Alternatives International

It's Worse Than You Think

Chris Hedges — 2016-12-01T05:27:59Z

Widespread social unrest will ignite when Donald Trump's base realizes it has been betrayed. I do not know when this will happen. But that it will happen is certain. Investments in the stocks of the war industry, internal security and the prison-industrial complex have skyrocketed since Trump won the presidency. There is a lot of money to be made from a militarized police state.

Our capitalist democracy ceased to function more than two decades ago. We underwent a corporate coup carried out by the Democratic and Republican parties. There are no institutions left that can authentically be called democratic. Trump and Hillary Clinton in a functioning democracy would have never been presidential nominees. The long and ruthless corporate assault on the working class, the legal system, electoral politics, the mass media, social services, the ecosystem, education and civil liberties in the name of neoliberalism has disemboweled the country. It has left the nation a decayed wreck. We celebrate ignorance. We have replaced political discourse, news, culture and intellectual inquiry with celebrity worship and spectacle.

Fascism, as historian Gaetano Salvemini pointed out, is about “giving up free institutions.” It is the product of a democracy that has ceased to function. The democratic form will remain, much as it did during the dictatorships in the later part of the Roman Empire, but the reality is despotism, or in our case, corporate despotism. The citizen does not genuinely participate in power.

“It is very similar to late Weimar Germany,” Noam Chomsky told me with uncanny insight when I spoke with him six years ago. “The parallels are striking. There was also tremendous disillusionment with the parliamentary system. The most striking fact about Weimar was not that the Nazis managed to destroy the Social Democrats and the Communists, but that the traditional parties, the Conservative and Liberal parties, were hated and disappeared. It left a vacuum which the Nazis very cleverly and intelligently managed to take over.

“The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen,” Chomsky went on. “Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like [Joseph] McCarthy or [Richard] Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest, this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. What are people supposed to think if someone says ‘I have got an answer: We have an enemy'? There it was the Jews. Here it will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told that white males are a persecuted minority. We will be told we have to defend ourselves and the honor of the nation. Military force will be exalted. People will be beaten up. This could become an overwhelming force. And if it happens, it will be more dangerous than Germany. The United States is the world power. Germany was powerful but had more powerful antagonists. I don't think all this is very far away. If the polls are accurate, it is not the Republicans but the right-wing Republicans, the crazed Republicans, who will sweep the next election.”

The repression of dissents will soon resemble the repression under past totalitarian regimes. State security will become an invasive and palpable presence. The most benign forms of opposition will be treated as if they are a threat to national security. Many, hoping to avoid the wrath of the state, will become compliant and passive. We, however, must fight back. We must carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience, as many have done in streets around the country since the election. But we must also be aware that the democratic space allotted to us in our system of inverted totalitarianism has become much, much smaller.

Trump, with no democratic institutions left to restrain him, will accelerate the corporate assault, from privatizing Social Security to exonerating militarized police forces for the indiscriminate murder of unarmed citizens, while he unleashes the fossil fuel industry and the war industry to degrade and most probably extinguish life on earth. His administration will be populated by the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, men and women characterized by profound intellectual and moral impoverishment, as well as a stunning ability to ignore reality. These ideologues speak exclusively in the language of intimidation and violence.

Half the country lives in poverty. Our former manufacturing centers are decayed wrecks. Our constitutional rights, including due process and habeas corpus, have been taken from us by judicial fiat. Corporations and the billionaire class carry out legal tax boycotts. Police gun down unarmed citizens in the street. The military, under Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, is empowered to carry out the extraordinary rendition of U.S. citizens within the United States, strip them of due process and hold them indefinitely in our black sites. We are the most spied upon, watched, eavesdropped, photographed and monitored population in human history. When the government watches you 24 hours a day, you cannot use the word “liberty.” That is the relationship between a master and a slave. And governments that wield this kind of surveillance power swiftly become totalitarian. Trump and his cronies have been handed by bankrupt elites the legal and physical mechanisms to instantly transform America into a brutal police state.

Rudy Giuliani; Newt Gingrich, who advocates stripping U.S. citizens of their citizenship if they are deemed to be terrorists; retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn and John Bolton—these men will not exhibit legal or moral restraint. They see the world through the Manichaean lens of good and evil, black and white, patriot and traitor. Politics have been transformed, as philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote of fascism, into aesthetics. And the ultimate aesthetic experience for the fascist, Benjamin warned, is war.

State terror and state violence, familiar to poor people of color in our internal colonies, will become familiar to all of us. Racism, nationalism, misogyny, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, intolerance, white supremacy, religious bigotry, hate crimes and a veneration of the hypermasculine values of military culture will define political and cultural discourse. The ruling elites will attempt to divert the growing frustration and rage toward the vulnerable—undocumented workers, Muslims, African-Americans, Latinos, homosexuals, feminists and others. White vigilante violence will be directed at those the state demonizes with little or no legal ramifications. New enemies, at home and abroad, will be manufactured. Our endless wars in the Middle East will be expanded, perhaps to include a confrontation with Russia.

There were some, such as Ralph Nader, who saw this dystopia coming. They desperately tried to build a viable third party and empower citizen movements to give the dispossessed working class a vision and hope. They knew that the longer corporate power had a stranglehold on the economic and political system, the more we seeded the ground for an American fascism. The elites put up numerous obstacles—refusing to let Nader or later, Jill Stein, into the debates, making ballot access difficult or impossible, turning campaigns into long, money-drenched spectacles that cost billions of dollars, and skillfully using the politics of fear to intimidate voters. But the elites were aided by a bankrupt liberal class. In presidential election after presidential election, especially after Nader's success in 2000, so-called progressives succumbed to the idiotic mantra of the least worst. Those who should have been the natural allies of third parties and dissident movements abjectly surrendered to the Democratic Party that, like the Republican Party, serves the beast of imperialism and makes war on the poor, the working class and the middle class. The cowardice of the liberal class meant it lost all credibility, much as Bernie Sanders did when he sold his soul to the Clinton campaign. The liberal class proved it would stand and fight for nothing. It mouthed words and ideas it did not truly believe. It bears significant responsibility for the phenomena that created Trump. It should have had the foresight to abandon the Democratic Party after President Bill Clinton passed the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, to build parties and institutions that defended the interests of the working class. If it had stood up for working men and women, it might have prevented them being seduced by proto-fascists.

The rot of our failed democracy vomited up a con artist who was a creation of the mass media—first playing a fictional master of the universe on a reality television show and later a politician as vaudevillian. Trump pulled in advertising dollars and ratings. Truth and reality were irrelevant. Only when he got the nomination did the mass media see their Frankenstein as a threat, but by then it was too late. If there is one vapid group that is hated even more than the liberal class, it is the corporate press. The more it attacked Trump, the better Trump looked.

Trump is emblematic of what anthropologists call “crisis cults.” A society in terminal decline often retreats into magical thinking. Reality is too much to bear. It places its faith in the fantastic and impossible promises of a demagogue or charlatan who promises the return of a lost golden age. The good jobs will come back. The nation will again be prosperous. The decrepit cities will be rebuilt. America will be great again. These promises, impossible to achieve, are no different from those peddled to Native Americans in the 1880s by the self-styled religious prophet Wovoka. He called on followers to carry out five-day dance ceremonies called the Ghost Dance. Native Americans donned shirts they were told protected them from bullets. They were assured that the buffalo herds would return, the dead warriors and chiefs would rise from the earth and the white men would disappear. None of his promises was realized. Many of his followers were gunned down like sheep by the U.S. army.

We face the most profound crisis in human history. Our response is to elect a man to the presidency who does not believe in climate change. Once societies unplug themselves from reality, those who speak truth become pariahs and enemies of the state. They are subject to severe state repression. Those lost in the reverie of the crisis cult applaud the elimination of these Cassandras. The appealing myths of magical thinking are pleasant opiates. But this narcotic, like all narcotics, leads to squalor and death.

Source: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/its_worse_than_you_think_20161111

Hillary Clinton Is Not Simply A Symptom Of Our Corrupt System, She Is A Leading Cause

Saib Bilaval — 2016-12-01T05:26:02Z

Since the results of the US Presidential election were announced, media focus has been on how Donald Trump won, rather than how Hillary lost. In the two days after the results, most of the media concluded (finally, and too late!) that Bernie Sanders would have been a better candidate against Trump even though he had been beating the President-elect by double digits in the polls since September 2015. The concern should have been about how the primary was rigged through election fraud and disfranchisement.

Voter turnout on both sides was lower than in 2008 and 2012. While the white vote has been blamed for the election of Trump, one must keep in mind that nearly as many white women and half as many white men voted for Hillary – the extremely low turnout among African Americans, whether in the North or the South, ultimately throwing the election to Trump. Interestingly, Trump's bigotry was expected to enable a higher turnout among African Americans for Hillary Clinton, who had apparently “decimated” Sanders in the same demographic.

Much of the voter disenchantment with Democrats has to do with Hillary Clinton's truly terrible favorability and trustworthy ratings. In the era of the informed voter, whistleblowers and internet at one's fingertips – a Clinton is a toxic candidate. The media, the political elite and the pundits all marveled aloud at Hillary's defeat, their complicity in the Clinton machine and long-term insider status in “politics as usual” blinding them to the fact the Clintons are not, in fact, just any corrupt politicians, or symptoms of the larger problem of money in politics. This essay seeks to list out ways in which the Clintons have over the years been crucial components in the construction of the modern oligarchy we see today, as well as the refiners and abusers of the most modern forms of legalized and grey area corruption in unprecedented ways – making them some of the most corrupt-seeming politicians in American history – a rather unique position.

* Hillary Clinton was the first person under FBI investigation to attempt running as a presidential candidate – in addition to being the only First Lady to ever be under FBI investigation – while the press paraded her as the most “qualified and electable” candidate. This sets a dangerous precedent – legitimate scandals would cease to cause political damage.

* The DNC and Podesta Wikileaks showed us that the White House was involved and knew about Clinton's server, interfered in the FBI investigation, corroborated with Hillary Clinton, and Secretary of State John Kerry regarding the private email server, and lied to media outlets. In addition, we discovered that Obama directly emailed Hillary Clinton on the private server.

* The Clintons were also the first Presidential couple to rent out the Lincoln bedroom, pawn the White House as a motel for donors, and use meetings for paid photo-ops.

* The signing of the Telecommunications Act in 1996 by Bill Clinton enabled the huge media monopoly that can be seen today, with six corporations controlling over 90% of news space. This concentration of projection of vested interests allowed corporate lobbies to stamp out stories that affect company profits (whether the parent company or the media offspring). TPP, Keystone Pipeline. NDAPL – as well as make or break a political candidate with coverage or lack thereof.

* Hillary Clinton's SuperPACs buy actual news sites to skew public objectivity through journalistic manipulation. The main front organization that carries out the influencing is Correct The Record, headed by former Republican political hitman David Brock, that often spent up to $3 million a month to pay individuals to counter the activism of Sanders supporters online. The parent company of the Daily Beast has Chelsea Clinton on its board. Correct the Record went on to buy Democratic websites such as Blue Nation Review in an attempt to discredit Sanders.

* Further, in 2016, Hillary Clinton has clearly been the highest recipient of donations from all elite groups: Wall Street banks, private prison corps, Monsanto, fossil fuel companies, pharma companies, the arms lobby, and billionaires in general – more than all the Republican candidates combined. This qualified her to be the plutocracy's stooge-in-chief.

* Hillary Clinton is the only candidate with whom one is uncertain whether her campaign chair is her boss or her employee. John Podesta, the person in question, has multiple firms listed in the Panama Papers and is a major donor and a lobbyist. Heather Podesta, his former sister-in-law owns a major law firm and is also a megadonor and bundler to Hillary Clinton. Her ex-husband,Tony Podesta, is another major contributor and the biggest lobbyist in Washington. A list of suggestions for federal appointments up to cabinet level was emailed to John Podesta when Obama became President-elect, which he promised to send over. Over 90% of those suggestions turned into actual appointments. In the light of the Podesta leaks, he has become the face of the shadow government – the billionaires and the corporations.

* The billionaire George Soros, who owns several media houses globally and has played a role in bringing down foreign governments and rigging elections in East Europe is Hillary's biggest donor and owns voting machines in 16 states and owns snopes.com, a “myth debunking” website that was frequently used to “fact check” (read: attack) Sanders and deflect blame from Hillary Clinton over her numerous scandals.

* The Wikileaks Podesta emails revealed that Hillary, unlike any Democrat other than Obama (who had earlier backed out) planned to gut social security.

* The Clintons are most responsible for the rightward turn the Democrats took, that had started with the fiscal policies of Jimmy Carter and matured in the Reagan era. They along with other current top Democrats, were the top office bearers of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC)/ Third Way movement that demolished the working and middle-class roots of the Democratic Party while sweeping aside the Rainbow Coalition.

* The rise of the Clintons is very closely parallel and congruent to the rise of Goldman Sachs, and Walmart. Goldman Sachs was just another Wall Street firm until the late 1980s, when their head, Robert Rubin, allied with Clinton to become his treasury secretary. After having Clinton repeal Glass-Steagall, Rubin became the top man at the newly merged Citigroup. Goldman Sachs went on to over-speculate, causing the dot com bubble and then crisis of the early 2000s, and became a major culprit in the 2007-08 Wall Street crash, despite the fact that chairs of the Federal Reserve and Treasury Secretaries since Rubin were, like him, all Goldman Sachs alumni. Goldman Sachs now has a singular grip on the world economy. Walmart was an Arkansas-level firm and a major campaign donor of then-Governor Clinton. Once the latter became President, his benefactors rose with him - Walmart replaced GM and GE as the largest private employer in the US, and the largest enabler and disabler of the minimum wage, and the largest recipient of corporate welfare, whose employees are the largest recipients of food stamps. Hillary Clinton even served on the Board of directors at WalMart, and did nothing to address issues regarding higher wages, unionization, and racism/diversity.

* Emerging forms of labor exploitation and public perception, embodied in corporations such as Google, Facebook, AirBnB and Uber had fallen in line behind Clinton, seeing her as the best candidate for their profits.

* Bill Clinton was the first Democrat President since Woodrow Wilson to cut welfare as part of his Welfare Reform bill. At the same time, Hillary Clinton's “superpredators” comment was the nastiest slur publicly used by a major politician since the struggle for the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s. Bill and Hillary Clinton were prone to display a dark side of the Democrats that certain generations had not seen.

* Glass-Steagall was the regulatory law Bill Clinton repealed which had kept commercial and investment banking apart. With the floodgates open, soon enough came the Wall Street crash due to financial fraud. Boosted by the repeal, not only did ordinary taxpayers lose their savings, but the taxpayer had to bail out the banks too. The crux of the matter is, the Clintons did a lot to endanger the American economy in a long term, irreversible (unless legislatively overturned) manner.

* The Clinton Foundation is a money laundering scheme like no other before it. It makes use of all possible tax loopholes, accepts money from foreign donors and governments, spends a tiny amount of its finances on grants (the bulk on paid speeches for the Clinton family or individuals they want to enrich, and travel).

* The Clinton Foundation, as a post-Presidential exclusion to the boundaries of the law, was a product of many earlier deals. There is the matter ofIndonesian money from the Riady family to Hillary, Bill (while he was President), and to Hillary's former law partners – an impeachable offence. Greg Palast details out a deal cut between Republicans and Democrats – where the former dropped a real opportunity to successfully impeach the President, while the Democrats agreed to not investigate the Koch brothers for campaign finance breaches. The Republicans then settled on sticking to Clinton's sex scandals instead:

Investigators with the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee located bank records linking the children's "charity" and other political front groups to Triad Management, an operation funded by the Kochs. Democratic senators threatened to subpoena Koch Industries' chiefs to question whether they funded Triad and manipulated its related groups. Democrats could drag the tycoons before the same public tribunal on campaign finances skewering Clinton.

A key Senate insider, who must remain anonymous, says Republicans then offered a straightforward trade: "A truce-you don't do Triad, we don't do Clinton." Other sources inside the committee confirm that the Republicans, under the direction of Senators Trent Lott and Don Nickles, rather than risk exposure of the Kochs' web of mega-dollar funding operations, agreed to shut down the money probe and let Clinton off the hook.

The true, unreported reason for the collapse of the inquiry most threatening to Clinton was the Indonesia money chain, which could have knocked him out of office and reveals the ultimate measure of Koch influence: that Republicans sacrificed their case against the president to keep their secret benefactors under wraps.

* Hillary and Bill Clinton are the highest recipients of money through paid speeches in the country – no politician or celebrity matches the total income accumulated this way, or their per speech rate.

* Regarding the Indo-US Nuclear deal – not only were the Clintons bribed by foreign businessmen, politicians, and diaspora to enable India's nuclear reactors and weapons research – the deal was a violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. It isn't a matter of selling out national interest, whether American or Indian – Hillary Clinton became a supporter of a potential domino effect in terms of NPT violations, and was ready to sell out world peace despite being an informed member of the Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, as well as while sitting on the Armed Services Committee in Senate.

* Further, there is the fact that Hillary Clinton also happens to be the most bloodthirsty Democrat, in terms of foreign policy, In decades.

* The economic legacy of the Clintons sums up to this: If Reagan was the lackey of big business and a union buster, Clinton was the second biggest job outsourcer and the main hand of finance capital. The latter form of capital is both more exploitative and more dangerous to the economy.

* To explain Hillary's general election loss, it is worth pointing out yet again that maybe, just maybe Trump won the election because he had actually won his primary, unlike Hillary Clinton. The 2016 Democratic Presidential Primary displayed the highest amount of scale-tipping the party had seen since 1968. In the interim period, rigging usually has occurred against certain Democratic candidates - Jesse Jackson, Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich - and usually through arranged media bias or endorsements. This time – white people were disenfranchised, blatant media talking points supplied directly by the Clinton campaign were used, and there were cases of electoral fraud (voting machines were rigged) never seen before in the history of the party.

The Clintons were not just the greatest candidates the establishment ever had, they were the makers of the system that fed and directed them.

The author is a research scholar in modern and contemporary history at Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India.

Source: http://www.realprogressivesusa.com/news/editorial/2016-11-12-hillary-clinton-is-not-simply-a-symptom-of-our-corrupt-system-she-is-a-leading-cause

"The U.S. Election: It's over at last, or is it?”

Immanuel Wallerstein — 2016-12-01T05:23:45Z

Almost everyone is astonished at Trump's victory. It is said that even Trump was astonished. And of course now everyone is explaining how it happened, although the explanations are different. And everyone is talking about the deep cleavages that the election created (or it reflected?) in the U.S. body politic.

I am not going to add one more such analysis to the long list I'm already tired of reading them. I just want to concentrate on two issues: What are the consequences of this victory of Trump (1) for the United States, and (2) for U.S. power in the rest of the world.

Internally, the results, no matter how you measure them, move the United States significantly to the right. It doesn't matter that Trump actually lost the national popular vote. And it doesn't matter that if a mere 70,000 votes in three states (something under 0.09% of the total vote cast) had been lacking to Trump, Hillary Clinton would have won.

What does matter is that the Republicans have gained what is called the trifecta - control of the Presidency, both Houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court. And while the Democrats might win back the Senate and even the Presidency in four or eight years, the Republicans will hold on to a Supreme Court majority for a very much longer time.

To be sure, the Republicans are divided on some important issues. This is apparent just one week after the elections. Trump has already begun to display his pragmatic side and therefore his priorities: more jobs, tax reduction (but certain kinds), and saving parts of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) that are widely popular. The Republican Establishment (a quite far right Establishment) has other priorities: destroying Medicaid and even Medicare, different kinds of tax reform, and rolling back social liberalism (such as abortion rights and gay marriage).

It remains to be seen if Trump can win against Paul Ryan (who is the key figure in the Congress-based rightwing), or Paul Ryan can push back Trump. The key figure in this struggle seems to be Vice-President Mike Pence, who has positioned himself remarkably as the real number two in the Presidential office (as had Dick Cheney).

Pence knows Congress well, is ideologically close to Paul Ryan, but politically loyal to Trump. It was he that chose Rience Priebus as Chief of Staff for Trump, preferring him to Steve Bannon. Priebus stands for uniting the Republicans, while Bannon stands for attacking Republicans who are less than 100% loyalists to an ultra-rightwing message. While Bannon got a consolation prize as an inside counselor, it is doubtful that he will have any real power.

However this intra-Republican struggle turns out, it is still the case that U.S. politics are now significantly further to the right. Perhaps the Democratic Party will reorganize as a more leftwing, more populist movement, and be able to contest the Republicans in future elections. That too remains to be seen. But Trump's electoral victory is a reality and an achievement.

Let us now turn from the internal arena in which Trump has won and has real power to the external arena (the rest of the world) in which he has virtually none. He used the campaign slogan "make America great again." What he said time and time again was that, if he were president, he would ensure that other countries respected (that is, obeyed) the United States. In effect, he alluded to a past in which the United States was "great" and said that he would recover that past.

The problem is very simple. Neither he nor any other president - be it Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or for that matter Ronald Reagan - can do very much about the advanced decline of the erstwhile hegemonic power. Yes, the United States once ruled the roost, more or less between 1945 and circa 1970. But ever since then, it has been steadily declining in its ability to get other countries to follow its lead and to do what the United States wanted.

The decline is structural and not something within the power of an American president to stem. Of course, the United States remains an incredibly powerful military force. If it misuses this military power, it can do much damage to the world. Obama was very sensitive to this potential harm, which accounts for all his hesitancies. And Trump was accused throughout the electoral campaign of not understanding this and therefore being a dangerous wielder of U.S. military power.

But while doing harm is quite possible, doing what the U.S. government might define as good seems virtually beyond the power of the United States. No one, and I mean no one, will follow today the lead of the United States if it thinks its own interests are being ignored. This is true not only of China, Russia, Iran, and of course North Korea. It is true as well of Japan and South Korea, India and Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, France and Germany, Poland and the Baltic states, and our erstwhile special allies like Israel, Great Britain, and Canada.

I am fairly sure that Trump does not yet realize this. He will boast about the easy victories, like ending trade pacts. He will use this to prove the wisdom of his aggressive stance. But let him try to do something about Syria - anything - and he will soon be disabused of his power. He is most unlikely to retreat on the new relationship with Cuba. And he may come to realize that he should not undo the Iran agreement. As for China, the Chinese seem to think that they can make better arrangements with Trump than they would have been able to do with Clinton.

So, a more rightwing United States in a more chaotic world-system, with protectionism the major theme of most countries and an economic squeeze on the majority of the world's population. And is it over? By no means, neither in the United States, nor in the world-system. It's a continuing struggle about the direction in which the future world-system (or systems) should and will be heading.

Commentary No. 437, Nov. 15, 2016

Trump Victory Comes With A Silver Lining For The World's Progressives

Yanis Varoufakis — 2016-12-01T05:21:10Z

The election of Donald Trump symbolises the demise of a remarkable era. It was a time when we saw the curious spectacle of a superpower, the US, growing stronger because of – rather than despite – its burgeoning deficits. It was also remarkable because of the sudden influx of two billion workers – from China and Eastern Europe – into capitalism's international supply chain. This combination gave global capitalism a historic boost, while at the same time suppressing Western labour's share of income and prospects.

Trump's success comes as that dynamic fails. His presidency represents a defeat for liberal democrats everywhere, but it holds important lessons – as well as hope – for progressives.

From the mid-1970s to 2008, the US economy had kept global capitalism in an unstable, though finely balanced, equilibrium. It sucked into its territory the net exports of economies such as those of Germany, Japan and later China, providing the world's most efficient factories with the requisite demand. How was this growing trade deficit paid for? By the return of around 70 per cent of the profits made by foreign corporates to Wall Street, to be invested in America's financial markets.

To keep this recycling mechanism going, Wall Street had to be unshackled from all constraints; leftovers from President Roosevelt's New Deal and the post-war Bretton Woods agreement which sought to regulate financial markets. This is why Washington officials were so keen to deregulate finance: Wall Street provided the conduit through which increasing capital inflows from the rest of the world equilibrated the US deficits which were, in turn, providing the rest of the world with the aggregate demand stabilising the globalisation process. And so on.

What goes up

Tragically, but also very predictably, Wall Street proceeded to build unfathomable pyramids of private money (also known as structured derivatives) on top of the incoming capital flows. What happened in 2008 is something small children who have tried to build an infinitely tall sand tower know well: Wall Street's pyramids collapsed under their own weight.

It was our generation's 1929 moment. Central banks, led by US Fed chief Ben Bernanke, a student of the 1930s Great Depression, rushed in to prevent a repetition of the 1930s by replacing the vanished private money with easy public credit. Their move did avoid a second Great Depression (except for weaker links such as Greece and Portugal) but had no capacity to resolve the crisis. Banks were refloated and the US trade deficit returned to its pre-2008 level. But, the capacity of America's economy to equilibrate world capitalism had vanished.

The result is the Great Western Deflation, marked by ultra low or negative interest rates, falling prices and devalued labour everywhere. As a percentage of global income, the planet's total savings are at a world record level while aggregate investment is at its lowest.

When so many idle savings accumulate, the price of money (ie. the interest rate), indeed of everything, tends to fall. This suppresses investment and the world ends up in a low-investment, low-demand, low-return equilibrium. Just like in the early 1930s, this environment results in xenophobia, racist populism and centrifugal forces that are tearing apart institutions that were the Global Establishment's pride and joy. Take a look at the European Union, or the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

Bad deal

Before 2008, workers in the US, in Britain and in the periphery of Europe were placated with the promise of “capital gains” and easy credit. Their houses, they were told, could only increase in value, replacing wage income growth. In the meantime their consumerism could be funded through second mortgages, credit cards and the rest. The price was their consent to the gradual retreat of democratic process and its replacement by a “technocracy” intent on serving faithfully, and without compunction, the interests of the 1 per cent. Now, eight years after 2008, these people are angry and are getting even.

Trump's triumph completes the mortal wounding this era had suffered in 2008. But the new era that Trump's presidency is inaugurating, foreshadowed by Brexit, is not at all new. It is, indeed, a post-modern variant of the 1930s, complete with deflation, xenophobia, and divide-and-rule politics. Trump's victory is not isolated. It will no doubt reinforce the toxic politics unleashed by Brexit, the undisguised bigotry of Nicolas Sarkozy and Marine Le Pen in France, the rise of the Alternative für Deutschland, the “illiberal democracies” emerging in Eastern Europe, Golden Dawn in Greece.

Thankfully Trump is not Hitler and history never repeats itself faithfully. Mercifully, big business is not funding Trump and his European mates like it was funding Hitler and Mussolini. But Trump and his European counterparts are reflections of an emergent Nationalist International that the world has not seen since the 1930s.

Just as in the 1930s, so too now a period of debt-fuelled Ponzi growth, faulty monetary design and financialisation led to a banking crisis that begat deflationary forces which bred a mix of racist nationalism and populism. Just like in the early 1930s, so too now a clueless establishment aims its guns at progressives, such as Bernie Sanders and our first Syriza government in 2015, but ends up being upended by belligerent racist nationalists.

Global response

Can the spectre of this Nationalist International be absorbed or defeated by the Global Establishment? It takes a great deal of faith to think that it can, in view of the Establishment's deep denial and persistent coordination failures. Is there an alternative? I think so: A Progressive International that resists the narrative of isolationism and promotes inclusive humanist internationalism in place of the neoliberal Establishment's defence of the rights of capital to globalise.

In Europe this movement already exists. Founded in Berlin last February, the Democracy in Europe Movement (DiEM25) is attempting to achieve that which an earlier generation of Europeans failed to do in 1930. We want to reach out to democrats across borders and political party lines asking them to unite to keep borders and hearts open while planning sensible economic policies that allow the West to re-embrace the notion of shared prosperity, without the destructive “growth” of the past.

But Europe is clearly not enough. DiEM25 is encouraging progressives in the US, who supported Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein, in Canada and in Latin America to band together into a Democracy in the Americas Movement. We are also seeking progressives in the Middle East, especially those shedding their blood against ISIS, against tyranny, and against the West's puppet regimes to build a Democracy in the Middle East Movement.

Trump's triumph comes with a silver lining. It demonstrates that we are at a crossroads when change is inevitable, not just possible. But to ensure that it is not the type of change that humanity suffered from in the 1930s, we need movements to spring out and to forge a Progressive International to press passion and reason back into the service of humanism.

Yanis Varoufakis is professor of economics at University of Athens, a former Greek finance minister and is a co-founder of DiEM25.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Source: http://www.theage.com.au/comment/trump-victory-comes-with-a-silver-lining-for-the-worlds-progressives-20161113-gsofrc.html

Justin Trudeau's Giant Corporate Giveaway

Martin Lukacs — 2016-12-01T05:18:08Z

A privatization spree in Canada could cost regular people billions, erode democracy and undermine the fight against climate change

While prime minister Justin Trudeau flogged our public assets last week, he had a soothing message: rest assured, we'll be well-served by the private sector. Bankers and billionaires lined up to sound a note of confidence. “I think it's unprecedented,” exclaimed Canada's top business lobbyist John Manley. “A once-in-a-generation opportunity,” enthused Trudeau's economic advisory council.

These corporate figures are rubbing their hands because Trudeau is about to put one of our great crises in their hands: the need for historic investment in the country's infrastructure, for so long the domain of the state.

No one will deny the urgency. Roads and bridges are crumbling and congested with traffic. Subways and buses overcrowded and underfunded. We need a roll-out of emissions-reducing initiatives to avert catastrophic climate change, and a build-up of defences to protect ourselves from floods and fires already locked in.

But many will question the Liberals plan to deal with it: selling off existing public assets to raise money, and having private investors fund, build and operate new infrastructure. If they get their way, expect a wave of privatizations—targeting public services and goods like roads, ports, airports, utilities, the post office, and more. According to Adam Vaughan, one of its Liberal architects, there simply isn'tan alternative: “to be afraid of the private sector when you're trying to fix this country's infrastructure is shortsighted…stupid, irresponsible.”

By responsible and far-sighted, does Vaughan mean the result of past Canadian experiments in privatization? Unsafely constructed schools. Packed, dangerous prisons. Water treatment systems flooded with sewage. Super hospitals built with faulty wiring in emergency rooms. Senior care homes over-run with inedible food and filth.

The politicians prattle about the private sector covering the risk of projects: the enabling lie that cannot for its life find evidence. Time and again, the costs of these public-private partnerships have instead been borne by the public. In Ontario over the last decade alone, their cost-overruns burdened citizens with an extra $8bn and racked up $30bn in public liabilities—the equivalent of $6000 per household. But perhaps Canadians are just too stupid to understand their merits. Stupid enough that 75 percent of them surveyed now oppose such privatization schemes. So stupid, indeed, that in many cases they have clamoured successfully for these services to be returned to public control.

Trudeau's plan for a privatization bank would expand these local disasters to a national scale. Corporate and pension-fund backers have already announced they expect returns of 7 to 9 percent on their investments. How do you think that will happen? The only way that skimping ever does: higher bills, user fees, and hidden government subsidies. Diminishment in quality of service. Cuts in jobs and pay. No wonder some of Trudeau's corporate advisors are offering their helpful advice free of charge: it's regular people who will end up carrying the cost.

These costs are not an oversight of privatization but their objective: the inevitable result of opening up the public sphere to private profit-making. For more than thirty years in Canada, such measures have been a tool of an elite agenda promoted by successive Liberal and Tory governments: the transfer of wealth from the poorer to the wealthy, from the public trust to the private clutch. Is it any wonder why most people's incomes and standard of living have stagnated, while those of millionaires has skyrocketed?

So it's not surprise that Trudeau doesn't dare call privatization by its name. Instead his Ministers have invented hip, ambiguous names like “asset recycling” and the “flywheel of reinvestment” to describe their proposed schemes. And the public opposition might explain how the Liberals' proclivity for consultations hasn't extended to this matter.

Because privatization serves the elite, it always spawns contempt for democracy. Take this revelatory example from a decade ago: a slide-show used by a Canadian legal firm as they promoted privatization projects in British Columbia. One slide describing the obstacles to privatization is entitled “Inherent diseases.” The obstacles? “Stakeholders,” “transparency,” and “public justification.” For corporations chasing endless profits, the basic value of democracy are not essential to a healthy, thriving society. They are a scourge to be avoided.

All this secrecy, euphemism and dismissive rhetoric is meant to obscure a single, glaring fact: the arguments in favour of privatization are rubbish. There is no need to privatize public assets: with government borrowing rates at historic lows, the Liberals could simply take out loans and build infrastructure at a fraction of the cost. And forget the notion that we're broke. This line is regularly peddled by the political and corporate class to distract from the cash, much of it accumulated through tax cuts, hoarded by Canadian corporations: at the end of 2015, a stunning $600bn.

You'd think that Trudeau's anti-austerity pledge, so crucial to his election, would have meant putting our hands on some of these obscene corporate profits. It has taken scarcely a year for the facade to fall away. He has barely shifted Canada's taxation structure—meaning government revenue, which could be the engine of a bold economic transformation, remains at the lowest since the post-WW2 period. And now, none other than Donald Trump has introduced a privatization infrastructure bank proposal strikingly similar to Trudeau's. Will even that not make the Liberals blush?

Those of us who anticipated and warned that Justin Trudeau would continue such policies were shouted down. But privatization, deregulation and downsizing in the scope and spending of the state: this is the neoliberal consensus that continues to grip politics across the continent. Donald Trump has become only its most racist and authoritarian expression; Trudeau its most glossy and beguiling.

The transition that Canadians want will require enormous levels of spending—and need to be public and paid for. By strengthening and reinventing the public sphere, the government could unleash a program of mass transit, building renovations, storm barriers, urban redesign and green jobs that reduces emissions, racism and inequality all at once. But pretending the private sector can lead this is a recipe for disaster: their hunger for profits will prevent this transformation from being either ambitious, accessible or fair.

Clear-thinking economists call it privatization. Liberal spin-doctors will call it by some fanciful name. I call it the legalized fleecing of Canadians, a giant corporate giveaway.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/true-north/2016/nov/22/justin-trudeaus-giant-corporate-giveaway?CMP=twt_a-environment_b-gdneco

Armed Drones Part of Trudeau's New Military

Matthew Behrens — 2016-12-01T05:15:20Z

A proposed Canadian Mission Sequence of Events takes readers through the log of a drone mission, with demonstrators referred to as “moving targets” and drones employed to “assist ground security forces [to] control a crowd of protestors.” Later on, the drone crew works with a security team and “vectors them to the area where they spot [a] vehicle and intercept it, identify the occupants and ascertain that the individuals were attempting to hang a banner concerning global warming.”

Following a U.S. election campaign dominated by questions of temperament and fitness to carry the nuclear football, the new President will also inherit one of the most troubling but little discussed legacies of the Obama administration. That's the limitless capacity to assassinate anyone by armed drone, a signature policy of the past 8 years resulting in thousands of casualties in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

“We now have this very significant bureaucratic and legal infrastructure to support targeted killing, and there's virtually no oversight by Congress or the courts of the lawfulness of these strikes,” says Jameel Jaffer, the Kingston-born human rights lawyer who, following a clerkship with Supreme Court Justice Beverley McLachlin, has spent the past 15 years on the front lines of U.S. court battles challenging war on terror practices from indefinite detention and warrantless wiretapping to torture and untold layers of government secrecy.

“Once you accept the concept that the battlefield is borderless and war powers can be used anywhere, you open up [the potential for] all sorts of abuses,” says Jaffer, who will deliver the 11th Annual Eva Holtby Lecture on Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum on November 15 and sign copies of his new book, The Drone Memos: Targeted Killing, Secrecy, and the Law. It's a partially redacted collection of originally top secret memos and documents in which some of the country's leading lawyers have twisted themselves like pretzels to justify abuses that Jaffer says would have been unthinkable a generation ago.

“When Bush proposed extrajudicial detention [of alleged terror suspects], Americans were quite rightly alarmed and outraged, but when Obama authorized extrajudicial killing, Americans were for the most part indifferent,” Jaffer says, noting part of that may have been due to the amount of faith Americans placed in him following the bleak Bush years.

“But you cannot invest that kind of power in the presidency just because of the person who occupies that spot at a certain point in time, because someone else will eventually occupy that spot. And when they inherit this virtually unchecked power, we have very little idea how they are going to use it, because we don't know what the world will look like in a few years. Something might happen that makes the resort to this kind of power much more appealing, and so a President may say certain people in Germany or Canada or Spain present a sufficient threat to the US that we need to kill them. At that time there will be no institutional checks against that kind of decision. To me that seems crazy.”

Drone warfare – in which pilots sitting in a Nevada or New York State military bunkers remotely pilot unmanned aerial vehicles armed with real-time video cameras and Hellfire missiles halfway around the globe – is very much part of public discourse, from Hollywood movies to Obama joking about the use of Predators to scare guys wanting to date his daughters. Obama was even quoted as saying “I'm really good at killing people,” but much of the assassination program's legal schematics remain secret, from why people are targeted to how someone can be defined as an “imminent threat” when they may be on a target list for months at a time.

In 2012, the New York Times reported the calculus for the administration's claims of extremely low drone strike civilian casualties was based on considering “all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”

Jaffer has spent years in the courts trying to force disclosure of the documentation behind those killings, but is frustrated with a judicial system that continues to defer to the administration's national security confidentiality claims. Similar legal fights may be in store here as the Canadian military pushes for a fleet of its own armed drones, which top soldier General Jonathan Vance touted last March at the Senate Defence Committee. Vance told Senators that he is prioritizing the Joint Unmanned Surveillance and Target Acquisition System (JUSTAS), and earlier this year, Public Works Canada put out a Request for Information to weapons manufacturers hungry for an opportunity to fulfill the program's mandate, whose parameters appear to engage the very profound legal, political, and moral questions Jaffer tackles in The Drone Memos.

Indeed, the 88-page JUSTAS document lists a number of potential scenarios which appear to share the Obama administration's shady targeted killings rationale. The program envisions a hypothetical “Expeditionary ISR/Strike Scenario” with Canadian Forces in Afghanistan performing reconnaissance for a coalition convoy, during which their drone pilots conduct “Pattern of Life Assessments” as they look for “High-Payoff Targets” on the approved “Joint Prioritized Target List” (echoing the Kill List updated at Obama's infamous “Terror Tuesday” meetings). As part of a proposed mission sequence, the pilot crew spots 3 Fighting Aged Males (FAMs) “standing near a long wall close to the road that the convoy is traveling on,” with one holding a small radio or cell phone. When it appears that “there is a shovel leaning against the wall next to the three FAMs,” and that some nearby dirt seems to have been disturbed, they suddenly become labeled as combatants, and the use of force – in this instance one Hellfire Missile and two 250-lbs GBU 48 laser guided bombs – is authorized.

While it is unclear how those dead FAMs can perhaps prove their innocence posthumously, the consideration of such a scenario raises significant questions about the extent to which Canadian officials will develop a similar targeted killing infrastructure to their American cousins. Given Ottawa's broad definition of Canadian interests, which now encompasses much of the globe, will that include non-battlefield scenarios, as has become commonplace stateside? And how will extrajudicial executions be justified by Trudeau's Justice Department's lawyers?

Equally concerning, drones are an increasingly favoured tool for surveillance and crowd control. The JUSTAS document posits another potential scenario, a Quebec G20 summit where “several groups have openly indicated their intent to protest and intelligence indicates that radical elements may exploit the presence of international media to further their anti-capitalist cause by disrupting the Summit.”

A proposed Mission Sequence of Events takes readers through the log of a drone mission, with demonstrators referred to as “moving targets” and drones employed to “ assist ground security forces [to] control a crowd of protestors.” Later on, the drone crew works with a security team and “vectors them to the area where they spot [a] vehicle and intercept it, identify the occupants and ascertain that the individuals were attempting to hang a banner concerning global warming.”

As Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan considers the best bang for his military buck, drone manufacturers argue their products are far cheaper than fighter jets. Jaffer, meanwhile, says that as militarized drone use appears on the Canadian horizon, “the public ought to know what the government is doing, and they should be able to assess how the use of this kind of violence is likely to change both the society in which the violence is used and the society that authorizes the use of it.”

The New Abnormal In Kashmir

Jean Drèze — 2016-12-01T05:12:55Z

Continued repression is likely to intensify the alienation in Kashmir. It would be much wiser for the government to realise the futility of stonewalling and initiate unconditional talks with all concerned

Sixteen years is a long time to do something about a situation that causes immense suffering to millions of innocent people. But when I returned to Kashmir last month, after a gap of 16 years, I found that people's agony and anger had — if anything — intensified.

Deciphering the shutdown

As in 2000, I found an intense popular aspiration for azadi (freedom). The Indian Army is perceived, almost unanimously, as an occupying force, and people are fed up with the controls, crackdowns, searches, arrests, beatings, torture and pellet guns. The most common graffiti found around the towns and villages of Kashmir is “Go India, go back”.

The latest expression of this anger is the popular uprising that has rocked Kashmir during the last few months. The Indian media commonly refers to it as a “shutdown”, an ambiguous term that fails to clarify who is shutting what. This so-called shutdown is actually a general strike (hartal). Ever since Hizbul Mujahideen ‘commander' Burhan Wani was killed in early July, shops have been closed in Kashmir, traffic has been halted, and schools have been deserted. There have been thoughtful exemptions from the strike, say for street vendors, chemist shops and specific times of the week. Some public services, notably health care and the public distribution system, were not only allowed but encouraged to keep going. For the rest, the strike has brought public life to a halt for months on end. That, at any rate, was the situation until I visited Kashmir in late October.

So far as I can tell from many discussions with students, farmers, workers, businessmen, intellectuals and others over a whole week, the strike has overwhelming popular support. It is difficult, of course, to believe that public life can be paralysed to this extent without an element of coercion or pressure. Sometimes the pressure is explicit: anyone who drove a car in Kashmir (outside privileged areas of Srinagar) during the last few months ran the risk of a broken windscreen. But this traffic control was not the work of armed squads or antisocial goons. It was the job of local residents and youngsters who support the strike. In any strike, there is a difficult question of how to deal with potential strike-breakers and free-riders.

Protest calendar for the people

Along with the strike, a series of protests took place all over Kashmir during this period. A “protest calendar” was issued every week (with varying effect) by Hurriyat leaders, who seem to have wide popular support. Examples of suggested protests include occupying the roads, freedom marches to the district headquarters, converging to the United Nations office in Srinagar, performing namaz (prayers) on the road, sit-ins in various locations, visiting those injured by pellet guns, boycotting government offices, reading collective pledges, wall painting, playing resistance songs or music, sending letters to the armed forces, holding conventions on the right to self-determination, displaying banners and placards saying ‘We Want Freedom', and more. To my knowledge, there are no calls to stone-pelting in the calendars, though it is perhaps taken as read that protests in Kashmir often end up with stone-pelting for one reason or another.

The spirit of these protest calendars was well expressed by Hurriyat leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq in a “preface” published on August 24 in Greater Kashmir: “As a war has been waged against us by a mighty force, our only means of resistance against the oppression is peaceful protest. The space for that is also highly constricted. Yet individually and collectively we have to find ways and means of registering our protest. The protest calendar is our collective voice. Each one of us especially our intelligentsia, artists, poets, writers, painters have to come forward and use their skills and creativity to express our pain and sentiment. Every Kashmiri's contribution to the movement counts.”

State clampdown on protests

So-called “anti-India” protests, however, are effectively banned in Kashmir, no matter how peaceful they may be. The authorities have sweeping powers to prevent protests, not only under the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, but also under Jammu and Kashmir's draconian Public Safety Act. Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code, prohibiting assemblies of more than four persons (an old tactic of the British Raj to prevent nationalist protests), is in force throughout the Valley. Assemblies, marches, graffiti, pamphlets, even silent vigils — all these are banned if there is any trace of a demand for freedom.

Further restrictions on civil liberties ensure that this state of affairs goes unchallenged. Student politics is banned. International human rights organisations such as Amnesty International and the United Nations Human Rights Council are not allowed to visit Kashmir. Local human rights activists are also on a short leash — the arbitrary detention of Khurram Parvez during the last two months is the latest warning that they should not go too far. Similarly, when Kashmir Reader (one of Kashmir's leading dailies) was banned on September 30, other media outfits “got the message”, to quote a prominent Kashmiri editor. Kashmir, in short, has been turned into a kind of open jail.

In an insightful article (“Address the ‘new normal' in Kashmir”, The Hindu, October 10), former National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan candidly acknowledged that the current unrest in Kashmir is a “home-grown” popular uprising which cannot be blamed on Pakistan or outsiders. He did not comment, however, on the “new abnormal” that accompanies this uprising — an extreme suppression of civil liberties.

When all forms of dissent are banned, the line between peaceful protest and armed resistance becomes blurred. The main difference, it may appear, is that violent deeds receive more attention. Everyone in India has heard of stone-pelting, but daily acts of peaceful protest — or attempted protest — in Kashmir have been ignored.

The refusal to engage

Today, the towns and villages of Kashmir are peppered with “Burhan Wani chowks”, often marked with slogans such as ‘Burhan Wani is in our heart' and ‘We are all Burhan Wani'. Those who remember Burhan are not hot-headed guerrillas — they are ordinary people who aspire to a peaceful life. If they admire him, it is not because he killed anyone (quite likely, he never did), but because he gave his life, at a tender age, for the freedom struggle. It is for the same reason that we remember and admire Bhagat Singh. Gandhi himself urged us to “bow to them [Bhagat Singh and his associates] for their heroism”, even as he criticised their acts.

There is, possibly, an insightful paradox in the fact that it took the death of an armed militant to spark a largely non-violent uprising across the Kashmir Valley. Many people proudly told me that the strike would continue “to the finish”. Yet they realised that azadi may not come any time soon. Thus, they often added that other uprisings would happen if need be. Indeed, it is not the first one — similar events happened in 2010.

The response of the Indian government to this uprising is to stonewall: refuse any concessions (even just a ban on pellet guns), arrest the leaders (Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, Yasin Malik, the lot), and wait for people to lose hope. This strategy, however, perpetuates the repression, and every act of repression intensifies the yearning for freedom in Kashmir. Nothing unites people like shared persecution.

If the current policy of inflexible suppression of the freedom movement persists, the brutality will continue for decades. Continued repression is likely to intensify the alienation of the Kashmiri people from India, and could also foster a revival of armed resistance in Kashmir and beyond. It would be much wiser to realise the futility of stonewalling, and initiate unconditional talks with all concerned. Atal Bihari Vajpayee (then Prime Minister of India) had taken significant steps in that direction, and seems to be remembered for it in Kashmir. Today, however, the iron fist is back.

The conformist nature of public opinion in India, when it comes to Kashmir, does not help matters. It is hard to understand how opposition parties, civil society and social movements have remained silent on Kashmir for so long. There have been no major demonstrations of solidarity with the people of Kashmir anywhere in India during the last few months. Even public discussions of the situation in Kashmir are extremely rare in India. As veteran journalist Kuldip Nayar observed many years ago, “When it comes to Kashmir, the conscience of most in the country becomes dead.” If anything, the situation is worse today, as the Indian media further dull our conscience with a barrage of distorted accounts of the situation in Kashmir. The new abnormal threatens to engulf us all.

Jean Drèze is a Visiting Professor at the Department of Economics, Ranchi University.

Montreal Convergence Assembly on Rojava and the Kurdish Struggle for World Kobane Day

Antoine Khalili — 2016-12-01T05:10:11Z

On Tuesday, November 1st 2016, World Kobane Day, activists and allies of the inspiring social movements in Rojava (the northern region of Syria) gathered in a large number of cities across the world. We in Montreal also chose to express our unfailing solidarity and admiration, not only for the Kurdish cause, but for all the peoples of this region who are struggling to exercise their local sovereignty by means of the principles of direct democracy, social justice, feminism, ethnic and religious harmony and ecology.

We do this because this people's movement embodies a flame of humanist hope shining in the midst of the obscurantism of the so-called Islamic State. We do this because this flame could be quickly extinguished by the nauseating breath of the Turkish State, or between the fingers of the great imperialist powers. For these reasons, it was important to meet and to express our solidarity and also to provide an opportunity for Montreal groups to learn about the struggle.

We in Montreal who are allies of Rojava do not make the error of compartmentalising various struggles according to their geographic zones or their protagonists; we believe that all of our different struggles are part of one movement to build a better world. It is in this sense that our event of international solidarity naturally took the form of a convergence assembly. The assembly, organised in the evening in the Alternatives building on Ave du Parc, comprised about fifty people belonging to 22 different organisations:

– The Kurdish Federation of Quebec
– The Committee of Kurdish Women
– Indigenous activists
– People from the YPG militia
– Women of Diverse Origins - Femmes des diverse origines (WDO-FDO)
– Raging Grannies
– Proletarian Feminist Revolutionary Front
– Centre des travailleurs-euses (im)migrant-e-s / Immigrant Workers Centre (CTI-IWC)
– International League of Peoples' Struggle (ILPS)
– The Quebec-Ottawa Committee con Ayotzinapa Solidarite Ayotzi and Nestora Salgado, a Mexican activist and political prisoner
– Artists for Peace / Les Artistes pour la Paix
– The Convergence of Anticapitalist Struggles (CLAC)
– Alternatives
– The Council of Canadians
– The Emma Goldman Collective (Saguenay)
– Institute of Social Ecology (Vermont)
– Vermont Workers' Centre
– BDS Quebec
– Tadamon
– Movement Against Rape and Incest
– The International Alliance of Women
– The Milagro Sala Committee

We came to a consensus on the need for struggle, of collective organisation, and of education as a means for attaining a social project in accordance with these values.

In the assembly, everyone was welcome to speak, which participants to exchange perspectives and share about their particular struggles and initiatives, which are diverse but clearly convergent and in parallel with the Kurdish struggle.

What is clear is the political coherence of carrying out parallel struggles for more local sovereignty in several places around the world (such as the region of Rojava in Syria, the First Nations struggles in Canada, the Chiapas in Mexico, and the province Jujuy in Argentina). All of these movements are supported by indigenous populations. This should remind us that the cultural and ethnic homogenisation of populations by force is at the heart of our criticism of the nation-state, of its borders, and of the colonial phenomenon that defined them. We reaffirm with the greatest vigour the inalienable right of all peoples to self-determination!

The assembly was in broad agreement concerning the idea that the free self-determination of a people invariably depends on its capacity to refuse sexist oppression in its midst. This implies the firmest rejection of capitalist objectification of women, as well as the total refusal of traditional patriarchy. Indeed, we must place women's struggles at the heart of our struggles if we want to build a better world.

The assembly concluded with exchange of contacts and the will to launch a Montreal network of solidarity with the people of Rojava and the Kurdish struggle in order to both express our solidarity together and also to better educate and share about this struggle in Montreal civil society. It is necessary at present that we remain mobilized in order to make these exchanges bear fruit, and to organize ourselves into a lasting and coherent convergence of struggles.

Translated by Josh Lalonde
Edited by Nathan McDonnell