The European Union has announced sweeping new sanctions against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, closing its airspace to Russian aircraft and banning Russian state media outlets broadcasting in the bloc.
EU chief Ursula von der Leyen, announcing the measures on Sunday, said the Union was also taking the unprecedented step of financing arms to Ukraine and was hitting Russian ally Belarus with sanctions for facilitating the invasion.
There is clear strategy here. His bulwark against Nato is to create a ‘frozen conflict’, like those in Georgia and Moldova
With his incursion into Donetsk and Luhansk, Vladimir Putin has broken international law and destroyed the best negotiating track, the Minsk agreement. That is clear. What is also clear is why he did it.
An increasing number of politicians and media analysts claim Putin may be mentally unstable, or that he is isolated in a bubble of yes-men who don’t warn him of dangers ahead. Many commentators say he is trying to restore the Soviet Union or recreate a Russian sphere of influence on his country’s borders, and that this week’s intrusion into eastern Ukraine is the first step towards an all-out attack on Kyiv to topple its government and even move against the Baltic states. None of these assertions is necessarily true.
The Russian president is a rational man with his own analysis of recent European history. Coming from a former Communist, his blaming of Lenin for giving excessive scope to local nationalism in drawing up the Soviet constitution is remarkable. Similarly, his criticism of the way national elites destroyed the Soviet Union in its final years is sharp.
Does he want to turn the clock back? People often quote his statement “the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”. But it bears pointing out that he enlarged on it later, saying: “Anyone who doesn’t regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants it restored has no brains.”
It is crucially important for those who might seek to end or ameliorate this crisis to first understand his mindset. What happened this week is that Putin lost his patience, and his temper. He is furious with the Ukraine government. He feels it repeatedly rejected the Minsk agreement, which would give the Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk substantial autonomy. He is angry with France and Germany, the co-signatories, and the United States, for not pressing Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to implement them. He is equally angry with the Americans for not taking on board Russia’s security concerns about Nato’s expansion and the deployment of offensive missiles close to Russia’s borders.
To those who say Nato is entitled to invite any state to join, Putin argues that the “open door” policy is conditioned by a second principle, which Nato states have accepted: namely that the enhancement of a state’s security should not be to the detriment of the security of other states (such as Russia). As recently as 2010 Barack Obama put his signature to the principle at a summit of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). The summit’s declaration includes a wonderfully idealistic ambition: “We recommit ourselves to the vision of a free, democratic, common and indivisible Euro-Atlantic and Eurasian security community stretching from Vancouver to Vladivostok”. This echoes Mikhail Gorbachev’s plea, when the cold war division of Europe ended, for Russia and other European states to live together in a “common European home”. We now suffer in the shadow of the thwarting of that dream.
For Putin, Obama’s signing of the OSCE statement is proof of the hypocrisy that goes back to earlier US presidents, who showed the dishonesty of Nato’s “open door” policy by rejecting Russia’s repeated feelers about joining the alliance. In his speech this week, the Russian leader said he had asked Bill Clinton about the possibility of membership but was fobbed off with the argument that Russia was too big. In 2000, during his first weeks as president, Putin was asked by David Frost on the BBC if it was possible Russia could join Nato. He replied: “I would not rule such a possibility out, if and when Russia’s views are taken into account as those of an equal partner.”
George Robertson, a former Nato secretary general, recently recalled meeting Putin during his time at Nato: “Putin said, ‘When are you going to invite us to join Nato?’ And [Robertson] said: ‘Well, we don’t invite people to join Nato, they apply to join Nato.’”
From outside the alliance, Putin has seen it expand continually. He says he does not seek a revived Soviet Union but a buffer zone that would be, as he put it in a long essay last year, “not anti-Russia”. John Kennedy wanted a similar cordon sanitaire when Khrushchev tried to put nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962. Putin suggested on Tuesday that Ukraine should return to the strategy of neutrality that was in the Ukrainian constitution until the “coup” that toppled the Yanukovych government in 2014, and brought pro-US nationalists to power. After all, a majority of Ukrainian MPs then believed that the country’s fragile unity would be more secure if it was not pulled and pushed by rival pressures from Moscow and the west.
Nato’s stance over membership for Ukraine was what sparked Russia’s takeover of Crimea in 2014. Putin feared the port of Sevastopol, home of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, would soon belong to the Americans. The western narrative sees Crimea as the first use of force to change territorial borders in Europe since the second world war. Putin sees this as selective amnesia, forgetting that Nato bombed Serbia in 1999 to detach Kosovo and make it an independent state.
Convinced that Nato will never reject Ukraine’s membership, Putin has now taken his own steps to block it. By invading Donetsk and Luhansk, he has created a “frozen conflict”, knowing the alliance cannot admit countries that don’t control all their borders. Frozen conflicts already cripple Georgia and Moldova, which are also split by pro-Russian statelets. Now Ukraine joins the list. There is speculation about what will happen next but from his standpoint, it is not actually necessary to send troops further into the country. He has already taken what he needs.
On Thursday, Poland — a longtime foe of Moscow — announced the country would ban the Russian TV channel.
Within the past few days, European capitals have also ramped up the pressure, imposing sanctions on the TV network’s editor-in-chief. The U.K. has questioned whether the channel should be allowed to broadcast in the country, and French lawmakers formally asked for its license to be removed — only weeks after Germany imposed an outright ban.
A French star reporter, Frédéric Taddeï, also announced he would stop hosting his daily talk show on RT “out of loyalty for France.”
Described in the West as a propaganda tool for the Kremlin, RT — formerly known as Russia Today — is part of an effort to disseminate pro-Russian rhetoric asserting that President Vladimir Putin is a peacemaker and that the NATO alliance is an aggressive warmonger. The Russian ruler has repeated that rhetoric in recent days to justify his invasion of Ukraine.
In the weeks leading up to the invasion of Ukraine, a massive information war unfolded both online and offline between Kremlin-backed news outlets and online trolls and media and actors both in Ukraine and across the West. According to French public radio France Inter, RT France's coverage of Ukraine was obviously one-sided and biased toward the Russian government.
On the other hand, RT is part of a much wider, decades-long Russian information operation, and prohibiting just one broadcaster might be meaningless or counterproductive, some politicians and experts warn.
Asked whether she was in favor of an RT ban in Europe, Commission Vice President for Values and Transparency Věra Jourová told POLITICO in a statement that “it is not up to me to decide, it is up to independent national media regulators … We all rely on the extra vigilance of regulators and coordinated action.”
“We should have a broader look and not focus only on [RT and Sputnik],” she warned. “The Kremlin has weaponized information. Disinformation is part of Russia military doctrine and so is running of foreign influence operations.”
France makes three
France is the third Western country to increase pressure on RT, weeks after President Emmanuel Macron explicitly targeted foreign “propaganda media” in his New Year speech to the press. (Politico Europe)
RT.com online has been offline most of the day (at least where we are).
Funny how quickly Freedom and DemocracyTM resorts to information suppression/repression when faced with a bit of opposition.
It was not always this way. In the decade following the collapse of the USSR, the newly created Russian Federation had sought western integration. And not only via the rapid adoption of free-market capitalism. Initially, Vladimir Putin sought a security alliance and even membership of Nato. In this, he was following a path set out by Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1989, the last Soviet leader spoke of a ‘common European home’ stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. There was the possibility of a new order in which Russia would take its rightful place as a great power in a transformed western community.
Putin gave voice to similar sentiments in his September 2001 Bundestag speech: Russia’s destiny was to be a European one. Nevertheless, he insisted that the relationship could not be based on hierarchy, identifying the tensions that would later destroy the whole edifice of Russia’s relations with the West. Russia’s post-USSR leaders sought to join a transformed collective West to turn it into what would, with Russia’s membership, have become a greater West. Instead, Moscow was faced with an expanding Atlantic power system, with Russia firmly on the outside.
Since the era of German reunification, Moscow had been repeatedly assured that there would be no enlargement of Nato beyond a united Germany. Then in 1999, the alliance brought in the former Soviet countries of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. Five years later came the ‘big bang’ enlargement, encompassing another seven former communist countries (Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia). In February 2007, Putin condemned the dangers of establishing a ‘unipolar world’ and listed a range of strategic and security concerns, including the marginalisation of the UN, the installation of ballistic missile defences in Eastern Europe — and above all Nato enlargement. He stressed that Russia ‘with a thousand years of history’ did not need to be instructed on how to behave in international affairs. How did the West respond? With the accession of Albania and Croatia in 2009, Nato membership rose to 28. The addition of Montenegro and North Macedonian in the last five years has brought that number to 30.
Even now it could be argued that it is not so much Nato enlargement that is the problem but the way it was done, above all the absence of a larger pan-continental security framework in which Russia could be accommodated. Atlanticism was held to be supreme, overshadowing continental European, let alone Eurasian, models of regionalism.
Putin has naturally become obsessed with Ukraine — a crucial node in the antagonism between the West and Russia. His fixation is often explained in cultural and historical terms: he has spoken often of Ukraine and Russia as constituting one people. And many see his lament at the passing of the Soviet Union — ‘one of the greatest geopolitical catastrophes of the century’ — as an expression of a long-held desire to unite the two countries once again.
Here we see two processes of Atlanticism — the chosen model of state-building and growing geopolitical contestation — combining to devastating effect. The interaction between the two reinforced the view that Ukraine, in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, had to be separated from Russia in all fundamental respects. The human rights of the Russophone population were ensured, but as a political constituency their concerns were denigrated. The 1996 constitution embraced a unitary model, thereby excluding federal devolution to the diverse regions (with the exception of Crimea).
Above all, Ukrainian was made the only state language, even though Russian is the native language of just under a third of the population, and a much larger proportion is fluent in the language. Russian was relegated ‘to the kitchen’ (as Russophone Ukrainians put it), and although prominent in the media it was gradually squeezed out of public institutions. This runs directly against the inclusive — even multicultural — trend practised everywhere else in the Atlantic world. Today Russian and other minority languages are effectively proscribed in the public sphere, provoking a shocking lack of condemnation from countries who like to think of themselves as part of the ‘league of democracies’.
In 2008, Ukraine was promised Nato membership — and although enlargement was not on the agenda in the Obama years, Russia feared then, as it does today, that a bilateral security deal with Kiev would create a bridgehead for US forces in the country. Fear that the crucial Black Sea port of Sevastopol would fall into Washington’s hands prompted the seizure of Crimea in March 2014. This was a defensive move, although couched in the expansive cultural terms of the reunification of the ‘Russian world’ — quite apart from being the freely-expressed wish of the great majority of the Crimean population.
Yet Russia’s aspiration for Ukraine is not as dramatic as it’s often made out to be. Nowhere has Putin suggested that he envisages a future single state, and there’s little reason to believe the Kremlin — hemmed in by a struggling economy, stagnant living standards, and a population which has demonstrated absolutely no appetite for dangerous foreign adventures — intends to reconstitute the Soviet Union. Instead, to protect its own security, Russia desires a neutral, friendly, multilingual Ukraine.
Reaching the Tipping Point
I left the Labour Party today. I have cancelled my direct debit to a Party that since April 2020 has been waging a full scale war, not on the most dangerous right-wing government I have lived under, but on its own members. A Party founded by trade unionists and dedicated socialists is embarrassed now by its union links and is a hostile environment for socialists. Latest estimates say 200,000 members have left under Labour’s “new management”.
That should be adjusted to 200,001.
Shadow Cabinet member Rachel Reeves openly rejoices that so many have left, slandering us all as “antisemites”. The same Rachel Reeves who gushingly declared her admiration for the Tory, Nancy Astor, the first woman to sit in Britain’s parliament, while ignoring Astor’s fanatical support of Hitler and the fervent hope she expressed that he would solve “the world problem” of “Jews and communism.” Small wonder that Labour MP Stafford Cripps dubbed Astor “the Member for Berlin”.
Mind you, Astor did make the odd exception. At a private gathering she introduced her friend Chaim Weizmann, later to become the first President of Israel, as a speaker, describing him as “the only decent Jew I ever met.”
When Starmer became Labour leader he said his first priority was to eradicate antisemitism in the Party. Reeves has not even had the slap on the wrist given to Barry Sheerman MP for his “silver shekels” remark, or to Steve Reed MP for describing a wealthy Jewish businessman/Conservative donor as “the puppet-master for the entire Tory Cabinet”.
When prominent Labour figures go unpunished for real antisemitism, while many members with impeccable anti-racist track records, especially left-wing Jews who voice criticism of Israel, face disciplinary measures, including expulsion, it is clear that the leadership’s claimed fight against antisemitism is about something else. The cynicism of their phoney war on antisemitism provided the ultimate tipping point that has compelled me to leave what has become a toxic party. I am leaving in disgust, as well as anger, at having discovered how my own ideas and commentary, as a Jewish socialist, were being manipulated by disciplinary bodies in the party to help them exclude other left-wing members. More on this later, but other factors have certainly contributed to my deep alienation from the Party as well.
Compared with the invective that Labour’s leaders direct against their own dedicated members, our hapless Tory government has escaped remarkably lightly. How many times since April 2020 have we heard Starmer’s mantra, “We support the government”, as the COVID bodies did indeed pile high because of the Tories’ disastrous and discriminatory “strategy” for dealing with the pandemic?
Many Labour members, and scientists too, argued for a Zero-COVID strategy aimed at eradicating the virus rather than managing it, but Labour’s leadership failed to promote any alternative strategy. They stayed as close to the Tories as possible while criticising them mostly for being chaotic and incompetent.
Early on in the pandemic when the National Education Union (NEU) flagged up the serious dangers of children and school staff returning too early to schools that lacked adequate safety measures, Starmer’s main concern seemed to be showing the public that unions would not dictate Labour’s policy. He was more gung-ho than the Tories to get children back to school quickly despite the risks. But when he first pursued this argument in parliament about school settings, the economy and COVID, he made his demands in language that closely mirrored documents just published by Tony Blair’s Global Institute. A clue perhaps as to who he was listening to.
The Tories’ “herd immunity” drive, which prioritised “the economy” over people’s health meant that those the Government considered expensive and/or expendable were disproportionately affected. Death rates among ethnic minorities, disabled and older people were devastating. While many grassroots Labour members, including myself, volunteered in mutual aid initiatives – and still do – Labour’s leadership was shamefully complicit in government strategies that brought suffering, financial hardship and so many unnecessary deaths.
It’s not only on COVID strategy that Labour has tried to place itself close to this far-right Tory government’s thinking instead of providing opposition and a real alternative. As an anti-racist and an internationalist I find Labour’s ultra-nationalism and obsession with Union Jacks stomach-turning. Labour will never outdo the Tory Party or fascist groups on patriotism – but why are they aspiring to? We ought to be the Party of commonality that cares for all citizens equally. Displays of ultra-nationalism will simply strengthen hostility towards migrants and refugees.
Every time I see or hear a Labour advert, a Starmer speech, I find so few words I identify with and so many that alienate me. I did not vote for him to become leader, though I know people on the left of the Party who did. They wanted to believe his election pledges which lie in tatters now. Starmer tells us, rightly, not to trust a word that Johnson says, but has opened himself up to the accusation of being a serial liar by ditching practically every pledge he made to convince members to elect him.
My background
I was born into a low-ish income Labour-voting family, conscious of its immigrant roots (all my grandparents, two of whom I never knew, were Jews born in Poland and Ukraine). I imbibed from my parents anti-racist values and a sense of being on the side of the underdog in an unequal society. By the time I was 16, in 1974, I had explicitly defined myself as a socialist. I witnessed the Tory government collapsing in the face of trade union action led by the miners. Harold Wilson formed a minority Labour government, and later that year won a narrow overall majority.
My parents took me and my brother to hear Wilson at an election rally locally (held in our secondary school hall). We couldn’t get in because it was full, but listened to it relayed outside over loudspeakers. Two years later, I was among hundreds in the same building hanging on Tony Benn’s every word, as he explained common-sense arguments for socialism. By then I was becoming involved in anti-racist and anti-fascist activities too.
I understood that the fight for socialism was a long-term project against powerful vested interests, but recognised the issues affecting people here and now that could not wait. I’m still waiting for socialism but I have spent the intervening years – I’m 64 now – arguing and persuading, campaigning and struggling alongside others, some of them Labour members, others not, on immediate issues bound together by principles of equality, rights and social justice.
My years as a Labour member in that time, though, starting with a few in the early 1980s, add up to less than 10. But they do include the last six and a half years. I was part of an insurgent, proudly socialist, internationalist, anti-racist, Labour Party that stood up with and for the exploited and oppressed from 2015-19. I cannot use any of those adjectives to describe our Party today. As I leave the Party, it will be a wrench to walk away from comrades I respect and admire and feel close to in my CLP, but I know I will continue to see and cooperate with them in collective struggles, just not in Labour Party meetings.
The Corbyn Leadership
In the Corbyn years I knew exactly what the Party stood for, and was proud to popularise it. I felt the palpable enthusiasm, the desire for fundamental change that this project offered, rather than a mere tinkering with a system rigged in favour of the rich and powerful. I am fortunate to live in Jeremy Corbyn’s constituency, Islington North, and I have known him personally for more than 30 years.
In 2015, I witnessed young people flooding into the Party and older people finding renewed enthusiasm. They knew especially that Corbyn and those close to him were deadly serious about redistributing economic and political power in the country and empowering ordinary people to claim their rights and a better future. Small wonder he induced so much fear in the establishment, who were determined to destroy him and toxify everything he stood for. They used the filthiest lies emanating from disreputable right wing bodies to smear and demonise him, and ultimately demoralise huge numbers who had found such hope in that movement. As Corbyn reminded us on several occasions. “It is not me they are attacking, it’s you!”
As that ugly process unfolded we saw more clearly who the establishment were: not just the Tory Party and their tame mainstream media, who will always defend wealth and class privilege, but also those elements of our own Party who were determined to sabotage his chances. Today, their hands hold the levers of power within Labour, though they are still nervous about their grip on it. Corbyn continues to live rent-free in the heads of Labour’s leaders. People like Starmer and Margaret Hodge display intense personal jealousy of Corbyn and the popularity he and his policies attract.
Labour’s “new management” recognised that they could only enforce their will on the Party by ruthlessly attacking democracy within it and abusing its disciplinary processes to drive out the bulk of ordinary members who signed up so wholeheartedly for the best motives for the Corbyn Project. And the new leaders have been prepared to bankrupt the Party to get their way.
Like Starmer I went to Leeds University, though not at the same time. I was fortunate to study politics there with Ralph Miliband. Perhaps I should have listened more closely to what he wrote about the Labour Party, though even he would not have predicted the Corbyn leadership and its wave of popularity. But I also took a completely fascinating course on fascism in my final year there, with the brilliant thinker, Peter Sedgwick. He gave me a deep insight into fascist ways of thinking and the mechanisms they use. I never imagined, then, that this would help me understand behaviours at the heart of the Labour Party.
Attack on democracy
Internally, Labour’s “new management”, especially through its General Secretary, have implemented methods that are more commonly associated with right-wing dictatorships. The most recent is retrospective bans. This means that members are being expelled for actions in the past that were permitted at the time – “crimes” such as joining a Facebook group, or even “liking” a Facebook post, or talking to a journal published by a group that has now been declared off-limits.
For the first four months of Starmer’s tenure, under the pretext of the pandemic, Party branches could meet on Zoom but were banned from passing resolutions and making decisions. That was eventually relaxed under grassroots pressure, but we were then forbidden to discuss certain issues that were “not competent business”. This included the massive financial settlement paid by the Labour Party, using our membership fees, over the BBC Panorama programme about Labour and antisemitism (a case Labour had been advised it would win).
That Panorama programme was a travesty, based on unfounded assertions and steeped in unstated factional politics. A series of “talking heads”, most of them past or present Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) officers, condemned Corbyn-led Labour for its alleged “failures” on antisemitism. Yet the JLM itself – an overwhelmingly right-wing, pro-Zionist Labour body – was not named. Some of those talking heads, lauded by the Party’s right-wing as “whistleblowers”, also feature in Labour’s Leaked Report, which offers a very different take on who was actually responsible for delays in dealing with antisemitism cases in the Party’s Governance and Legal Unit (GLU). That report also alleges that the GLU failed to provide accurate information to Corbyn when he inquired about the quantity of cases and progress with them.
The JLM’s political priorities were revealed during the 2019 election, which it effectively boycotted, save for a few seats. They wanted Labour to lose, even though they knew this would open the door to a Tory government led by a known racist, Boris Johnson, who would continue a hostile environment for migrants and refugees. They would surely have known too, that since 2010 the Tories had been co-leaders with Poland’s Law and Justice Party, of a group in the Euro Parliament that included far-right antisemitic, Islamophobic and anti-Roma parties and governments.
Another subject we were forbidden to discuss was the hugely controversial IHRA definition/statement on antisemitism, which was heavily criticised by leading Jewish academics and Palestinian rights campaigners for chilling free speech by confusing and conflating opposition to Israeli policy or to Zionism with antisemitism.
Political anti-Zionism is as old as political Zionism, and was invented, first used and developed by Jews for positive reasons, especially through a socialist, internationalist and anti-nationalist organisation called the Bund, which I and many other left wing Jews identify with. The Bundist philosophy is diasporist. It fights for absolute equality, freedom and cultural rights for Jews and all minorities in the countries where they live: “Rights and justice for Jews everywhere without wrongs and injustice to other people anywhere”.
Outside bodies, however, bullied the Party into adopting the flawed and contested IHRA statement as policy by threatening to slander them as antisemites if they didn’t.
“There where we live, that is our country. A democratic republic! Full political and national rights for Jews”. [Left] A Bund Election poster in Yiddish Ukraine 1918
In late 2020, an older Jewish member of my CLP, with an outstanding record of international human rights work and campaigning dating back to the early 1960s, and still active in his local synagogue’s projects around homelessness and refugees, was summarily suspended after he submitted a motion to his branch that was critical of the IHRA definition of antisemitism. Two months later, after he joined a collective court case against the Party over similar unjust measures, he was hastily readmitted, but with no explanation or apology.
Many Jewish Labour members I know personally as committed socialists, humanitarians, and anti-fascists have suffered defamatory suspensions and Notices Of Investigation charging them with antisemitism. Their names have been dragged through the mud and they suffered abuse on social media for expressing valid and honest opinions consistent with their progressive outlook on matters relating to Israel/Palestine, antisemitism and the Jewish community.
One recent case that affected me deeply because I have known her since the mid-1980s, concerned Diana Neslen. Her work against racist brutality and apartheid began in the land of her birth – South Africa. She is also a very knowledgeable person steeped in and very attached to Jewish/Yiddish culture. I suspect her accusers within the Party’s disciplinary machinery are not.
I have described her on social media as a “lomed vovnik” (one of the 36). An old Jewish religious tradition holds that in every generation there are 36 ordinary, yet extraordinary, people whose selfless, righteous work enables the world to renew itself. She has suffered several rounds of accusations and investigations from the Party’s bureaucracy, in the midst of which she was diagnosed with cancer and also lost her husband (who incidentally grew up in a Bundist family, and spoke and championed Yiddish, his mother tongue). Just as she was taking the Party to court to assert her right to express anti-Zionist beliefs in the Party without being condemned as antisemitic, they backed down, but again no apology. Instead of cherishing members like her, the Labour Party is punishing them.
In a similar totalitarian fashion to the injunctions over discussing the IHRA, Party members were later forbidden from discussing the EHRC’s Report on its investigation into antisemitism in the Labour Party, which in my view was a shoddy, repetitive piece of work that drew grand conclusions from little hard evidence. The spin put on the report by Keir Starmer was at odds with the bulk of its content. Many left-wing Jewish members, including myself, expressed strong support for the fair and measured statement that Jeremy Corbyn made about it.
The Party banned us from discussing it, treating it as a tablet of stone beyond question. Labour members were thereby prevented from mentioning in meetings the embarrassing immediate aftermath of the report on antisemitism in Labour being published: a damning report on the EHRC itself published by a Joint Parliamentary Committee that criticised its major failures around racism both internally and externally; and a very strong complaint by women working at the BBC calling the EHRC’s report on wage differentials between men and women working there, a “whitewash”. Yet Labour members were not permitted to question any aspect of the EHRC Report on Antisemitism in the Labour Party.
The response by the Party leadership to Jeremy Corbyn’s comments on the EHRC Report is well known. His statement that “the scale of the problem [antisemitism in the Labour Party] was also dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the Party, as well as by much of the media” was distorted into an accusation that he considered antisemitism itself to be exaggerated. His contextualising words within the same post were simply ignored. He wrote: “Anyone claiming there is no antisemitism in the Labour Party is wrong. Of course there is, as there is throughout society, and sometimes it is voiced by people who think of themselves as on the left”. He was suspended and had the Labour Whip removed.
The NEC panel looking into his suspension had to examine all his words on the matter and he was reinstated into the Party as there was clearly no case against him. At that point he was a full member again with the Labour whip. Twenty four hours later during which newspapers reported that Margaret Hodge had threatened to resign if Corbyn retained the whip, Starmer removed it from him again it without following any recognisable Party rules or processes. Promises to review the decision within three months never materialised. Corbyn has now been without the Labour whip for 15 months. CLPs were forbidden from discussing and passing resolutions about the action against Corbyn, though right-wing Labour MPs who approved of this action frequently and freely pronounced on it.
When an NEC motion was put last month to resolve this issue by restoring the whip, It was voted down by the right wing NEC majority who could not and did not offer a single argument to justify that decision. One of the reasons I stayed in the Party this long was to help the campaign to restore my MP to the Parliamentary Labour Party. Corbyn remains in limbo and I do not believe there is any intention to restore the whip to him or to restore democratic justice to his constituents who have voted so overwhelmingly for him since 1983.
Tipping point
But the real tipping point for me had already occurred. I was conscious that many Jewish Labour members I knew were being disciplined by the Party for making comments on social media very similar to those that I had made: expressing non-Zionist/anti-Zionist positions; being critical of the treatment of Palestinians by the Israeli army, settlers, courts and government; and openly criticising the views of right-wing Jewish bodies in our community that define themselves as community “leaders” and claim to express the voice of the community.
Yet I was not personally targeted. I then discovered through informal sources that something worse was happening. Non-Jewish left-wing Labour members were being accused of antisemitism if they “liked”, shared or retweeted certain social media posts that I had written. These had been carefully assembled and were appearing in the “charge sheets” accompanying Notices Of Investigation. They were also being presented to some candidates seeking to become councillors in their interviews, in ways that implied that their candidacy would be viewed negatively if they had indeed liked, shared or retweeted such posts.
Why did they not target me directly? I believe it is partly because they knew that these posts expressed a legitimate political point of view of a Jewish member who had an established profile as an author, a contributor to newspapers and journals and as a blogger. But they clearly believed they could get away with accusing non-Jewish members of antisemitism for adopting similar views, fulfilling their factional goal of removing left wingers from the Party.
The most bizarre instance I saw on a charge sheet of a member with a decades-long record of antiracist and anti-fascist work, concerned a Facebook post with a photo of myself and Jeremy Corbyn holding a copy of the new edition of my book Rebel Footprints at its launch event. In the post I described Corbyn as “a rebel I have always been so proud to work and campaign with”. I added “Solidarity with you against the haters, the ignoramuses and the tukhes-lekers (arse-lickers) of the wealthy”. It seems that this non-Jewish member was being condemned for antisemitism for sharing a post that included a Yiddish phrase!
But perhaps they dug a bit deeper and discovered that, in addition to writing a book on the fight against antisemitism in Britain in the 1930s, and helping to organise five-yearly commemorations of the Battle of Cable Street, in which several national and local labour politicians and branches have participated, I do a considerable amount of educating about antisemitism within my professional work and in my voluntary work in the anti-racist movement. This includes being one of the group leaders of annual educational visits to Auschwitz and Krakow for trade unionists, students and anti-racist activists. That work educates people about the rich and very meaningful Yiddish cultural life of Jews in pre-war Poland, as well as about their death.
The most generous description of the behaviour of those within Labour’s disciplinary department, who use my words to incriminate others, would be to call it “cowardly”. I find it sickening, dishonest and disgusting. It was when I had firm evidence that this was happening that I resolved to end my ties with the Party. This is a clear case of cynically weaponising accusations of antisemitism for another purpose – to purge left wing members. It cheapens and devalues the term antisemitism. In doing so, it endangers Jews, while doing nothing to combat real antisemitism.
If anyone still doubts how low the Party has sunk on these matters, the events just a few weeks ago in Hornsey and Wood Green CLP’s online general meeting on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day are salutary. The local Party invited two of its Jewish members to give presentations, one was the branch’s leading JLM figure, the other a left-wing Jewish member, Sue Levi Hughes, whose parents fled Nazi Germany in the late 1930s, while other close relatives were murdered in Auschwitz and Belsen. She was preparing a presentation about Jewish women’s resistance during the Holocaust to accompany reflections on her family’s experience.
Hours before the meeting, the local Labour MP, Catherine West, tried to persuade Sue Levi Hughes to withdraw because the JLM speaker was refusing to share the platform with her. He cited a tweet she had made several days earlier about the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah, which referred to Israel as an Apartheid state (a formulation used by Israel’s leading human rights body, B’Tselem among several others.)
At the meeting, an attempt by Labour right-wingers to block the presentation was voted down by a substantial majority. As Sue Levi Hughes began her presentation, more than a quarter of the members present left the online event. The JLM complainant did not attend the meeting at all. When Catherine West addressed the meeting before it closed, she did not acknowledge Sue Levi Hughes’ presentation at all, or thank her or express sympathy, but instead condemned the “shoddy” treatment of the JLM activist!
Many of those who walked out of the meeting were non-Jews who seem to have decided that they didn’t want to hear from the “wrong sort of Jew” – one who had criticisms of Israel. However they may have justified it to themselves, this was an antisemitic act. But this whole framing of which Jews are allowed to express their views has been promoted by the Labour leadership who take their cue from a narrow set of Jewish establishment bodies, rather than engaging with the diverse views among Jewish Labour Party members let alone the wider Jewish community. And it’s more than distasteful for non-Jews to dictate what views Jewish people may or may not express.
Within an hour of the meeting, those proud of their boycott action were leaking it to a reporter on the Jewish News, praising their MP, who had “really kicked arse tonight” and praising themselves for “giving the left a bloody nose” by walking out. Had they forgotten what the meeting was about, and what Holocaust Memorial Day represents?
I know Sue Levi Hughes well and have been on group visits with her in recent years to Auschwitz and Treblinka. I have seen her presentation, which is stunning and very educational. Fortunately, with the encouragement of the local Party’s BAME officer, the presentation was subsequently sent to every CLP member there. But have we really got to the point where a Jewish Labour Party member’s right to speak about her own family’s experience in the Holocaust and talk about Jewish women’s resistance to the Nazis is conditional on them adopting a particular pro-Zionist position on issues in Israel/Palestine?
For what it is worth, my own view on antisemitism is that it is becoming stronger in British society alongside other forms of racism, under a Tory government which has been given the easiest ride over this by the mainstream media and by the Labour opposition. It is also growing menacingly in several other countries again alongside other bigotries. I have personally encountered and witnessed more antisemitism here in the last 10 years than in the previous 50, and heard reliable reports from friends corroborating my perceptions.
That includes a small number of cases within the Labour Party. I have no doubt that there needs to be a deeper understanding of facets of antisemitism within Labour and across the Left. That is an educational task. But I also believe that where it comes up in contexts where education can play a part in challenging it and changing people’s minds and behaviour, that has to be our first response. I would apply this to other bigotries as well. Shami Chakrabarti understood this in her report which was attacked and rubbished by some of the very same people who have been waging a factional war under the guise of tackling what they claim to be antisemitism in the Party.
There might be one more reason why the Party did not target me directly. That is because I have been involved in a complaint of antisemitism to the Labour Party made on behalf of a wider group of left-wing Jewish members in December 2020 after we received a collective death threat from a non-Jewish right-wing member of the Party. The case is live, so I won’t add more except to emphasise that it has now been 14 months since it was submitted. A suspension took place quickly but the case, for reasons that we don’t understand (though we can speculate), has not been heard nor brought to a conclusion.
One of my reasons for staying in the Party was to pursue this case. It is outrageous that it has not been concluded yet, but I know that the other victims will continue to pursue it.
What’s next?
Last week I attended the my CLP’s AGM. I wanted to see out the year in my role as Political Education Officer which members have elected me to do for the last few years, and which I have carried out willingly and enthusiastically. I wanted to be democratically accountable for my work in the Party. On the weekend before the AGM, I held one end of our CLP banner at the People’s Assembly rally in Parliament Square over the cost of living crisis. I was proud to do so, even though I knew it would be for the last time.
I don’t judge individual members for the decisions they take on whether to stay in the Party or to leave. Socialists need to engage in the struggle where they feel they can be most effective in bringing progressive change, and also feel valued and respected. I have always felt valued and respected in my CLP, but clearly I am not valued or respected by the Party machinery. No doubt they will be glad to see me go, but I refuse to go along any further with their utter contempt for democracy, the centralisation of unaccountable power at the expense of grassroots members, their lack of basic humanity, and their attempts to destroy the possibility of Labour being able to elect a left-wing leader again and be a force for a radical transformation of our capitalist society.
I am not seeking to join another Party but intend to replace the considerable amount of time each month that I had put into the Party with work on the political issues that seem most pressing to me, through my trade unions (I am in two), and through specific campaigns – especially those concerned with refugees, anti-racism, oppressive police powers and human rights internationally. There are urgent issues to confront within each of these spheres. I look forward to contributing my energy, skills and experience, and not just doing the right thing but being able to speak truthfully, free from the threats of censure by the machinery of a Party that was created to obtain freedom, equality, dignity and decent lives for everyone, but has moved so far away from these goals.
See you in the struggle!
Biographical Notes
In the 1980s I worked for the GLC-funded Jewish Cultural and Anti-Racist Project then later for the Runnymede Trust, where I co-authored a book, Daily Racism: The press and black people in Britain. I worked as a Teacher in an inner London primary school for 23 years where I was also the union representative and the Equalities Manager. I have written two other books: Battle for the East End: Jewish responses to fascism in the 1930s; and Rebel Footprints: a guide to uncovering London’s radical history. I am an adult educator specialising in radical history in London (including many aspects of Jewish history) and of the history of the Warsaw Ghetto. I lead regular walks through London’s radical history. https://www.eastendwalks.com
There’s no money? Then how can there be $10 trillion for financiers in two years?
Noting that there is always money to be thrown at the finance industry but little for social needs is by now about as startling as noting the Sun rose in the east this morning. But what is eye-opening is the truly gargantuan amounts of money handed out to benefit the wealthy.
We’re not talking billions here. We are talking trillions.
For example, the amount of money created by the central banks of five of the world’s biggest economies for the purpose of artificially propping up financial markets since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic totals US$9.94 trillion (or, if you prefer, €8.76 trillion). And that total represents only one program of the many used by the U.S. Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, Bank of Japan, Bank of England and Bank of Canada.
That is on top of the US$9.36 trillion (or €8.3 trillion at the early 2020 exchange rate) that was spent on propping up financial markets in the years following the 2008 global economic collapse.
So we’re talking approximately US$19.3 trillion (€17.1 trillion) in the span of 14 years for five central banks’ “quantitative easing” programs, the technical name for intervening in financial markets by creating vast sums of money specifically to be injected into them and thereby inflating stock-market bubbles. And that total doesn’t include various other programs that also come with price tags, nor the similar programs of other central banks, including those of Australia, Sweden and Switzerland. As just one example, the Paycheck Protection Program initiated by the U.S. Congress in 2020 sent most of its money into the grasping hands of business owners and shareholders rather than workers earning a paycheck.
Given these repeated massive subsidies, why are we supposed to believe that the capitalist economic system “works”? And why do working people always have to pay for financiers’ ever more imaginative speculations?
Imagine all the public good that could have been done with even a fraction of that money. Fixing infrastructure, proper funding of social programs, upgrading health coverage, adequately funding hospitals, canceling student debt, strengthening education systems and more — all of this could have been done.
For example, the consultancy firm Aecom estimates that Britain’s infrastructure needs are underfunded by a total less than what the Bank of England spent on its quantitative-easing scheme for the past two years. Parallel to that, the U.S. could wipe out all student debt, fix all schools, rebuild aging water and sewer systems, clean up contaminated industrial sites and repair dams for less than what the Federal Reserve spent on quantitative easing since the pandemic began. As for Canada, one estimate is that the country needs to spend an additional C$60 billion per year on technologies that would enable Canada to meet its carbon neutral targets by mid-century — a total that is a fraction of what the Bank of Canada has thrown at the financial industry.
Spending big to inflate a stock-market bubble
What is quantitative easing and why does it matter? Quantitative easing is the technical name for central banks buying their own government’s debt in massive amounts and, generally in lesser amounts, corporate bonds. In the case of the Federal Reserve, it also buys mortgage-backed securities as part of its QE programs.
The supposed purpose of quantitative-easing programs is to stimulate the economy by encouraging investment. Under this theory, a reduction in long-term interest rates would encourage working people to buy or refinance homes; encourage businesses to invest because they could borrow cheaply; and push down the value of the currency, thereby boosting exports by making locally made products more competitive.
In actuality, quantitative-easing programs cause the interest rates on bonds to fall because of the resulting distortion in demand for them, enabling bond sellers to offer lower interest rates and making them less appealing to speculators. Seeking assets with a better potential payoff, speculators buy stock instead, driving up stock prices and inflating a stock-market bubble. Money also goes into real estate speculation, forcing up the price of housing. Money not used in speculation ends up parked in bank coffers, boosting bank profits, or is borrowed by businesses to buy back more of their stock, another method of driving up stock prices without making any investments. And the strategy of governments to lower the value of their currencies — a widespread tactic in the years following the 2008 collapse — can’t succeed everywhere because if someone’s currency devalues, someone else’s concurrently rises in value.
In other words, these programs, along with most everything else central banks in capitalist countries do, are to benefit the wealthy, at the expense of everybody else. Although we wouldn’t reasonably expect capitalist government agencies to act differently, central banks are particularly one-sided in their policies, which they can do because they are “independent” of their governments. Thus they openly serve the wealthy without democratic control.
A trillion here, a trillion there but not for you
Figuring out what central banks are up to and how much money they are creating for financiers is difficult because they don’t provide totals; at best there are monthly targets for spending and, even then, targets are not listed for all programs. And some, such as the Bank of Canada, are particularly reluctant to share money figures. Most often, banks’ websites and press releases proudly list the many programs designed to benefit financiers but without putting price tags on them. Thus the figures below may not be precisely accurate, but they are in the ballpark. To the biggest financial corporations, what’s a hundred billion more or less?
Having provided the caveats, my best calculations of what some of the world’s most prominent central banks have spent on quantitative easing are as follows (figures in U.S. dollars):
That’s a total of US$9.94 trillion. Imagine the height of the stack of bills that such a sum would reach — maybe it would be so high that orbiting spacecraft would ram into it, scattering the money across wide areas. At least that way, more people might benefit.
The above of course are not the only central banks to join the party. The Reserve Bank of Australia has spent an estimated A$320 billion in the past two years, although, according to Reuters, it is “considering how and when to wind up its A$4 billion ($2.84 billion) in weekly bond buying given the economic pick up.” Sweden’s Riksbank and the Swiss National Bank also indulge in quantitative easing; Switzerland’s central bank has done so much of it that it owns assets valued at more than the country’s gross domestic product. Similar to Australia’s, central banks, the Bank of Japan excepted, also are indicating they’d like to wind down their latest QE programs, but doing so is a delicate operation given that speculators have become drunk on the spending and cutting off the money could lead to sudden downturns in stock prices, in turn triggering disruptions in the economy.
Nothing like free money to make the party fun. But, on a less humorous note, how is it that deficit scolds and ideologues of austerity, who never miss an opportunity to shoot down legislation intended to give working people assistance, are silent about these gargantuan piles of money thrown at financial markets? The later version of the Build Back Better plan pushed by President Joe Biden, originally estimated to cost about $3.5 trillion before being reduced to less than $2 trillion, would have cost less than half of what was spent on quantitative easing. And, however flawed, would have provided vastly better relief.
And remember, the nearly $10 trillion and counting in two years of QE programs are only a portion of the money rained on business and the wealthy who benefit from these policies.
One sure outcome of all this is that inequality will increase, as exemplified by the dramatic increases in the wealth of billionaires. A report published last month by Oxfam, appropriately titled “Inequality Kills,” found that the wealth of the world’s 10 richest people has doubled since the pandemic began while “99% of humanity are worse off because of COVID-19,” a situation Oxfam calls “economic violence.” The wealth of the world’s 2,755 billionaires has increased by $5 trillion in less than a year — from $8.6 trillion in March 2021 to $13.8 trillion in January 2022.
And although increasing inequality is nothing new, the pace is accelerating. The Oxfam report states:
“This is the biggest annual increase in billionaire wealth since records began. It is taking place on every continent. It is enabled by skyrocketing stock market prices, a boom in unregulated entities, a surge in monopoly power, and privatization, alongside the erosion of individual corporate tax rates and regulations, and workers’ rights and wages—all aided by the weaponization of racism.”
Unlimited money for U.S. financiers, a little money for workers
In addition to quantitative easing, the Federal Reserve has instituted nine lending programs; three of these are “unlimited” and the other six authorized for $2.9 trillion. (This is all in addition to the $4 trillion spent on QE.) Of this additional $2.9 trillion, just $500 billion is earmarked for revenue-strapped state and local governments; the remainder are for businesses, including those in the financial industry. About $450 billion per day for several weeks during spring 2020 was dedicated to dollar swaps with other central banks — an agreement between two central banks to exchange currencies, most often to enable central banks to provide foreign currencies to domestic commercial banks.
Is there anyone who actually knows how much money the Federal Reserve is spending to keep capitalism running?
And even when money is supposed to go to working people, it mostly doesn’t go to them. A prime example of this not terribly surprising phenomenon is the U.S. Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). Multiple studies over the past year have shown that most PPP money flowed upward, regardless of what the intentions of Congress members who designed the program may have been.
The most recent and likely most comprehensive of these studies, a National Bureau of Economic Research “working paper” issued in January 2022 by 10 authors led by David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found the PPP to be “highly regressive.” About three-quarters of PPP money wound up in the hands of the top 20 percent of households. The paper estimates that 23 to 34 percent of PPP dollars went directly to workers who would otherwise have lost jobs. The majority of the funds flowed to business owners and shareholders. The study focused on 2020 results; the paper’s authors believe that 2021 loans did not boost employment, a result that implies the share of PPP money going to workers would actually reduce the 23 to 34 percent estimate.
The paper calculates that for every $1 in wages saved by the PPP, $3.13 went somewhere else. To put it another way, the cost of saving a job for a year was $170,000 to $257,000, three to five times the average compensation for affected jobs. “This program was highly, highly regressive,” Dr. Autor told The New York Times.
Three papers published earlier came to similar conclusions. A study by Michael Dalton, a research economist for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that was issued in November 2021, found that “a range of $20,000 to $34,000 of PPP spent per employee-month retained, with about 24% of the PPP money going towards wage retention in the baseline model.” To put it another way, $4.13 were spent for each $1 of wages saved. Finding still worse results, a separate National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, with Raj Chetty as lead author, found that so little of PPP spending flowed to businesses most affected by the pandemic that employment at small businesses increased by only 2%, “implying a cost of $377,000 per job saved.” Finally, a paper published by Amanda Fischer, then the Policy Director at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, concluded that PPP funding did not have a statistically significant impact on preventing avoidable layoffs among employees and that PPP money was not geographically directed at the worst-hit areas, further reducing effectiveness.
Class warfare in action, pandemic style. A little bit for working people, lots for those who already have more. The PPP did provide benefits, including saving jobs, and surely played a role in the unprecedented reversal of the high unemployment rate of 2020, but at a price far higher than necessary — no help for working people without more going to the wealthy.
Class warfare in Europe
In addition to its quantitative easing, the European Central Bank is increasing borrowing limits and easing borrowing rules for banks; it is also reducing required capital holdings for banks. The ECB has upped its QE spending to €40 billion per month and will reduce that to €20 billion by October 2022. A December 2021 announcement implied it intends to eventually end the program altogether, “shortly before it starts raising the key ECB interest rates.”
Remember all the finger-pointing and scapegoating of Greeks when the ECB and the European Commission imposed punishing austerity on Greece? There was no money and people had to be punished. Yet there are virtually unlimited funds to benefit financial speculators. These disparate responses aren’t completely inconsistent — Greeks had to be punished because the ECB and European Commission, leading institutions of the European Union, were determined that big banks, particularly French and German banks, had to be repaid in full, no matter the cost to working people or the Greek economy — the ECB even cut off Greek banks from routine financial flows in 2015 to enforce their diktats.
Britons recently received a fresh lesson in who the Bank of England serves when the bank’s governor, Andrew Bailey, declared that employees should not be given raises. It was sufficiently embarrassing that this open class-warfare statement, the sort of policy that is supposed to be kept behind closed doors, was said in public that the British government actually issued a rebuke. Noting that British household disposable incomes are expected to fall by 2 percent this year and that inflation-adjusted pay remains below the pre-2008 financial crisis peak, The Guardian reported:
“The governor of the Bank of England has come under fire from unions and earned a rebuke from 10 Downing Street for suggesting workers should not ask for big pay rises to help control inflation. Andrew Bailey said he wanted to see ‘quite clear restraint’ in the annual wage-bargaining process between staff and their employers to help prevent an upward spiral taking hold. However, his comments drew a furious response from union leaders, as households face the worst hit to their living standards in three decades as soaring energy prices cause inflation to outstrip wage growth. … Bailey was paid £575,538, including pension, in his first year as the Bank’s governor from March 2020, more than 18 times the UK average for a full-time employee.”
The average full-time employee is not who the Bank of England, or any other central bank in the capitalist world, has in mind when setting policy. What this episode nicely illustrates is that profits increase when wages are held down. Profit, it can’t be said too often, comes from paying employees only a small fraction of the value of what they produce. The drive by the corporations of the advanced capitalist countries to move production to low-wage, low-regulation havens around the world, continually in search of the next stop on a race to the bottom, is why so-called “free trade” agreements contain ever more extreme rules to benefit multi-national capital.
Class warfare in Canada and Japan
Getting precise figures on what the Bank of Canada is up to is impossible as it is particularly coy in announcing money figures. Bloomberg, for example, could only say that “hundreds of billions of dollars” has been spent in the bank’s QE program. My calculation on what the bank may have spent on quantitative easing is based on the C$376 billion differential on the amount of assets held by the bank between the end of 2019 and on February 2, 2022.
Like the other central banks, the Bank of Canada has several other programs to benefit the financial industry. In the first weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic, it announced multiple programs. The bank implemented several QE programs for buying corporate bonds, federal and provincial government bonds, mortgage bonds and commercial paper (short-term debt issued by corporations), as well as programs to provide credit and “support the stability of the Canadian financial system.” The bank was not forthcoming about the total cost of these programs at the time; it committed to spending C$5.5 billion per week, with no cutoff date, on just two programs, the purchases of federal government bonds and mortgage bonds.
The amount of “direct aid to households and firms” was only a small fraction of what was committed to helping the financial industry. No different, of course, than the response of other central banks.
The Bank of Japan, which had never ended the quantitative easing it began after the 2008 economic collapse, has committed to unlimited government bond buying. In a September 2021 announcement in which it committed to buying ¥20 trillion worth of corporate bonds, the central bank said it “will purchase a necessary amount of Japanese government bonds (JGBs) without setting an upper limit so that 10-year JGB yields will remain at around zero percent.” So large has the bank’s purchases been that it owns assets worth almost 130 percent of Japan’s gross domestic product. The bank doubled the pace of its bond purchases at the beginning of the pandemic.
Since March 2020, the benchmark index of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, the Nikkei 225, has increased 51 percent. In contrast, Japanese wages are “about at the same level as two decades ago,” The New York Times reports. Wages actually fell by around one percent in both 2020 and 2021, Reuters reports, with wage declines accelerating at the end of 2021. Working people have not done well from the world’s longest experiment in quantitative easing.
Circling back to the (admittedly rhetorical) questions asked in the opening paragraphs of this article, it depends on what is meant by “works.” If we mean by that word, as most people likely would, that an economic system functions for the benefit of all, then the scope of money required to keep it functioning forces a conclusion that it does not work in any meaningful sense. If, however, we mean “works” in the meaning given that word by financiers, industrialists and those who serve them and/or interpenetrate with them, most certainly including central bank officials, then all is well because it facilitates the accumulation of capital. Working people around the world pay to maintain financiers and industrialists in their accustomed wealth and power because that is how capitalism is supposed to work. How else would absurd “theories” like trickle down still be implemented after 40 years of failing to do what they are publicly advertised to do?
Another reminder that capitalist markets are simply the aggregate interests of the most powerful financiers and industrialists, and those interests are diametrically opposed to the interests of the vast majority of humanity. It cannot be otherwise.
Huh? International Rulebook(TM).
So if Kremlin’s aim is to have less NATO on Russia’s borders, it will only get more NATO.
Somebody get this moron of my screen, please...
[big snip]
Wrong Ideas of “Freedom”
It is true that the Canadian protesters are not uniformly white nor all committed to a Trumpian white nationalism; there are participants who have seen an opportunity, albeit catalyzed by a pathetic anti-mandate movement, to protest Trudeau’s government and its neoliberal policies.
One could squint and see the potential for anti-authoritarian affinities to be found. Squint that hard, though, and you might find your eyes are closed. We cannot ignore the white supremacist notion of autonomy that undergirds the movement, which is not an incidental aspect that could be exorcised to reveal a working-class movement based on solidarity.
Needless to say, there’s nothing salutary in the individualist rejection of masks and vaccines. The historian Taylor Dysart in the Washington Post rightly characterized these truckers’ notion of “freedom” — the ability to move freely and potentially spread disease across the occupied Indigenous lands of the U.S. and Canada — as the “freedom” of settler colonialists.
The settler colonialism was evident in the occupiers’ offensive misuse of Indigenous ceremony — which Indigenous groups have condemned — and the way the convoy protesters ignore Native communities’ calls for the end of this occupation on already occupied land.
The “Freedom Convoy” is also not a challenge to the U.S. and Canada’s violent border regimes, even though it began in protest of the border policy mandating that truck drivers be vaccinated to cross between the U.S. and Canada. A number of the movement’s leaders have openly expressed racist, anti-immigrant sentiments and been involved in far-right organizing.
The anti-mandate protesters are not in the struggle for the freedom of anyone’s movement but their own.
Yellow Vests Example
A useful comparison might be drawn with the Yellow Vest movement, which exploded onto the streets of France in late 2018. The protests were initially in response to the ur-neoliberal French President Emmanuel Macron’s increase on fuel taxes — a putatively ecological measure that in fact put an extraordinary financial burden on the working class while refusing to challenge major corporations. The protests erupted into a generalized uprising against the French status quo of austerity and economic injustice.
Under the Yellow Vest umbrella, fascist elements were also pushing for harsh immigration policies, while antifascist leftists were taking to the streets against the police and capitalist institutions. The movement contained deep internal conflicts, and left-wing participants were faced with the question of whether it was worth trying to fight the racist and fascist elements of the uprisings from within the movement. Many, though, deemed the alternative — to allow far-right forces to direct and control the revolutionary moment — unacceptable.
Could the same logic also speak to the anti-state protests in Canada and beyond today? Should the left refuse to cede the ground of anti-state dissent and circulation struggles to the right-wing conspiracy theorists?
The difference between the current blockades and the Yellow Vests is that the “Freedom Convoys” are not only incidentally rich in far-right elements; the notion of autonomy driving the movement is essentially a white supremacist, individualist one. Notably, too, American right-wing support of the blockades is only anti-state insofar as the state is not a Trumpian one. And it’s worth recalling that when Canada saw its own Yellow Vest movement emerge in response to France’s, it was explicitly right-wing and anti-immigrant in character; the current blockades are within this legacy.
If there is a Yellow Vests-related legacy to carry forward toward more liberatory aims than those of the Ottawa occupations, we might instead recall the Black Vests, or “Gilets Noirs” in French. This huge collective of undocumented immigrants in France carried out major protest actions in 2019, including occupying a terminal in Paris’s Charles De Gaulle Airport in direct resistance to Air France’s role as “the official deporter of the French state.” The movement understood, too, the importance of striking at major points of circulation: sites of the free flow of capital and brutal limits on the movement of peoples.
Like the Black Vests’ answer to the Yellow Vests, any worthwhile response to the “Freedom Convoy” occupations and blockades must take effect on wholly anti-racist, antifascist, and anti-capitalist terms. On this side of the Atlantic, the way has already been paved — and not by anti-mandate protesters. Indigenous land and water defenders from Standing Rock to the Wet’suwet’en territories have shown us what it looks like to take up the struggle against capitalist circulation in the service of collective, rather than individual, freedom.
@TI.
H/T Harry Feldman.
UK military shares map of ‘Putin's invasion’
British intelligence fuels fears of a sudden Russian attack with an ominous chart
The British Defence Ministry has published a map of a potential Russian “invasion” of Ukraine, in the sort of measure previously reserved for the tabloid press. Red arrows race across the territory of the country to illustrate the possible routes along which the alleged attack might unfold.
“Russia retains a significant military presence that can conduct an invasion without further warning,” the UK's military tweeted, on Thursday. describing the image as “President Putin’s possible axis of invasion.”
The ministry’s map featured seven different arrows “invading” Ukraine from Russia and Belarus. DefenceHQ’s tweet came about an hour after UK foreign minister 'I think we need to move on from Partygate' Liz Truss said she was “very concerned about reports today of increased Russian aggression.”
Truss followed that up by saying that reports of “alleged abnormal military activity by Ukraine in Donbas are a blatant attempt by the Russian government to fabricate pretexts for invasion.”
INTELLIGENCE UPDATE: Russia retains a significant military presence that can conduct an invasion without further warning.
— Ministry of Defence 🇬🇧 (@DefenceHQ) February 17, 2022
Below demonstrates President Putin's possible axis of invasion. He still can choose to prevent conflict and preserve peace. pic.twitter.com/QHRM1wNwJG
Apparently she [recently] arrived in Ukraine to show solidarity - [my link] with Boris Johnson's warning of 'false flag operations'. Couldn't they have kept her there, in a glossy cardboard box, with a few airholes?
Remembering the mollification of the general public: preparing it for Iraq II. After a 2005 US Senate report named him as having profited from illegal Iraqi oil sales, British MP George Galloway came back with a searing critique of US corruption and interventionist foreign policy.
The story of Anna Delvey/Anna Sorokin is well known by now and would merit a 1 to 2 hour documentary, but not a near-infinitely and very soapy docudrama.
In one of first installments of 'Inventing Anna' defiantly and childishly the tone is set for much of the rest of the soap:
This whole story is completely true. Except for all the parts that are totally made up.It shows.
Oh, and the music? If this is the soundtrack of modern Manhattan, I'd rather be in Nashville.
The CIA essentially sets its own rules over what data it collects, and politicians know it. Here’s how it is allowed to do so
The recent efforts by two US Senators to get more transparency over intelligence harvesting by the Central Intelligence Agency, which involves the “incidental” collection of US citizens’ personal information, opens the door to an Orwellian universe of doublespeak that threatens the very fabric of American democracy.
The whole scenario reminds me of a famous scene in the movie ‘Casablanca’. Captain Louis Renault, a French police officer in Nazi-occupied French Morocco, is instructed to shut down ‘Rick’s Café Americain’, operated by an American expatriate, Rick Blaine. The pretext used is the “discovery” by Renault that Rick is running an illegal casino. “I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!” Renault exclaims. The croupier then hands him a wad of cash, telling Renault, “Your winnings, sir.” Renault pockets the money, replying “Oh, thank you very much.”
On February 10, Senators Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), and Martin Heinrich (D-New Mexico), both of whom are members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, issued a public statement calling for greater transparency on the part of the CIA regarding a secret bulk collection program operated under the auspices of Executive Order 12333. The senators were acting on the declassification of a letter they wrote to CIA Director William Burns and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines on April 13, last year, in which they called for the declassification of information on this program.
In the letter, Wyden and Heinrich expressed shock at the existence of this program, which, they claimed, “operated entirely outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection, and without any … judicial, congressional or even executive oversight.” In short, Wyden and Heinrich have accused the CIA of conducting a rogue operation outside the framework of law and oversight that politicians have ostensibly demanded of intelligence operations.
While the specific activities Wyden and Heinrich are concerned with have been redacted from the letter, the CIA, by releasing a tranche of declassified documents in response to the senators’ request, has provided significant clues as to what the data collected consists of: “Information storage media, raw intercepts, personal property, or information derived therefrom” have been provided to the CIA by “entities of cooperating foreign governments.”
As the CIA points out in these documents, human intelligence collection has been a mission assigned to the agency under Executive Order (EO) 12333, originally promulgated under President Ronald Reagan in 1981, but recently updated under Barack Obama. Indeed, Section 309 of the Intelligence Authorization Act of 2015 details the “procedures for the retention of incidentally acquired communication” under EO 12333.
Wyden was elected senator in 1996 and has served on the select committee since early 2001. Heinrich was elected senator in 2013; he was assigned to the committee that same year. Both voted against the 2015 Intelligence Authorization Act, citing concerns over the reach of the collection of communications and the lack of safeguards in place to protect the constitutional rights of Americans caught up in such activity. In short, both were aware not only of EO 12333, but also the specific legislation which made such collection legally possible. Their collective outrage today has the same credibility as Captain Renault’s shock at the existence of gambling in Rick’s Café.
The fact of the matter, though, is that, as members of the select committee, both are severely constrained about the level of detail that can be shared with the US public about intelligence programs, even those they oppose. However, Wyden’s heart is in the right place – that much was evident in his treatment of former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper during questioning in March 2013. Then, Wyden asked Clapper if the NSA collects “any type of data at all on millions of Americans.”
“No, sir,” Clapper replied. “There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly.”
Wyden had just caught Clapper in a lie, given under oath, before the US Congress, ostensibly a serious crime. But Wyden could not expose the lie at that time, due to the classification of the programs in question. Only after Edward Snowden released over a million pages of highly classified intelligence reports detailing the existence of some of the very intelligence programs Clapper had denied were in place was he compelled to admit he had lied – sort of.
In a June 2013 appearance on MSNBC, Clapper said there simply was no straightforward answer to Wyden’s question. “I thought, though in retrospect, I was asked – ‘When are you going to start – stop beating your wife’ kind of question, which is meaning not – answerable necessarily by a simple yes or no. So, I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful, manner by saying ‘No’.”
In a letter to the chairperson of the select committee, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California), Clapper modified his confession, denying he had deliberately lied to Congress, but rather that he “simply just didn’t understand the question” he was asked, claiming he was focused on intelligence collection under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, while Wyden’s question was about Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Wyden threw cold water on this excuse, however, stating publicly that he had shared the question with Clapper ahead of time, and that he knew exactly what was being asked of him.
James Clapper needs to stop making excuses for lying to the American people about mass surveillance. To be clear: I sent him the question in advance. I asked him to correct the record afterward. He chose to let the lie stand. https://t.co/i6jls7I9Em
— Ron Wyden (@RonWyden) March 6, 2019
Nowhere in this exchange, however, were the collection programs conducted under EO 21333 discussed; neither Wyden nor Clapper made any reference to this program. And yet, as documents published by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in 2014 highlight, both knew that the bulk of the data collected by the US intelligence community which contained information on US citizens was done so under EO 21333. “The NSA conducts the majority of its SIGINT activities solely pursuant to the authority provided by Executive Order (EO) 21333,” one document noted. Another declared that EO 12333 “is the primary source of [the] NSA’s foreign intelligence gathering authority.”
The failure of either Wyden or Clapper to refer to EO 12333 cannot be explained away simply by saying that the issue was unknown to either of them. Indeed, the controversy surrounding EO 12333 and the potential it created for the CIA to spy on US citizens was a matter of public debate shortly after the order was issued back in 1981. A 1985 article in the June 5, 1985 issue of the Cornell Law Review, entitled ‘Executive Order 12333: Unleashing the CIA violates the Leash Law’, declared that “[t]he Order allows the CIA … to direct domestic counterintelligence, foreign intelligence, covert operations, and law enforcement activity against United States citizens,” and argued that it should be rescinded immediately.
Back in 1985, no one could have imagined the level to which digital communications would come to dominate every aspect of the lives of not only US citizens, but virtually every person in the world who owns a smartphone. The fact that the CIA conducts intelligence sharing relationships with agencies of foreign governments should come as a surprise to no one – that’s its mission. Neither should the fact that the CIA has relationships which result in vast amounts of digital communications transferred from these agencies to it for follow-on analysis. Again, this is its job.
What should disturb – even disgust – every American is that the CIA is using these activities, all of which are conducted under the authority of EO 12333, as a ‘backdoor’ for US law enforcement to collect information on American citizens that it would otherwise be prohibited from doing so because of constitutional constraint. The CIA, of course, argues otherwise. In documents released in 2017, its Office of Privacy and Civil Liberties declared that “The CIA complies with Executive Order 12333’s prohibition against conducting electronic surveillance in the United States, but may in the course of its authorized intelligence activities acquire electronic communications through other means.”
This references the “incidentally” acquired “information storage media, raw intercepts, personal property, or information derived therefrom” the CIA receives from its foreign collaborators.
The CIA then goes on to detail how its “collection, retention, and dissemination of information concerning United States persons” conforms with both the law and restrictions put in place by the attorney general.
The problem is that, in the Orwellian universe of US intelligence, words like “collection” and “retention” mean something very different to the practitioners than they do to the average American citizen. James Clapper alluded to this in his June 2013 MSNBC interview when he noted that, when it came to the issue of “intelligence collection,” “[w]hat I was thinking of is looking at the Dewey Decimal numbers – of those books in that metaphorical library – to me, collection of US persons’ data would mean taking the book off the shelf and opening it up and reading it.”
Clapper, like all US intelligence personnel, has been trained to operate in a world where “it is necessary to stop first and adjust your vocabulary,” as a US intelligence training guide notes. “The terms and words used in [regulations] have very specific meanings, and it is often the case that one can be led astray by relying on the generic or commonly understood definition of a particular word.
“For example, the ‘collection of information’ is defined in the Dictionary of the United States Army Terms as: ‘The process of gathering information for all available sources and agencies’. But, for the purposes of [the regulations], information is ‘collected’… only when it has been received for use by an employee of a DoD intelligence component in the course of his official duties … (and) an employee takes some affirmative action that demonstrates an intent to use or retain the information … [t]herefore, mere receipt of non-essential information does not constitute a violation of [regulations].”
As such, the CIA defines itself as not “collecting” intelligence when it receives data on US citizens from foreign intelligence agencies. It only “collects” intelligence when this data is accessed by a CIA analyst.
Likewise, the term “retention” means more than merely retaining information in files: “[I]t is retention plus retrievability.” As per the regulation, “the term retention as used in this procedure, refers only to the maintenance of information about United States persons which can be retrieved by reference to the person’s name or other identifying data.”
In short, the CIA can “collect” and “retain” information on US citizens if it does not access the data in question using search queries involving names, social security numbers, telephone numbers, or other identifying data.
This isn’t simply a matter of ‘inside baseball’, playing semantic games with various legal authorities and definitions. There are real-world implications involving the fundamental issue of how “rule of law” functions in a democracy. “There's a key difference,” the ACLU warned in 2014, “between EO 12333 and the two main legal authorities that have been the focus of the public debate – Section 215 of the Patriot Act and the FISA Amendments Act, which the government relies on to justify the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records and the PRISM program. Because the executive branch issued and now implements the executive order all on its own, the programs operating under the order are subject to essentially no oversight from Congress or the courts.”
Read those words again. “No oversight from Congress or the courts.” Essentially, US citizens are expected to trust the CIA to restrain its operations on its own volition. No one would, or should, accept such terms, especially from an organization such as the CIA with a proven track record of dissembling when it comes to telling the truth (as former CIA Director Mike Pompeo noted, in April 2019: “I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment”).
Ronald Reagan famously made use of a Russian proverb, “Trust, but verify,” when speaking of the necessity of adequate verification measures when it came to arms control. If that standard was good enough for the Soviet Union, then it should be good enough for the CIA. Otherwise, we will continue to live in a world where our elected officials continue to be shocked to discover that there is gambling taking place in Rick’s Café, all the while pocketing the profits of such illicit activity.
Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of 'SCORPION KING: America's Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.' He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, served in General Schwarzkopf's staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991 to 1998 served as a chief weapons inspector with the UN in Iraq. Mr Ritter currently writes on issues pertaining to international security, military affairs, Russia, and the Middle East, as well as arms control and nonproliferation. Follow him on Twitter @RealScottRitter
Why Neoliberal economics is entirely wrong.
For some Americans, sub-minimum-wage online tasks are the only work available.
Technology has helped rid the American economy of many of the routine, physical, low-paid jobs that characterized the workplace of the last century. Gone are the women who sewed garments for pennies, the men who dug canals by hand, the children who sorted through coal. Today, more and more jobs are done at a computer, designing new products or analyzing data or writing code.
But technology is also enabling a new type of terrible work, in which Americans complete mind-numbing tasks for hours on end, sometimes earning just pennies per job. And for many workers living in parts of the country where other jobs have disappeared—obviated by technology or outsourcing—this work is all that’s available for people with their qualifications.
This low-paid work arrives via sites such as CrowdFlower, Clickworker, Toluna, and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, to name a few. Largely unregulated, these sites allow businesses and individuals to post short tasks and pay workers—in cash or, sometimes, gift cards—to complete them. A recent Mechanical Turk listing, for example, offered workers 80 cents to read a restaurant review and then answer a survey about their impressions of it; the time limit was 45 minutes. Another, which asked workers to fill out a 15-minute psychological questionnaire about what motivates people to do certain tasks, offered $1, but allowed that the job could take three hours.
These are not, by and large, difficult tasks—someone with just a high-school education could complete them easily. And they may seem like one-off jobs, done for money on the side by people with a surplus of idle time. But a growing number of people are turning to platforms like Mechanical Turk for the bulk of their income, despite the fact that the work pays terribly. It’s emblematic of the state of the economy in certain regions of the country that some people consider this type of work to be their only choice. A 2016 Pew Research Center survey found that 25 percent of workers who earned money from online job platforms like Mechanical Turk, Uber, and TaskRabbit went on these sites because there was no other available work in their area.
I talked to one such woman, a 29-year-old named Erica, who performs tasks for Mechanical Turk from her home in southern Ohio. (Erica asked to use only her first name because, she says, she read on Reddit that speaking negatively about Amazon has led to account suspensions. Amazon did not reply to a request for comment about this alleged practice.) Erica spends 30 hours a week filling out personality questionnaires, answering surveys, and performing simple tasks that ask her, for example, to press the “z” key when a blue triangle pops up on her screen. In the last month, she’s made an average of $4 to $5 an hour, by her calculations. Some days, she’ll make $7 over the course of three to four hours.
Erica, who has a GED and an associate’s degree in nursing administration, says the work for Mechanical Turk is the only option in the economically struggling town where she lives. The only other work she was able to find was a 10-hour-a-week minimum-wage job training workers at a factory how to use computers. “Here, it’s kind of a dead zone. There’s not much work,” she told me. In the county where Erica lives, only about half of people 16 years or older are employed, compared to 58 percent for the rest of the country. One-quarter of people there earn below the poverty line.
One reason Erica, who has filled out more than 6,000 surveys on Mechanical Turk and has a high rating on the site, earns so little is that the work simply doesn’t pay very well. But there are other reasons she makes so little that have to do with the nature of the platform. On Mechanical Turk, where she spends most of her working hours, Erica looks out for “HITs,” as assignments are called (for “human intelligence task”), that “requesters” are hiring for online. The tasks that pay the best and take the least time get snapped up quickly by workers, so Erica must monitor the site closely, waiting to grab them. She doesn’t get paid for that time looking, or for the time she spends, say, getting a glass of water or going to the bathroom. Sometimes, she has to “return” tasks—which means sending them back to the requester, usually because the directions are unclear—after she’s already spent precious time on them.
