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The Lost Art (and Joy) of Taxing the Rich
By ending the practice of taxing the those with the most, we have witnessed an incredibly intense concentration of wealth that has recreated the same sort of top-heavy economic imbalances that ushered in the Great Depression almost a century ago.
Sep 05, 2023
Eight decades ago, at a pivotal turning point in American history, our nation’s richest faced a 94 percent federal tax rate on their income over $200,000, the equivalent of about $3.5 million today. At that point, near the end of World War II, only one other nation — the UK — taxed its rich at a steeper rate. The wealthiest Brits ended the war facing a 97.5 percent tax on their top-bracket income.
These stiff top tax rates — all nearly unimaginable today — would help usher in a generation of unparalleled economic progress for average Americans and Brits. And those rates ebbed only slightly in the postwar years. In the 1950s, America’s richest faced a 91 percent top tax rate. The GOP president then sitting in the White House, Dwight Eisenhower, made no move whatsoever to hack that top rate down.
Overall, notes the economist Thomas Piketty, America’s wealthiest faced an average 81 percent top tax rate between the years 1932 and 1980, one key reason why our richest 0.1 percenters — over the course of the 20th century’s middle decades — saw their share of the nation’s wealth sink from 25 to just 7 percent.
The rich — on both sides of the Atlantic — would spend plenty of time stewing about that shocking sink throughout those middle decades. But these deep pockets would eventually regain their political mojo, first in the UK with Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 political ascent and then a year later with Ronald Reagan’s election. By 1988, the UK’s top rate had sunk by over half, and America’s richest faced just a 28 percent top-bracket bite.
But none of this tax cutting — back then and ever since — has brought us the nirvana that the Thatcherites and Reaganites promised. We’ve experienced no uplifting trickle-down. We have, instead, witnessed an incredibly intense concentration of wealth that has recreated the same sort of top-heavy economic imbalances that ushered in the Great Depression almost a century ago.
Our rich are still raking it in
The Democratic Party in the United States and the Labour Party in the UK have had, since the late 1980s, some modest success undoing the most generous of the tax breaks that have gone rich people’s way. The mainstream leadership of both parties has over recent years signaled, at least rhetorically, support for undoing even more.
In 2021, for instance, the Labour Party insider set to become the UK’s top finance official should Labour regain a majority in the upcoming 2024 elections, reaffirmed her support for hiking the tax burden on her nation’s grandest fortunes.
“People who get their income through wealth,” opined Rachel Reeves at that time, “should have to pay more.”
The Labour Party’s prime-minister-in-waiting Keir Starmer last September pledged to undo the ruling Conservative Party’s axing of Britain’s 45 percent top-bracket tax.
“I would reverse it — be absolutely clear about that,” Starmer told the BBC.
The UK Conservative Party’s tax giveaways to the rich, Starmer would add at the Labour Party’s annual conference last fall, rested on the “wrong headed” argument that “if you allow the rich to get richer, somehow that money will trickle down into the pockets of all the rest of us.”
But Starmer and Reeves have both changed their tune over recent months. In June, Starmer openly backpedaled on his commitment to press for a higher tax rate on top incomes if Labour triumphs, as polls now predict, in Britain’s next elections. Then Reeves, asked if Starmer’s about-face meant that Labour was abandoning the tax-the-rich path, started spouting a standard rich people-friendly line.
“I don’t see a route towards having more money for public services that is through taxing our way there,” she told reporters. “It is going to be through growing our way there. And that’s why the policies that we’ve set out are all about how we can encourage businesses to invest in Britain.”
“We have no plans for a wealth tax,” Reeves went on to emphasize at the end of August. “I don’t see the way to prosperity as being through taxation. I want to grow the economy.”
But that economy’s growth, the British labor movement detailed last month, is enriching only the already rich. The UK, says Trades Union Congress general secretary Paul Nowak, now needs “ to start a national conversation about how we tax wealth in this country.”
That conversation appears to be exactly what the Labour Party’s current leadership seems intent on quashing. Britain’s 50 richest families, notes the University of Sheffield’s Prem Sikka, hold more wealth than the entire bottom 50 percent of the nation’s population. Yet the Labour leadership, he points out, will not consider broadening “the tax base by levying a wealth tax.”
This leadership, Sikka goes on, wants Labour “to be seen as a party of fiscal responsibility,” a stance that can only bring on a continuation of the Conservative Party’s “austerity and real wage cuts for public sector workers.”
“The UK is splitting apart,” a New Statesman analysis last month would agree, “fueled by a tax system that entrenches inequality.”
The United States, in the meantime, faces the same split and a similar inequality-entrenching tax system. The Democratic Party in the United States also faces, like the British Labour Party, a general election in 2024. Will the mainstream leadership of the Democrats follow the Labour Party’s leadership lead and reject the sort of bold moves needed to fix that tax system? Or will the Democratic Party take inspiration from the serious tax-the-rich agenda of the New Deal years so long ago?
The struggle to answer questions like these will define and determine our future.
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Will Ukraine Be Turned Into a Radioactive Battlefield?
Why isn’t depleted uranium banned? That’s a question antinuclear activists have been asking for years.
Apr 18, 2023
It’s sure to be a blood-soaked spring in Ukraine. Russia’s winter offensive fell far short of Vladimir Putin’s objectives, leaving little doubt that the West’s conveyor belt of weaponry has aided Ukraine’s defenses. Cease-fire negotiations have never truly begun, while NATO has only strengthened its forces thanks to Finland’s new membership (with Sweden soon likely to follow). Still, tens of thousands of people have perished; whole villages, even cities, have been reduced to rubble; millions of Ukrainians have poured into Poland and elsewhere; while Russia’s brutish invasion rages on with no end in sight.
The hope, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is that the Western allies will continue to furnish money, tanks, missiles, and everything else his battered country needs to fend off Putin’s forces. The war will be won, according to Zelensky, not through backroom compromises but on the battlefield with guns and ammo.
“I appeal to you and the world with these most simple and yet important words,” he said to a joint session of Great Britain’s parliament in February. “Combat aircraft for Ukraine, wings for freedom.”
The United Kingdom, which has committed well over $2 billion in assistance to Ukraine, has so far refused to ship fighter jets there but has promised to supply more weaponry, including tank shells made with depleted uranium (DU), also known as “radioactive bullets.” A by-product of uranium enrichment, DU is a very dense and radioactive metal that, when housed in small torpedo-like munitions, can pierce thickly armored tanks and other vehicles.
Reacting to the British announcement, Putin ominously said he would “respond accordingly” if the Ukrainians begin blasting off rounds of DU.
While the UK’s decision to send depleted-uranium shells to Ukraine is unlikely to prove a turning point in the war’s outcome, it will have a lasting, potentially devastating, impact on soldiers, civilians, and the environment. The controversial deployment of DU doesn’t pose faintly the same risks as the actual nuclear weapons Putin and his associates have hinted they might use someday in Ukraine or as would a potential meltdown at the embattled Zaporizhzhia nuclear facility in that country. Still, its use will certainly help create an even more lethal, all too literally radioactive theater of war — and Ukraine will end up paying a price for it.
The Radioactive Lions of Babylon
Stuart Dyson survived his deployment in the first Gulf War of 1991, where he served as a lance corporal with Britain’s Royal Pioneer Corps. His task in Kuwait was simple enough: he was to help clean up “dirty” tanks after they had seen battle. Many of the machines he spent hours scrubbing down had carried and fired depleted uranium shells used to penetrate and disable Iraq’s T-72 tanks, better known as the Lions of Babylon.
Dyson spent five months in that war zone, ensuring American and British tanks were cleaned, armed, and ready for battle. When the war ended, he returned home, hoping to put his time in the Gulf War behind him. He found a decent job, married, and had children. Yet his health deteriorated rapidly and he came to believe that his military service was to blame. Like so many others who had served in that conflict, Dyson suffered from a mysterious and debilitating illness that came to be known as Gulf War Syndrome.
After Dyson suffered years of peculiar ailments, ranging from headaches to dizziness and muscle tremors, doctors discovered that he had a severe case of colon cancer, which rapidly spread to his spleen and liver. The prognosis was bleak and, after a short battle, his body finally gave up. Stuart Dyson died in 2008 at the age of 39.
His saga is unique, not because he was the only veteran of the first Gulf War to die of such a cancer at a young age, but because his cancer was later recognized in a court of law as having been caused by exposure to depleted uranium. In a landmark 2009 ruling, jurors at the Smethwick Council House in the UK found that Dyson’s cancer had resulted from DU accumulating in his body, and in particular his internal organs.
“My feeling about Mr. Dyson’s colon cancer is that it was produced because he ingested some radioactive material and it became trapped in his intestine,” Professor Christopher Busby, an expert on the effects of uranium on health, said in his court testimony. “To my mind, there seems to be a causal arrow from his exposure to his final illness. It’s certainly much more probable than not that Mr. Dyson’s cancer was caused by exposure to depleted uranium.”
The U.S. Department of Defense estimated that American forces fired more than 860,000 rounds of DU shells during that 1991 war to push Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein’s military out of Kuwait. The result: a poisoned battlefield laced with radioactive debris, as well as toxic nerve agents and other chemical agents.
In neighboring southern Iraq, background radiation following that war rose to 30 times normal. Tanks tested after being shelled with DU rounds had readings 50 times higher than average.
“It’s hot forever,” explains Doug Rokke, a former major in the U.S. Army Reserve’s Medical Service Corps who helped decontaminate dozens of vehicles hit by DU shells during the first Gulf War. “It doesn’t go away. It only disperses and blows around in the wind,” he adds. And of course, it wasn’t just soldiers who suffered from DU exposure. In Iraq, evidence has been building that DU, an intense carcinogenic agent, has led to increases in cancer rates for civilians, too.
“When we were moving forward and got north of a minefield, there were a bunch of blown-out tanks that were near where we would set up a command post,” says Jason Peterson, a former American Marine who served in the first Gulf War. “Marines used to climb inside and ‘play’ in them … We barely knew where Kuwait was, let alone the kind of ammunition that was used to blow shit up on that level.”
While it’s difficult to discern exactly what caused the Gulf War Syndrome from which Dyson and so many other soldiers suffered (and continue to suffer), experts like Rokke are convinced that exposure to depleted uranium played a central role in the illness. That’s an assertion Western governments have consistently downplayed. In fact, the Pentagon has repeatedly denied any link between the two.
“I’m a warrior, and warriors want to fulfill their mission,” Rokke, who also suffers from Gulf War Syndrome, told Vanity Fair in 2007. “I went into this wanting to make it work, to work out how to use DU safely, and to show other soldiers how to do so and how to clean it up. This was not science out of a book, but science done by blowing the shit out of tanks and seeing what happens. And as we did this work, slowly it dawned on me that we were screwed. You can’t do this safely in combat conditions. You can’t decontaminate the environment or your own troops.”
Death to Uranium
Depleted uranium can’t produce a nuclear explosion, but it’s still directly linked to the development of atomic weaponry. It’s a by-product of the uranium enrichment process used in nuclear weapons and fuel. DU is alluring to weapons makers because it’s heavier than lead, which means that, if fired at a high velocity, it can rip through the thickest of metals.
That it’s radioactive isn’t what makes it so useful on the battlefield, at least according to its proponents. “It’s so dense and it’s got so much momentum that it just keeps going through the armor — and it heats it up so much that it catches on fire,” says RAND nuclear expert and policy researcher Edward Geist.
The manufacturing of DU dates back to the 1970s in the United States. Today, the American military employs DU rounds in its M1A2 Abrams tanks. Russia has also used DU in its tank-busting shells since at least 1982 and there are plenty of accusations, though as yet no hard evidence, that Russia has already deployed such shells in Ukraine. Over the years, for its part, the U.S. has fired such rounds not just in Kuwait, but also in Bosnia, Iraq, Kosovo, Syria, and Serbia as well.
Both Russia and the U.S. have reasons for using DU, since each has piles of the stuff sitting around with nowhere to put it. Decades of manufacturing nuclear weapons have created a mountain of radioactive waste. In the U.S., more than 500,000 tons of depleted-uranium waste has built up since the Manhattan Project first created atomic weaponry, much of it in Hanford, Washington, the country’s main plutonium production site. As I investigated in my book Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America, Hanford is now a cesspool of radioactive and chemical waste, representing the most expensive environmental clean-up project in history with an estimated price tag of $677 billion.
Uranium, of course, is what makes the whole enterprise viable: you can’t create atomic bombs or nuclear power without it. The trouble is that uranium itself is radioactive, as it emits alpha particles and gamma rays. That makes mining uranium one of the most dangerous operations on the planet.
Keep It in the Ground
In New Mexico, where uranium mines were primarily worked by Diné (Navajo People), the toll on their health proved gruesome indeed. According to a 2000 study in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, rates of lung cancer in Navajo men who mined uranium were 28 times higher than in those who never mined uranium. The “Navajo experience with uranium mining,” it added, “is a unique example of exposure in a single occupation accounting for the majority of lung cancers in an entire population.”
Scores of studies have shown a direct correlation between exposure to uranium and kidney disease, birth defects in infants (when mothers were exposed), increased rates of thyroid disease, and several autoimmune diseases. The list is both extensive and horrifying.
“My family had a lot of cancer,” says anti-nuclear activist and Indigenous community organizer Leona Morgan. “My grandmother died of lung cancer and she never smoked. It had to be the uranium.”
One of the largest radioactive accidents, and certainly the least reported, occurred in 1979 on Diné land when a dam broke, flooding the Puerco River near Church Rock, New Mexico, with 94 million gallons of radioactive waste. The incident received virtually no attention at the time. “The water, filled with acids from the milling process, twisted a metal culvert in the Puerco and burned the feet of a little boy who went wading. Sheep keeled over and died, while crops curdled along the banks. The surge of radiation was detected as far away as Sanders, Arizona, fifty miles downstream,” writes Judy Pasternak in her book Yellow Dirt: A Poisoned Land and the Betrayal of the Navajo.
Of course, we’ve known about the dangers of uranium for decades, which makes it all the more mind-boggling to see a renewed push for increased mining of that radioactive ore to generate nuclear power. The only way to ensure that uranium doesn’t poison or kill anyone is to leave it right where it’s always been: in the ground. Sadly, even if you were to do so now, there would still be tons of depleted uranium with nowhere to go. A 2016 estimate put the world’s mountain of DU waste at more than one million tons (each equal to 2,000 pounds).
So why isn’t depleted uranium banned? That’s a question antinuclear activists have been asking for years. It’s often met with government claims that DU isn’t anywhere near as bad as its peacenik critics allege. In fact, the U.S. government has had a tough time even acknowledging that Gulf War Syndrome exists. A Government Accountability Office report released in 2017 found that the Veterans Affairs Department had denied more than 80% of all Gulf War illness claims by veterans. Downplaying DU’s role, in other words, comes with the terrain.
“The use of DU in weapons should be prohibited,” maintains Ray Acheson, an organizer for the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons and author of Banning the Bomb, Smashing the Patriarchy. “While some governments argue there is no definitive proof its use in weapons causes harm, it is clear from numerous investigations that its use in munitions in Iraq and other places has caused impacts on the health of civilians as well as military personnel exposed to it, and that it has caused long-term environmental damage, including groundwater contamination. Its use in weapons is arguably in violation of international law, human rights, and environmental protection and should be banned in order to ensure it is not used again.”
If the grisly legacy of the American use of depleted uranium tells us anything, it’s that those DU shells the British are supplying to Ukraine (and the ones the Russians may also be using there) will have a radioactive impact that will linger in that country for years to come, with debilitating, potentially fatal, consequences. It will, in a sense, be part of a global atomic war that shows no sign of ending.
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Is Brexit Win a Warning Signal for Trump-Era America?
"The uprising has begun. The question now is, who will lead it going forward?"
Jun 25, 2016
The UK's shock decision to exit the European Union has left a foreboding shadow over the American political landscape, sending the U.S.--and the world--a stark warning about the dangers of a disaffected working class and the power of negative politics.
Conservatives worldwide have been heralding Thursday's vote as a victory for "the people" over the "political elite."
Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for U.S. president, was quick to heap praise on the result, comparing it with his own campaign, which has similarly preyed on the frustrations of an economically insecure population, sowing fears about outsiders to garner support.
"Basically, they took back their country. That's a great thing," the New York billionaire declared from Scotland, where he arrived Friday to reopen a golf resort.
"People are angry all over the world. They're angry over borders, they're angry over people coming into the country and taking over, and nobody even knows who they are," he continued. "They're angry about many, many things in the UK, the U.S. and many other places. This will not be the last."
"The EU has not listened to its constituents. Like other self-absorbed ruling classes, including those in the United States, it is now paying for its arrogance."
--columnist Stephen Kinzer
While many are pointing to the overt xenophobic rhetoric that enabled the "Leave" campaign to win a narrow majority of votes, observers are highlighting how it was the policies of the European Union's political establishment--austerity, deregulation, globalization--that drove those voters into the arms of the conservative campaigners.
As Padraig Reidy, editor of the London-based magazine Little Atoms, wrote Friday, "The vote was a reflection of a growing divide between a metropolitan elite that has flourished in a globalized economy and populist anger on the part of those who feel left behind."
Sound familiar?
As former international correspondent Stephen Kinzer explained in the Boston Globe:
Visionaries who promoted European unity in the years after World War II saw it as a gift to the continent's people. But their successors have rarely consulted those people, listened to their complaints, or adjusted EU policies to meet their needs. Instead, they embraced the ideology of deregulation, privatization, and reduced social spending. They imagined Europe as a free-trade zone with open borders but little social protection for ordinary people.
"The EU has not listened to its constituents," he added. "Like other self-absorbed ruling classes, including those in the United States, it is now paying for its arrogance."
Indeed, the parallels with the United States are clear. In the lead-up to the November elections, rampant inequality continues to grip the nation while campaign finance laws push lawmakers to unabashedly promote policies that solely benefit the corporate elite.
Distrust of the American political establishment enabled at least one outsider candidate, Trump, to dominate a major party while, Hillary Clinton, the presumed Democratic nominee, has been plagued by consistently high "unfavorability" ratings--largely because of her entrenchment in the political class.
Clinton's rival, Bernie Sanders--whose outsider bid drew a massive swell of support during the Democratic primary--said Friday that the vote to leave the EU was a testament to the failure of the global economy.
"What this vote is about is an indication that the global economy is not working for everybody," he told MSNBC. "It's not working in the United States for everybody and it's not working in the U.K for everybody. When you see investors going to China and shutting down factories and laying off [...] millions of people, people are saying, 'You know what, the global economy may be great for some people but not for me.'"
"So what we need to do," Sanders continued, "is create a situation where there is more international cooperation--put an end to these horrific wars that we have seen over the years--but at the same time we must make sure we do not forget about the people left behind, and make sure we have jobs, and income, and healthcare for all of our people."
Like the rise of Sanders and Trump in the United States, the vote was "a stunning rejection of Great Britain's political establishment," wrote Richard Eskow of Campaign for America's Future.
Eskow explained that the Leave campaign "prevailed despite opposition from all three major political parties" in the UK and from U.S. President Barack Obama, who "crossed the Atlantic to stand beside Cameron and offer his support."
"Voters rejected all of them," Eskow added. "The uprising has begun. The question now is, who will lead it going forward?"
"From Donald Trump to Bernie Sanders, from Syriza in Greece to Podemos in Spain, from the Austrian far-right to the rise of the Scottish independence movement, this is an era of seething resentment against elites," said Guardian columnist Owen Jones. "That frustration is spilling out in all sorts of directions: new left movements, civic nationalism, anti-immigrant populism."
As for how this dynamic will play out in the United States, only time will tell.
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EU Referendum: A Disastrous Outcome
Jun 24, 2016
The following is a statement by the Left Unity Executive Committee following the outcome of the referendum vote in the UK:
Left Unity deplores the Leave outcome of the EU Referendum. This referendum came from pressure from the far right - driven by anti-immigration sentiment, fuelled by racism. This has been the most reactionary national campaign in British political history, resulting in an open emergence of the extreme right.
In Brexit Britain, we still face austerity, poverty and extreme inequality: the rotten policies of our government are still here. Brexit will not be a loosening of the shackles of neo-liberalism as some on the left have argued. It will be an unmitigated compounding of the same policies by the British ruling class. We deeply regret that the working people of Britain have been deceived and manipulated into believing that Brexit will bring about relief from the grinding austerity that is destroying lives and communities. We will now work tirelessly to oppose those who would divide us further. We will fight to defend the rights of working-class communities and rebuild support for socialist ideas.
We will step up the fight against neo-liberalism here - opposing all cuts, defending the NHS, fighting for decent housing - and across Europe, because the problems we face cannot be solved on a national basis. These are international problems faced by the working class internationally, and solidarity and cooperation across national boundaries are required. We cannot cut ourselves off from our allies: the peoples of Europe in our shared and common struggles. Unity is strength and that means unity of working people, poor and exploited people, across borders.
We call on all those who reject this disastrous turn in British politics to unite to oppose racism, to defend the rights of migrants and to fight to protect and extend workers' and other rights that are now under threat. We reject the 'divide and rule' methods of our ruling class, setting one worker against another, wherever they come from, and turning one community against another. The problems we face result from the neo-liberal, deregulatory, anti-working class policies imposed by successive British governments, not from immigrants and refugees - our fellow working people. We have been proud to share this position with the Labour leadership, the TUC and the overwhelming majority of trade unions and we will work together to take these principles forward.
We may be heading out of the EU but it is more important than ever to work in solidarity with other workers and communities. Movements and left parties throughout Europe are mounting their own massive political opposition to neo-liberalism, against austerity and poverty. We stand a better chance of defeating our own ruling class by working together with the people of Europe with shared strategies in common campaigns.
We watch the advance of the left in Europe - particularly where there is newfound cooperation and unity in Spain and Portugal - with our hearts filled with hope. We send our solidarity and best wishes to Unidos Podemos in Spain for success in their election this weekend. We see the struggles of the French workers against the imposition of the new labor laws and convey our solidarity with these and other struggles. But we also watch with grave concern the rise of the far right across Europe as well as in Britain. We need urgently to consolidate our forces against this growing tendency.
Left Unity emerged from the struggles of the European working class and is proud to be part of the European Left Party. We must unite the working class across Europe, to defeat neo-liberalism and the far right. We are in a period of profound economic and political crisis - both in Britain and across Europe - with increasing political polarisation and intensifying class struggle. The basis on which that struggle can be fought and won has to be absolutely clear. We will fight to rebuild the British left on uncompromisingly anti-racist, pro-immigration terms, making no concessions to the false narrative that has dominated the referendum debate. We appeal to all those who share this perspective to join us and work with us.
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In Wake of Jo Cox Killing, Voters Back Away from Brexit
One survey found that support for "Remain" had jumped to 44 percent, while support for "Leave," had fallen to 43 percent
Jun 20, 2016
New polls show the British public may be rethinking its stance on exiting the European Union after last week's killing of Labour Party MP Jo Cox, who was known as a "champion of refugees" and was in favor of keeping Britain's membership in the group.
An exclusive survey for the Independent conducted over the weekend found that the "Remain" campaign may have pulled back into the lead, and three polls released after that found public opinion swinging back to the pro-EU faction.
One survey by YouGov conducted for the Sunday Times found that support for "Remain" had jumped five points to 44 percent, while the support for "Leave," also known as "Brexit," had fallen three points to 43 percent.
Nigel Farage, leader of the UK's right-wing Independence Party, admitted on Sunday that the Brexit campaign "did have momentum until this terrible tragedy."
"It has had an impact on the whole campaign for everybody," Farage said.
The suspect in Cox's killing reportedly made anti-immigration and nationalist statements before he shot and stabbed her as she met with constituents in Birstall, West Yorkshire. Her death prompted both sides of the Brexit vote to halt their lobbying for three days. According to some experts, the tragedy and the subsequent pause in campaigning may have been enough to change the game.
On Monday, David Marsh, European markets columnist at MarketWatch, wrote that the turn of events "may spur a sharp sympathy vote for Remain protagonists favoring the status quo."
Marsh added that "Opinion polls--largely based on surveys before Thursday's assassination--show both sides are still neck-and-neck. But the widespread assumption is that Cox's demise dents pro-Brexit forces."
The Independent also noted that one in 10 voters are undecided, but when asked to predict what side they would be more likely to support, 20 percent responded in favor of Remain, and only 11 percent said they would vote for Leave.
Britain votes on Thursday whether or not to exit the European Union.
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Thanks to UK and US Intervention, al-Qaeda now Has a Mini-State in Yemen. It's Iraq and Isis All Over Again
As has happened repeatedly since 9/11, the US and countries like Britain fail to combat terrorism because they give priority to retaining their alliance with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies
Apr 15, 2016
They have done it again. The US, Britain and regional allies led by Saudi Arabia have come together to intervene in another country with calamitous results. Instead of achieving their aims, they have produced chaos, ruining the lives of millions of people and creating ideal conditions for salafi-jihadi movements like al-Qaeda and Islamic State.
The latest self-inflicted failure in the "war on terror" is in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia and a coalition of Sunni states intervened on one side in a civil war in March 2015. Their aim was to defeat the Houthis - labelled somewhat inaccurately as Shia and pro-Iranian - who had seized most of the country in alliance with the former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who retained the loyalty of much of the Yemeni army. Yemeni politics is exceptionally complicated and often violent, but violence has traditionally been followed by compromise between warring parties.
The Saudi intervention, supported in practice by the US and Britain, has made a bad situation far worse. A year-long campaign of air strikes was supposed to re-impose the rule of former president Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi, whose dysfunctional and unelected government had fled to Saudi Arabia. Relentless bombing had some success and the forces fighting in President Hadi's name advanced north, but were unable to retake the capital Sanaa. Over the last week there has been a shaky truce.
The real winners in this war are al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) which has taken advantage of the collapse of central government to create its own mini-state. This now stretches for 340 miles - longer than the distance from London to Edinburgh - along the south coast of Yemen. AQAP, which the CIA once described as the most dangerous protagonist of "global jihad" in the world, today has an organized administration with its own tax revenues.
Unnoticed by the outside world, AQAP has been swiftly expanding its own statelet in Yemen in 2015/16, just as Isis did in western Iraq and eastern in Syria in 2013/14. Early last year, President Obama contemptuously described Isis as being like a junior basketball team that would never play in the big leagues. Likewise in Yemen, the American and British governments misjudged the degree to which AQAP would benefit from Operation Decisive Storm, the ill-chosen Saudi name for its military intervention that has proved predictably indecisive.
The Saudi intervention turned a crisis into a catastrophe. Some 6,427 people are known to have been killed in the fighting, but these are only the figures for casualties known to the health authorities. Since the UN says that 14.1 million Yemenis, 54 percent of the population, have no access to health care, this is likely to be an underestimate. Even before the war, Yemen was the poorest Arab nation and its people are now starving or malnourished. OXFAM estimates that 82 percent of Yemen's 21 million population are in need of humanitarian assistance.
The disaster is not only humanitarian, but political, and does not only affect Yemen. As in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan, foreign intervention energizes and internationalizes local differences as factions become the proxies of outside powers.
Yemen has always had Shia and Sunni, but it is only recently that sectarian hatred has begun to get anywhere near the level of Syria and Iraq. Saudi Arabia portrays the Houthis as pawns of Iran, though there is little evidence for this, so Yemen is drawn into the regional confrontation between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
A point seldom given sufficient weight is that AQAP is expanding so fast, not because of its own strength, but because its opponents are so weak. The Saudi and Gulf-financed media often refer to pro-President Hadi forces as taking territory, but in reality, the government-in-exile remains in Saudi Arabia. It recaptured the port city of Aden last summer, but its few officials who are there dare not leave their heavily defended compound except by helicopter. Even where Saudi-backed fighters advance, they leave anarchy behind them, conditions in which the arrival of disciplined AQAP forces may be welcomed by local people.
I have been struck, ever since the US and British invasion of Iraq in 2003, by the extent to which their whole strategy depends on wishful thinking about the strength and popularity of their local ally who usually, on the contrary, is feared and hated. I seldom spoke to Afghans who truly supported the Taliban, but I was always impressed by the number who detested the Afghan government. Yet when one UN official stated publicly that the foreign powers fighting the Taliban, supposedly in support of the government, had "no local partner", he was promptly fired.
There was the same lethal pretense by Western powers in Libya and Syria that the rebels they backed represented the mass of the population and were capable of taking over from existing regimes. In reality, the weakening or destruction of the central government created a power vacuum promptly filled by extreme jihadi groups.
The dire consequences of the Saudi intervention and the rise of AQAP has been largely ignored by Western governments and media. Contrary to their grim-faced declarations about combating terrorism, the US and UK have opened the door to an al-Qaeda mini-state.
This will have an impact far beyond the Middle East because what makes the atrocities orchestrated by Isis in Paris and Brussels so difficult to stop is that they are organized and funded by a real administrative apparatus controlling its own territory. If one terrorist cell, local leader or bomb expert is eliminated, they can be replaced.
As has happened repeatedly since 9/11, the US and countries like Britain fail to combat terrorism because they give priority to retaining their alliance with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies, even when their policies - as in Yemen - wreck a whole country and enable al Qaeda and Isis to use the chaos to establish safe havens.
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If a Close US Ally Backdoored Juniper, Would NSA Tell Congress?
Dec 26, 2015
You may have heard that Juniper Networks announced what amounts to a backdoor in its virtual private network products. Here's Kim Zetter's accessible intro of what security researchers have learned. And here's some technical background from Matthew Green.
As Zetter summarizes, the short story is that some used weaknesses encouraged by the NSA to backdoor the security product protecting many American businesses.
They did this by exploiting weaknesses the NSA allegedly placed in a government-approved encryption algorithm known as Dual_EC, a pseudo-random number generator that Juniper uses to encrypt traffic passing through the VPN in its NetScreen firewalls. But in addition to these inherent weaknesses, the attackers also relied on a mistake Juniper apparently made in configuring the VPN encryption scheme in its NetScreen devices, according to Weinmann and other cryptographers who examined the issue. This made it possible for the culprits to pull off their attack.
As Green describes, the key events probably happened as early as 2007 and 2012 (contrary to the presumption of surveillance hawk Stewart Baker, who is looking to scapegoat those calling for more security). This means this can't be a response to the Snowden document, which strongly suggests the NSA had pushed those weaknesses in Dual_EC.
I find that particularly interesting, because it suggests whoever did this either used public discussions about the weakness of Dual_EC, dating to 2007, to identify and exploit this weakness, or figured out what (it is presumed) the NSA was up to. That suggests two likely culprits for what has been assumed to be a state actor behind this: Israel (because it knows so much about NSA from having partnered on things like StuxNet) or Russia (which was getting records on the FiveEyes' SIGINT activities from its Canadian spy, Jeffrey Delisle). The UK would be another obvious guess, except an Intercept article describing how NSA helped UK backdoor Juniper suggests they used another method.
This leads me back to an interesting change I noted between CISA -- the bill passed by the Senate back in October -- and OmniCISA -- the version passed last week as part of the omnibus funding bill. OmniCISA still required the Intelligence Community to provide a report on the most dangerous hacking threats, especially state actors, to the Intelligence Committees. However, it eliminated a report for the Foreign Relations Committees on the same topic. I joked at the time that that was probably to protect Israel, because no one wants to admit that Israel spies and has greater ability to do so by hacking than other nation-states, especially because it surely learns our methods by partnering with us to hack Iran.
Whoever hacked Juniper, the whole incident offers a remarkable lesson in the dangers of backdoors. Even as the FBI demands a backdoor into Apple's products, it is investigating who used a prior US-sponsored backdoor to do their own spying.
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Far From Extreme, Corbyn's Anti-Austerity Stance Is 'Mainstream Economics'
"Despite the barrage of media coverage to the contrary, it is the current government's policy and its objectives which are extreme," economists write
Aug 24, 2015
Even as the mainstream media and members of his own party seek to portray Labour leader hopeful Jeremy Corbyn as uncredible on economic policy, a group of more than 40 leading economists wrote a paper this weekend. They seek to counter that narrative by publicly supporting key planks of his anti-austerity platform.
"His opposition to austerity is mainstream economics," the economists wrote in an open letter published Sunday. "Despite the barrage of media coverage to the contrary, the current government's policy and its objectives are extreme."
The letter clarifies that its signatories "are not all supporters of Jeremy Corbyn," who is currently the frontrunner in the leadership contest according to national polls.
"But we hope to clarify just where the 'extremism' lies in the current economic debate," they continued, blasting harsh spending cuts and privatization embraced by current Labour leaders.
Meanwhile, on Sunday, Corbyn detailed his economic strategy in the Observer, criticizing "an absentee government" that has produced "yawning inequality" in the UK.
"Parliament can feel like living in a time warp at the best of times," he wrote, "but this government is not just replaying 2010, but taking us back to 1979: ideologically committed to rolling back the state, attacking workers' rights and trade union protection, selling off public assets and extending the sell-off to social housing."
Corbyn highlighted the importance of a national investment bank, a national education service that provides universal free childcare and ongoing skills training, and stronger trade unions.
"Our opposition cannot be limited to the parliamentary chambers and TV studios of Westminster," he wrote. "Labour is best when it is a movement, which has swelled to an enthusiastic 600,000 who will decide this leadership election. Once that is over, we face a bigger task: to force this government to abandon its free-market dogma and become the strategic state our society needs."
The Independent reported Monday that Corbyn said the Labour Party should set up a fund to help low-income people become members of Parliament. "If the party is to win back the five million predominantly working-class voters lost since 1997, then we must reflect those we seek to represent," the candidate reportedly argued. "It is not enough to be for working people--we have to be of working people as well."
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As Anti-Austerity Candidate Surges, 'Corbynomics' Catches Fire in UK
A recent poll has socialist Jeremy Corbyn 32 points ahead of his closest rival for the Labour leadership post, up from a 17-point lead three weeks ago.
Aug 11, 2015
New polling shows longtime left-wing lawmaker Jeremy Corbyn, a leading anti-war and anti-austerity voice in the UK, surging toward victory in his quest to become leader of Britain's opposition Labour Party.
Or, as Stephen Bush put it Tuesday in the New Statesman, "Is there anyone now who honestly believes that Jeremy Corbyn isn't on course to win the Labour leadership election?"
A YouGov poll conducted for London's Sunday Times has Corbyn 32 points ahead of his closest rival, up from a 17-point lead three weeks ago.
Corbyn, 66, has sparked an enthusiasm in the UK that has garnered comparisons to Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, and the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders in the U.S.
"He has pushed an anti-austerity agenda into the heart of the political debate, forced his rivals to halt their shift to the right, and brought tens of thousands of young people into active politics," Guardian columnist and associate editor Seumas Milne wrote earlier this month.
"Where the Corbyn campaign parts company with the dominant economic thinking of both the Conservative government and the other Labour leadership candidates is that we don't believe that the vast majority of middle- and low-income earners who didn't cause the economic crisis should have to pay for it through cuts in tax credits, pay freezes, and cuts in essential services," MP John McDonnell, chair of the socialist campaign group of Labour MPs, wrote at the Guardian on Tuesday.
"Instead," McDonnell continued, "we believe we can tackle the deficit by halting the tax cuts to the very rich and to corporations, by making sure they pay their taxes, and by investing in the housing and infrastructure a modern country needs to get people back to work in good jobs."
Such "Corbynomics" has led establishment politicians and media to downplay or dismiss Corbyn's candidacy. Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's former spokesperson, has warned Labour risks "driving itself off a cliff" if Corbyn is elected.
Voting opens Friday, by mail or online, and continues for about a month. Dues-paying party members are eligible to cast ballots, along with members of affiliated organizations and anyone who wants to pay a PS3 ($4.70) fee. The results of the contest will be announced on September 12.
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UK Readies for Massive Protest Against 'Austerity on Steroids'
Tens of thousands are expected to march against 'nasty, destructive cuts to the things ordinary people care about'
Jun 19, 2015
A massive and growing anti-austerity movement will take to the streets of London on Saturday, June 20, with demonstrators demanding "an alternative to austerity and to policies that only benefit those at the top."
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Tens of thousands are expected to march from the Bank of England to Parliament Square on Saturday, protesting the conservative government's "nasty, destructive cuts to the things ordinary people care about--the [National Health Service], the welfare state, education and public services."
Organized by The People's Assembly--a politically unaffiliated national campaign against austerity--the demonstration comes in the wake of UK elections in early May that saw the Conservative (Tory) Party seizing the majority of Parliamentary seats and Prime Minister David Cameron sweeping back to power.
"David Cameron and George Osborne can hardly contain their enthusiasm for the torrent of cuts and privatizations they are about to unleash," wrote the Guardian's Seumas Milne on Wednesday. "This is to be austerity on steroids."
In fact, Milne warned, "indefinite austerity, which transfers wealth from public to private and poor to rich, is Osborne's aim."
But "there's no necessity to put up with the attacks they're about to launch on millions of people's living standards, and every reason to resist them," Milne concluded. "The austerity program needs to be opposed in parliament, but also with industrial action, demonstrations, and local campaigns. That process is already kicking off, with a national anti-austerity march in London this Saturday."
A separate but similarly themed rally is planned for Glasgow, Scotland on Saturday. As Al Jazeera explains, the political landscape is different in Scotland, where the Scottish National Party (SNP) won an overwhelming victory in May.
"The SNP's victory was widely seen as an endorsement of nationalist leader Nicola Sturgeon's anti-austerity stance," Al Jazeera reports, while noting that "the party also benefited from a wave of grass-roots enthusiasm whipped up during last year's referendum on independence from the U.K.--which generated unprecedented levels of political engagement among previously apathetic sections of Scottish society."
Stephen Boyd, the assistant secretary of the Scottish Trades Union Congress, which represents more than 600,000 Scottish workers and is one of the main sponsors of Saturday's event, told Al Jazeera: "We expect George Square [in central Glasgow] to be packed. The rally will reflect the significant anger in Scotland at Tory plans to widen and deepen austerity."
He continued: "With the Tories having achieved an overall majority at Westminster, it is essential that progressive forces in Scotland work together more closely than ever before to counter this unnecessary attack on society's most vulnerable people."
Ahead of Saturday's march, the People's Assembly made the following video outlining their grievances and demands:
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