation must include a pathway for undocumented immigrants here to legalise their status. Such a step, according to the report, “could hugely benefit both the U.S. and Mexican economies,” in part by increasing both tax payments to local, state and federal governments and remittances sent to Mexico.

Given the results of the November elections and the pressure on Republicans to ease their opposition to any such “amnesty” scheme, such reforms are considered more likely to pass the Congress than at any time since the last major immigration reform in the mid-1980s.

The challenges posed by public insecurity, organised crime, and drug trafficking and abuse “may be the most harrowing test” for both governments, according to the report, which recommended that they should jointly review Washington’s policies toward illicit drugs and firearms, whose export to Mexico has fuelled the violence there.

Pena Nieto should follow through on campaign pledges to create an elite federal police force that would sharply reduce the role of Mexico’s military in the anti-crime campaign, while Obama should allocate significantly more resources to prevention and treatment programmes that help reduce demand for illicit drugs, it says.

The report’s recommendations to consider U.S. drug policy reform and legalisation of marijuana – as well as reassessing the five-year-old security-assistance programme, the Merida Initiative – were welcomed by Laura Carlson, director of the Mexico City-based Americas Program of the Center for International Policy as “bright spots” in the report.

But she expressed disappointment that the commission “repeats the formulas that have led to increased poverty under NAFTA and made Mexico one of the most unequal nations in the world.”

“That this group would come out with a recommendation of …more free trade, more privatisation, more guest workers, more oil drilling is not surprising,” she told IPS in an email. “But it’s particularly hard to swallow when no mention is made of poverty alleviation, shared environmental crisis, human rights or corruption on both sides of the border.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2013.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Diplomacy, Featured, Foreign Affairs, Human Rights, Politics, United States Tagged With: , ,

It’s All About Israel

February 3, 2013 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

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Senator Chuck Hagel at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Service Committee Jan. 31, 2013. Credit: DoD Photo by Erin A. Kirk-Cuomo

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Feb 02 (IPS) – If former Defence Secretary-designate Sen. Chuck Hagel’s lacklustre performance at his confirmation hearing Thursday heartened neo-conservatives and other hawks opposed to his nomination, those who argued that the Israel lobby has been exerting too great an influence on U.S. foreign policy were ecstatic.Indeed, Stephen Walt, the Harvard international relations professor who co-authored the "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy", issued a special thanks to the Senate Armed Services Committee that held the hearing on his foreignpolicy.com blog Friday, suggesting that controversial 2007 book should sell like hotcakes after what he called “the Hagel circus".

“I want to thank the Emergency Committee for Israel, Sheldon Adelson, and the Senate Armed Services Committee for providing such a compelling vindication of our views,” wrote Walt, who, among other things, has been accused of anti-Semitism for writing a book that criticised the allegedly excessive influence the Israel lobby wields over U.S. foreign policy and the public debate that surrounds it.

As evidence, Walt cited the number of mentions of Israel and its most powerful regional foe, Iran, received in the course of Hagel’s eight-hour ordeal – 166 and 144, respectively, according to a compilation by the Internet publication, Buzzfeed.

By comparison, he noted, the epidemic of suicides among U.S. troops – a necessary concern for any incoming Pentagon chief – was addressed only twice.

In fact, the degree to which Israel and the threat posed to it by Iran dominated the hearing was somewhat understated by Buzzfeed. The full transcript revealed that Israel was brought up no less than 178 times, followed closely by Iran with 171 mentions.

Those numbers compared with a grand total of five mentions of China, the central focus of the Obama administration’s much ballyhooed “pivot” from the Middle East to the Asia/Pacific; one mention (by Hagel himself) of Japan, Washington’s closest Asian ally whose territorial dispute with China has recently escalated to dangerous levels; and one mention of South Korea, Washington’s other major treaty ally in Northeast Asia.

Similarly, NATO, Washington’s historically most important military alliance – and one with which it fought a successful air war in Libya last year and is currently fighting its 12th year in Afghanistan – warranted a total of five mentions.

“It is extraordinary that, in an eight-hour hearing, as little attention was devoted as it was to issues such as China and NATO, which ought to be near the top of the concerns for any secretary of defence of the United States,” said Paul Pillar, a former top CIA analyst who served as the National Intelligence Officer for the Near and South Asia from 2000 to 2005.

“The emphasis on Israel and Iran – which, in American politics, has become for the most part an Israel issue – demonstrates that the senators were far less concerned with the strategic questions that the secretary of defence should be focused on and much more interested in trying to defeat a nominee who has strayed from political orthodoxy, especially on issues related to Israel,” he told IPS.

Hagel, a decorated Vietnam War veteran and former Republican senator from Nebraska, has come under sustained attack from neo-conservatives – who still exercise a preponderant influence on the Republican Party’s foreign policy views despite the general unpopularity of the Iraq war which they championed – since he was first rumoured to be Obama’s top choice to succeed Leon Panetta as Pentagon chief in mid-December.

The anti-Hagel attacks have been carried out by a number of groups, such as the Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI), that have refused to disclose the identity of their donors.

The New York Times reported Sunday that billionaire Sheldon Adelson, the single biggest contributor to the Republican presidential campaign last year and a staunch supporter of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was involved in the campaign, by far the most expensive and organised ever mounted against a cabinet nominee.

Initially joined in their attacks by some leaders of the more-mainstream and bipartisan Israel lobby, they charged, among other things, that Hagel was anti-Semitic (in part because he had used the phrase “Jewish lobby” on one occasion) and hostile to Israel.

Conversely, they complained, he has been too sympathetic toward Palestinians, too eager to engage Iran and other Israeli foes diplomatically, and too averse to using military force, particularly against Iran if negotiations over its nuclear programme fail.

On these issues, they argued in a mantra subsequently adopted by half a dozen Republican senators, Hagel was “out of the mainstream” or even “far to the left of” Obama himself.

In fact, Hagel’s views on the Middle East and the use of military force, in particular, not only largely reflect those of the administration and, according to public-opinion polls, of a war-weary electorate, but also of most of the foreign-policy elite. Dozens of retired top-ranked diplomatic, intelligence, and military officials, as well as former Cabinet officers from both Republican and Democratic administration have rallied to Hagel’s defence in recent weeks.

But those “mainstream” views are not reflected in Congress, where the Israel lobby has long wielded its greatest influence.

While its main institutions, such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), declared their neutrality on the nominee after his formal nomination by Obama earlier this month, they worked with sympathetic senators from both parties and their staffers to ensure that particular questions would be asked that would elicit reassuring answers with respect to both supporting Israel and preventing Iran from achieving a nuclear bomb by any means necessary.

The effort – which was supplemented by angry prosecutorial performances by several senators, notably John McCain, Lindsay Graham, and Ted Cruz, closely associated with neo-conservatives – largely worked, as Hagel recanted or softened some of his more-provocative previous statements to the disappointment of many of his supporters.

But, in some respects, the effort, as suggested by Walt, succeeded too well, simply because it demonstrated quite dramatically to the interested public how completely Israel dominates the foreign-policy agenda, at least on Capitol Hill.

After all, the U.S. remains the world’s one superpower with interests in every country. Its defence budget – at well over half a trillion dollars this year — is greater than the combined budgets of the 10 next-most powerful militaries.

Yet Israel was mentioned more often in the hearing, according to IPS’s tally, than the following countries or entities combined: Iraq (30), Afghanistan (27), Russia (23), Palestine or Palestinian (22), Syria (18), North Korea (11), Pakistan (10), Egypt (9), China (5), NATO (5), Libya (2), Bahrain (2), Somalia (2), Al-Qaeda (2), and Mali, Jordan, Turkey, Japan, and South Korea (once each).

Several key regional powers with which Washington has been trying hard to build or already enjoys strong defence relationships – notably India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia – were not mentioned even a single time. Vietnam was mentioned 41 times but exclusively in relation to Hagel’s wartime service there or his work as a senior official in the Veterans Administration.

“They were not asking questions that had any relevance to the tasks facing the secretary of defence, in terms of either the military or budgetary challenges we face,” noted Amb. Chas. Freeman (ret.), whose appointment early in the Obama administration to head the National Intelligence Council (NIC) provoked such a furious campaign by neo-conservatives and key Israel lobby figures that he felt compelled to withdraw his name from consideration.

“So there was no serious discussion of defence or larger strategic issues,” he told IPS. What was there was a lot of grandstanding about whether or not the nominee was politically correct.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2013.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


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Opposition to U.S. Bases Reaches Turning Point

November 26, 2012 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

Suvendrini Kakuchi

TOKYO, Nov 25 (IPS) – Okinawa, the largest of a group of 60 sub-tropical islands forming Japan’s southernmost prefecture, has an equable climate and preferential treatment for United States servicemen under the Mutual Cooperation Security Treaty between the U.S. and Japan.According to Chobin Zukeran, a member of the House of Representatives from Okinawa, the archipelago is the perfect U.S. base because it fans out into the Pacific Ocean towards Taiwan, making it a vital bulwark for U.S. military strategists concerned with containing China.

Here is where the bulk of the U.S.’ 47,000 troops in Japan are based.

But Okinawans, who number roughly 1.4 million, have long opposed U.S. military presence on their homeland, which experienced the only bloody ground battle between Japan and the invading U.S. military at the end of World War II in 1945.

Since the return of the islands to Japan in 1972, over 90 percent of Okinawans – concerned about their personal safety and noise and environmental pollution – have supported the demand for a complete removal of the bases, which occupy 18 percent of their land.

Now, a string of recent incidents involving military personnel has pushed opposition to the bases into outright protest and threatens to foil the U.S.’ plans to beef up its military in the Asia-Pacific region.

On Nov. 7, Christopher Browning and Skyler Dozierwalker were charged with raping and injuring a local woman on Oct. 16, in a case that sparked widespread protest across Okinawa.

“Okinawa’s struggle against the U.S. military bases is reaching a turning point. We are prepared to take our demands all the way to Washington to end the deadlock,” Zukeran said at a press meeting in Tokyo earlier this month.

Frustration with impunity for U.S. troops on the island is nothing new. In 1995, the gang rape of a 12-year-old Okinawan girl by three U.S. servicemen resulted in a U.S.-Japan agreement to reduce U.S. military presence on the Okinawan chain of islands, but this did little to appease the local population.

“The rapes and a skewed sense of justice when these crimes involve U.S. servicemen is the worst form of violence against women,” said Ryuichi Hattori, a member of the Social Democratic Party that has traditionally led political demands to have the bases removed from Okinawa.

Statistics compiled by the police indicate no fewer than 6,000 cases of crime – including violence and rape – since 1972.

Catherine Fisher, an Australian national who was raped in 2002 by a sailor stationed on a ship on the U.S. naval base of Yokosuka, 64 miles south of Tokyo, was among the first women to speak publicly about the latest crime.

Fisher took her own case to the U.S. in September in pursuit of her attacker who had been honourably discharged by the U.S. military, although he was found guilty by the Tokyo district court in 2004 and ordered to pay damages.

“I was determined to receive justice and challenge a system that is totally unfair. Perpetrators, when they are U.S. soldiers, have legal protection and this must be changed,” she told IPS.

Fisher is currently touring Japan to gather support for her demand that perpetrators of crimes remain in Japan to face trial. She is also trying to set up a 24-hour rape crisis centre that can deal specifically with crimes committed by U.S. military servicemen.

Yet another wave of protest is growing over regular crimes committed by U.S. marines who frequent the bustling bars of Okinawa and participate in its vibrant nightlife.

Masayo Hirata, a former counselor for women seeking advice on their problems with U.S. troops – including offspring abandoned by fathers returning to the U.S. – says romantic liaisons with locals are common.

“Marrying or having relationships with American servicemen has become common these days among younger generation females who meet them in bars,” she said.

These interactions are a big part of the problem, according to protest groups, which include academics, lawyers and local politicians.

Sexual exploitation of local women has also sparked protests in other Asia-Pacific countries hosting U.S. forces, such as in the Philippines, which has a ship repair and recreational facility.

Public protests compelled the Philippine Senate to vote against the renewal of the lease on Clark Base in Angeles City in 1991 – a decision that many Okinawans found encouraging.

South Korea, officially at war with North Korea, hosts 37,000 marines located around the country, but the brutal killing in 1992 of a local woman working in an entertainment area close to the bases triggered demands for an end to the arrangement.

A 2010 survey conducted by the Mainichi Shimbun and Ryukyu Shimpo newspapers found that 71 percent of the Okinawans polled felt that the presence of U.S. troops was not necessary and 41 percent wanted the bases removed.

Campaigns have also focused on environmental degradation caused by the construction of military bases.

Human sit-ins against the construction of a heliport off the northeast coastline of Henoko, a quiet village, were forcibly disbanded. Locals, along with environmentalists on the mainland, claimed the heliport construction endangered coral and the native dugong population.

Okinawans say their daily lives are consumed with gnawing fear of accidents from U.S. fighter airplanes that also create deafening noise as they fly into U.S. bases located in densely crowded areas.

Animosity has recently been aggravated by the deployment on the island of Osprey aircraft, with locals voicing concerns over the poor safety record of the plane, which is capable of taking off and landing vertically.

Prof. Tsuneo Namihara, sociologist at the Okinawa University, explained to IPS that the recent territorial clashes between Japan and China over the Senkaku islands, claimed by both countries, have made it more difficult to get rid of U.S. bases.

“As a result, I fear the anti-base movement will veer away from the traditional pacifism (associated) with the local protests. The younger generation is getting impatient with the heavy hand of the Japanese government that is ignoring the wishes of the local population,” he warned.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2012.

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Asian Giants Poised to Outshine USA and Europe

November 11, 2012 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IDN

By Jaya Ramachandran

IDN-InDepth NewsAnalysis

PARIS (IDN) – The economies of China and India are poised to outshine those of the United States and Western Europe over the next half century, though an overwhelming majority of the Chinese and Indians are unlikely to attain the living standards of citizens in the rich industrial countries, predicts a new study.

Titled Looking to 2060: A Global Vision of Long-term Growth, the report expects the United States to cede its place as the world’s largest economy to China, as early as 2016. India’s GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is also projected to exceed that of the U.S. over the long term.

2060_oecd“Combined, the two Asian giants will soon surpass the collective economy of the G7 industrial nations – Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, USA and Japan. Fast-ageing economic heavyweights, such as Japan and the euro area, will gradually lose ground on the global GDP table to countries with a younger population, like Indonesia and Brazil,” says the study by the 34-nation Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Using a new model for projecting growth in the 34 OECD members and 8 major non-OECD G20 economies over the next 50 years, the report forecasts global economic growth of 3 percent annually, with sharp differences between the emerging-market economies, which are expected to grow at a much faster pace, and the advanced countries, which will likely grow at slower and often declining rates. Cross-country GDP per capita differences mainly reflect differences in technology levels, capital intensity, human capital and skills.

“The economic crisis we have been living with for the past five years will eventually be overcome, but the world our children and grandchildren inherit may be starkly different from ours,” said OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría. “As the largest and fastest-growing emerging countries fully assume a more prominent place in the global economy, we will face new challenges to ensure a prosperous and sustainable world for all. Education and productivity will be the main drivers of future growth, and should be policy priorities worldwide.”

The report expects that the shifting balance of long-term global output will lead to corresponding improvements in living standards, with income per capita expected to more than quadruple in the poorest countries by 2060. The increase could even be seven-fold in China and India, it says. Subsequently, the gap that currently exists in living standards between emerging-markets and advanced economies will have narrowed by 2060.

“But large cross-country differences will persist. China will see more than a seven-fold increase in per capita income over the coming half century, but living standards will still only be 60% of that in the leading countries in 2060. India will experience similar growth, but its per capita income will only be about 25% of that in advanced countries,” predicts the study.

“None of these forecasts are set in stone,” Gurría said. “We know that bold structural reforms can boost long-term growth and living standards in advanced and emerging-market economies alike.”

Thus, OECD research shows that wide-ranging labour and product market reforms could raise long-term living standards by an average of 16% over the next 50 years relative to the baseline scenario, which only assumes moderate policy improvements.

World GDP

The report forecasts major changes in the composition of world GDP – taken as sum of GDP for 34 OECD and 8 non-OECD G20 countries. On the basis of 2005 purchasing power parities (PPPs), China is projected to surpass the Euro Area in a year or so and the United States in a few more years, to become the largest economy in the world, and India is projected to surpass Japan in the next year or two and the Euro area in about 20 years.

The faster growth rates of China and India imply that their combined GDP will exceed that of the major seven (G7) OECD economies by around 2025 and by 2060 it will be more than 1½ times larger, whereas in 2010 China and India accounted for less than one half of G7 GDP. Strikingly, the combined GDP of these two countries will be larger than that of the entire OECD area, based on today’s membership, in 2060, while it currently amounts to only one-third of it.

“Such changes in shares of world GDP will be matched by a tendency of GDP per capita to converge across countries, which however will still leave significant gaps in living standards between advanced and emerging economies,” explains the report.

Over the next half century, the unweighted average of GDP per capita (in 2005 PPP terms), is predicted to grow by roughly 3% annually in the non-OECD area, as against 1.7% in the OECD area. As a result, GDP per capita in the poorest economies will (in 2011) more than quadruple (in 2005 PPP terms), whereas it will only double in the richest economies.

China and India will experience more than a seven-fold increase of their income per capita by 2060. The extent of the catch-up is more pronounced in China reflecting the momentum of particularly strong productivity growth and rising capital intensity over the last decade. This will bring China 25% above the current (2011) income level of the United States, while income per capita in India will reach only around half the current US level.

Income gaps

Despite this fast growth among “catching-up” countries, the rankings of GDP per capita in 2011 and 2060 are projected to remain very similar. Even though differences in productivity and skills are reduced, remaining differences in these factors still explain a significant share of gaps in living standards in 2060.

Additionally, in a few European OECD countries and some emerging economies differences in labour input will also continue to explain a sizeable share of the remaining income gaps. Indeed, for some European countries, where ageing is more pronounced and/or older-age participation rates are low, these factors are enough to cause a widening in the income gap with the United States, despite continued convergence in productivity and skills levels. [IDN-InDepthNews – November 11, 2012]

2012 IDN-InDepthNews | Analysis That Matters

Image: OECD

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Neoliberal Political Economy: Regressive Distribution on a Global Scale

November 9, 2012 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy

By Alan F. Fogelquist, Ph.D

This essay discusses some of the main characteristics of today’s neoliberal political and economic order. Other terms exist to describe the same general set of institutions and policy prescriptions, but neoliberalism is a convenient expression for designating them in one word that is now widely used and understood.

Neoliberalism is now used as a generic term to characterize an economic ideology that favors unrestricted “free” markets, “free trade”, macro-economic stability, and a set of related economic policies. Neoliberal ideology favors unrestricted freedom of private corporations to pursue profit, the privatization of public enterprises and services, and the elimination or reduction of public or government control, regulation, and guidance of economic activity. Neoliberal policy prescriptions give priority to the prevention and control of inflation over economic growth and employment. In some versions of neoliberalism, there are also prescriptions for tax reductions for corporations and upper income groups under the assumption extra income retained after tax reduction will be reinvested in productive capacity. The ideology also calls for free trade and the elimination of tariffs or government support of domestic manufacturing. The ideology assumes that unregulated markets will correct themselves and produce optimal outcomes for society as a whole.

Over the decades neoliberal ideology has evolved and received a variety of labels ranging from monetarism in the 1980s to the Washington Consensus in later years. Despite some changes and refinement, the policy prescriptions have remained much the same in terms of their regressive effects on distribution of income and wealth and also their contribution to financialization of the economy and the decline of the manufacturing industry in many countries. Rightwing politicians have culled political slogans from popularized works of neoliberal economists or political ideologues like Milton Friedman and his successors. In advanced developed economies, the introduction of neoliberal institutions and policies began in the 1980s under the governments of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the UK In subsequent years neoliberal policy came to dominate much of the economic landscape of the capitalist world and in one form or another was adopted by major political parties and governments in many countries. In the United States both Republican and Democratic governments adopted key elements of neoliberal thinking including free trade dogmas. The notable exception to neoliberal capitalism in recent decades has been in the rapidly developing economies of Asia that rejected some of the core doctrines and practices of neoliberalism as practiced in the United States and much of Europe and Latin America.

Set of Badges, Labels, Tags "Made in China". Vector illustration. Grunge stamp with text The neoliberal economic order produces institutionalized inequality – unequal power, unequal advantage, and unequal exchange. Those without power are forced to exchange their labor and expertise for less than the real value of their product or contribution. While any economic transaction has the potential for unequal or unfair exchange, the current system of rewards is completely in favor of those with political and economic bargaining power and against those who depend on wages and salaries for their work, either physical or mental. The neoliberal order is one where institutionalized inequality and perverse incentives prevent technological advances from reaching their full potential to improve the human condition. Instead tiny minorities reap most of the benefits while the majority of the world’s inhabitants receive marginal benefits or are left out. Neoliberal ideology based on fallacious assumptions presented as science is used to justify regressive economic policy and race-to-the bottom competition based on lower wages and special state favors to monopolistic or speculative “enterprises.” In the Orwellian language of neoliberalism speculation is confused with productive investment. Speculation becomes coterminous with investment.

The vast expansion of the global market economy to include countries with enormous populations of desperately poor workers and farmers has created an enormous downward pressure on employment and wages in countries that had achieved higher incomes and economic security for the wage and salary workers after decades of economic development and social struggles. Globalization following the inclusion of China, India, and Russia in the world market economy has created race-to-the bottom competition and increased levels of exploitation. It has contributed to the imbalance between wage income paid to workers directly engaged in production and the performance of services on the one hand and income in the form of profits or executive and upper managerial salaries that accrues to the economically powerful on the other hand.

Also intensifying inequality has been the change in policy regime starting in the early 1980s when neoliberal monetarist macroeconomic policy replaced more expansionary policies of the early post war compact between labor and capital. Also accentuating inequality were measures to break labor unions and increase the power of employers to step up the level of exploitation of workers and employees.

Increased profit and upper managerial and executive income beyond increases in labor productivity have repeatedly produced a chronic imbalance between effective demand or purchasing power and the supply of goods and services even in times of economic expansion. This has resulted in a growing accumulation of income at the top with no productive outlet for investment. The existence of large pools of capital without profitable outlets for productive investment fuels speculation. These pools of capital are funneled into financial institutions that clamor for deregulation in order to have a free hand to engage in high-risk asset speculation driving up the price of tangible and intangible assets and distorting the structure of the economy. The collapse of asset prices fueled by speculation has led to repeated financial panics and economic crises. Following neoliberal policy prescriptions, step-by-step deregulation of financial institutions in the 1980s and 1990s accelerated the growth of the private financial sector at the expense of manufacturing and public services. The growth of the financialized speculative sector fueled by excess profits, higher managerial income, and increased exploitation of an underpaid labor force also increased the capacity of large corporations and wealthy individuals to use their financial power to gain political power. The same corporations and individuals were able to influence politics through domination of the mass media, intensified lobbying efforts, funding of electoral campaigns, funding of policy institutes, and ideological influence over business and economic education in universities. All of these activities contributed to the growing dominance of plutocratic capitalism over policy discussion and to the promotion of policies that serve the interests of tiny wealthy minorities rather than the general public.

After decades of testing neoliberal ideology as the dominant paradigm it is now possible to see its deep flaws and inhuman consequences. Austerity economics prescribed by neoliberal politicians and economists, especially during a crisis or recession produces massive unemployment and downward pressure on the wages and salaries. These policies intensify and prolong recessions. Free trade dogma has led to a decline in manufacturing and the transfer of factories and jobs to low wage countries placing additional downward pressure on wages and loss of employment in many middle income and developed countries without proportional benefits to workers and ordinary people in poor countries. Outsourcing of information technology and jobs to lower wage countries now threatens the economic security even in the technologically advanced sectors of developed economies. In the meantime factory workers in countries that have gained jobs from this zero-sum activity are severely exploited and live under inhuman conditions while the multinational elites profit from the transfer. Everywhere it is the multinational capitalists and elites in the emerging economic giants like China and India that receive the benefits of uncontrolled globalization. In short, neoliberal policies have resulted in a massive transfer of income and wealth upwards and contributed to global imbalances and instability.

Unless there as a fundamental change in ideology, these trends will certainly continue and there will be major crises that inflict enormous but preventable human casualties. Highly volatile and imperfect markets characterized by unequal power, an unequal advantage, crony capitalism, reckless casino finance, environmental wreckage, and plutocratic domination of government and the media will continue their unsustainable course creating mass misery, and periodic crises.

Choice of economic policy usually involves tradeoffs between goals that may be in partial conflict such as low inflation versus high employment or cheap manufactured goods versus jobs and decent wages, but most tradeoffs benefit some groups more than others. The best tradeoffs are those that benefit the majority of the people, those engaged directly in the creation of useful goods or performance of needed services for the general population. The best tradeoffs are those that serve the public good rather than the good of tiny minorities. The real choice in economic policy boils down to who gets what and fair versus unfair exchange.

Neoliberalism is not the only analytical framework available. There are real and feasible alternatives to neoliberalism that can lead to better living conditions and better economic outcomes for the majority of the world’s inhabitants. There have always been alternative frameworks for economic and political analysis and successful examples of alternative economic practices that have led to better outcomes. Examples of successful economic policies outside the framework of neoliberalism can be found in many countries and forms ranging from government policies to promote the development of domestic manufacturing in East Asia and Brazil to social democratic support for health care, education, vocational training and pensions for the elderly in Scandinavia, Germany, and France. Argentina offers lessons for overcoming financial crises aggravated by neoliberal austerity and some examples of worker owned enterprises. The Mondragon industrial cooperative in Spain shows that plutocratic ownership of industry is not the only alternative. Many countries and regions have successful experiments in public support for green development and efforts to preserve the environment.

No set of policies is perfect, but some serve the needs of the many and human well being much better than others. From the beginning, there have been social scientists, economists and observers of economic and political life who have challenged what proved to be flawed assumptions and claims of the neoliberals. The reason for the power and influence of neoliberalism lies largely in the tremendous economic, political, and media power of the minorities that have benefited from its prescriptions. In future essays we will go into more detail in our analysis of the dynamics of neoliberalism, alternative frameworks, and the experience of various regions and countries around the world.

© Copyright 2012 Alan F. Fogelquist, Ph.D. All rights reserved.

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Alan F. Fogelquist is an economic historian and analyst of geopolitical and economic issues. He is editor of the Global Geopolitics & Political Economy and Real Political Economy websites.


Filed Under: Economic Crisis, Economic Policy, Economy, Finance, Inequality, Lead, Social Justice, Trade Tagged With: , , , ,

It Was the Demography, Stupid

November 9, 2012 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Nov 09 (IPS) – Twenty years ago, Democratic pol James Carville immortalised the phrase “It’s the economy, stupid” in explaining how former Arkansas governor Bill Clinton would unseat President George H. W. Bush, who was riding high off his smashing military victory in the first Gulf War.Now, 20 years later, pros in both parties appear to agree that “It was the demography, stupid” that best explained how President Barack Obama defeated former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, despite four years of hard economic times and a nearly eight-percent unemployment rate.

Demographics has become almost a cliché in the 48 hours since Romney went down to defeat despite the support of nearly 60 percent of white voters.

“It’s a changing country,” observed the wildly successful right-wing talk-show host, Bill O’Reilly, soon after the major television networks concluded that Obama had won the electoral vote by a landslide, even as the popular vote gave him a victory of only about three percent.

“The demographics are changing; It’s not a traditional America anymore,” O’Reilly told his FoxNews viewers ruefully. “…Whereby 20 years ago, President Obama would have been roundly defeated by an establishment candidate like Mitt Romney, the white establishment is now the minority.”

In fact, the “traditional America” of an overwhelmingly white, patriarchal society that has effectively dominated the country from its independence nearly 240 years ago through at least the era of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s is long gone.

And both minorities and women, combined with the so-called Millennium Generation of 18 to 29-year-olds whose attitudes are far more tolerant of “untraditional” people and lifestyles than any that preceded it, proved the point quite convincingly on election night this year.

Sixty percent of white voters, combined with just a smattering of minority votes, would have clinched any presidential election until the end of the Reagan era. Indeed, when Bush Sr. received the same percentage of white votes as Romney, he won the 1988 election by eight percentage points despite receiving only 30 percent of Hispanic and 12 percent of African American votes.

But given both the increase in the size of minority populations and their increased turnout at the voting booths – as well as the growing identification of women with the Democratic Party – those days are now gone, and this election hammered that truth home like no other.

In many respects, it’s just a matter of mathematics. In 1988, non-Latino white voters constituted 85 percent of the electorate. By 2008, when Obama defeated Sen. John McCain, that percentage was down to 74 percent. It fell again this year – to only 71 percent.

And that trend will inevitably continue, much to the distress of most Republican leaders who fear that, absent a major and convincing effort to woo ethnic and religious minority voters, their party will lose and lose again, at least at the national level.

“If you’re not going to be competitive with Latinos, with African Americans, with Native Americans, with Asian Americans, you’re not going to be a successful party,” noted former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich this week.

He lost the party’s nomination to Romney in the primary campaign in part due to his support for more liberal immigration policies than those endorsed by Romney and the party’s right-wing and “Tea Party” activist core.

Unsurprisingly, African Americans, who make up about 12 percent of eligible voters, cast their ballots overwhelmingly for the biracial Obama, although, at 93 percent, that was two percentage points less than in 2008.

More shocking to the Republicans, however, was how Latinos, the country’s largest ethnic minority, voted. Just over two percent of the electorate in 1992, Latinos accounted for 10 percent of all voters in this election, and they voted by a whopping 71-27 percent majority for Obama.

While Republicans were concerned that their tough immigration stance would hurt them with Latinos, they consoled themselves that the “traditional values” of the party, combined with the dismal economy, would permit them to increase their share of the Latino vote above the 31 percent received by McCain four years ago.

That calculation, however, was not born out. Romney received only 27 percent of the Latino vote, compared to Obama’s 71 percent.

Moreover, the greater Latino turnout magnified the loss and, according to most political analysts, probably made the difference in such key swing states as Nevada, Colorado, Virginia, and Florida – which Obama appears poised to win officially – where they make up 17 percent of the electorate.

Republicans also underestimated their losses among the country’s fastest-growing minority – Asian Americans – who, while constituting only about three percent of the total electorate, were a key constituency in the swing state of Virginia.

As a whole, the group has historically been divided politically by national origin, with Japanese and Southeast Asian Americans tending to vote more Republican. In 1992, 55 percent of Asian Americans voted for Bush Sr.

But, with the arrival of new immigrants – the Asian-American population grew at a rate of nearly 50 percent in the past decade –and the increasingly right-wing trajectory of the Republican Party, Asian Americans have moved into the Democratic column.

In 2000, 54 percent voted for Vice President Al Gore; eight years later, 62 percent for Obama. This year, however, Asians surpassed Latinos in support for the president, voting 73-26 percent, or three-to-one, in his favour.

All of these statistics paint a very gloomy picture for a Republican Party that, in the aftermath of its defeat – it unexpectedly lost, in addition to the White House, two seats in the Senate and at least seven in the House of Representatives – is turning into a circular firing squad, with the Tea Party and Christian Right claiming that Romney was too moderate and more establishment politicians insisting that he was not moderate enough.

The debate whether the party must change its substantive positions on issues – notably immigration – in order to win over minorities or whether merely softening its tone – by, for example, explicitly disowning racist messages that have become commonplace on right-wing radio and television talk shows – is also underway.

But the party faces a serious challenge, according to Matt Barreto, a pollster of Latino Decisions.

“There’s this combination: the Asian vote is high, and each year it is going to add another percent. The Latino vote is growing fast. And as long as the African American vote continues to turn out at high rates, in that next election in 2016, it maybe down to like 69 percent white voters,” he told Southern California Public Radio Thursday.

“At that point, if they don’t make increases among blacks and Latinos and Asians, then the Republican Party is not going to win another national election.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2012.

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Narco-States Grope for New Strategy*

November 5, 2012 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

Emilio Godoy

MEXICO CITY, Nov 05 (IPS) – Mexico, Colombia and Guatemala face the need to modify their approach to the fight against drug trafficking and are urging the world to do the same. But Mexico and Colombia’s willingness to make the necessary changes is unclear.The three countries are connected by a powerful circuit of trafficking of drugs – whose main market is the United States – weapons and money from illegal activities. But the extent of the problem and the way drug organisations operate in each one of these countries vary.

Mexico is urgently in need of a new strategy. The militarisation of the drug war since President Felipe Calderón took office in late 2006 has resulted in more than 90,000 people killed, some 10,000 missing and at least 250,000 forced to flee their homes, according to human rights groups and press reports.

And the power of the drug cartels, over society, the government and the economy, has remained intact.

Colombia, for decades the world’s number one producer of cocaine, should look at how the mafia works in Italy to understand its own drug cartels, while Mexico should look at Colombia, said one of the most knowledgeable analysts of the drug trade in Colombia, sociologist Ricardo Vargas, a researcher associated with the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute.

His summary of the situation puts one in mind of the descriptions by Italian journalist Roberto Saviano in his book “Gomorra” of how organised crime works in Naples, where few economic activities are really what they appear to be, and most leave no tracks.

The situation in Colombia “can be likened to the case of Italy, in terms of the effort to reduce violence and create much more sophisticated mechanisms of managing illegal activities, relations with the world of politics, and taking advantage of the economic growth experienced by some countries in Latin America,” Vargas told IPS.

Drug traffickers “are also investors, and launderers of huge amounts of dollars. For that reason they don’t need a lot of violence; they need a more organised and subtle, a more business-oriented, structure,” just like the mafia has in Italy today, he said.

The analyst said he saw Colombia as “moving in that direction,” while “Mexico is still in a phase of outright violence.”

Guatemala, meanwhile, a small Central American country that has become a storehouse and transit point for drugs, has one of the world’s highest homicide rates. But its president, right-wing Otto Pérez Molina, has publicly suggested that drugs be decriminalised as part of a regional agreement that would include the United States.

In a joint statement to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in October, the presidents of the three countries urged U.N. nations “to undertake very soon a consultation process to take stock of the strengths and limitations of the current policy, and of the violence generated by the production, trafficking and consumption of drugs in the world.”

Colombian analyst Luis Garay says that what is needed is close cooperation in intelligence, and oversight of financial flows.

“Intelligence has to operate transnationally, the way criminal organisations do,” Garay told IPS. “It must be highly interactive and must operate in real time. Regional cooperation is not the best, but it is the second-best option, because any cooperation must include the United States.”

Garay is the academic director of Scientific Vortex, a non-profit research group that describes itself as providing “methodologies and inputs for policy-making, under integrative science principles.”

He studied case files from Mexico, Colombia and Guatemala and social interactions between drug traffickers, paramilitaries, businesspersons, legislators and government officials in legitimate and clandestine activities, with which organised crime has effectively co-opted the state, he said.

The result of that work is the book “"Narcotráfico, corrupción y Estados. Cómo las redes ilícitas han reconfigurado las instituciones en Colombia, Guatemala y México" (Drug trafficking, corruption and states; how illicit networks have reconfigured the institutions in Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico”), co-authored by Scientific Vortex director Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán and released in Mexico City in late October.

The book suggests using financial intelligence information, creating a trilateral investigation agency, reaching agreements for technical and logistical cooperation between Mexico and Colombia, and signing agreements for investigations between institutions in the three countries.

Luis Astorga, a professor at the political science faculty of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, says “a fundamental element is being ignored: the United States, which must be taken into account in the internal, bilateral and international debate,” he told IPS.

In Mexico, president-elect Enrique Peña of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, who takes office Dec. 1, announced a shift in the country’s anti-drug strategy, to expand beyond the hunt for drug traffickers. He proposed creating an elite body to fight the cartels, and promised to cut the number of murders in half in his first year in office.

But he has not announced detailed measures. And his track record does not shed much light on the question. In his 2005-2011 term as governor of the state of Mexico – which surrounds the Federal District of Mexico City – he replaced the state’s chief prosecutor three times, and the murder rate climbed from nine per 100,000 population in 2007 to 14 per 100,000 in 2010, according to official figures.

Vargas believes that in Mexico, the violence “will tend towards reaching a point of equilibrium, and will improve, although not with an end to the drug trade but through a process of stabilisation in which Mexican drug traffickers will consolidate structures along the lines of what exists in Colombia.”

This will be seen as “a great political achievement by Mexico. But it will not mean the disappearance, but the consolidation through other channels, of these criminal organisations,” Vargas said.

That is the big issue ignored in the October declaration by the presidents of Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico calling for changes in the global fight against drugs. “No country has fully acknowledged that the problem lies in the presence of solid organised crime structures, which also have a strong capacity to influence states,” Vargas said.

“That dimension of the problem has not been put on the table, although it must be the cornerstone of any real change in strategy,” he said.

Mexico’s criminal organisations are involved in nearly two dozen different kinds of illegal economic activities, from drug and people trafficking to kidnapping, extortion, contraband and counterfeit goods, which gives them the ability to quickly mutate.

Nevertheless, Vargas believes that Mexico and Colombia should lead a process of influencing multilateral institutions where Latin America has an important presence, to spearhead reforms in international conventions on drugs.

Mexico’s president-elect announced that he chose General Óscar Naranjo, a former Colombian police chief, as his future security adviser.

According to Vargas, Naranjo “advocates differentiated treatment of marijuana and other substances. If his actions are consistent with what he has proposed up to now, Mexico and Colombia could drive a process of experimentation with the decriminalisation of marijuana use.”

That would be an “extremely interesting approach,” because there is no evidence available yet of the effects that this would have in the region, said the analyst.

He also mentioned the case of Uruguay, where the government presented a bill that would essentially create the world’s first government-run marijuana market. But he said that the South American country’s experience was “a bit isolated from the Latin American context.”

* With reporting by Constanza Vieira in Bogotá.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2012.

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Latest EPI Report – Growing U.S. trade deficit with China cost more than 2.7 million jobs between 2001 and 2011

August 23, 2012 by

Excerpt from the Latest Report of the Economic Policy Institute on Job Loss From US Trade With  China

Read the Full Report on the EPI Website

Report | Trade and Globalization

The China toll

Growing U.S. trade deficit with China cost more than 2.7 million jobs between 2001 and 2011, with job losses in every state

By Robert E. Scott | August 23, 2012

Briefing Paper #345

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Press release

Briefing Paper: Growing U.S. trade deficit with China cost 2.8 million jobs between 2001 and 2010

Since China entered the World Trade Organization in 2001, the extraordinary growth of trade between China and the United States has had a dramatic effect on U.S. workers and the domestic economy, though in neither case has this effect been beneficial. The United States is piling up foreign debt and losing export capacity, and the growing trade deficit with China has been a prime contributor to the crisis in U.S. manufacturing employment. Between 2001 and 2011, the trade deficit with China eliminated or displaced more than 2.7 million U.S. jobs, over 2.1 million of which (76.9 percent) were in manufacturing. These lost manufacturing jobs account for more than half of all U.S. manufacturing jobs lost or displaced between 2001 and 2011.

Supplemental Table A: Jobs displaced due to U.S. trade deficits with China, by congressional district, 2001–2011 (ranked by share of jobs displaced) [PDF] [Excel]

Supplemental Table B: Jobs displaced due to U.S. trade deficits with China, by congressional district, 2001–2011 (sorted by state and congressional district) [PDF] [Excel]

Supplemental Table C: U.S. trade with China, by industry, 2001–2011 [PDF] [Excel]

The more than 2.7 million jobs lost or displaced in all sectors include 662,100 jobs from 2008 to 2011 alone—even though imports from China and the rest of the world plunged in 2009. (Imports from China have since recovered and surpassed their peak of 2008.) The growing trade deficit with China has cost jobs in all 50 states and the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, as well as in each congressional district.

Among specific industries, the trade deficit in the computer and electronic products industry grew the most, and 1,064,800 jobs were displaced, 38.8 percent of the 2001–2011 total. As a result, many of the hardest-hit congressional districts were in California, Texas, Oregon, Massachusetts, Colorado, and Minnesota, where jobs in that industry are concentrated. Some districts in North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama were also especially hard-hit by job displacement in a variety of manufacturing industries, including computers and electronic products, textiles and apparel, and furniture.

But the jobs impact of the China trade deficit is not restricted to job loss and displacement. Competition with low-wage workers from less-developed countries such as China has driven down wages for workers in U.S. manufacturing and reduced the wages and bargaining power of similar, non-college-educated workers throughout the economy. The affected population includes essentially all workers with less than a four-year college degree—roughly 70 percent of the workforce, or about 100 million workers (U.S. Census Bureau 2012b).

Put another way, for a typical full-time median-wage earner, earnings losses due to globalization totaled approximately $1,400 per year as of 2006 (Bivens 2008a). For a typical household with two earners, the annual cost is more than $2,500. China is the most important source of downward wage pressure from trade with less-developed countries because it pays very low wages and because its products make up such a large portion of U.S. imports (China was responsible for 55.3 percent of U.S. non-oil imports from less-developed countries in 2011).

These conclusions about the jobs impact of trade with China arise from the following specific findings of this study:

  • Most of the jobs lost or displaced by trade with China between 2001 and 2011 were in manufacturing industries (more than 2.1 million jobs, or 76.9 percent).
  • Within manufacturing, rapidly growing imports of computer and electronic products (including computers, parts, semiconductors, and audio-video equipment) accounted for 54.9 percent of the $217.5 billion increase in the U.S. trade deficit with China between 2001 and 2011. The growth of this deficit contributed to the elimination of 1,064,800 U.S. jobs in computer and electronic products in this period. Indeed, in 2011, the total U.S. trade deficit with China was $301.6 billion—$139.3 billion of which was in computer and electronic products.
  • Global trade in advanced technology products—often discussed as a source of comparative advantage for the United States—is instead dominated by China. This broad category of high-end technology products includes the more advanced elements of the computer and electronic products industry as well as other sectors such as biotechnology, life sciences, aerospace, and nuclear technology. In 2011, the United States had a $109.4 billion deficit in advanced technology products with China, which was responsible for 36.3 percent of the total U.S.-China trade deficit. In contrast, the United States had a $9.7 billion surplus in advanced technology products with the rest of the world in 2011.
  • Other industrial sectors hit hard by growing trade deficits with China between 2001 and 2011 include apparel and accessories (211,200 jobs), textile mills and textile product mills (106,200), fabricated metal products (120,600), furniture and fixtures (80,700), plastics and rubber products (57,600), motor vehicles and parts (19,800), and miscellaneous manufactured goods (111,800). Several service sectors were also hit hard by indirect job losses, including administrative, support, and waste management services (160,600) and professional, scientific, and technical services (145,000).
  • The more than 2.7 million U.S. jobs lost or displaced by the trade deficit with China between 2001 and 2011 were distributed among all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, with the biggest net losses occurring in California (474,700 jobs), Texas (239,600), New York (158,800), Illinois (113,700), North Carolina (110,300), Florida (106,100), Pennsylvania (101,200), Ohio (95,900), Massachusetts (92,700), and Georgia (87,300).
  • Jobs displaced due to growing deficits with China equaled or exceeded 2.2 percent of total employment in the 12 hardest-hit states: New Hampshire (20,400 jobs lost or displaced, equal to 2.94 percent of total state employment), California (474,700, 2.87 percent), Massachusetts (92,700, 2.86 percent), Oregon (50,200, 2.85 percent), North Carolina (110,300, 2.67 percent), Minnesota (72,300, 2.66 percent), Idaho (18,200, 2.65 percent), Vermont (8,000, 2.43 percent), Colorado (57,800, 2.38 percent), Texas (239,600, 2.26 percent), Rhode Island (11,800, 2.24 percent), and Alabama (43,900, 2.20 percent).
  • The hardest-hit congressional districts were concentrated in states that were heavily exposed to growing China trade deficits in computer and electronic products and other industries such as furniture, textiles, apparel, and durable goods manufacturing. The three hardest-hit congressional districts were all located in Silicon Valley in California, including the 15th (Santa Clara County, which lost 44,700 jobs, equal to 13.77 percent of all jobs in the district), the 14th (Palo Alto and nearby cities, 32,700 jobs, 10.20 percent), and the 16th (San Jose and other parts of Santa Clara County, 29,000 jobs, 9.55 percent). Of the top 20 hardest-hit districts, seven were in California (in rank order, the 15th, 14th, 16th, 13th, 31st, 34th, and 50th), four were in Texas (31st, 10th, 25th, and 3rd), two were in North Carolina (4th and 10th), two were in Massachusetts (5th and 3rd), and one each in Oregon (1st), Georgia (9th), Colorado (4th), Minnesota (1st), and Alabama (5th). Each of these districts lost at least 11,400 jobs, or more than 3.7 percent of its total jobs.

The job displacement estimates in this study are conservative. They include only the direct and indirect jobs displaced by trade, and exclude jobs in domestic wholesale and retail trade or advertising; they also exclude re-spending employment.1 However, during the Great Recession of 2007–2009, and continuing through 2011, jobs displaced by China trade reduced wages and spending, which led to further job losses.

Read the Full Report on the EPI Website

© 2012 Economic Policy Institute


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