Wednesday, August 31, 2016
Johan Galtung’s view from Europe: The Global Power Imbalance
The Global Power Imbalance
29 August 2016
Nº 444 | Johan Galtung, 29 Aug 2016 - TRANSCEND Media Service
Let us start with two major relations: nature-human, USA-Rest.
Look at the human-nature relations. We are used to being on top, killing and taming animals, protected against many of nature’s hazards including micro-organisms. But nature comes up with ever smaller viri, and larger, or more, tsunamis and earthquakes, and an erratic climate. We oscillate between blaming ourselves, including military scheming, and the anthropomorphic “Mother Nature is angry” (Evo Morales). If nature is angry, she has good reasons for a good riddance of us. And we are slow at a deeper human-nature relations respecting and enhancing both.
Nature is on top and our natural sciences are simply not good enough, taken by surprise all the time. Meteorology is good at covering the whole Beaufort wind range from 0-12; others not. Maybe we have desouled nature and besouled ourselves too much to establish our own Herrschaft (rule, dominance), at the expense of Partnerschaft (partnership). Unless this changes, imbalance with nature on top, and surprises, will continue.
Maybe the opposite holds for the US-Rest imbalance; that US exceptionalism serves USA as badly as humans above nature serves us?
This author, in 1976, compared the decline and fall of the Roman Empire to a possible decline and fall of the West in general and the US Empire in particular, based on the synergy of uni-causal paradigms. Rome considered itself exceptional and invincible by barbarians, but the counterforces were tearing at them; and they lived on past glory. Clinton, straight from the past with some domestic renewal, will enact that past; any realistic assessment being close to treason. There are elements of the latter in Trump, but he lives in his own bubble, insensitive to the context on which he depends. 60-40 for Clinton?
What happens then? A continuation of the USA on a collision course with three of the other seven big powers in the world. With Russia over Ukraine; with China over “everything but China” TPP, and navy navigation rights in the South China Sea; with Islam over the Islamic State, to be eliminated before it is understood. The USA says this is with Putin-Xi-IS, grossly underestimating how representative they are.
The relation with the other four is not too good either: with major powers Germany and France in EU-NATO over Ukraine; the USA still unable to treat African and Latin American-Caribbean unification with dignity, and on equal terms, and to handle India’s many ambiguities. They think they have Japan–not among the 8 Big–in the pocket with “collective self-defense”, but may underestimate Abe’s ambiguities.
We mentioned a human tendency to desoul nature and besoul humans. There is a similar US tendency to see others as objects to be handled by the only true subject, the USA. The objects, all seven, now enter subject-hood with their own goals and ways of pursuing them. Some of the ends and means may be incompatible with those of the US; spelling conflicts. However, rather than solving those conflicts creatively the USA may turn these subjects in ultimate object-hood, bombing that recalcitrant thing into the Stone Age (from which they then emerge).
This will not work. The US-topped pyramid will tumble down, and in the debris at the bottom USA will find itself on more equal terms. There will be massive US resistance, already visible, and few allies will sign up on the US side. The most likely are those of the same evangelical faith, Denmark and Norway, bombing Libya, contributing the latest (last?) NATO Secretaries General. The world as a whole, more afraid of USA than others, is sick and tired of the whole thing. The balance there once was, like for the Roman Empire, has smoldered away, a victim of massive abuse and living in the past. Clinton will speed this up, leaving for the 2020 president to create a new reality.
But there are more imbalances. Inside EU, Germany is now on top of a pyramid, realizing a German goal from two “world” wars in Europe. This is not what the others want: if EU, then equality. Germany will come tumbling down too; Volkswagen with all its tricks contributing. Much German technical magic, like the US political magic, is gone. Other members can also make cars and things, flattening the pyramid.
Still more imbalances and a rather major one: Europe vs Eurasia, Europe in the old sense of EU and some more vs Eurasia with not only Russia and former Soviet republics, Caucasian, “stans”, but with China and potentially the rest of Islam, Mongolia–and Turkey in the middle. Middle? A US NATO ally fighting the Kurds, another US ally, in Syria; and turning to Russia for good neighbor relations in spite of history. How successfully, we shall see; the shadows of history are deep indeed.
1600+ years have split Orthodox and Catholic Europe, with a power balance to Russia abused by a Napoleon, a Hitler. Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill bridging deepens the split to the Evangelicals and strengthens Eurasia. The old “balance” may yield to a European House.
Still more. The relation of Russia to Eastern Europe took the shape of a power balance with the latter enrolled in NATO and EU. The relation of Russia to China became SCO against US encirclement; NATO vs a Warsaw Pact moved 10,000 Km to the east and very much stronger. Is Russia able to persuade Eastern Europe not to be afraid of Russia, that Crimea-Ukraine was special? Is China able to persuade Russia not to be afraid of Chinese farmers moving into former Chinese territory?
What we see all over is “power balance” based on force on both sides yielding to imbalance because one is smoldering, or yielding to peace, meaning a balance based on good things flowing. In short, what we see globally is not power balance but power imbalance that can lead to war “before it is too late”, to passive coexistence, or to active coexistence, peace. Very, very dynamic indeed. No stability.
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Johan Galtung, a professor of peace studies, dr hc mult, is founder of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment and rector of the TRANSCEND Peace University-TPU. He has published 164 books on peace and related issues, of which 41 have been translated into 35 languages, for a total of 135 book translations, including ‘50 Years-100 Peace and Conflict Perspectives,’ published by the TRANSCEND University Press-TUP.
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Thursday, August 18, 2016
Justice Department to end use of private prisons—when will Hawaii do the same?
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“This is a huge deal. It is historic and groundbreaking,” said David Fathi, director of the ACLU National Prison Project. “For the last 35 years, the use of private prisons in this country has crept ever upward, and this is a startling and major reversal of that trend, and one that we hope will be followed by others.”—quoted in Washington Post article
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by Larry Geller
Various news outlets reported today that the Justice Department will end its use of private prisons.
Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates announced the decision on Thursday in a memo that instructs officials to either decline to renew the contracts for private prison operators when they expire or “substantially reduce” the contracts’ scope. The goal, Yates wrote, is “reducing — and ultimately ending — our use of privately operated prisons.
[Washington Post, Justice Department says it will end use of private prisons, 8/18/2016]
This does not affect other federal agencies, for example ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), but it is a beginning.
Now, when will Hawaii follow suit?
Former Governor Neil Abercrombie announced his intention to stop using private prisons on the Mainland, but did not follow through:
Ige’s predecessor, Neil Abercrombie, was a former probation officer who said bringing back Hawaii prisoners was one of his top priorities.
“It is dysfunctional to send people out of the state. It costs money. It costs lives. It costs communities. It destroys families. It is dysfunctional all the way around — socially, economically, politically and morally,” Abercrombie told reporters in December 2010.
[Civil Beat, Ige: Number of Hawaii Inmates Imprisoned in Arizona Will Go Up Before it Goes Down, 8/3/2015]
See also the ongoing Civil Beat series, Hawaii Behind Bars with articles by reporter Rui Kaneya. Particularly troubling is that Hawaii prisoners are being subjected to “valley fever” in Arizona and reportedly not receiving proper treatment. The disease can be and has been fatal.
But that is only one of many abuses, including and especially the separation of inmates from communities that help them make a successful re-entry to society at the end of their sentence, and the devastating effect on their children and families:
Kat Brady, a Hawaii-based prisoner advocate, decries her state’s practice of shipping their prisoners to Arizona, stating that “our people have been moved around like chess pieces, sold to the lowest bidder, in essence. I hear the anguish of families, of children who miss their daddies, of wives struggling to keep their families together and the desperation of people trying to locate their loved ones.”
[Prison Legal News, Study Details States’ Abuses of Out-Of-State Prisoner Transfers to For-Profit Prisons, 11/10/2015]
What to do with the prisoners? Brady suggests reducing offenses that put people in prison in the first place. Too many of our state prisoners should not be in prison to begin with, and reducing their number would clearly reduce chronic overcrowding and the need to ship prisoners to private facilities on the Mainland.
Monday, August 15, 2016
Johan Galtung’s view from Europe: Money, Economy, Economics
Money, Economy, Economics
15 August 2016
Nº 442 | Johan Galtung, 15 Aug 2016 - TRANSCEND Media Service
Money is the key: that genius innovation for storing general value and exchanging specific values according to price. Not strange, that heads of state had their faces imprinted on coins and bills.
But not on cents and euros. The EU is faceless. Brexit is not.
Coins and bills are fading; not money, capital, and its growth. Look at The Richest Man Who Ever Lived: The Life and Times of Jacob Fugger by Greg Steinmetz, brilliantly reviewed by Martha Howell (TNYRB, 7 Apr 2016). Born in 1459, in that pivot German city Augsburg, he died in 1515, and here is how he used the system:
“Fugger expanded his business from trade and used his ability to provide ready credit in order to secure rights to productive assets, such as mines that reliably yielded returns over considerable periods of time. He made princes, in this case the Habsburgs dependent on his money. He financed their elections to the sponsorship, extended loans to pay their armies, and bribed their enemies to keep them at bay.”
Sounds familiar? Half a millennium ago. Solid. There is more to it:
“-wealth was made not in production as Marx thought but in “arbitrage” trade, where goods like silks and pepper, gold and silver, furs and wax, were bought cheap and sold dear. -wealth came from long distance trade, and the longer the distance traveled, or the more difficult the journey, the more mysterious the origin, the more rare the goods transported, the more exotic or the more vital to rule the products supplied, the greater the chance for profit”. Like David Ricardo.
The quip about Marx is important. His brilliant analysis of means and modes of production, with exploitation of the body and alienation of the soul, focused only on production, not on “trade” or new means of transportation-communication, as important as new means of production. They invent new products, like computers, but trade in the chain from producers to end consumers often fetches more profit[i].
Even if Marx missed that point[ii], Fugger did not. He settled on pepper, and became richer than the Medicis, Rothschilds, Rockefellers. Considerable risk-taking, gambling, speculation, were parts of it.
What corresponds to pepper today? Drugs, for deeper tastes. Making drugs illegal increases risks and hence the price. If demanded, products from Moon-Mars-Venus would fetch even higher prices.
What is new is on the money side: processing money into financial objects at ever-higher complexity, derivatives, with enormous amounts to gain and lose. No investment, no contact with the real world, only with the virtual finance economy world, speculating also with other people’s money, often ruining them. Fugger would have joined with enthusiasm, like the (Spanish)-Portuguese-Dutch-English; “invariably aided by ruthless exploitation of human labor and natural resources”. Capital grows, many humans and much nature deteriorate; then as now.
The real economy extracts resources from Nature, processes them through Production, distributes to Consumption through trade, sending waste from production and consumption back to nature. An astounding amount and variety of products–goods and services–available on the market on a demand-supply basis to those who can afford the price. But there is no built-in protection and enhancement of humans and nature, only of capital. Hence, the term capitalism–as opposed to humanism, naturism, or a mix of the three–for that economy is entirely correct.
The not built-in must come from the outside. States, which helped Capital work the way it does, may come to the rescue. The State can regulate Capital, and be deregulated, like before the 2008 crisis[iii]. Limitations on capital flowing abroad can be lifted: “international capital flows are now more than 60 times the value of trade flows”[iv].
Civil Society can boy/girlcott, and establish alternative economies[v].
That an inequitable system produces inequality, now[vi], as between Fugger and his peers, and the rest, is small wonder. The history is called modernity. The sociology is called class. The geography of “ruthless exploitation of human labor and natural resources”, by the companies and warships of the states mentioned, spells colonialism; in the Americas where the indigenous almost disappeared, in Africa with rampant slavery, and in Asia. The situation is now improving many places[vii]; not because the economy changed, but colonialism did.
A social science with data and theories about how that economy works would be economics, or “capitalistics” rather. Marx did that, predicting its demise. The economy had obviously gone, was, wrong[viii].
Economics also went wrong[ix] as mathematized, contradiction-free virtual real economy, latent with a manifest equilibrium in its womb. Not Aristotelian statics with things in natural places; but Galilean-Newtonian dynamics with static laws. Balances: “willing buyer-seller” (no side-effects), demand/supply (but demand/supply-driven economies), Smith’s invisible hand turning egoisms into altruism (but not yet).
Enters daoism: in balance there is imbalance, and vice versa, forces and counter-forces, contradictions. The West needs more daoist thought and less modeling frictionless mechanics and virtual economies on each other[x] The sciences of politics and society were more open to change and alternatives, not trying to canonize any present version like economics did. Why? Because domestic and global elites found alternatives meeting their interests whereas economics already did?
Companies-states were bodies, capital the position, its growth was the distance covered, rate of growth the speed, maybe accelerating, A. By laws of nature, bodies move and companies-states accumulate capital. To accelerate from feudal statics takes entrepreneurial force E=MA; M being the levels of inertia of the company-state, to be overcome.
Beautiful, but celestial bodies either move in circles-ellipses like planets and satellites, or linearly, like meteorites with a crash and a crater, hole, like for the pensioners whose savings disappeared. That in a finite world linear growth ends as if that has not sunk in.
An “economics” only for the quiet, balanced is like a meteorology for calm and breezes, not for gales, storms, let alone hurricanes. Beaufort 0-6 at most, not 7-12. We would not accept that meteorology.
The remedy? An economy centered on meeting basic human and nature needs, and empirical-critical-creative economics exploring how to do it[xi].
NOTES:
[i]. A personal example: As an author, I may get 13% from the sale of my books; the shop selling them 40%. Cut out the shop and Amazon accumulates the money. Cut out printed books–
[ii]. Marx did it his way in “On the Jewish Question”, linking capitalism to Judaism and the overthrow of capitalism to “the emancipation of mankind from Judaism”: “The Jew–has acquired financial power–insofar as through him and without him money has risen to world power and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian peoples. The Jews have emancipated themselves to the extent that the Christians have become Jews”. Michael Walzer, reviewing David Nirenberg Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition in TNYRB 20 March 2013 debunks Marx and others with a dialectic approach to Judaism and Jews, but the point here is Marx’ view, not Walzer’s.
[iii]. See Paul Krugman–admitting he did not foresee 2008–reviewing Mervyn King, The End of Alchemy, Norton, in TNYRB 14 July 2016.
[iv]. J K Sundaram, “Illicit Financial Flows”, english@other-news.info 29 Apr 2016; “end up in–US and the UK /and/ tax heavens”.
[v]. Barbara Harris-White, “Poverty and Capitalism”, Economic and Political Weekly, 1 April 2006, discusses 8 processes–and counter-processes–mitigating poverty; having in common that they have to come from outside the capitalist system. The same applies to the “15 Roads to Equality” by Norwegian economists discussed in Klassekampen October 2015. However, for the 23 to be “built into the economy” the economy has to have another focus than capital growth.
[vi]. And it is getting worse in the US economy: “–the poorest of the poor were a lot worse off in 2012 than in either 1996 or 1998.” Christopher Jencks, TNRYB 9 June 2016, reviewing K J Edin and H L Schaefer, $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, Houghton Mifflin.
[vii]. J K Sundaram, “The Geography of Poverty”, english@other-news.info 30 June 2016.
[viii]. Edmund Phelps “What Is Wrong with the West’s Economies?”, TNYRB, 13 August 2015: lack of justice; Bentham’s maximizing “sum of utilities” by redistributing from high to low, Rawls’ taxes and subsidies “to pull up people with the lowest wages”. But rather than abstract “lack of justice–meaning what?–the simple answer is “concrete suffering of humans and nature”.
[ix]. In “What’s the Matter with Economics?”, TNYRB, 18 Dec 2014 Alan S. Blinder–mainstream economist and textbook author–argues against Jeff Madrick Seven Bad Ideas: How Mainstream Economists Have Damaged America and the World, Knopf; also see the follow-up exchange in TNYRB 8 Jan 2015. The Seven ideas are major doctrines by economists, No. 1 “the invisible hand”. The book is reviewed favorably by Paul Krugman, “The dismal science of economics”, INYT, 27-28 Sep 2014: “Hardly any economist predicted the 2008 crisis”-“Economists presented as reality an idealized vision of free markets, dressed up in fancy math that gave it a false appearance of rigor”.
Also see Krugman’s review of R B Reich, Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few, Knopf, in TNYRB 17 Dec 2015; a more dubious thesis.
[x]. Joel Kaye, A History of Balance, 1250-1375: The Emergence of a New Model of Equilibrium and Its Impact on Thought, Cambridge University Press, argues that the economy and the role of money inspired mechanics rather than vice versa.
[xi]. For an effort, see this author’s Peace Economics, Transcend University Press, 2012.
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Johan Galtung, a professor of peace studies, dr hc mult, is founder of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment and rector of the TRANSCEND Peace University-TPU. He has published 164 books on peace and related issues, of which 41 have been translated into 35 languages, for a total of 135 book translations, including ‘50 Years-100 Peace and Conflict Perspectives,’ published by the TRANSCEND University Press-TUP.
This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC 4.0 License.
Thursday, August 11, 2016
It’s time to pay attention to what Trump is doing, not just what he tweets or says
by Larry Geller
The twittersphere and the commercial media seem mesmerised by whatever Trump tweets or says. It seems all to easy for him to get attention. But like a master magician, much of what we hear or see is misdirection.
It’s about time that he is given the serious analysis that a presidential candidate should receive. Fortunately, there are two programs, available as broadcast or as podcast, that provide much of the needed scrutiny.
While tweets argue over Trump’s alleged suggestion that Clinton be assassinated, another matter is getting little attention: Who are the “advisors” Trump is putting in charge of his policy? I put the term in quotes because it is interesting to swap the term with “donors.” Should he become president, I wonder how much it will take in contributions to be appointed to his cabinet.
For better analysis than one can find in a daily paper, watch or listen to Democracy Now (on `Olelo at 11 p.m. repeated the next day at 7 a.m.) or on the web at democracynow.org .
On this spacific issue, and regularly on all aspects of the election, I’ve been enlightened by Greg Palast’s regular conversations on Flashpoints, a long-running and popular program on KPFA which is available also as a podcast. The episoe feed is here.
Flashpoint host Dennis Bernstein interviewed Palast on the August 10 program on Trumps choice of economic advisors. The segment begins at the 29 minute point. The link to this program is here. Just move the slider forward to 29.
Much of the same material is in an interview titled Trump Economic Advisor Took Billions In Auto Industry Bailout on YouTube. It has the advantage that you get to “meet” Greg Palast visually, and yes, he always wears that same hat. I met him once in New York many years ago. I can’t say it was actually the very same hat, but it could be… nevermind. Here’s the video. I preferred the Flashpoint interview, but if you really must have video, try this:
Check the Flashpoint feed for more interviews with Greg Palast.Palast also has a website here. I greatly admire his style—he never, never pulls his punches.
