Dear Friend,
Whenever a question arises about the macroeconomics of sustainability, it behooves us to consider the three basic alternatives: growth, degrowth, and the steady state economy. Neither growth nor degrowth are sustainable in the long run. This is most obvious in the case of degrowth. Meanwhile, the full body of work by Herman Daly, CASSE, and our many friends and colleagues in ecological economics (not always well-represented in Ecological Economics) makes it obvious enough regarding growth as well. This leaves the steady state economy as the sustainable alternative.
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Binu Mathew
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Degrowth Toward a Steady State Economy: Unifying Non-Growth Movements for Political Impact
Co-Written By Brian Czech and Riccardo Mastini
Whenever a question arises about the macroeconomics of sustainability, it behooves us to consider the three basic alternatives: growth, degrowth, and the steady state economy. Neither growth nor degrowth are sustainable in the long run. This is most obvious in the case of degrowth. Meanwhile, the full body of work by Herman Daly, CASSE, and our many friends and colleagues in ecological economics (not always well-represented in Ecological Economics) makes it obvious enough regarding growth as well. This leaves the steady state economy as the sustainable alternative.
Triumphal Divisions: Trump’s State of the Union
Address
by Dr Binoy Kampmark
In this year of the presidential elections, President Donald J. Trump shows little sign of cowering. It had been some time in coming, but here was a businessman talking to a Congress long in the pocket of business, a seemingly seamless order of things that would have made the Founding Fathers cringe.
In this year of the presidential elections, President Donald J. Trump shows little sign of cowering. It had been some time in coming, but here was a businessman talking to a Congress long in the pocket of business, a seemingly seamless order of things that would have made the Founding Fathers cringe.
Trump’s rule has remade political practice in the United States. Protocols have been abandoned; forms torn. The language of politics is sillier, barrel scraping and coarse, the lingo of the tweet, rather than the elevation of inspired ideas. His enemies have become poor facsimiles of the Trump method, and for this, he must always be remembered.
Damning protocol was already something Trump was keen on even before he began his speech. He turned his back on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s outstretched hand. It was not a level of rudeness to be batted away with magisterial indifference; Pelosi was keen to show that she was more than able to abandon convention and reciprocate with similar childishness. She refused to use the language of customary introduction – that it was her “honour” to introduce the president. At the conclusion of his speech, she tore up the speech in view of the cameras. It was, she explained to journalists, “the courteous thing to do, considering the alternatives.”
The Democrats have never quite nailed down a program of getting at Trump the showman. They lament his mendacity, which he can always turn into a weapon, deployed as brief stabs over the social media cycle; they loathe his character, which he can always rebrand as daring in the face of fetters that encourage dreariness. Shockingly, the opposition seems grey, haggard, stilted and, at points, decidedly confused. (The Iowa caucus fiasco did not help.) By vote, they impeached him in the House of Representatives, where they were bound to, given that they control the chamber. By vote, they are bound to fail to remove him from office in the Senate trial that concludes on Wednesday.
Trump’s speech, billed as the “Great American Comeback”, took deep bites out of the economy mantra, fictional as it is. “Jobs are booming, incomes are soaring, poverty is plummeting, crime is falling, confidence is surging, and our country is thriving and highly respected again!” He stressed high velocity, speedy movement, the sort of subject matter US presidents luxuriate in. “We are moving forward at a pace that was unimaginable just a short time ago, and we are never going back!” What this entails is less relevant than the illusion of busy dedication. “In just three short years, we have shattered the mentality of American decline and we have rejected the downsizing of America’s destiny.”
The president also took a chance to dare and prod his opponents in the House. He made it clear that the Presidential Medal of Freedom would be awarded to Rush Limbaugh, a radio demagogue who has revealed he has advanced lung cancer. Having rewarded a figure with well proven credentials in divisiveness, he explained that he was himself the leader of inclusivity. “The next step forward in building an inclusive society is making sure that every young American gets a great education and the opportunity to achieve the American dream.”
His project for the US involved constructing “the world’s most prosperous and inclusive society – one where every citizen can join in America’s unparalleled success, and where every community can take place in America’s extraordinary rise.”
That prosperous society evidently entailed not having universal healthcare but a good deal of private healthcare directed away from rogue illegal aliens who seemed to be finding themselves in the United States, despite Trump’s own claims that the US-Mexico border is resoundingly secure. Unconvincingly, Trump suggested that 130 lawmakers “in this chamber have endorsed legislation that would bankrupt our Nation by providing free taxpayer-funded healthcare to millions of illegal aliens, forcing taxpayers to subsidize free care for anyone in the world who unlawfully crosses our borders.”
By right of reply, the opposition duties for this year fell to Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. “Bullying people on Twitter doesn’t fix bridges – it burns them.” What the governor has failed to appreciate here is that bridges have a solidity a tweet does not. A set of rapidly fired words furnish fantastic distractions that can be altered at a moment’s pressing. Lacking punch, even Trump critics found Whitmer’s speech tedious.
Trump’s speeches are never to be taken as factual representations. They are merely signposted sentiments and crude displays. Unemployment is low, but job security in the United States is precarious. The stock market has been booming, but that ignores the massive underwritten expansion that arose from the injection of public moneys into the economy during the Obama years. The fiction of a healthy Wall Street independent, daring and free of the state remains a delusion with high circulation. Trump is by no means the only one to advertise that nonsense, which assures companies that their losses will be socialised, and their profits treated as acts of ingenious self-achievement.
The timing of the address was also significant, becoming a display of of both the man himself and the system he represents. On Wednesday, his impeachment trial will conclude with a Senate vote, and he is likely to remain in place. Pelosi’s rudeness was put down, in part, to the hope that she will not preside over another State of the Union from Trump. She may well live to regret saying so. The White House is certainly reminding her of that fact, claiming that the act of tearing Trump’s speech was tantamount to ripping up, “The survival of our last surviving Tuskegee Airmen”, survival of a child born at 21 weeks, families in mourning, and a “service member’s reunion with his family.” Shallow and flawed reasoning, but substantive enough to sell.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
Palestinians have no choice but to resist injustice!
by Dr Salim Nazzal
The Palestinians lost all hope for international justice, and no longer had a choice but to resume the resistance. All the occupied peoples resisted the invaders, and the Palestinian people are no exception.
For more than seventy years, the Palestinians have been awaiting international justice. They have hoped that they will obtain their rights through international laws. They have long believed that the world will not accept this injustice they subjected to. They also think that they have enough UN resolutions to their side to restore their stolen rights.
In 1947, when a Palestinian problem moved to the United Nations, the imperial power dominating, then the UN proposed dividing Palestine between the indigenous people, and immigrants brought by Zionism with British approval, most of them did not even hold Palestinian citizenship.
It was natural for the Palestinians to refuse to divide their country with new immigrants who did not come as refugees or as foreign workers but rather as invaders. No other people on earth would have accepted that.
The Zionists benefited from the fact that they came in a period of Arab weakness and a stage of widespread Western sympathy, using the Holocaust to make another Holocaust to other people.
The Zionists did everything that could come to mind from killing, terror and deporting Palestinians fro their homes. The modern history of Palestine is in short, a history of the terror caused by Zionists.
The Zionists should have taken revenge for the Holocaust by fighting the countries that caused the Holocaust. But they did the opposite. They cooperated with all imperial powers to revenge from people who did no wrong to Jews.
Since those times, the Palestinian people moved from a tragedy to a tragedy, and the reason is the Zionist Jews. All the wars that took place in the region would not have taken place had it not been for the Zionists. And they know that their presence is based on power only.
After the Oslo agreement, the Palestinians agreed to a state with an area of 22 per cent of their homeland. But the Zionists, whose racist mentality did not change, manipulated to win the time, and negotiations remained 27 years without any result. At this time they were filling Palestinian land with Jewish settlements to make the establishment of a Palestinian state impossible.
Trump’s Zionist plan offers only ten per cent of historic Palestine, which is impossible for any Palestinian to accept.
The Palestinians lost all hope for international justice, and no longer had a choice but to resume the resistance.
All the occupied peoples resisted the invaders, and the Palestinian people are no exception.
Dr. Salim Nazzal, a Palestinian-Norwegian historian on the Middle East, He has written extensively on social and political issues in the region.
Crisis and Opportunity: The ‘Deal of the Century’ Challenge for Palestinians
by Dr Ramzy Baroud
Consisting of 80 pages, 50 of which are entirely dedicated to the plan’s economic component, the document was a rehash of previous Israeli proposals that have been rejected by Palestinians and Arab governments for failing to meet the minimum standards of justice, equality and human rights.
Duh, Jared! So who built the PA as a ‘police state’?
by Jonathan Cook
During an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria this week, Kushner dismally failed to cloak the fact that his “peace” plan was designed with one goal only: to screw the Palestinians over.
Nazareth: Maybe something good will come out of the Trump plan, after all. By pushing the Middle East peace process to its logical conclusion, Donald Trump has made crystal clear something that was supposed to have been obscured: that no US administration has ever really seen peace as the objective of its “peacemaking”.
The current White House is no exception – it has just been far more incompetent at concealing its joint strategy with the Israelis. But that is what happens when a glorified used-car salesman, Donald Trump, and his sidekick son-in-law, the schoolboy-cum-businessman Jared Kushner, try selling us the “deal of the century”. Neither, it seems, has the political or diplomatic guile normally associated with those who rise to high office in Washington.
During an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria this week, Kushner dismally failed to cloak the fact that his “peace” plan was designed with one goal only: to screw the Palestinians over.
The real aim is so transparent that even Zakaria couldn’t stop himself from pointing it out. In CNN’s words, he noted that “no Arab country currently satisfies the requirements Palestinians are being expected to meet in the next four years – including ensuring freedom of press, free and fair elections, respect for human rights for its citizens, and an independent judiciary.”
Trump’s senior adviser suddenly found himself confronted with the kind of deadly, unassailable logic usually overlooked in CNN coverage. Zakaria observed:
“Isn’t this just a way of telling the Palestinians you’re never actually going to get a state because … if no Arab countries today [are] in a position that you are demanding of the Palestinians before they can be made a state, effectively, it’s a killer amendment?”
Indeed it is.
In fact, the “Peace to Prosperity” document unveiled last week by the White House is no more than a list of impossible preconditions the Palestinians must meet to be allowed to sit down with the Israelis at the negotiating table. If they don’t do so within four years, and quickly reach a deal, the very last slivers of their historic homeland – the parts not already seized by Israel – can be grabbed too, with US blessing.
Preposterous conditions
Admittedly, all Middle East peace plans in living memory have foisted these kinds of prejudicial conditions on the Palestinians. But this time many of the preconditions are so patently preposterous – contradictory even – that the usually pliable corporate press corps are embarrassed to be seen ignoring the glaring inconsistencies.
The CNN exchange was so revealing in part because Kushner was triggered by Zakaria’s observation that the Palestinians had to become a model democracy – a kind of idealised Switzerland, while still under belligerent Israeli occupation – before they could be considered responsible enough for statehood.
How was that plausible, Zakaria hinted, when Saudi Arabia, despite its appalling human rights abuses, nonetheless remains a close strategic US ally, and Saudi leaders continue to be intimates of the Trump business empire? No one in Washington is seriously contemplating removing US recognition of Saudi Arabia because it is a head-chopping, women-hating, journalist-killing religious fundamentalist state.
But Zakaria could have made an even more telling point – was he not answerable to CNN executives. There are also hardly any western states that would pass the democratic, human rights-respecting threshold set by the Trump plan for the Palestinians. Nor, of course, would Israel.
Think of Britain’s flouting last year of a ruling by the International Court of Justice in The Hague that the Chagos Islanders must be allowed to return home decades after the UK expelled them so the US could build a military base on their land. Or the Windrush scandal, when it was revealed that a UK government “hostile environment” policy was used to illegally deport British citizens to the Caribbean because of the colour of their skin.
Or what about the US evading due process by holding prisoners offshore at Guantanamo? Or its use of torture against Iraqi prisoners, or its reliance on extraordinary rendition, or its extrajudicial assassinations using drones overseas, including against its own citizens?
Or for that matter, its jailing and extortionate fining of whistleblower Chelsea Manning, despite the Obama administration granting her clemency. US officials want to force her to testify against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange for his role in publishing leaks of US war crimes committed in Iraq, including the shocking Collateral Murder video.
And while we’re talking about Assange and about Iraq…
Would the records of either the US or UK stand up to scrutiny if they were subjected to the same standards now required of the Palestinian leadership.
Impertinent questions
But let’s fast forward to the heart of the matter. Angered by Zakaria’s impertinence at mildly questioning the logic of the Trump plan, Kushner let rip.
He called the Palestinian Authority a “police state” and one that is “not exactly a thriving democracy”. It would be impossible, he added, for Israel to make peace with the Palestinians until the Palestinians, not Israel’s occupying army, changed its ways. It was time for the Palestinians to prioritise human rights and democracy, while at the same time submitting completely to Israel’s belligerent, half-century occupation that violates their rights and undermines any claims Israel might have to being a democracy.
Kushner said:
“If they [the Palestinians] don’t think that they can uphold these standards, then I don’t think we can get Israel to take the risk to recognize them as a state, to allow them to take control of themselves, because the only thing more dangerous than what we have now is a failed state.”
Let’s take a moment to unpack that short statement to examine its many conceptual confusions.
First, there’s the very obvious point that “police states” and dictatorships are not “failed states”. Not by a long shot. In fact, police states and dictatorships are usually the very opposite of failed states. Iraq was an extremely able state under Saddam Hussein, in terms both of its ability to provide welfare and educational services and of its ruthless, brutal efficiency in crushing dissent.
Iraq only became a failed state when the US illegally invaded and executed Saddam, leaving a local leadership vacuum that sucked in an array of competing actors who quickly made Iraq ungovernable.
Oppressive by design
Second, as should hardly need pointing out, the PA can’t be a police state when it isn’t even a state. After all, that’s where the Palestinians are trying to get to, and Israel and the US are blocking the way. It is obviously something else. What that “something else” is brings us to the third point.
Kushner is right that the PA is increasingly authoritarian and uses its security forces in oppressive ways – because that’s exactly what it was set up to do by Israel and the US.
Palestinians had assumed that the Oslo accords of the mid-1990s would lead to the creation of a sovereign state at the completion of that five-year peace process. But that never happened. Denied statehood ever since, the PA now amounts to nothing more than a security contractor for the Israelis. Its unspoken job is to make the Palestinian people submit to their permanent occupation by Israel.
The self-defeating deal contained in Oslo’s “land for peace” formula was this: the PA would build Israeli trust by crushing all resistance to the occupation, and in return Israel would agree to hand over more territory and security powers to the PA.
Bound by its legal obligations, the PA had two possible paths ahead of it: either it would become a state under Israeli licence, or it would serve as a Vichy-like regime suppressing Palestinian aspirations for national liberation. Once the US and Israel made clear they would deny the Palestinians statehood at every turn, the PA’s fate was sealed.
Put another way, the point of Oslo from the point of view of the US and Israel was to make the PA an efficient, permanent police state-in-waiting, and one that lacked the tools to threaten Israel.
And that’s exactly what was engineered. Israel refused to let the Palestinians have a proper army in case, bidding to gain statehood, that army turned its firepower on Israel. Instead a US army general, Keith Dayton, was appointed to oversee the training of the Palestinian police forces to help the PA better repress internal dissent – those Palestinians who might try to exercise their right in international law to resist Israel’s belligerent occupation.
Presumably, it is a sign of that US programme’s success that Kushner can now describe the PA as a police state.
Freudian slip
In his CNN interview, Kushner inadvertently highlighted the Catch-22 created for the Palestinians. The Trump “peace” process penalises the Palestinian leadership for their very success in achieving the targets laid out for them in the Oslo “peace” process.
Resist Israel’s efforts to deprive the Palestinians of statehood and the PA is classified as a terrorist entity and denied statehood. Submit to Israel’s dictates and oppress the Palestinian people to prevent them demanding statehood and the PA is classified as a police state and denied statehood. Either way, statehood is unattainable. Heads I win, tails you lose.
Kushner’s use of the term “failed state” is revealing too, in a Freudian slip kind of way. Israel doesn’t just want to steal some Palestinian land before it creates a small, impotent Palestinian state. Ultimately, what Israel envisions for the Palestinians is no statehood at all, not even of the compromised, collaborationist kind currently embodied by the PA.
An unabashed partisan
Kushner, however, has done us a favour inadvertently. He has given away the nature of the US bait-and-switch game towards the Palestinians. Unlike Dennis Ross, Martin Indyk and Aaron David Miller – previous American Jewish diplomats overseeing US “peace efforts” – Kushner is not pretending to be an “honest broker”. He is transparently, unabashedly partisan.
In an earlier CNN interview, one last week with Christiane Amanpour, Kushner showed just how personal is his antipathy towards the Palestinians and their efforts to achieve even the most minimal kind of statehood in a tiny fraction of their historic homeland.
He sounded more like a jilted lover, or an irate spouse forced into couples therapy, than a diplomat in charge of a complex and incendiary peace process. He struggled to contain his bitterness as he extemporised a well-worn but demonstrably false Israeli talking-point that the Palestinians “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity”.
He told Amanpour: “They’re going to screw up another opportunity, like they’ve screwed up every other opportunity that they’ve ever had in their existence.”
The reality is that Kushner, like the real author of the Trump plan, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, would prefer that the Palestinians had never existed. He would rather this endless peace charade could be discarded, freeing him to get on with enriching himself with his Saudi pals.
And if the Trump plan can be made to work, he and Netanyahu might finally get their way.
This article first appeared on Jonathan Cook’s blog: https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/
Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.
The Mottled Logic of Power: Reactions to Seattle’s Anti-CAA Resolution
by Romi Mahajan
A few days ago, the Seattle City
Council approved a resolution condemning the CAA and NRC, both creations of the ruling BJP government in India. People involved in the creation and support of the resolution speak clearly of the splenetic reaction of many Indian-Americans to the resolution and of their searing rhetoric offered in defense of the CAA and NRC. The Indian Consul-General on the West Coast, Sanjay Panda, suggested that the resolution “is dividing” the Indian-American community in Seattle.
A Trade War? ‘The Battle of ‘Washing Machines’
by Dr Nath Aldalala’a
Trump continuously pitching American ‘beautiful’ weapons. From this perspective, it is rather easy to understand that all what needs to be done is to buy from Donald Trump— anything. There is no Trade War, there are no trade battles, or perhaps, ironically, could we ask: yes, there is a ‘Trade War’ which started with the battle of the ‘Washing
Machines’?
Curbing The Coronavirus – While Targetting China
by Dr Chandra Muzaffar
We are inundated with an avalanche of information on the novel coronavirus infection. Within this avalanche, there is a lot of “news” that is clearly false.
Catering to finance alone can not qualify India as a democracy
by Sunanda Sen
The budget placed in the Indian Parliament on 1st February fails to send out a long due message to the stagnating Indian economy. This is by failing to announce policies for a possible recovery of aggregate employment and output in near future.
Delhi Election 2020: One Election, Two Battles
by Mohd Shahwaiz
In the most common parlance, like every election in a democracy, the current
election of Delhi legislative assembly seems that it has triggered the battle between major parties – Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) and Indian National Congress (INC) – to got requisite electoral mandate of people in order to claim the throne of the national capital territory of Delhi (also known as State Legislative Assembly of Delhi).
Cycling Against #CAA_NRC_NPR
by Jagadish G Chandra
How a single person can fight against CAA, NRC, NPR
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