Emmanuel Macron Is a Cautionary Tale for Democrats

DEC 16, 2019

TD ORIGINALS

Conor Lynch

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/emanuel-macron-is-a-cautionary-tale-for-democrats/

Emmanuel Macron was born nearly a decade after the 1968 protests and strikes that shook France more than a half-century ago, threatening the presidency of Charles de Gaulle and bringing the country to a halt, but the 41-year-old president’s first few years in office have been highly reminiscent of that turbulent period in French history.

Since becoming president two and a half years ago, the country has been plagued by social unrest and historic protests, starting with the yellow vest (gilets jaunes) movement that erupted over a year ago, and continuing last week with a massive national strike. At least 800,000 people took to the streets across France Dec. 5 to protest the president’s plan to overhaul the country’s pension system, which could push up the retirement age and reduce benefits for millions of French public workers. The strikes have since continued, and on Wednesday, the government officially introduced its plan, leading French unions to call for more strikes. It has been the country’s biggest week of demonstrations since Macron became president, and it comes after more than a year of steady yellow vest protests against the president’s neoliberal economic policies.

The yellow vest movement, which began in October 2018, has caused some of the worst social unrest in Paris since 1968, and has continued far longer than the protests that shook the nation 50 years ago. The past week’s strikes have been even more disruptive, especially to the economy, shutting down trains, flights, schools and museums.

Halfway through his five-year term, Macron, who was billed as the great liberal bulwark against the rising tide of right-wing populism back in 2017, has managed to revive the great protest tradition in France. He also has made it increasingly likely that his 2017 opponent, the far-right nationalist Marine Le Pen, will come back stronger and even more powerful over the next few years. A French public opinion survey published last month, for example, revealed that Le Pen is gaining in the polls as Macron bleeds support. In the poll, Le Pen is projected to win the first round of the 2022 election, and though Macron still wins easily in the second round, he is down from 66% in 2017 to 55%, while Le Pen is up from 34% to 45%.

Commenting on the poll, Arnaud Montebourg—Macron’s predecessor as finance minister under Francois Hollande’s government—remarked that two years of “Macronism” had already boosted Le Pen by 11 points, and “with a little more effort, Mr Macron will pave the way for a Le Pen victory.” The president “isn’t a rampart against the RN [Le Pen’s National Rally party],” he said, but “a propeller for the RN.”

This trend was rather predictable, and many on the left did in fact predict what is currently transpiring under Macron. Though he ran as an outsider candidate in 2017, creating his own party and promising a new and innovative approach to governing that would transform France into a “startup nation” (as if he could run the government like a startup), it was easy to see that he represented continuity over change. Most French voters recognized this, but grudgingly voted for the lesser of two evils. Like the two front-runners in the 2016 American election, Macron and Le Pen were both widely disliked, resulting in the lowest voter turnout in almost 50 years. Macron’s victory was hardly a triumph over far-right populism, as so many centrists and liberals were eager to believe just a few months after Trump’s devastating win in the United States.

In just a few years Macron has shown us exactly how not to combat right-wing populism and nationalism. Earlier this year, Le Pen’s RN came in first in the European Parliament elections, ahead of Macron’s centrist party, with the highest turnout for the European elections in France in decades. Now, as protests and strikes continue to erupt, the far-right leader will attempt to exploit popular anger to benefit her own agenda. And with a president like Macron, who shows arrogant disdain in the face of any criticism, Le Pen will have the perfect foil for her right-wing populist narrative.

In America, Democrats should be paying close attention to what is happening in France, especially with an election coming up against our own right-wing demagogue. If there is any presidential candidate in the Democratic primaries who most resembles Macron, it is South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who, if successful, would be around the same age as the French president was when he was elected in 2017. Like Macron, Buttigieg is fawned over by the press for his precocious intelligence, and the 37-year-old presents himself as an outsider as he recycles the same old centrist talking points. While Macron studied at France’s elite École nationale and started his career as an investment banker for Rothschild & Co., Buttigieg went to Harvard before cutting his teeth at McKinsey & Company. And like the startup president, Buttigieg is popular with tech billionaires and is Silicon Valley’s favorite candidate.

When Macron won in 2017, many American liberals said that Democrats needed their own version of Macron, and Buttigieg seems to fit the bill. But Democrats should be careful what they wish for. The current chaos in France is showing no signs of letting up, and with only 27% of French citizens expressing trust in Macron, according to a poll taken shortly before the Dec. 5 strike, the young president seems to be feeding the populist beast rather than taming it.

The strikes are set to continue indefinitely, and with a president who sees himself as the CEO of a startup corporation rather than a servant of the people, things will likely get worse before they get any better. For liberals watching from across the Atlantic, the lesson should be clear.

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The Moment the Military-Industrial Complex Became Uncontrollable

William D. Hartung / TomDispatch

DEC 16, 2019

OPINION

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-moment-the-military-industrial-complex-became-uncontrollable/

I’ve been writing critiques of the Pentagon, the national security state, and America’s never-ending military overreach since at least 1979 — in other words, virtually my entire working life. In those decades, there were moments when positive changes did occur. They ranged from ending the apartheid regime in South Africa in 1994 and halting U.S. military support for the murderous regimes, death squads, and outlaws who ruled Central America in the 1970s and 1980s to sharp reductions in the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals as the Cold War wound down. Each of those victories, however complex, seemed like a signal that sustained resistance and global solidarity mattered and could make a difference when it came to peace and security.

Here’s a striking exception, though, one thing that decidedly hasn’t changed for the better in all these years: the staggering number of tax dollars that persistently go into what passes for national security in this country. In our case, of course, the definition of “national security” is subsidizing the U.S. military-industrial complex, year in, year out, at levels that should be (but aren’t) beyond belief. In 2019, Pentagon spending is actually higher than it was at the peak of either the Korean or Vietnam conflicts and may soon be — adjusted for inflation — twice the Cold War average.

Yes, in those four decades, there were dips at key inflection points, including the ends of the Vietnam War and the Cold War, but the underlying trend has been ever onward and upward. Just why that’s been the case is a subject that almost never comes up here. So let me try to explain it in the most personal terms by tracing my own history of working on Pentagon spending and what I’ve learned from it.

From the Anti-Apartheid Movement to Battling the Military-Industrial Complex

I first began analyzing this country’s weapons-making corporations in the mid-1970s while still a student at Columbia University and deeply involved in the anti-apartheid movement of that moment. As one of my topics of research, I spent a fair amount of time tracing how some of those outfits were circumventing the then-existing arms embargo on (white) South Africa by using shadow companies, shipping weapons through third countries, and similar deceptions.

One of the outlets I wrote for then was Southern Africa magazine, a collectively produced, independent journal that supported the liberation movements in that part of the world. The anti-apartheid struggle was ultimately successful, thanks to the efforts of the global solidarity movement of which I was a small part, but primarily to the courageous acts of South African individuals and organizations like the African National Congress and the Black Consciousness Movement.

As it happens, there has been no such luck when it comes to reining in the Pentagon.

I started working on Pentagon spending in earnest in 1979 when I landed a job at the New York-based Council on Economic Priorities (CEP), an organization founded on the notion that corporations could be shamed into being more socially responsible. Armed with a BA in Philosophy — much to the chagrin of my father who was convinced I would be unemployable as a result — I was lucky to get the position.

Even then I had my doubts about whether encouraging social responsibility would ever be adequate to tame profit-hungry multinational corporations, but the areas of research pursued by CEP were too important to pass up. One of their most significant studies at the time was a report identifying the manufacturers of anti-personnel weaponry used to grim effect in the war in Vietnam. And Gordon Adams, who went on to be the top defense budget official in the Clinton White House in the 1990s, wrote a seminal study, The Iron Triangle, while I was at CEP. That book laid out in a memorable fashion the symbiotic relationships among congressional representatives, the arms industry, and the Pentagon that elevated special interests above the national interest and kept weapons budgets artificially high.

My initial assignment was as a researcher for CEP’s Conversion Information Center — not religious conversion, mind you, but the conversion of the U.S. economy from its deep dependence on Pentagon spending to something better. The concept of conversion dated back at least to the Vietnam War era when it was championed by figures like Walter Reuther, the influential head of the United Auto Workers union, and Seymour Melman, an industrial engineering professor at Columbia University who wrote a classic book on the subject, The Permanent War Economy of the United States. (I took an undergraduate course with Melman which sparked what would become my own abiding interest in documenting the costs and consequences of the military-industrial complex.)

My work at CEP mostly involved researching subjects like how dependent local and state economies were — and, of course, still are — on Pentagon spending. But I also got to write newsletters and reports on the top 100 U.S. defense contractors, the top 25 U.S. arms-exporting corporations, and the companies advocating for and, of course, benefiting from President Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars missile defense initiative. (That vast program was meant to turn space into a new “frontier” of war, a subject that has recently lit the mind of one Donald Trump.) In each case, CEP’s goal was to push public interest and indignation to levels that might someday bring an end to the most costly and destructive aspects of the military-industrial complex. So many years later, the results have at best been mixed and, at worst, well… you already know, given the sky-high 2020 Pentagon budget.

During my years at CEP and after, work on economic conversion was pursued at the national level by groups like the National Commission on Economic Conversion and Disarmament and, when it came to projects in defense-dependent states, by local outfits from Connecticut to California. Yet all of that work has been stymied for decades by a seemingly never-ending pattern of rising Pentagon budgets. The post-Vietnam dip in such spending briefly made the notion of conversion planning more appealing to politicians, unions, and even some corporations, but the military build-up in the early 1980s under President Ronald Reagan promptly reduced interest again. With that gravy train back on track, why even plan for a downturn?

From the Nuclear Freeze to the 1991 Gulf War

There was, however, one anti-militarist surge that did make progress during the Reagan years: the Nuclear Freeze Campaign. I worked closely with that movement, authoring a report, for instance, on the potentially positive economic impacts of an initiative to reduce U.S. and Soviet nuclear forces. Although President Reagan never agreed to a freeze of any sort, that national grassroots movement helped transform him from the president who labeled the Soviet Union “the Evil Empire” and joked that “the bombing will start in five minutes” to the one who negotiated the elimination of medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe and declared that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” As Frances Fitzgerald documented in Way Out There in the Blue, her history of Reagan’s missile defense initiative, by 1984 key presidential advisers were concerned that the increasingly mainstream anti-nuclear movement could damage him politically if he didn’t make some kind of arms-control gesture.

Still, the resulting progress in reducing those nuclear arsenals brought only a temporary lull in the relentless growth of the Pentagon budget. It peaked in 1987, in fact, before dipping significantly at the end of the Cold War when Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell famously claimed to be “running out of demons.” Unfortunately, the Pentagon soon fixed that, constructing a costly new strategy aimed at fighting “major regional contingencies” against regimes like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and North Korea (as Michael Klare so vividly explained in his 1996 book Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws).

President George H.W. Bush’s 1991 intervention in Kuwait to drive out Iraqi forces would provide the template for that new strategy, while seeming to presage a veritable new way of war. After all, that conflict lasted almost no time at all, seemed like a techno-wonder, and succeeded in its primary objective. As an added bonus, most of it was funded by Washington’s allies, not American taxpayers.

But those successes couldn’t have proved more illusory. After all, the 1991 Gulf War set the stage for nearly four decades of never-ending war (and operations just short of it) by U.S. forces across the greater Middle East and parts of Africa. That short-term victory against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, in fact, prompted a resurgence of imperial hubris that would have disastrous consequences for the greater Middle East and global security more broadly. Militarists cheered the end of what they had called the “Vietnam Syndrome” — a perfectly sensible public aversion to bloody, ill-advised wars in distant lands. Had that “syndrome” persisted, the world would undoubtedly be a safer, more prosperous place today.

The Merger Boom, Iraq War II, and the Global War on Terror

The end of the Cold War resulted, however, in that rarest of all things: real cuts in the Pentagon budget. They were, however, not faintly as deep as might have been expected, given the implosion of the other superpower on the planet, the Soviet Union. Still, those reductions hit hard enough that the weapons industry was forced to reorganize via a series of mega-mergers encouraged by the administration of President Bill Clinton. Lockheed and Martin Marietta formed Lockheed Martin; Northrop and Grumman became Northrop Grumman; Boeing bought McDonnell Douglas; and dozens of other firms, large and small, were scooped up by the giant defense contractors until only five major firms were left standing: Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, Boeing, Raytheon, and General Dynamics. Where dozens of firms had once stood, only the big five now split roughly $100 billion in Pentagon contracts annually.

The theory behind this surge in mergers was that the new firms would eliminate excess capacity and pass on the savings in lower prices for weapons systems sold to the U.S. government. That, of course, would prove a fantasy of the first order, as Lawrence Korb, then at the Brookings Institution, made clear. As I’ve also pointed out, the Clinton administration ended up essentially subsidizing those mergers, providing billions of taxpayer dollars to cover the costs of closing factories and moving equipment, while actually picking up part of the tab forthe golden parachutes given to executives and board members displaced by them.

Meanwhile, the companies laid off tens of thousands of workers. Congressman Bernie Sanders (I-VT) dubbed this process of subsidizing mergers while abandoning workers to their fate “payoffs for layoffs” and pushed through legislation that prevented some, but not all, of the merger subsidies from being paid out.

Meanwhile, those defense mega-firms began looking to foreign arms sales to bolster their bottom lines. An obliging Clinton administration promptly stepped up arms sales to the Middle East, making deals at a rate of roughly $1 billion a month in 1993 and 1994. Meanwhile, despite promises made at the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse, Washington oversaw the expansion of NATO to the Russian border, including the addition of Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic to the alliance.  As Tom Collina of the Ploughshares Fund has written, that helped scuttle the prospects for the kind of U.S.-Russian rapprochement that could have delivered a true “peace dividend” (the phrase of that moment) and accelerated reductions in global nuclear arsenals.

For companies like Lockheed Martin, however, such new NATO memberships looked like manna from heaven in the form of more markets for U.S. arms. Norman Augustine, that company’s CEO at the time, even took a marketing tour of nascent NATO members, while company Vice President Bruce Jackson found time in his busy schedule to head up an advocacy group with a self-explanatory name: the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO.

The 1990s also saw the beginnings of movement towards a second war with Iraq, pushed in those years by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), an advocacy group whose luminaries, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, would all too soon become part of the administration of President George W. Bush and the architects of his 2003 invasion of Iraq.

You won’t be surprised to learn that they were joined at PNAC by Lockheed Martin’s ubiquitous Bruce Jackson. Nor, at this late date, will you be shocked that those merger subsidies, NATO expansion, and the return to a more interventionist policy helped get military spending back on a steady growth path until the 9/11 attacks opened the spigots, launched the Global War on Terror, and sent a flood of new money pouring into the Pentagon and the national security state. The budget of the Department of Defense would only increase for the first 10 years of this century, a record not previously matched in U.S. history.

New World Challenges: Prospects for Shrinking the Pentagon Budget

Why has it been so hard to reduce the Pentagon budget, regardless of the global security environment? The power of the arms lobby, strengthened by the merger boom of the 1990s, was certainly one factor. Fear of terrorism generated by the 9/11 attacks, which set the stage for 18 years of ill-advised military adventures, including the never-ending (and disastrous) war in Afghanistan, is certainly another. The political fear of losing elections by being seen as either “soft” on defense or unconcerned about the fate of military-industrial jobs in one’s home state or district made many Democrats view taking on the Pentagon as the true “third rail” of American politics. And the military itself has blindly adhered to a strategy of global dominance that’s essentially been on autopilot, no matter the damaging consequences of near-endless war and preparations for more of it.

Still, even decades later, hope is not entirely lost. It remains possible that all of this might change in the years to come as a war-weary public — from progressives to large parts of Donald Trump’s base — has tired of the country’s forever wars, which have minimally cost something like $6.4 trillion, while resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths, according to the latest analyses by Brown University’s Costs of War project.

As even Donald Trump has acknowledged, those trillions could have gone far in repairing America’s infrastructure and doing so much else in this country. In truth, as Lindsay Koshgarian of the National Priorities Project has pointed out, that sort of money could have underwritten significant parts of major initiatives like the Green New Deal or Medicare for All that would change the nature of this society rather than destroying other ones.

But that money’s gone. The question is: What will the nation’s budget priorities be going forward? Both Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have called for reductions in Pentagon spending, with Warren singling out the Pentagon’s war budget, the so-called Overseas Contingency Operations account, or OCO, in particular for elimination. OCO has been used as a slush fund not only to pay for those wars, but also to fund tens of billions of dollars in Pentagon pet projects that have nothing to do with our current conflicts. Eliminating it alone could save up to $800 billion over the next decade for other uses.

There has recently been a surge of proposals aimed at cutting the soaring Pentagon budget in significant ways. My own organization, the Center for International Policy, for example, has created a Sustainable Defense Task Force made up of ex-White House and congressional budget experts, former Pentagon officials and military officers, and analysts from think tanks across the political spectrum. Our group has already outlined a plan that would save $1.25 trillion from current Pentagon projections over the next decade.

Meanwhile, a group of more than 20 progressive organizations called #PeopleOverPentagon has proposed $2 trillion in cuts over that decade and the Poor People’s Campaign, working from an analysis done by the Institute for Policy Studies, would up that to $3.5 trillion, while investing the savings in urgent domestic needs.

Whether any of this succeeds in breaking the pattern of ever-rising budgets remains an open question. The most urgent threats to the safety of the planet today are climate change, nuclear weapons, epidemics, the rise of extreme right-wing nationalism, poverty, and grotesque levels of inequality. As a recent report from the organization Win Without War noted, none of these challenges can be addressed through military means. The rationale for spending more than $700 billion a year on the Pentagon — and well over $1.2 trillion for national security writ large — simply does not exist.

There are, of course, no guarantees that the Pentagon budget will finally be downsized, but 40 years after beginning my own work on this issue, I’m not giving up and neither is the growing network of organizations and individuals working to demilitarize foreign policy and impose budget discipline on the Pentagon. Unfortunately, neither are the giant defense contractors and those who run the national security state.

Progressives Need a United Front for Warren and Sanders

DEC 16, 2019

OPINION

Norman Solomon

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/progressives-need-a-united-front-for-warren-and-sanders/

We’re now seven weeks away from the Iowa caucuses, the first voting in the Democratic presidential race. After that, frontloaded primaries might decide the nominee by late spring. For progressives torn between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — or fervently committed to one of them — choices on how to approach the next few months could change the course of history.

As a kindred activist put it to me when we crossed paths last weekend, “Bernie speaks our language”—a shorthand way of saying that the Bernie 2020 campaign is a fight for a truly transformative and humanistic future. “Not me. Us.”

I actively support Bernie because his voice is ours for genuine democracy and social justice. Hearing just a few minutes from a recent Bernie speech is a reminder of just how profoundly that is true.

At the same time, many thoughtful and well-informed progressives are supporting Warren. While I’m wary of the conventional foreign-policy outlook that she laid out early this year and reaffirmed days ago, there’s much to applaud in Warren’s record and proposals on economic and social issues. Notwithstanding her declaration of being “a capitalist to my bones,” Warren has earned corporate America’s hostility.

Overall, Wall Street despises Elizabeth Warren. With some exceptions, the titans of “the Street” are highly averse to her regulatory agenda, fear her plans such as a wealth tax, and definitely don’t want her to become president.

What’s more, the power structure of top corporate Democrats is out to crush the Warren campaign as well as the Sanders campaign. Not coincidentally, corporate media attacks rose along with Warren’s poll numbers. The corporate system’s antipathy toward her isn’t as high as it is toward Sanders, but it’s pretty damn high.

Meanwhile, powerful status-quo interests are eager to see acrimony develop between Sanders and Warren forces.

“The year began with a weak-looking Sen. Elizabeth Warren posing no threat to Sanders; by summer, Warren had jumped past Sanders and the rest of the field,” the Washington Post’s David Weigel noted days ago. “Now, with Warren’s momentum fading, the two Democrats most broadly acceptable to the left have been splitting endorsements and capturing separate swaths of the electorate.”

Let’s face it. Supporters of Sanders and Warren will probably need each other if one of them is going to win the nomination.

Scenarios for Sanders or Warren to ultimately go it alone at the mid-July national convention in Milwaukee are unlikely. Much more probable is a necessity of teaming up to combine the leverage of their delegates.

In the shorter term, given the structure and rules of the Iowa caucuses coming up on February 3, tacit teamwork between Sanders and Warren supporters would benefit both while undermining the corporate Democrats in contention.

The approach taken so far by Sanders and Warren on the campaign trail suggests how their supporters ought to proceed in relation to each other—illuminating real and important differences without rancor, while teaming up to fend off policy attacks from corporate-backed opponents.

What continues to be in effect between Sanders and Warren—and what is needed among their supporters on the ground—is the equivalent of a nonaggression pact. At the same time, we should be willing to draw clear distinctions between the policy positions of those two candidates.

The need is for supporters to openly explain reasons for preferring Warren or Sanders while avoiding the start of a mutual demolition derby. In the process of strengthening progressive forces, it’s vital to defeat corporate Democrats, before proceeding to defeat Donald Trump.

“Electability” can be debated endlessly, but anyone claiming total certainty as to which candidate would be more likely to beat Trump is overreaching. At the same time, the need for a Sanders-Warren united front should be clear—as clear as the imperative of rolling back the monstrous right-wing power that has controlled the presidency during the last three years.

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India’s Government Is Going to War Against Its Own People

Vijay Prashad December 17, 2019

https://citizentruth.org/indias-government-is-going-to-war-against-its-own-people/

Protests against India’s new Citizenship Act are now ongoing in every part of India, with a cross-section of society outraged by the religious implications of this law.

On December 13, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights released a powerful statement that criticized India’s new citizenship law. This “fundamentally discriminatory” Citizenship (Amendment) Act of 2019 would expedite citizenship for persecuted religious minorities from India’s neighboring countries. But in the list of those minorities, it names only Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians. It does not name Muslims, despite the fact that there have been several important cases of Muslims being persecuted in Pakistan (the Ahmadis), in Afghanistan (the Hazaras), and in Myanmar (the Rohingyas). The UN said that not only does this law violate India’s obligations to conventions, treaties, and compacts that it has signed at the global level, but also that it is in violation of its own Constitution.

India’s ruling party—the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi put this bill before both the lower and upper houses of India’s parliament. Apart from the Left and some regional parties, opposition in the lower house (the Lok Sabha) was weak; in the upper house (the Rajya Sabha), the bill passed by a slim margin—125 votes to 105 votes.

Protests against the Citizenship Act are now ongoing in every part of India, with a cross-section of society outraged by the religious implications of this law. There are 200 million Muslim citizens of India—almost 15 percent of the population; this bill sends a clear message that they should see themselves as second-class citizens. There is no other interpretation of the BJP’s agenda here.

The BJP government was particularly ruthless against protests at two major universities—Jamia Millia Islamia (New Delhi) and Aligarh Muslim University (Aligarh), both historically Muslim universities. The police have been extraordinarily violent against student protests in the past several months, but this was at another level. At Jamia, the police beat unarmed students, chased them into their dormitories and continued to beat them, and fired tear gas into the library. There is video evidence of policemen burning buses, assaulting journalists, and creating the conditions of a full-scale police-driven riot; in Aligarh, there is video evidence of the police breaking student motorcycles.

Brinda Karat of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), who went to Jamia during the attack, said, “The police action is unacceptable.” Jamia, she said, must be “freed of police presence and action be taken against those responsible.” The Delhi Police has announced that it “will investigate” the violence, although Deputy Commissioner of Police M.S. Randhawa seemed to suggest that all the violence came from the students, none from the police. Senior advocate Indira Jaising appeared before the Supreme Court on December 16 to urge the bench—headed by Chief Justice S.A. Bobde—to take up the case since the violence “is a very serious human rights violation all over the country.”

As if on cue, the BJP government hastily shut down internet access in India’s northeast, and in parts of the country where the protests have been most virulent. Last year, India led all other countries in internet shutdowns. Overall, 67 percent of all shutdowns of the internet took place in India; this year, already, 63 percent of all shutdowns have been in India. Internet in Jammu and Kashmir has now been off for 136 days (between August 4 and December 17); there is no sign that it will be restored. Indeed, the suffocation of Jammu and Kashmir continues unabated. The Kashmir Chamber of Commerce says that Kashmiri businesses have lost over $1.4 billion in this period.

Several state governments have said that they would not fulfill the provisions of the new Citizenship Act, since they argue that it is unconstitutional. The Supreme Court of India will soon discuss this bill. In Kerala, the Left Democratic Front’s Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said, “We are accountable only to the ideals of the Constitution of India, not to the fundamentalist ideology of the RSS-BJP.” (The RSS refers to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the fascist movement that is behind the BJP.)

The Left parties have called for demonstrations on December 19 across the country against the Citizenship Act.

Austerity

International Monetary Fund (IMF) Chief Economist Gita Gopinath is in India this week. She said that the slowdown of the Indian economy has surprised many, “including us here at the IMF.” India’s Gross Domestic Product growth has slowed for the sixth consecutive quarter. All the noises made by the BJP government about “Make In India” are silenced by the slump in manufacturing and the low domestic consumption.

Not surprisingly, the IMF urges the Modi government to push ahead with its “structural reforms,” which include what is so euphemistically called “labor… market reforms” and “fiscal consolidation.” The former—labor market reform—means that the government should erase protections for workers, and regulations of businesses; the latter—fiscal consolidation—means that the government must cut spending to lower public debt levels. This means less earning power for the majority of the population, and lower government spending to create social programs for the public.

What the IMF proposes is what the BJP government wants to do—to push a much deeper austerity agenda in India.

This is precisely what the students and workers, the farmers and the youth have argued against in protest upon protest.

The BJP government pushed for a 150 percent rise in hostel fees for the flagship university in Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). This astronomical increase would force at least half the post-graduate students to leave their studies. A #FeesMustFall protest dynamic opened up across the country in solidarity with JNU, it being clear to the students that what happens at JNU will spread outward. The police violence against unarmed students was shocking. It was equally outrageous that the intelligence services visited the home in Sopat, Jammu and Kashmir, of a former student leader—Aejaz Ahmad Rather—and said to his family chillingly, “A bullet never asks for an address.”

Farmer, peasant, and trade union organizations have been consistently on the march against the government’s various economic policies. In the past five months, the price of onions—a good indicator of food inflation—spiked by 253 percent. Rather than fix the endemic internal problems in the domestic onion market, a demand of the farmer and peasant organizations, the BJP government has loosened rules for the import of onions, a demand of the big traders. BJP policy is not made to benefit the working class and peasantry. It is made on behalf of the big businesses. It is almost as if the BJP-IMF slogan is “Save the Billionaires,” or “Billionaires Bachao,” as Srujana Bodapati, the coordinator of the Delhi office of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, writes. Little wonder that the farmer, peasant, and trade union federations have announced a major general strike for January 8, 2020. It is expected that hundreds of millions of workers and peasants will be on the streets on that day. Their charter of demands is a direct assault on the BJP-IMF austerity policies.

The First Bullets

The temperature in India is very high. The BJP government feels that it has a mandate to push through a hard-right agenda, both in economic and social policy. It has received backing for this from the IMF (in terms of labor market reform and bank reform) and from its hard-right partners across the world (in terms of its citizenship and anti-immigration policies).

But the government faces stiff resistance that seems unwilling to abate. As night fell over Jamia, and the fires burned out, Chandrasekhar Azad, the leader of the Bhim Army—a social movement in nearby Uttar Pradesh—gave a powerful speech. He said that Muslims are an integral part of India, and that if the State fires on Muslim students, “we will take the first bullets.” This is the mood. It is something that the BJP and the RSS and the IMF need to consider.

Cash-Strapped NRA Discloses Spending on Foreign Fundraising For First Time

Guest Post December 17, 2019

https://citizentruth.org/cash-strapped-nra-discloses-spending-on-foreign-fundraising-for-first-time/

The NRA’s tax records show its involvement abroad, expanding to a longer list of regions from the Middle East and Asia to Europe and sub-saharan Africa.

(By Anna Massoglia, Center for Responsive Politics) The National Rifle Association disclosed spending on foreign fundraising for the first time in the gun rights group’s history as it faced a multimillion-dollar shortfall for a third consecutive year, new tax returns reveal.

Despite that foreign fundraising, federal government grants and millions of dollars siphoned from its charities, the NRA spent more than it brought in last year. The tax filing unearths details of the NRA’s finances amid mounting scandals during the first election cycle in recent history where gun control groups outspent their pro-gun counterpart.

While the NRA’s disclosed spending on foreign fundraising makes up only a small slice of the operation’s total 2018 outlay, the actual amount of money brought in by that fundraising is unknown. The NRA is not allowed to use foreign funds to influence elections. But as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, it can continue to spend millions of dollars on political activity without revealing its funders, how much foreign money it takes in or what that money was spent on.

Some funding information can be extracted from the NRA’s sponsorship program memberships and other public records. Many of the NRA’s biggest disclosed allies and corporate funders stem from outside the U.S.

Austria’s Glock, Italy’s Beretta and Germany’s SIG Sauer have all received membership in the NRA’s Golden Ring of Freedom, which is composed of individuals or corporations that donate $1 million or more to the NRA and its affiliates.

The NRA’s top disclosed ally in the gun industry is a foreign firearms manufacturer, Taurus, which is based in Brazil and has a beachhead in Miami targeting U.S. markets. The exact amount the NRA receives from Taurus is not public, but the Brazilian gun manufacturer advertises that it buys an NRA membership for every gun sale to a U.S. customer.

Last year may have been the first time the NRA disclosed spending on foreign fundraising but the group has been building ties with foreign gun manufacturers for years. It has a long history of quietly pushing against gun regulation outside the U.S. in places like Brazil, where Taurus’ headquarters is based.

Prior to reporting $92,000 on foreign program expenses and $24,000 spending on foreign fundraising in 2018, the NRA’s previously disclosed overseas activities were limited to offshore investments in Central America and the Carribean along with occasional trainings or events in that region and Europe.

A September 2019 report by Senate Finance Committee Democrats found that the NRA acted as a “foreign asset” for Russia in the leadup to Trump’s 2016 election. In the heat of congressional inquiries probing the NRA’s ties to Russian actors, the NRA also admitted to taking Russian money. The organization said the cash wasn’t used for political purposes.

Gun Lobby Goes Global

The NRA’s tax records show its involvement abroad, expanding to a longer list of regions from the Middle East and Asia to Europe and sub-saharan Africa.

The NRA has been public about some of its activities in sub-saharan Africa, where it has found an ally in the safari hunting expedition industry.

NRA-supported foreign hunts have recently attracted controversy, such as an elephant-hunting expedition in Zimbabwe that coincided with the Trump administration overturning an Obama-era ban on importing hunted elephant carcasses.

Donald Trump Jr. also came under fire after ProPublica reported he killed an endangered argali sheep during a hunting trip to Mongolia purchased at an NRA charity auction. The Mongolian government retroactively granted the younger Trump permits after the killing took place. His spokesperson said the trip was a purely personal expedition, though it was supported by U.S. government and Mongolian government resources, including security details.

The NRA’s website and publications feature multiple posts describing the lures of argali hunting.  One post from the same month as Trump Jr.’s Mongolian hunting trip touts “the primary reasons sportsmen and women travel to the Gobi are to hunt Gobi ibex and argali.”

The NRA’s 2018 auction catalog includes a Mongolian safari through the same company. An auction catalog from Dallas Safari Club, a nonprofit that promotes hunting and works closely with the NRA, explicitly mentioned that the Mongolian expeditions may be upgraded to include hunting the endangered sheep. Shortly after Donald Trump Jr. reportedly bought the Mongolian hunting trip in 2015, he was a guest speaker at a Dallas Safari Club fundraiser.

NRA Drains Charities, Pays For PAC

For the NRA, charity begins at home. The NRA, which is set up as 501(c)(4) social welfare nonprofit, rakes in money from its charitable affiliates while footing bills for its PAC with no sign of reimbursement. Although affiliated charities reimburse the NRA millions of dollars for various expenses, federal campaign finance records for the NRA’s Political Victory Committee show no sign of reimbursements to the NRA.

The NRA has disclosed reimbursements and other money from its charitable affiliates, draining more than $320 million from its charities over the past decade.

The NRA Foundation, the NRA Special Contribution Fund, the NRA Civil Rights Defense Fund and the NRA Freedom Action Foundation directed more than $31 million to the NRA in 2018 alone. The NRA raked in more money from its charitable affiliates in 2018 than any year other than 2016 in at least a decade.

NRA Foundation payments to the NRA’s main lobbying arm labeled as reimbursements jumped to more than $17.4 million in 2018, the largest in at least a decade and nearly three times the $6 million reported in reimbursements the prior year.

The NRA paid off one $5 million loan from the NRA Foundation in early 2018 but secured another $5 million loan from the foundation shortly thereafter, on top of a $13.5 million grant and more than $17.4 million in reimbursements from the foundation.

The NRA’s audited financial statements, first flagged by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, show the NRA’s reliance on and control over its foundation. They include admissions that “the NRA is able to influence the Foundation’s operating and financial decisions as well as the NRA having ongoing economic interest in the net assets of the Foundation.”

The NRA, its foundation and other charitable arms take money from funders whose identities are kept hidden from the public under IRS rules. That makes it difficult to parse who is bankrolling the NRA’s activities, how much they are giving and even the true nature of the group’s financial state going into the 2020 election cycle.

Unlike the NRA’s main 501(c)(4) arm, however, its affiliated charities allow donors to get a tax break in exchange for contributions. Thus they are subject to more restrictions on political activity.

The NRA Foundation fills its own coffers with fundraisers such as auctioning guns in schools and Friends of the NRA sponsorship programs. The top reported corporate sponsor is tactical rifle manufacturer Daniel Defense. Other big corporate sponsors include firearms manufacturers Henry Repeating Arms, Mossberg, Inter Ordnance and Ruger, as well as international hunting safari service providers Bayete, Rivers South Safaris, Ibamba Safari and Otis Safari Specialty Importers.

The NRA reported covering more than $5.1 million in administrative and fundraising expenses for its PAC arm, the NRA Political Victory Committee, last year alone — shelling out roughly $90 million over the last decade, according to an OpenSecrets’ analysis of audited financial statements.

Federal campaign finance records for the NRA’s Political Victory Committee show no sign of reimbursements to the NRA, and an NRA spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.

NRA Under Scrutiny

The NRA has incentives to preserve its reputation as a political juggernaut.

If spending on activities such as politics or lobbying exceeds a certain percentage of the organization’s overall budget, the organization may be subject to additional disclosure requirements or even be at risk of losing tax-exempt status.

Nonprofits like the NRA may spend millions of dollars in elections without ever disclosing donors but are not allowed to have politics as their “primary purpose.” The generally accepted rule is that less than half of a 501(c)(4) nonprofit’s operations can be devoted to influencing elections.

This percentage threshold still allows large organizations like the NRA to spend tens of millions of dollars on elections without disclosing donors –– so long as their budget is big enough to counter that spending with a little dark money alchemy. This means the NRA can spend millions of dollars on elections simply because it also reported spending a similar amount on activities is says are apolitical.

But that doesn’t mean the NRA is avoiding scrutiny. New York’s state attorney general recently issued a new subpoena to the NRA covering a range of campaign finance and tax issues, according to the New York Times. The request reportedly included records related to transfers among the NRA’s affiliates and charitable arms.

Since the NRA is chartered in New York, it is subject to oversight of the state’s attorney general as well as federal authorities. The same attorney general’s office brought a case that led to the dissolution of the Trump Foundation and a hefty $2 million fine.

The NRA’s Little-Known Federal Funding

Despite its limited-government rhetoric, the NRA experienced a resurgence of funding from another unlikely source in 2018: the U.S. government.

In April 2018, the Department of Defense awarded the NRA $11,900 for firearms instructor development. That August, the Justice Department’s Drug Enforcement Agency spent more than $10,000 buying NRA tactical waterproof blankets for students attending a prep course for “overseas assignments.” The U.S. Border Patrol awarded the NRA another $10,000 for a government contract classified as “public relations” services in the form of a “recruiting sponsorship” the following month.

In July 2019, the Department of Energy offered the NRA a potential award up to $24,653 for use of a “specialized training venue” with access to “other facilities that support training such as classrooms and restrooms.”

Days later, on Aug. 1, the Interior Department awarded the NRA a $50,000 grant. The grant was intended to help the Fish and Wildlife Service “identify, protect, conserve, manage, enhance or restore habitat or species on both public and private lands” under the Recovery Act, which provided for funding awarded as part of the federal stimulus package to promote economic growth.

While the new government contracts are hardly the first instance in which the NRA got U.S. federal government support, they follow a lull since 2015 and mark the NRA’s first government contracts under the Trump Administration.

Secretive LLCs Tied to NRA

The NRA’s tax return identifies related entities tied to recent scandals and mysterious LLCs with all the trappings of shell companies that were not previously listed in tax returns filed by the gun rights group.

Previously unreported entities tied to the NRA include Wingate Church Insurance Services and Lexington Concord Holdings LLC. Both entities share the NRA’s address and are described as being in the “development phase,” according to its tax return. Delaware incorporation records and tax documents obtained by OpenSecrets show both entities are directed by J. Steven Hart, the NRA board’s longtime outside counsel who may be best known as the lobbyist whose wife rented EPA administrator Scott Pruitt a Capitol Hill condo for $50 per night.

The NRA reported paying $88,410 to Lexington Concord Holdings LLC, which was incorporated in August 2018, over the course of that year.

The NRA’s tax returns list it as the direct controlling entity and 99 percent owner of WBB Investments LLC, a limited-liability company tied to facilitating the purchase of a 10,000-square-foot Texas mansion for LaPierre. The LLC was first identified by ProPublica as the recipient of a $70,000 payment flagged by NRA accountants in a “List of Top Concerns for the Audit Committee.”

NRA accountants said the payment was not properly documented, and asked the audit committee to examine it due to suspicions such as the “vague description,” noting the “company didn’t exist” and the business address matched the home of an officer of the NRA’s longtime public relations firm, Ackerman McQueen.

Ackerman McQueen was the NRA’s highest paid vendor in 2018. Raking in at least $38.3 million from the NRA last year alone, Ackerman McQueen’s ongoing legal battle with the NRA has fueled scrutiny of the gun rights group’s finances and activities.

An NRA spokesperson did not respond to questions from OpenSecrets.