Sean McElwee writes: There’s a lot of talk of Karl Marx in the air these days – from Rush Limbaugh accusing Pope Francis of promoting “pure Marxism” to a Washington Times writer claiming that New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is an “unrepentant Marxist.” But few people actually understand Marx’s trenchant critique of capitalism. Most people are vaguely aware of the radical economist’s prediction that capitalism would inevitably be replaced by communism, but they often misunderstand why he believed this to be true. And while Marx was wrong about some things, his writings (many of which pre-date the American Civil War) accurately predicted several aspects of contemporary capitalism, from the Great Recession to the iPhone 5S in your pocket.
Here are five facts of life in 2014 that Marx’s analysis of capitalism correctly predicted more than a century ago: [Continue reading…]
The Express Tribune reports: While the biggest arms companies recorded a slump in sales during 2012, Russian companies posted sharp increases, noted the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) in its latest data on international arms production released on Friday.
Despite the slump, seven US companies remained amongst the world’s top ten entities in terms of 2012 arms sales, with Lockheed Martin emerging at top.
The list excluded China, about which SIPRI says:
“Although several Chinese arms-producing enterprises are large enough to rank among the SIPRI Top 100, it has not been possible to include them because of lack of comparable and sufficiently accurate data.”
The global top 100 list had 42 companies from the US and six from Russia. The total sales of arms and military services by these hundred companies in 2012 amounted to no less than $395 billion.
“Sales by the 42 US-based arms producers amounted to 58 per cent of the total arms sales of the Top 100, with 30 companies based in Western Europe making up another 28 per cent of the total,” SIPRI says.
The US-based Lockheed Martin was followed by Boeing (also US-based) and United Kingdom’s BAE Systems on number three. [Continue reading…]
The Jerusalem Post reports: A resolution to the nuclear dispute with Tehran, should current diplomatic efforts fail, “is likely to involve military action,” US State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf said on Friday.
“I’m not predicting that we would take military action right away,” Harf said. “It’s more of a broad statement that, look, if we can’t get this done diplomatically in six months or a year or at any time, we will – we are committed to resolving it. And that involves less durable and, quite frankly, riskier actions.”
In his annual State of the Union address last week, US President Barack Obama said that negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 – the US, United Kingdom, France, Russia, China and Germany – were the world’s best chance to resolve the standoff “peacefully” and to avoid “the risks of war.”
But rather than directly stating that diplomatic failure could lead to war, Obama said that should talks fail, he would be “the first” to seek additional sanctions against the Islamic Republic from the US Congress.
Asked by The Jerusalem Post which the administration considered more likely if diplomacy does not achieve a comprehensive solution in a time frame agreed upon by world powers – war or additional sanctions – Harf responded: “I’m not saying in six months we’re going to go to war if we don’t get a deal done. Broadly speaking, the alternative to resolving this diplomatically is resolving it through other means.
“There are only a few scenarios that come out of this: Either we resolve it diplomatically or we resolve it a different way,” Harf continued.
“It’s just common sense that that different way could involve – is likely to involve military action.” [Continue reading…]
Reuters reports: President Hassan Rouhani has secured the backing of senior conservative clerics against hardliners opposed to a nuclear deal reached with major powers, Iran’s official news agency IRNA said on Saturday.
His first vice president, Eshaq Jahangiri, visited clerics in the Shi’ite Muslim holy city of Qom to explain the deal and seek their blessing over “complex foreign policy issues” ahead of talks next month on a long-term accord, IRNA said.
The Guardian reports: In late December 2001, someone calling themselves TheTrueHOOHA had a question. He was an 18-year-old American male with impressive IT skills and a sharp intelligence. His real identity was unknown. Everyone who posted on Ars Technica, a popular technology website, did so anonymously.
TheTrueHOOHA wanted to set up his own web server. It was a Saturday morning, a little after 11am. He posted: “It’s my first time. Be gentle. Here’s my dilemma: I want to be my own host. What do I need?”
Soon, regular users were piling in with helpful suggestions. TheTrueHOOHA replied: “Ah, the vast treasury of geek knowledge that is Ars.” He would become a prolific contributor; over the next eight years, he authored nearly 800 comments. He described himself variously as “unemployed”, a failed soldier, a “systems editor”, and someone who had US State Department security clearance.
His home was on the east coast of America in the state of Maryland, near Washington DC. But by his mid-20s he was already an international man of mystery. He popped up in Europe – in Geneva, London, Ireland, Italy and Bosnia. He travelled to India. Despite having no degree, he knew an astonishing amount about computers. His politics appeared staunchly Republican. He believed strongly in personal liberty, defending, for example, Australians who farmed cannabis plants.
At times he could be rather obnoxious. He called one fellow-Arsian, for example, a “cock”; others who disagreed with his sink-or-swim views on social security were “fucking retards”.
His chat logs cover a colourful array of themes: gaming, girls, sex, Japan, the stock market, his disastrous stint in the US army, his negative impressions of multiracial Britain (he was shocked by the number of “Muslims” in east London and wrote, “I thought I had gotten off of the plane in the wrong country… it was terrifying”), the joys of gun ownership (“I have a Walther P22. It’s my only gun but I love it to death,” he wrote in 2006). In their own way, the logs form a Bildungsroman.
Then, in 2009, the entries fizzle away. In February 2010, TheTrueHOOHA mentions a thing that troubles him: pervasive government surveillance. “Society really seems to have developed an unquestioning obedience towards spooky types… Did we get to where we are today via a slippery slope that was entirely within our control to stop? Or was it a relatively instantaneous sea change that sneaked in undetected because of pervasive government secrecy?” [Continue reading…]
McClatchy reports: The Obama administration is refusing to divulge how much it spent to build the secret prison facility at Guantanamo where the accused 9/11 co-conspirators are held and has asked a federal court to dismiss a lawsuit by a Miami Herald reporter demanding documents that would reveal the number.
In a filing Friday, the Justice Department said that the Pentagon had found just one document that would provide information relevant to a 2009 Freedom of Information Act request reporter Carol Rosenberg filed seeking that cost figure. That document was exempt from disclosure, the filing said, because it contained details of internal deliberations and the names of many officials who were entitled to privacy.
The Justice Department also made a separate secret filing with the court that provided more details on why the document should remain secret. That filing was not shared with Rosenberg’s attorneys, and its contents are unknown. [Continue reading…]
Omar Barghouti writes: If Secretary of State John Kerry’s attempts to revive talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority fail because of Israel’s continuing construction of illegal settlements, the Israeli government is likely to face an international boycott “on steroids,” as Mr. Kerry warned last August.
These days, Israel seems as terrified by the “exponential” growth of the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (or B.D.S.) movement as it is by Iran’s rising clout in the region. Last June, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu effectively declared B.D.S. a strategic threat. Calling it the “delegitimization” movement, he assigned the overall responsibility for fighting it to his Strategic Affairs Ministry. But B.D.S. doesn’t pose an existential threat to Israel; it poses a serious challenge to Israel’s system of oppression of the Palestinian people, which is the root cause of its growing worldwide isolation.
The Israeli government’s view of B.D.S. as a strategic threat reveals its heightened anxiety at the movement’s recent spread into the mainstream. It also reflects the failure of the Foreign Affairs Ministry’s well-endowed “Brand Israel” campaign, which reduces B.D.S. to an image problem and employs culture as a propaganda tool, sending well-known Israeli figures around the world to show Israel’s prettier face. [Continue reading…]
Pardiss Kebriaei writes: I just returned from Guantánamo, where I met with my client Ghaleb Al-Bihani, a Yemeni citizen who began his thirteenth year of detention without charge there this month. He has been deprived of a third of his life, from ages 22 to 35, because the United States government says that in 2001 he was a cook for a Taliban affiliate that no longer exists. In a few months, he will go through another government review that will either recommend his transfer from Guantánamo or his continued and indefinite imprisonment. We have words and images to describe waterboarding; it is harder to convey the suffocation of perpetual detention.
The crisis of Ghaleb’s continuing detention — its injustice and pain — was at one time more visible. Guantánamo began as a prison the Bush administration declared was outside the law, and there was little pretense about it. People were shoved off the first transport planes in shackles and hoods and locked into outdoor cages. For two years, they were held incommunicado and denied the right to know or contest why they were being detained. When it came to torture, the “gloves were off,” to paraphrase top military and civilian officials.
The wrongful detention and abuse of the men who remain are less overt now. Today, as the result of years of legal challenges and advocacy, detainees have the right to challenge the legality of their detention in federal court; indeed, it is a federal court that sanctioned Ghaleb’s indefinite detention for being a cook. Today, the cages of the makeshift “Camp X-Ray” are overgrown with weeds; the majority of detainees are held in “state-of-the-art” facilities that resemble maximum-security prisons in the United States and mask similar cruelties. Today, torture is the mental torment of 4,380 days behind the walls of an island prison without good reason or end. It is that which Ghaleb says is excruciating.
A colleague, the first civilian attorney allowed access to the prison in 2004, talks of that first visit. The barbarity of the way human beings were being treated was raw and exposed. My visits nowadays begin with a mint on my pillow in my lodging quarters. I can bring pizza to my clients. The crisis at Guantánamo is as present now as ever, but it has been given legal cover, sanitized, normalized. It took a mass hunger strike at the prison last year to wake us up to it.
A few years ago, at an event in January marking yet another anniversary of the Guantánamo prison’s existence, I met the father of Fahad Hashmi, a US citizen of Pakistani descent who grew up in New York City. Fahad is incarcerated at another infamous US prison — the Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX) in Colorado. As a lawyer, I had spent the last several years trying to extend the protections of the American legal system to Guantánamo. But that meeting was an introduction to a slice of unjust punishment and torture on American soil—another outrage born of the “War on Terror,” where government zealotry produces grotesque outcomes, the façade of legal process can legitimize profound unfairness, and barbarity is masked by utter normality. [Continue reading…]
Noah Shachtman reports: The target computer is picked. The order to strike has been given. All it takes is a finger swipe and a few taps of the touchscreen, and the cyberattack is prepped to begin.
For the last year, the Pentagon’s top technologists have been working on a program that will make cyberwarfare relatively easy. It’s called Plan X. And if this demo looks like a videogame or sci-fi movie or a sleek Silicon Valley production, that’s no accident. It was built by the designers behind some of Apple’s most famous computers — with assistance from the illustrators who helped bring Transformers to the silver screen.
Today, destructive cyberattacks — ones that cause servers to fry, radars to go dark, or centrifuges to spin out of control — have been assembled by relatively small teams of hackers. They’re ordered at the highest levels of government. They take months to plan. Their effects can be uncertain, despite all the preparation. (Insiders believe, for example, that the biggest network intrusion in the Pentagon’s history may have been an accidental infection, not a deliberate hack.)
With Plan X, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is looking to change all that. It wants munitions made of 1s and 0s to be as simple to launch as ones made of metal and explosives. It wants cyberattack stratagems to be as predictable as any war plan can be. It wants to move past the artisanal era of hacking, and turn cyberwarfare into an industrial effort. [Continue reading…]
Earlier this week, Ron Kampeas wrote: On Facebook today, Tzipi Livni, the Israeli justice minister and the top negotiator in talks with the Palestinians, posted an attack aimed at her coalition partner Naftali Bennett.
Bennett, Israel’s economy minister and leader of the pro-settler Jewish Home party, had the night before delivered a speech in which he apparently argued that Israel’s problem was one of hasbara, or PR. This is not a new argument from him — it’s not a new argument at all — but something set Livni off this time.
So in a Facebook post that was dripping with sarcasm, she proposes a PR campaign for Bennett’s vision of an Israel that has rejected of Palestinian statehood, and wonders if it could be even worse than apartheid South Africa.
Livni is not the first Israeli politician to warn that a failure to arrive at a two-state solution could lead to apartheid; she is not even the first scion of the “fighting family” of right-wing Revisionists who once stood for a Greater Israel to do so — that would be Ehud Olmert, the former prime minister.
But I’ve never seen any Israeli leader so senior describe so brutally an erosion of democracy in the country, nor have I seen anyone use real-time examples to posit an apartheid analogy. Olmert and Ehud Barak before him said that demographic realities could lead to Apartheid; Livni sees it looming before her in the radical Hilltop Youth settler movement and the “price tag” attacks on Palestinians. [Continue reading…]
The Guardian reports: Kerry announced the start of a new peace process in July – itself the product of intensive negotiations – flanked by Israeli and Palestinian negotiators, beneath the chandeliers of the State Department’s Benjamin Franklin Room in Washington. “I believe that history is not made by cynics,” he declared. “It is made by realists who are not afraid to dream.”
The goal Kerry set for the talks had defeated previous secretaries of state and presidents: a peace agreement, based on a resolution of every single major issue that has divided Israel and Palestine for decades. And he wanted it secured within just nine months.
The 68th secretary of state had by then already acquired a reputation for grandiose speeches; privately, some diplomats began asserting that his self-belief could border on hubris.
Now some of his critics say they are being proved right. “It does not seem to me the talks are going well,” said Elliott Abrams, a former White House advisor who worked on the Israel-Palestine conflict under George W Bush’s administration. “The secretary went into this initially with the goal of a final status agreement. It is very clear that that is impossible. He maybe has a rabbit in his hat. But I doubt it.”
Much of the scepticism is born from the fact Kerry’s ambitious talk of the all-encompassing “final status agreement” has, for some months now, been replaced with more modest noises about a getting the sides to endorse a set of basic principles for further talks.
Others say that persuading both sides to agree to a “framework deal” will be a remarkable achievement given the wide gaps between them thus far, and could lead to further progress. “A framework agreement is a logical part of trying to get to a final, comprehensive agreement,” said a senior US administration official close to the process.
But, clearly, the goalposts have shifted. Gone is the promise of a wide-ranging final agreement, achieved in one go; instead, the US has settled on a step-by-step approach. [Continue reading…]
In the 1930s, the war against fascism attracted the support of 35,000 foreign fighters who traveled to Spain from as many as 53 nations to join the International Brigades.
In the U.S. media, the foreigners drawn to Syria are generally branded as jihadists or terrorists and their motives assumed to be extreme or fanatical. That for many of them their motives might be comprehensible to others who are not Muslim, seems to require a leap of imagination outside the reach of Washington, the press or most news consumers on this side of the Atlantic.
Channel 4 News in the UK, however, has the editorial gumption to frame the following report in a way that none of their American counterparts would dare:
Tom Perkins, who was one of the founders of venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, sees himself as belonging to America’s “creative one percent” — the one percent who are “the job creators.” He takes pride in the fact that Kleiner Perkins has “created pretty close to a million jobs.” He says the rich “get richer by creating opportunity for others.”
The idea that capitalists create jobs is central to the American view of the way economies work. It’s so axiomatic, hardly anyone seems to pause to consider whether it makes any sense.
Certainly, capitalists provide investments that make the creation of jobs possible, but this isn’t fundamentally different from walking into Best Buy and buying an iPhone.
In a store, the transaction is simple: make a payment and in return receive a product. There’s nothing creative in the action of the buyer. Money is used in order to be able to make use of the creativity of others. The buyers of iPhones do not create iPhones.
Likewise, investors are buying the fruit of the labor of others. Investors have the luxury of being able to afford to wait for a return on their capital and the willingness to risk seeing no return, but the only creative element in what they do is focused on their calculations about where to place their bets. Even then, it’s creative focus, irrespective of the innovative vehicle, is on the creation of wealth.
Capitalists don’t create workers and the jobs they claim they are creating are useless if no one with the required skills is available to fill them. It is workers themselves and educators and the society that supports them, that are the real engine of job creation. All the investor does is control the flow of money and cream off a hefty portion of the profit.
As for Perkins claim that if the rich are allowed to do what the rich do, which is get richer, then everyone else will get richer too, he’s just rehashing discredited free-market economics.
Thomas Piketty’s new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, lays out the reasons that growing inequality is not just a problem — it’s built into the structure of capitalism.
There are a number of key arguments in Piketty’s book. One is that the six-decade period of growing equality in western nations – starting roughly with the onset of World War I and extending into the early 1970s – was unique and highly unlikely to be repeated. That period, Piketty suggests, represented an exception to the more deeply rooted pattern of growing inequality.
According to Piketty, those halcyon six decades were the result of two world wars and the Great Depression. The owners of capital – those at the top of the pyramid of wealth and income – absorbed a series of devastating blows. These included the loss of credibility and authority as markets crashed; physical destruction of capital throughout Europe in both World War I and World War II; the raising of tax rates, especially on high incomes, to finance the wars; high rates of inflation that eroded the assets of creditors; the nationalization of major industries in both England and France; and the appropriation of industries and property in post-colonial countries.
At the same time, the Great Depression produced the New Deal coalition in the United States, which empowered an insurgent labor movement. The postwar period saw huge gains in growth and productivity, the benefits of which were shared with workers who had strong backing from the trade union movement and from the dominant Democratic Party. Widespread support for liberal social and economic policy was so strong that even a Republican president who won easily twice, Dwight D. Eisenhower, recognized that an assault on the New Deal would be futile. In Eisenhower’s words, “Should any political party attempt to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear from that party again in our political history.”
The six decades between 1914 and 1973 stand out from the past and future, according to Piketty, because the rate of economic growth exceeded the after-tax rate of return on capital. Since then, the rate of growth of the economy has declined, while the return on capital is rising to its pre-World War I levels.
“If the rate of return on capital remains permanently above the rate of growth of the economy – this is Piketty’s key inequality relationship,” [Branko] Milanovic [an economist in the World Bank’s research department] writes in his review, it “generates a changing functional distribution of income in favor of capital and, if capital incomes are more concentrated than incomes from labor (a rather uncontroversial fact), personal income distribution will also get more unequal — which indeed is what we have witnessed in the past 30 years.” [Continue reading…]
The Guardian reports: Nearly 1,900 people have been killed in Syria since the Geneva talks between the government and the opposition began just over a week ago, it was reported on Friday, as the UN mediator admitted there had been “no progress to speak of” so far.
The casualty figures were published by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based pro-opposition group. It said at least 498 of the dead were civilians, 850 were fighters from mainstream or extremist rebel groups and 515 were on the government side. An estimated 130,000 people have died since the conflict erupted nearly three years ago. [Continue reading…]
The Los Angeles Times reports: The Obama administration on Thursday slammed Syria for failing to fulfill its pledges to surrender its most dangerous chemical weapons for destruction and voiced concern that the entire project could now be in jeopardy.
In a statement to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in the Netherlands, U.S. Ambassador Robert P. Mikulak accused Syria of “open-ended delaying” of the disarmament process in an attempt to renegotiate the deal it agreed to last fall.
The effort “has seriously languished and stalled,” Mikulak told the executive council of the group, which is overseeing the initiative with the United Nations. Syria’s “open-ended delaying of the removal operation could ultimately jeopardize the carefully timed and coordinated multistate removal and destruction effort.”
U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, at an appearance in Warsaw, also expressed concern.
“They need to fix this,” he said.
Syrian President Bashar Assad agreed to surrender his chemical arsenal, one of the biggest in the world, to deflect President Obama’s threat to launch punitive missile strikes last summer in response to Syria’s alleged use of deadly nerve agents against civilians in suburbs of the capital, Damascus.
Syria initially appeared to comply with its promises to give up its poison gases, and the White House hailed the deal as a major foreign-policy accomplishment. But veteran arms experts have predicted since the deal was signed in September that Assad would seek to test the world community’s resolve and might try to keep some parts of a huge stockpile.
Under a disarmament plan proposed by the Syrians, Damascus was to deliver 700 tons of its most dangerous chemicals by next Wednesday to the port of Latakia, where the material would be loaded onto ships and destroyed at sea. But officials say it has delivered only about 32 tons, in two shipments on Jan. 7 and Jan. 27. [Continue reading…]
Sean McElwee writes: There’s a lot of talk of Karl Marx in the air these days – from Rush Limbaugh accusing Pope Francis of promoting “pure Marxism” to a Washington Times writer claiming that New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is an “unrepentant Marxist.” But few people actually understand Marx’s trenchant critique of capitalism. Most people are vaguely aware of the radical economist’s prediction that capitalism would inevitably be replaced by communism, but they often misunderstand why he believed this to be true. And while Marx was wrong about some things, his writings (many of which pre-date the American Civil War) accurately predicted several aspects of contemporary capitalism, from the Great Recession to the iPhone 5S in your pocket.
In the 1930s, the war against fascism attracted the support of 35,000 foreign fighters who traveled to Spain from as many as 53 nations to join the 
