Credit: Yuryi Abramochkin/RIA Novosti - Creative Commons

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Sep 1 2022 (IPS)

With the death of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last great statesman, and an entire epoch, disappears.

I had the privilege of working with him, as deputy director of the World Political Forum, which Gorbi had founded in Turin in 2003, with a headquarters agreement with the Piedmont Region. The Forum brought together personalities from all over the world to discuss what was happening.

After Gorbachev, politicians lost the dimension of statesmen. They have gradually fallen back to the demands of electoral success, to short-time politics, to the shelving of debates of ideas, and instead turn not to reason, but to the voters' instincts

The greatest international protagonists, from Kohl to Mitterrand, from Jaruzelski to Oscar Arias, would discuss frankly their role and their mistakes. I will always remember an FPM in 2007, in which Gorbachev reminded those present that he had agreed in a meeting with Kohl, to withdraw support for the East German regime, in return for an assurance that NATO borders would not be moved beyond reunified Germany.

And Kohl replied, pointing to Andreotti who was present, that some were not so enthusiastic about a return to creating Europe’s greatest power, a position shared by Thatcher. Andreotti had said: ‘I love Germany so much that I prefer to have two‘. And the American delegation acknowledged this commitment, but complained that Secretary of State Baker had been overwhelmed by the hawks, who wanted to continue to enlarge NATO and squeeze Russia in a straitjacket.

Gorbi’s comment was lapidary: ‘instead of cooperating with a Russia that wanted to continue on a northern-style socialist path, you hastened to bring it down, and had Yeltsin first, who was conditionally yours‘.

But from Yeltsin was born Putin, who began to see things in a completely different way.

Gorbachev had cooperated with Reagan to eliminate the Cold War. It is amusing to see American historiography attributing the historic victory over communism and the end of the Cold War to Reagan. But without Gorbachev, the powerful but dull Soviet bureaucracy would have continued to resist, and would certainly have lost power. But the Berlin Wall would not have fallen, and the wave of freedom in socialist Europe would surely have come after Reagan’s term.

How much Gorbachev was intent, even more than Reagan, on advancing on the path of peace and disarmament, became clear after the 1986 meeting in Reykjavík. Gorbachev proposed to Reagan the total elimination of atomic weaponry. Reagan said that, because of the time difference, he would consult Washington later. When the two met the next morning,

Roberto Savio

Reagan told him that the US proposed the elimination of 40 per cent of the nuclear warheads. And Gorbachev replied to him: ‘if you can do no more, let’s start like this. But I remind you that we can now destroy the planet and humanity hundreds of times over’. Time would prove that disarming nuclear Russia was certainly in the American interest if Defence Secretary Weinberg, who went so far as to threaten resignation, had been able to look far ahead.

Yeltsin did everything he could to humiliate Gorbachev, to replace him. He stripped him of every pension, every perk: bodyguard, state car, and made him vacate the Kremlin in a matter of hours. But with Putin he became practically an enemy of the people. The propaganda against him was crude, but effective.

Gorbachev had presided over the end of the Soviet Union ‘the great tragedy’, and had believed the West. Now the USSR was encircled by NATO, and Putin saw himself obliged, in the name of history, to recover at least part of the great power that Gorbachev had squandered.

Those who had stood by Gorbachev since Yeltsin’s arrival saw how the elder statesman, who had changed the course of history, suffered deeply to see the course it was taking. Of course, the press preferred to ignore the deep corruption of the Yeltsin era, which cost the Russian people terrible sacrifices. Under Yeltsin, a team of American economists issued decrees privatising the entire Russian economy, with an immediate collapse in the value of the rouble and social services.

The average life expectancy fell back ten years in one fell swoop. I had a great impression to discover that my breakfast in the morning in the hotel cost as much as an average monthly pension. It was deeply saddening to see so many old ladies dressed in black selling their few poor belongings on the street.

At the same time, a few party officials, friends of Yeltsin, were buying up at bargain prices the large state enterprises put up for sale.

But how did they do it, in a society where there were no rich people? Giulietto Chiesa documented this in an investigation in Turin’s ‘La Stampa’.

Under American pressure, the International Monetary Fund granted an emergency loan of five billion dollars (in 1990) to stabilise the dollar. These dollars never reached the Russian Central Bank, nor did the IMF raise any questions. They were distributed among the future oligarchs, who suddenly found themselves fabulously millionaires. When Yeltsin had to leave power, he sought a successor who would guarantee him and his cronies impunity. One of his advisers introduced him to Putin, saying that he could tame the uprising in Chechnya.

And Putin agreed on one condition: that the oligarchs would never get involved in politics. One of them. Khdorkowski, did not respect the pact, and opened a front in opposition to Yeltsin. We know his fate: stripped of all property, and imprisoned. It was the only appearance of an oligarch in politics.

Gorbachev is the last statesman. With the arrival of the League in Turin, the agreement to host the World Political Forum was, to his amazement, cancelled. The Forum moved to Luxembourg and then the Italians in Rome Foundation took over some of its activities (very presciently) on environmental issues. Gorbachev’s right-hand man, Andrei Gracev, Gorbi’s spokesman in the PCUS and in the transition to democracy, a brilliant analyst, moved to Paris, where he is the point of reference for debates on Russia.

Gorbi, suffering from diabetes, experienced the war in Ukraine as a personal drama: his mother was Ukrainian. He retreated to a hospital under close supervision where he finally died. The era of statesmen is over, also the era of debates by great protagonists of history.

After Gorbachev, politicians lost the dimension of statesmen. They have gradually fallen back to the demands of electoral success, to short-time politics, to the shelving of debates of ideas, and instead turn not to reason, but to the voters’ instincts. Instincts to be aroused and conquered, even by a relentless campaign of fake news.

A school that Trump has managed to export to the world, from the constitutional vote in Chile on 4 September, to Bolsonaro, to Marcos, to Putin and, consequently, to Zelenski. And I find myself writing my bitterness, my discouragement, not only for the death of one of my mentors (as Aldo Moro was) but for an era that now seems definitively over: that of Politics with a capital P, capable of shaking up the world it encountered, with great risks and with the great goals of Peace and International Cooperation.

And to write uncomfortable truths, known by few, that will be immediately buried by hostile interventions and ridicule. Andrei was right when he said to me a short while ago on the phone: “Roberto, my mistake and yours is to have survived our era. Let us also be careful, because we will end up being a nuisance…”

Publisher of OtherNews, Italian-Argentine Roberto Savio is an economist, journalist, communication expert, political commentator, activist for social and climate justice and advocate of an anti-neoliberal global governance. He is co-founder of Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency and its President Emeritus.

Colombia was one of the first countries in the Americas to receive the COVID-19 vaccine through the COVAX Facility. Credit: PAHO/Karen González

By Riccardo Petrella and Roberto Savio
BRUSSELS / ROME, May 10 2021 (IPS)

The news of the Biden Administration’s willingness to lift intellectual property rights protections in the case of the Covid-19 pandemic has sent the world into turmoil, even though in recent days this willingness had become increasingly airy.

Big step forward? Victory for the “South” and the movements that have been fighting for this (including, for more than a year, the Agora of the Earth’s Inhabitants – agora-humanite.org – even though from the beginning we considered that the provisional suspension was a “par défaut” solution)?

Are we experiencing humanitarian compassion and confirmed dominance of the rich over the poor?

Interesting aspects

The position taken by Biden constitutes the change expected by the world. The media pressure on Biden and on the Democratic representatives in Congress was so strong that a negative or uncertain response would have cost Biden a great deal in terms of his global image. The language and form were also good, in total contrast to the previous administration. Biden did not disappoint.

Second point. He has given a breath of hope and credibility back to the ‘international community’ in a dramatic phase for the entire world population. We are still a long way from the “All Brothers” of Pope Francis, but the Catholic Biden has not failed to wink at his Pope’s public incitement

Finally, he forced the EU to follow suit. Yesterday, for the first time in many years of rejection, the EU also declared itself willing to discuss it.

Crucial aspects

The fact is that on the substance the change is not so evident.

Why? Let us examine carefully the statement of Katherine Tai, the US Trade Representative at the World Trade Organisation (WTO)

1. The statement begins with yet another statement of faith on the protection of intellectual property rights. “This is a global health crisis, and the extraordinary circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures. The Administration believes strongly in intellectual property protections, but in services of ending this pandemic, supports the waiver of those protections for Covid-19 vaccines”.

No dissociation from the founding principles of the dominant economy, nor a clear and open contrast with the world of business and the pharmaceutical industry, especially American. Moreover, the support given is rather restrictive, limited only to anti-Covid-19 vaccines. By introducing such a restriction in a very complex scientific and technological field (the production of basic materials indispensable to vaccine production, for example, is excluded), the effective possibilities of suspending protection are considerably reduced.

2. Article 31 of the WTO-TRIPS treaties provides for the possibility of waiving the protection of intellectual property in the event of serious needs and for public intervention. We mention in particular the “compulsory licence”, which authorises a State to allow the “local” production of all therapeutic tools (tests/diagnoses, medicines, vaccines…) without the consent of the companies holding the patents. In fact, this is the first time that the United States has not been generous but has shown that it accepts the respect of those WTO-Trips rules that it had always, since 1995, fought against because they were considered contrary to its interests.

In other words, the important ‘political’ change is that the United States, from being disrespectful of international treaties that do not suit them, has become a state that is willing, in the case of Covid-19 vaccines, to discuss how to apply the existing rules. The treaties, moreover, already specify the conditions under which exceptions to the protection of intellectual property can be applied. If one adds the above-mentioned restriction, one has to admit that the US position is rather tortuous and bizarre. But why do they do it?

3. A possible answer is given in the official statement. The US does not commit itself to anything specific. They say “We will actively participate in text-based negotiations at the WTO need to make that happen”, and correctly state that “These negotiations will take time given the consensus-based nature of the institution and the complexity of the issues involved”. That is, the US does not say, “well, as of tomorrow we will apply the rules of provisional suspension according to the conditions mentioned in the Treaties”. No, the statement insists that the negotiations will take a long time. How long? Three months, a year, three years? According to experts in the field, it will take, if all goes well, almost a year to rewrite the rules. And in the meantime?

4. It is clear from this that the real strategy of the US is to prioritise logistical and financial solutions concerning essentially the production of vaccines, their distribution and marketing at affordable prices, especially for the 92 low-income countries and other middle-income countries in increasing economic difficulty. The statement says “The Administration’s aim is to get as many safe and effective vaccines to as many people as fast as possible.

As our vaccines supply for the American people is secured, the Administration will continue to rump up its efforts – working with the private sector and all possible partners – to expand a vaccine manufacturing and distribution. It will also work to increase the raw materials needed to produce these vaccines”.

Considering the problem and solutions of the health crisis as a problem of production, supply and purchase, market prices and consumer solvency is typically an American/capitalist approach.

As is the appeal that since the security of supply of vaccines for the American people has been guaranteed, the US will increase its efforts to increase the production and distribution of vaccines at affordable prices paid for by the public authorities. Well, we have some difficulty in assessing this as a major step forward.

A mainly public health policy and solutions to the dramatic pandemic go beyond the processes of vaccine production and consumption. No opening is made for a public vision of the pharmaceutical industry and the world health system.

Vaccines, and first and foremost knowledge/science/, remain private under patent ownership. The market remains the principle and the fundamental regulatory mechanism. The financial imperatives of the market dictate the choices of the public authorities.

Hence the absence of any mention of the fact that the central axis of world health policy must shift from the rules on trade (WTO) to the rules on universal rights to health and the health system under the responsibility of public international bodies such as WHO, UNICEF, UNDP, UNEP, UNESCO…).

According to the American government, states are there to ensure the proper functioning of health markets, and to defend the security of their citizens in the context of a ‘world economic governance’ dominated by the rules of the WTO and the World Bank. The richer states have the task of helping the poorer ones. See the role of Covax and its probable financial strengthening.

We remain in the midst of the structural dualism of “rich and poor” and the logic of the inevitability of aid and the domination of the “North” over the future of the peoples of the “South” and the planet.

The oxygen crisis in India is a major example of the consequence of the inadmissible commodification and privatisation of oxygen for therapeutic purposes that has been going on for several decades.

Forget health as a universal human right, a common good, a public good! Forget ‘public health policy’.

In conclusion

The US position is new, but in some ways, it goes in a direction that is not necessarily better. It is also important that the US forced the EU, however recalcitrant, to state yesterday that Europe is also willing to negotiate.

No one can say what the outcome of the negotiations will be. In the meantime, putting the emphasis on increased vaccine production (“now that the American people are safe….”) means that the fundamental, structural premises unfortunately remain unchanged.

Of course, the fact that the ‘good’ emperor has finally listened to the cry of the people is not to be dismissed. But is this enough to sing victory? Whose victory?

Why should the peoples of the Earth thank the USA for the step taken?

In order to hope that the symbolic value of the change made by Biden will be transformed into an effective process in favour of the right to health and life of all the inhabitants of the Earth, other changes are objectively necessary.

The compassion of the powerful is only an illusory remedy.

*Riccardo Petrella is Professor Emeritus of the Catholic University of Louvain (B) and Roberto Savio is President of Other News; co-founders of the Agora of Earth’s Inhabitants.

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For 2021, Italy has been given chairmanship of the Group of 20, which brings together the world’s 20 most important countries. On paper, they represent 60% of the world’s population and 80% of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP). While the shaky Italian government will somehow perform this task (in the general indifference of the political system), the fact remains that this apparently prestigious position is in fact very deceiving: the G20 is now a very weak institution that brings no kudos to the rotating chairman. Besides, it is actually the institution which bears the greatest part of responsibility for the decline of the UN as the body responsible for global governance, a task that the G20 has very seldom been able to face up to.

Roberto Savio

Let us reconstruct how we arrive at the creation of the G20. It is a long story, that begins in 1975, when France invited the representatives of Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, leading to the name Group of Six, or G6. The idea was to create a space where to discuss the international situation, not for decision making. Then it became the Group of Seven, with the addition of Canada in 1997. Russia was added in 1998, so the summit became known as the G8. And then, in 1980, the European Union was invited as a “nonenumerated participant”. In 2005 the UK government initiated the practice of inviting five leading emergency markets – Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa. Finally, in Washington, in 2005, the world leaders from the group recognized the growth of more emerging countries, and they decided that a meeting of the 20 most important countries of the world would replace the G8 and become the G20.

At the meetings the United Nations, the European Union, and the major international monetary and financial institutions are also invited. Spain is a permanent invitee, together with leaders of the Asian, African Union, of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, the Financial Stability Board, the International Labor Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the World Bank Group, and the World Trade Organization.

Plus. The host country can invite some countries that it feels particularly associated with its foreign policy, at its year of presidency. Until now, 38 countries have been invited, from Azerbaijan to Chad, from Denmark to Laos, from Sweden to Zimbabwe. To complete, it is important to mention that Russia was suspended by the G8 in 2014, because of its annexation of Crimea. And was never readmitted. Trump, in his inexplicable deference to Putin, asked for its readmission to the G8, and this was refused by the other countries. The G7 has kept meeting, as “a steering group of the West”. At the same time, the G20 meets regularly, with Russia as part of his members.

So, Italy has the task to invite all those different actors, establish the agenda and planning and hosting a series of ministerial-level meetings, leading up to summit of head of governments. Italy has decided as agenda “The three P”: People, Planet and Prosperity. This imaginative and original agenda will be structured in 10 specialized meetings, like Finance (Venice July 9-10th); Innovation and Research (Trieste Aug. 5-8th); Environment, Climate, Energy (Naples, July 22nd), just to give a few examples. Beside these 10 specialized meetings, there will be 8 “engagement’s groups”, which will go from business to civil society, youth, etc.

The G20 is formed by countries that are involved in different and often contradictory groups. For instance, after Trump killed the TTP, (the Transatlantic Pacific Partnership), that Obama was able to put together excluding China, with a vast range of counters going from Australia to Mexico, from Canada to Malaysia, China was able to reciprocate, and crate the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which puts together the same countries plus some others and leave outside completely the United States. This commercial bloc is the largest ever created and has 30% of the world’s population, and 30% of the world GDP. But the European Union, (to which Italy belongs) has explicitly taken a path of European nationalism, to make the EU able to survive in the coming competition between China and the United States. European Union (and therefore Italy) are also members of NATO, where the United States is the indispensable and fundamental partner. And in the G20 China seats with India, which is the only country that has refused to join RCEP, and who is clearly taking an alternative path to China’s expansion in Asia. But this is also Japan’s policy, who is very active in G7, in the G20, and has entered RCEP, and considers, like South Korea, a priority to limit the Chinese expansionism.

Of course, there are a number of other pacts, agreements, treaties and alliances, that would be now boring and useless to enumerate. One country, like Italy, would therefore wear several hats at the same time. The point to make is, that since the arrival of Ronald Reagan as President of the United States in 1981, the multilateral system started to be under attack. Reagan, in Cancun’s Summit for the North-South dialogue, a few months after his election, questioned the idea of democracy and participation as the basis for international relations. Until then, the General Assembly resolutions were considered the basis for global governance. In 1973, the GA passed unanimously a resolution, calling for the reduction of the economic gap between the North and the South of the world, calling rich countries to their duties to establish a New International Economic Order, more just and based on the faster development of the poorer countries. Reagan denounced this as an anti-American maneuver. The US is not the same as Montecarlo, as he famously said (probably he intended Monaco, as Montecarlo is no state), and yet they have a vote each. So, this democracy coming from the UN, was in fact a straitjacket, and the US would proceed on the basis of bilateral relations, and not to be strained by multilateral mechanisms. Reagan was the first to talk of America first, He, together with Margaret Thatcher in Europe, dismantled all the social progress made in the world after the end of the Second World War. The market, with his invisible hand, would be the sole engine of society (that Thatcher said does not exist, only individuals). The State, that he called “the beast”, was the first enemy of the citizen. He declared: the most terrifying words in English are: I am from the Government, and I am here to help”. Any public or social cost was just a brake to the market. Reagan wanted to privatize even the ministry of Education: he and Thatcher left UNESCO, as a symbol of disengagement from the UN. Both he and Thatcher curtailed trade unions, privatized whatever possible, and started the era of neoliberal globalization, whose effect is now widely evident, and that Trump, Bolsonaro and Co. bless every day, because it has created a very large swath of disaffected citizens, who believe they will readdress their destiny.

Is important to note that Reagan did not have any real opposition, from the other rich countries. So, all this fragmentation of the world, with the creation of G7, G8, G20, and other exclusive clubs, was not an exclusive responsibility of Reagan and Thatcher. For forty years, the process of divesting the UN from its responsibility for the world’s peace, development, and democracy went on. Neoliberal globalization was based on finance and trade. Even before the end of the war, finance was delegated to the System of Bretton Wood, by the name of the site where it was founded. Let us just constate a fact: the Financial System was established in a such way, that Finance is the only sector of human activity that has no regulatory body. Today it has clearly separated by the general economy when its original function was to be at its service. And political institutions are not able to control its global structure.

The other engine of globalization was trading. United Nations had the UN Commission on Trade and Development, UNCTAD, which looked to trade as an instrument of development. The creation in 1995 of the World Trade Organization, as an independent organization, envisaging trade as an economic engine, divested the UN from trade too. And more the UN weakens, the easier is to decry its shortcomings.

The stroke of grace to multilateralism has been the arrival of Trump, the heir and an updated version of Ronald Reagan. But with a totally different agenda and vision. His basic idea is not “America First”, but “America Alone”. He pushes Regan’s idea of bilateralism versus multilateralism to the extreme of ignoring the concept of alliances. So, he declared, Europe is even worse than China. But there is a fundamental difference between them: Trump never pretended to be the President of all Americans. On the contrary, he tried immediately to divide and polarize the United States, and he leaves as a legacy the US that will take a very long time to become again a united and pacified country. And his strategy has been taken by several other leaders, from Bolsonaro to Orban, from Erdogan to Salvini.

It will be, therefore, difficult, for the UN to recover its function of the meeting place, to express plans of global governance, based on democracy and participation. It was a vision based on the lessons learned in the Second World War: let us avoid millions of deaths, terrible destruction, and to do so we need to work together. That lesson has been now forgotten. Just compare the kind of political leaders from that time, and the present one, to see the enormous change. Therefore, the expression of national egoisms will continue, with the richest countries in exclusives clubs, like OECD or the G20.

But there is a problem: those clubs are not efficient, because they gather together countries with very different agendas and priorities. Let us take a good example from the last G20, held last November under the very discredited chairmanship of Saudi Arabia. One of the points was the cancellation of the debt from poor countries, evidently urgent, because of the additional burden of the pandemic that is going to bring disproportionate damage. The Pope, the Secretary-General of the UN, Gutierres, pressed for that decision. All that the G20 was able to do, was to freeze the payment of the interest of the debt, for six months. And here, let us divagate for a useful learning exercise of the Third World Debt, and on the nobility of the rich countries.

If you take a loan that you repay over 20 years at 5%, or a mortgage, of 100, at the end you will have repaid 200. And during the first ten years, all you pay are the interest, and only in the second decade, you start to pay back, progressively, the capital. The result is that the poor countries several times renegotiated their debt and every time what they paid where the interest, to start again. And those interests were cumulative. During that process, they paid several times the amount of the capital that they received. But all that they paid went to the interests… At the university, you learn one good example of the perversity of cumulative interests. The old story is that a Dutch settler, Peter Minuit, bought the island of Manhattan from the Algonquin tribe. The price paid was $24 worth of beads, trinkets, a jar of Mayonnaise, two pairs of wooden clogs, a loaf of wonder bread and a carton of Quaker oats. If that amount was put in a loan at 5%with composite interest, it would be by now more than the estimated value of all of Manhattan, which exceeds three trillion dollars. So, the decision of the G20 to freeze interests for six months, amount to nothing. It is interesting to listen to insiders’ voices. The loans of the rich countries are computed in the DAC, Development Assistance Committee, established by OECD (the organizations that gathers all rich countries). The OECD engaged itself, in the old good day of multilateralism, to dedicated 1% of the members’ GDP to the development of the underdeveloped countries. This engagement was never kept, except for the Nordic Countries and Nederland. The US never went over 0,3%. Anyhow, any debt condonation goes into the official statistics of the DAC committee. But new loans are made, by countries that are not in the DAC committee, like China, which has made a very extensive number of loans, especially in Asia and Africa in not public conditions. For the OECD countries (basically the West), to cancel their loans could mean to unleash resources that could go to pay China loans, becoming so China funders. This is a good example of how competing interests, block the G20 from concerted actions.

Decisions on this issue are now expected from the next G20 Summit in Rome, in November. But before, the Global Health Summit, called from the G20 together with the EU in May, will be the occasion to verify what will happen. with vaccinations. But in the same month, Portugal has called for the very important Social Summit of the European Union. Portugal has taken the much more substantial chairmanship of the EU, and this is a very positive contribution to a positive 2021. Portugal is today probably the most civilized country of Europe, a place of tolerance, harmony and civic engagement, much like Sweden in the 80s. And is the only credible country on the issue of immigration. In the Social Summit Lisbon will push to strengthen social Europe, after so many decades of a solely economic Europe. The outgoing German chairmanship was fundamental in abandoning the austerity dogma and move to an unprecedented plan of solidarity and institutional strengthening, made also possible by the blessed departure of England, and its anti-European historical bias. The fact that vaccination is a European plan, and not a hotchpotch of national attempts, is great progress in term of vaccination. And if it will continue on the same path, on the issue of climate control, and technological development, it will recover much trust from the citizens, who felt Brussels an unaccountable institution, far from their priorities. Now the EU deals with unemployment, with the economic and social disaster brought by the virus. It is a tribute to the virtues of multilateralism, solidarity and development. And Portugal will try to complete what the German Presidency was unable to conclude.

But if we look to the obvious need for a world’s vaccination, the reality is much dimmer. Until now the rich countries have bought as many as possible vaccines. f. Europe, with 13% of the world population, has bought 51% of the total production. Israel is a case study. With a population of 9 million people, highly registered and organized in the health system, Netanyahu (who will do everything to stay in power), has bought the vaccines at an extra cost but is fast reaching all the population. Certainly, this cannot be the case of India, with nearly 1.4 billion people, and a very primitive system of health… Even the Pope has launched an appeal for distributing a free vaccine in the poor countries, and India and South Africa (which are a member of the G20), have asked the General Assembly of the World Health Organization for free distribution in poor countries. There has been strong opposition from the rich countries, that have financed at the tune of 10 billion dollars the development of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, which now they buy at market prices, several times higher than those of AstraZeneca… And then those two vaccines use a new technology, whose side effects are still unknown, unlike AstraZeneca, which uses a well-experimented technique.

But even if we take the cheaper vaccines, there is a very basic issue: under which ethical and human logic, patents and money can be made over public goods, as the Pope has repeatedly asked? The patent industry has been patenting seeds, rice, plants, which have been existing for hundreds of years, and those new peasants cannot use them without paying a royalty to the company who patented them. And then the pharmaceuticals tried to patent, parts of the human body… Citizens from several parts of the world have been setting up an association, Agorà for Humankind, that is conducting a campaign, for the elimination of patents and profits over public goods, as they belong to humankind. Also, an international alliance has been set up between the public and private sectors, the General Alliance for Vaccine Initiative, GAVI, which has the task to finance vaccination in 93 middle and poor countries. But funding is still far from coming. As things are now, at the end of 2021, only 30% of humankind will be vaccinated, basically from rich countries.

Yet, if there is something that should make all of us aware that we are in the same boat, is this pandemic. Until at least 70% of all humans will be vaccinated, the virus will continue to strike and kill. The British mutation, much more contagious, is a good example. The country with more cases is now Spain, which has no physical contact with the UK. But it went to Gibraltar, the British colony since 1713 in the South of Spain. And from there spread to the surrounding Spanish villages and towns. Did the realization that viruses does not know borders help to make the new treaty for relations between Gibraltar and Spain? The answer is not really: it is trade. Yet, it does not require a virologist to assume that trade spreads the virus…

So, after this long ride among different subjects, its thread should be clear. We have gone from an era when the lessons of the Second World War created a generation of politicians who made of peace and development the common ground for international relations, even during a very dangerous Cold War. Would Trump, Johnson and Putin be at Yalta, instead of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, the outcome would have been very different. Most probably, we would have had no United Nations, no international organizations. Just think that the US, to push for the creation of the UN, agreed in its founding engagement, to pay 25% of its costs.

Then, beginning with Reagan and Thatcher, a profound change came. The interests of my country are more important than international cooperation, and the stronger I am, the more so. Multilateralism, cooperation, went under attack, and so the role of the State, its function of guarantor of social progress, equity and participation. Other organizations started to sprout, and weaken the UN, and the instruments of a social pact, like trade unions. From the spirit of the fall if the Berlin’ Wall, in 1989, a number of clubs of rich countries, like the G7, the G8, the G20, started to substitute the UN, and private clubs, like the World Economic Forum of Davos, attracted more important personalities than the General Assembly of the United Nations.

We are now in a third phase, whose symbol abounds: nationalism, xenophobia, and the illusion that sovereignty is more important than cooperation. Brexit is a notable example. But Trump sets up an unprecedented level of legitimacy to what was once considered the betrayal of civism and democracy: exploit and exasperate the divides of a country, racial, cultural, gender, and run without any compliance to rules and traditions. He is accompanied by a variegated assortment of autocratic, populist, and narcists kind of new political generation: Bolsonaro, Orban, Kacynski, Putin, Modi, Sissi, Nehayanu, Duterte, just to cite the most known, while others, like Salvini, are poised to take the power. The virus, instead of uniting citizens, has further divided them. To wear the mask, is a left-wing declaration, like to worry about the climate, which is a survival’ concern. Military expenses are on a continuous increase. In 2019 they have reached an unprecedented amount of 1917 billion dollars. Enough to solve all problems of food, health and education worldwide. The UN is still the only organization able to provide the world with plans of global significance. Its Agenda 2030 gives a plan for the solution of our most significant problems. It costs a fraction of the military expenses. The G20 has paid some lip services, to Agenda 30, but never anything significant. The new generations of politicians are under general scrutiny, and it is not positive at all… I would say that is representative of our crisis, books still get published on a world of conspiracy, like that the virus is used by Bill Gates to inoculate nanoparticles that will make it possible to control all human bodies, Or myths like the one on Bilderberg Club, one of the private’s clubs meeting, as the place where decisions are taken by a small elite on how to run the world. This, when more than ever is clear that the system has lost its compass, and even the tragedy of climate and soon two million deaths are not able to bring back cooperation and multilateralism… but the explosions of conspiracies is a good sign of the decline of democracy…

So, Italy enters now the chairmanship of the G20. It is a position without any significant weight, with the task to realize a coming Summit, of the head of States, from which nobody expects much. If Trump’s defeat has any significant meaning, by November the political situation could have improved, but we will have a Germany without Merkel, probably more nationalist, and the miraculous social engagement of the European Union, could come to a halt. Italy has a very fragile government, and the dubious distinction of having a very young minister of Foreign Affairs, whose only working experience was to be a steward at Naples’ stadium. On the Health Summit, he does not look particularly commanding respect and authority. This will be Italy’s first test. In May, it will be clear that without vaccination in the world, rich countries will not be out of danger. It should be easy to rally the 20 most important countries of the world, which include India and South Africa, to such obvious actions. But in those times, where interests and selfishness are the reality, it is legitimate to nourish many doubts… Anyhow, if 2021 will not be a year of regeneration and creation, we will be on an irreversible slipping decline… time is running out…

But it looks now like the solution to the problems is beyond the reach of the system…

Publisher of OtherNews, Italian-Argentine Roberto Savio is an economist, journalist, communication expert, political commentator, activist for social and climate justice and advocate of an anti-neoliberal global governance. Director for international relations of the European Center for Peace and Development. Adviser to INPS-IDN and to the Global Cooperation Council. He is co-founder of Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency and its President Emeritus.

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Batara slum in a Dhaka suburb. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Nov 26 2020 (IPS)

The recent meeting of the G20 – scheduled to take place in Riyadh but held virtually due to the Coronavirus pandemic – has been an eloquent example of how the world is drifting, in a crisis of leadership.

It was, in a sense, a showcase. Everybody had to accept the view that the host of the meeting, the ailing King Salman of Saudi Arabia, was accompanied on TV screens by his apparent heir, Prince Mohamed bin Salman, who is clearly the mastermind of the brutal assassination, dismembering and disappearance of the body of dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Roberto Savio

Mohamed bin Salman got away with it, also because of the support of Donald Trump who, in his video intervention said, among other pearls, that nobody in US history had done as much as he had for the environment (like when he said that nobody since Abraham Lincoln had done as much as he had for black Americans). After that, Trump promptly left for his golf course, and ignored the debate.

Raison d’état, realpolitik, diplomatic constraints have always been part of history. The fact that the G20 was virtual, can partly hide a fact: that politicians now accept the most preposterous statements without blinking, because everything has become acceptable and legitimate. In Saudi Arabia, Prince bin Salman is highly popular and in the US, those who live in the parallel world of Trumpland follow blindly.

Biden will have a very difficult life. At least one-third of Americans believe that a massive fraud has deprived their idol of the presidency. He has a Supreme Court staffed by his nominee. And unless the Democrats win the two seats for the Senate in Georgia on January 5th, it will remain in the hands of Mitch McConnell, who will block every single Biden project that needs Senate approval.

Add to this a Trump permanent electoral campaign during the next four years, probably with his own TV channel, and it is difficult to predict that Biden’s vice-president, a woman and black, will repeat his feat in 2024.

There are plenty of solutions if there was only political will. For instance, Oxfam estimates that just an increase of 0.5% over ten years on the taxes paid by 1% of the richest (a negligible increase) would suffice to create 117 million jobs in strategic sectors like health, education, and assistance to the elderly

I apologise for this diversion. The real goal of this article is to show the stunning lack of responsibility of the leaders who met virtually, and besides making totally ritual declarations about the pandemic and climate change, when faced with the issue of the impact of Covid-19 on the poor of the world, simply decided to extend the moratorium on the interest of the external debt of the poorest countries for another year. This is a debt which, in many cases, has been amply repaid with the payment of cumulative interests.

Now, it is certainly difficult to believe that the leaders of France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the UK, India, China and Canada, and the President of the European Council, and the President of the European Union – leaving aside the United States – ignore the impacting data on the increase of poverty provided by all the international organisations.

The creation of the G7 and the G20 has been the most visible attempt of the great powers to displace substantial debates and decisions from the United Nations. It was certainly not due to lack of information that they ignored the appeal of the Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres, who implored action in his intervention against the unfolding drama of the poor of all over the world, which is nullifying all progress achieved in the last two decades.

The data that the G20 ignored all converge on two conclusions: the impact of the Covid-19 virus is stronger than expected, and it will bring about a global social imbalance that will have a lasting impact on several millions of people – in fact, about 300 million people.

This comes on top of an already dire situation. According to the World Bank, 720 million people will be living in extreme poverty (less than 1.90 dollars a day). Of those, 114 million are the direct result of Covid-19: that is 9.4% of the world’s population. According to the UN World Food Programme, more than 265 million are already starving, and many will die. And according to the International Labour Organization 200 million will lose their job.

Let us not forget that half of the world’s population – 3.2 billion people – live on less than 5.50 dollars a day. These are in the global South, as well as those in rich countries who are close to the conditions of the poor countries. The scale of this condition is much greater than we normally think. In the United States, according to the US Census Bureau, 11.1% of the population (49 million people) can be classified as poor; but Covid-19 will probably add another 8 million people.

A staggering 16.1 million children live in food precarity, while more than 47 million citizens depend on food banks. The National Center on Family Homelessness estimates that in 2013, 2.5 million US children experienced some form of homelessness. Finally, the US Health Affairs journal affirms that in 2016, the United States had the largest rate of children mortality in the 20 countries belonging to the OECD, while according to the US Census Bureau, life expectation has shrunk by three years.

In Europe thanks to a culture of welfare (absent in the US), things are going somewhat better. Eurostat estimates that in 2017, 11.8 million people lived in a household “at risk of poverty or social exclusion”. And Save the Children estimates that 28% of those under 18 are at risk of poverty and social exclusion.

We do not have estimates of the impact of Covid-19 in Europe, but the European Union estimates that poverty may increase by 47% if the pandemic lasts until next summer. This excludes the impact of the expected third wave in the winter of 2021. Caritas Italy estimates that at the end of the year there will be at least one million more poor children.

The leaders of the G20 cannot ignore that in April UNCTAD issued an alert: we need to find at least 2.5 billion dollars to attenuate the coming social crisis. They cannot ignore that the ILO has stated that in the poorest countries of the world, like Haiti, Ethiopia or Malawi, the average income of informal workers has fallen by 82%.

They cannot ignore the political consequences of this social crisis, and how Covid-19 is putting a brake on the world economy. But the poor, for many reasons, is not a priority in political choices. Suffice it to note that in the EU’s unprecedented and brilliant Recovery Plan for Europe there are no special provisions for the poor. They are part of the general population, and of those who have suffered because of Covid-19: people working in the tourism sector, in restaurants bar, in shops, and so on.

Yet, we have all the data to know that they suffer specific problems, problems that differ from those of who have lost their jobs. Structural poverty is a cage which does not let out those who are inside it. We have no space here to analyse why poverty needs a specific action. There are tons of studies on the subject, on the relations between poverty and education, poverty and democracy, poverty and social movements, and the list goes on.

What we want to stress is that there are plenty of solutions if there was only political will. For instance, Oxfam estimates that just an increase of 0.5% over ten years on the taxes paid by 1% of the richest (a negligible increase) would suffice to create 117 million jobs in strategic sectors like health, education, and assistance to the elderly.

Repatriating 10% of the capital hidden in fiscal paradises would obtain the same result. But we have been following Ronald Reagan’s mantra that the poor bring poverty and the rich bring wealth, so the rich should be left to create wealth. This may seem like a joke, but the OECD indicates that the average taxation on companies fell from 28% in 2000 to 20.6% in 2020.

This occurred despite the rise of the wealth of large companies, which has been accompanied by a notable decline of the middle class, not to speak of workers and the proliferation of precarious and informal jobs. According to the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies, between March 18 and June 4, the wealth of the richest Americans increased by 19.1% – a monumental 565 million dollars. Now, the richest Americans own 3.5 billion dollars.

Just 10% of that would be enough to bail out the 46.2 million fellow citizens who ask for unemployment subsidies. Another solution would be to reduce subsidies to the fossil industry, which the International Institute for Renewable Energy estimates at 3.1 trillion dollars – 19 times those for renewables – in spite of the imminent climatic tragedy.

The same imbalance is happening with the pandemic. It is clear that until vaccination becomes universal, Covid-19 is here to stay. It recognises no borders and global problems cannot have an assorted collection of local answers.

Yet, to date, pharmaceutical companies have received 13.1 billion dollars to develop a vaccine: a fantastic business, as they will now make more money on the market, with their costs already having been paid by governments. A central discussion would be whether markets should make profit on common goods like water, air and humans, but we have no space for this debate.

This aside, the situation today is that again according to Oxfam, the rich countries have 13.5%of the world population, Yet they have bought in advance 51% of the doses that pharmaceutical companies will produce – in 2021, 86.5 % of the world will have to make do with the remaining 49%. A consortium of public and private enterprises, COVAX, has been established to deal with the most fragile parts of the world population. Over 185 countries are involved, but it is still very far from gathering the necessary funds.

What is the lesson we can draw from this incomplete analysis? That we are far from having a political class able to face global issues. On the contrary, nationalism and xenophobia are on their way back. The attitude of nationalist leaders to Covid-19 has been similar to that for the threat of climate change: it is a left-wing idea from globalists. So, wearing a mask has become a political declaration.

Trump lost re-election in a great measure due to his attitude on the virus. We can only have a dim hope that this lesson will have some impact. When it comes to the poor, the terms social justice and solidarity are out of fashion, but we are creating imbalances and tensions that we will probably pay dearly for. The French Revolution was not done by a political party, but by an impoverished Third State, or the poor, who revolted against the nobility and the clergy. That is a lesson that the richest 1% would do well not to forget.

Publisher of OtherNews, Italian-Argentine Roberto Savio is an economist, journalist, communication expert, political commentator, activist for social and climate justice and advocate of an anti-neoliberal global governance. Director for international relations of the European Center for Peace and Development. Adviser to INPS-IDN and to the Global Cooperation Council. He is co-founder of Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency and its President Emeritus.

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

President Donald Trump at the UN Security Council (UNSC) when the US held the rotating Presidency of the Council. Credit: UN Photo/Cia Pak

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Nov 11 2020 (IPS)

Now it is clear that Joe Biden is the new president of the United States. It is unlikely that Donald Trump’s legal manoeuvring will change the election results, as when a conservative Supreme Court in 2000 decided in favour of George Bush over Al Gore, who lost by 535 votes.

Even this Supreme Court, where Trump has six sympathetic members (three appointed by him, quite a record), and only three unsympathetic, will dare to change a result coming from too many states.

Trump is gone, but it is sad to say, Trumpism is here to stay. But is that a specific situation of the United States, or is it a more general phenomenon? We think that, in an era of globalisation, we should attempt a global analysis.

This will leave out a zillion of facts, events and analysis, but this is now the destiny of journalism. Anyone can add what they think is relevant and decide what has been left out. This will be a big improvement over this abridged analysis.

But let us start with the United States first. Biden’s victory comes from the unusually high participation in the election, where it attracted 67% of the voters. In American elections, participation rarely exceeds 50%, although the largest participation was in 1900, when 73% of the population votes.

Remember that in the US, voting is defined as a privilege, not a duty. To vote, you have to register, and many states make that a demanding task, automatically excluding the more fragile part of the population.

Biden won the largest popular vote in US history: 71.4 million compared with the 69.4 million obtained by Barack Obama. Nevertheless Trump gathered 68.3 million votes, nearly four million more than in 2016, in spite of a pandemic which, until now, has left more than 230.000 dead, with the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and after four years of confrontations, some massive, like Black Lives matter.

Trump has now lost his Teflon, and he is a loser. But he has 68 million followers on Twitter, and he is probably going to open his own TV channel. He is going to be a serious problem for the Republican Party. He is going to cultivate the myth of stolen elections and keep his followers in a state of confrontation. Trump is gone, but Trumpism remains

He doubled the votes of the LGBT community, he obtained 18% of Afro-American votes, white woman increased their vote for him by 6%, and he won Florida thanks to the Latino votes (Cubans, Venezuelans and to a lesser extent Puerto Ricans).

The United States is going through a demographic transformation, which will further exacerbate the polarisation. The Census Bureau estimates that this year the majority of the country’s 74 million children will not be white. And in the decade of the 2040s, the white population will be under 49% with the other 51% made up of Latinos, blacks, Asians and other minorities.

The genesis of the United States differs from that of Europe. It was created by an immigration of English religious radicals, who wanted to create a new world, a “town shining on a hill”, where the secularism and moral corruption of their country would be left behind. Following their arrival, they had to fight against indigenous people who were considered barbarians, without a true religion (very much like the Spanish conquest did in Latin America).

The war of independence from England reinforced the moral value of their action: freedom from tyranny, And, with the Industrial Revolution, wave after wave of immigrants arrived, all escaping Europe because of poverty or oppression They were also uneducated and obliged to integrate into an already existing strong society, which defined itself a ‘WASP’ (White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) society.

To do this, the US invented mass media as an instrument for the melting pot (until then in Europe newspapers had small circulations for the elites), and two myths: American Exceptionalism and the American Dream.

The conquest of the west was a national saga, with the cinema as the other instrument for the melting pot. Children of different immigrants reacted with joy to the sound of the trumpet announcing the cavalry charge which would wipe out hordes of attacking Indians.

And beside media and cinema, a strong advertising industry shaped tastes and consumption patterns. An abundance of natural resources, and a permanent arrival of immigrants, fuelled continuous growth. Here the two myths become uncontested truth. America exceptionalism, the fact that US has a different destiny form all other countries, became a staple of public discourse.

In 1850, President James Monroe emitted a declaration, by which no European country was any longer allowed to intervene in Latin America. And still today, a large part of the population thinks that US has the right to intervene in the world, because US is the keeper of order and law in a chaotic world.

To become an American citizen, you have to swear that you forget your origins, because you are born a new man. The inscription on the Statue of Liberty, which was what millions of immigrants saw first after a long journey, bears an inscription which symbolises the myth well:

Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries the Statue with silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-lost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

The second myth, the American Dream, was another powerful tool for patience and hard work. It was part of the Protestant founding legacy. Anybody who works hard will become affluent or rich. If you do not become rich, it is because you did not try hard enough.

This is the myth that evangelical church has adopted: God rewards the hardworking faithful, and not the lazy. As a result, poverty is not contemplated by God. And the evangelical church has achieved a remarkable result (not only in the US, but everywhere, from Brazil to Guatemala): having the poor voting to the right.

US exceptionalism is evident when you look at other English colonies. Australia, for example, was the destination of prostitutes, thieves and bankrupt British citizens. It would never be thinkable that the prime minister of Australia speak on behalf of Australia and Humankind, as the US president routinely does. Nor does the PM of Canada ever speak in the name of God or say that God loves Canada. The US is the only country in the world that does not accept its military personnel being judged by a foreign court.

Roberto Savio

And the US saw confirmation of its exceptionalism, and its role as defender of the humankind, with the Second World War. Despite the enormous loss of Russian troops and civilians (27 million, compared with 419,000 Americans), the clear victor against the evils of Nazism and Fascism was the United States of America. It was able to win the war because of its astonishing military production (one ship in three days), and the construction of the atomic bomb. So, the US entered our contemporary era with all its myths reinforced.

And the Marshall Plan, which resurrected Europe from its ruins, was a measure of containment against the new evil, Communism, but it also become final proof of its superiority and solidarity.

The US also created the United Nations as an institution which would avoid the repetition of the horrors of the war. It was intended to bring all counties together under the same roof, and take decisions trough debates and agreements, not war.

But the world did not freeze, because the American vision of the world became a straitjacket for the US. It preached freedom of trade and investments. Of course, it was by far the strongest country, and so the winner of an American World Order, with the Soviet threat under containment, the strategy formulated by American diplomat George F. Kennan in 1947.

But once the UN expands from the original 50 countries to 187, and you insist on free competition and trade, you become a victim of your rhetoric. Those countries, in a democratic institution, all have a vote. In 1973, the General Assembly unanimously voted for a New World Economic Order, based on international solidarity and the transfer of wealth from the rich countries to the poor for world development.

The United States voted with the General Assembly. But then came Ronald Reagan, an admirer of John Wayne and in many ways a precursor of Trump. Shortly after his election, Reagan went to the North-South Summit of Head of States in Cancun, Mexico, in 1981, to announce that US no longer accepted being a country like all others, and that it would pursue foreign policy that was more convenient to its interests.

Reagan had also a vision of a radical change at home. He believed strongly that the values of social justice, solidarity and fiscal equity, had become a brake on the economy and society. He was the first to introduce the idea that the state (the “beast”) was bloated, costly and inefficient, and the enemy of business and corporations, which should be left untouched to allow all their creativity to be freed.

Among others, he wanted to shut down the Ministry of Education, because he believed that education could be done better by the private system. He was a very good communicator, and a specialist in finding easy answers to very complicated issues, banalising the real issue – an example on environment: industries do not pollute, trees pollute. By his time, the US had reached an impressive level of research and teaching (for a few), as shown by the large numbers of Nobel Prizes.

Reagan was also the first to openly challenge the elites, speaking on behalf of ordinary citizens: the people. And it is here that US story lose its individual identity and starts to merge with the world. Reagan had a counterpart in Europe, Margaret Thatcher, who shared the same vision, and went to fight trade unions, cut state spending, privatised railways, airports and whatever else possible. She famously declared that ”society does not exist, only individuals”. Together they launched what was called neoliberal globalisation and they withdrew from UNESCO. The main basis was that the market and no longer man, was the basis of the economy and society. US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said that globalisation was the new name for American Domination.

All this was reinforced by three historical events:

1. The fall of Berlin Wall in 1989 which eliminated the threat of communism and gave capitalism total freedom for manoeuvring.
2. The Washington Consensus, established by the US Treasury, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The Consensus ordered worldwide that social costs were unproductive, that any national barrier should be abolished for allowing investments and free trade to prosper and privatise as much as possible.
3. UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s ‘Third Way’ theory according to which, because it was impossible to halt globalisation, it would be best for the Left to ride it and become its human face. So, for two decades, under American influence, neoliberal globalisation became the norm of governance, both at national and international level. According to its apologists, it would lift all boats.

But then in 2008, an earthquake shook Wall Street. In 1999, under Bill Clinton, the Steagall-Glass regulation, adopted after the crash of 1929, was abolished. That regulation kept investment banks separate from traditional commercial banks. A giant tsunami hit investments, i.e. speculation.

Free of any control and international control (the banking sector is the only one in the world without any regulator or comptroller), the banking system took on a life of its own, leaving the real economy. And it went into more and more speculative operations until, in 2008, the American banks went practically bankrupt.

That crisis expanded worldwide, and in Europe in 2009 banks also went into bankruptcy. According to OECD estimates, to rescue the banking system, the world had to invest two trillion dollars. That comes to 267 dollar per person in a world in which nearly 2 billion people then lived on less than two dollars a day.

The crisis of 2008-9, and the consequent uncertainty and fear, obliged a critical examination of neoliberal theory, For nearly three decades, citizens, media, civil society, economists, sociologists and statisticians had been denouncing that globalisation in fact exacerbated social injustice, dispossessed many people of their income through delocalisation of companies to cheaper places, created unequal growth between towns and rural area and heavy damage to the planet, and that it was urgent to counter those abuses.

After 8 years of George W. Bush, wars and lack of attention to the social problems of the country, in 2009 America elected a man with a message of hope, integration and peace: Barack Obama. But if Obama really wanted to unravel a system that had been established for 20 years, it was beyond his reach. In 2015, the US Senate passed into the hands of Republicans, and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell blocked every possible move by the Obama administration.

In 2017, he refused to even consider Obama’s proposal for the Supreme Court, because there would be elections in ten months (the same Mitch McConnell who, in just three weeks, obtained the appointment of Catholic integralist and traditionalist Amy Coney Barrett on the eve of the just-held elections).

While the dreams evoked by Obama started to fade, the crisis of 2009 brought some unprecedented political developments. Uncertainty and fear were also exasperated by the flow of immigrants from countries destabilised by the interventions of the US and Europe in countries like Iraq, Libya, and Syria, and those escaping dictatorial regimes and hunger.

All over the world, that led to a flourishing of nationalism and xenophobia, with so-called ‘sovranist’ parties being established in every country of Europe, and progressively all over the world. They all based themselves on xenophobia against migrants, denunciation of world and regional institutions as illegitimate and enemies of national interests, and speaking on behalf of the people who were victims of globalisation: workers of factories that had closed due to delocalisation, calls to a glorious past (Brexit, 2016), people from rural areas left behind by the faster development of towns (the Yellow Jackets in France in 2018), Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s brutal annexing of Kashmir to India in 2019, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s astonishing elimination of protection of the Amazon in 2019, Xi annexing of Hong Kong 2020.

So, it would be a mistake to single out Trump, when we are facing a much more serious problem. Trump, of course, now leaves the others naked. Maybe this is the beginning of a new political cycle … but the system is now broken, and it is nearly impossible to fix it.

The coronavirus pandemic has put another nail in the coffin. The negationist wave is another symptom of how the crisis of trust has eroded our society. And, by the way, we have now two proponents of the Qanon theory of conspiracy elected in the House of Representatives. The Qanon theory is that Hillary Clinton and several other important figures, from Bill Gates to George Soros, gather to drink the blood of young boys in the cellar of a pizzeria in New York. Trump is supposed to be the saviour. The fact that the pizzeria in question has no cellar is irrelevant.

To return to the United States, the myths of exceptionalism and the American Dream have now evaporated in the United States. Trump did surprisingly well if you look at the situation with the eyes of a cultivated guy. He is the first president of the United States who never spoke on behalf of the people: on the contrary, he portrayed those who did not vote for him as un-American.

In his government, he had very few Cabinet meetings and he governed through tweets, rarely consulting his staff. He mobilised the fears of the white population against immigrants and other minorities; he proclaimed law and order against any mobilisation, demonising the participants.

He is the quintessence of narcissism, he loves only himself, he does not care about anybody else, and he does not trust anyone. He is an example of misogynism, he paid his taxes in China, but not in the US. He has inaugurated the post-truth era, by making several false affirmations every day.

He has used the public administration as his personal staff, changing public servants continuously and putting people who share his views in their jobs. The Minister of Education does not believe in the public school. The Minister of Justice believes that the president has power over the judiciary. The person responsible for the environment is against clean energy. It looks as if vampires are in charge of blood banks!

It is useless to list all Trump’s disasters in international affairs as they are well known. He has withdrawn from the idea of international cooperation, from the Paris agreement on climate, from the World Health Organization, he has jeopardised the World Trade Organization (a US creation), shown preferences for dictators like Putin and Kim Il Jong, and banalised the NATO alliance (another US creation), and we could go on and on.

He represents classical American isolationism: let is withdraw from a world in chaos, which does not appreciate us, but just wants to exploit us. But we are now living in a multipolar world and globalisation is being played by many hands. By 2035, China will have surpassed the US as the world’s strongest power.

Yet, Trump has drawn votes form all the sick strata of American society. The whites that feel threatened; the rural people who feel left behind; the workers from factories that closed because of delocalisation; the affluent middle class of the suburbs who felt threatened by the poor people encroaching on their properties; the blacks who become middle class and looked with horror to the miseries of the majority of Afro-Americans; the evangelicals who were happy with a Supreme Court becoming right wing and having a vice-president, Mike Pence, and a Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, who are evangelicals; those who keep the myth of the Far West, its individualism, its macho value and its weapons; all those who look at the state, the public, as an enemy of freedom; the policemen who found their impunity under judgement; those who decided that women, gays, abortion and human rights were tilting America into the opposite of its founding values.

All those people exist, they were united by Trump, but they survive him. And in a country where there is now hate and opponents have become enemies, in a country plagued by the opioids epidemy, where one American under six has psychological problems, where more people die each year because of weapons than in the Vietnam War, creating unity is a very, very difficult task.

Democrats thought that to put up an elderly and civilised candidate, Joe Biden, would bring back empathy and dialogue as a rallying factor. In fact, it looks more like Trump has lost the elections than that Biden has won them.

Progressives look at him as an epitome of the establishment and will keep pressing him to become freer from the system. We will only know on January 6^th if the Republican Party holds on to the Senate, as is likely, and if the Senate returns under the control of Mitch McConnell the blockage it placed in front of Obama will look like gentle times.

Biden will be able to undo many of Trump’s executive orders but, for example, he will be unable to change the composition of the Supreme Court, which will last for at least a couple of decades. He will not be able to increase health coverage.

The chance of increasing the minimum wage and increasing taxation on the very rich will be near to zero. Republicans will now again become the guardians of fiscal austerity, after having left Trump increase the national deficit to an unprecedented level. And the increasingly powerful left-wing of the Democratic Party will try to condition and push Biden, who they elected just to get rid of Trump.

Trump has now lost his Teflon, and he is a loser. But he has 68 million followers on Twitter, and he is probably going to open his own TV channel. He is going to be a serious problem for the Republican Party. He is going to cultivate the myth of stolen elections and keep his followers in a state of confrontation. Trump is gone, but Trumpism remains.

And this is true for the world. Until we eliminate neoliberal globalisation, the Trumps, the Bolsonaros, the Viktor Orbans and so on of this world will be just be the visible part of the iceberg. But what is going to do that? We have a ray of hope from civil society. Climate drama has brought young people back to acting. And then there are the other two world mobilisations, Me Too for the dignity of women dignity and Black Lives Matter for combatting racism (which is not just an American phenomena), which have brought together millions of people worldwide.

We are in a period of transition. It is not clear to what, but we can only hope that it will be without blood. In the end, it will depend on men and women all over the world, on the ability to find common values in our diversities for establishing relations of peace and creating social justice, solidarity and participation as global bridges. Controlling climate change and saving our planet is an immediate and urgent task. This will depend on each one of us, and we must make this the first bridge to walk, with all humankind.

Publisher of OtherNews, Italian-Argentine Roberto Savio is an economist, journalist, communication expert, political commentator, activist for social and climate justice and advocate of an anti neoliberal global governance. Director for international relations of the European Center for Peace and Development.. He is co-founder of Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency and its President Emeritus.

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Sep 25 2020 (IPS)

After the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of WWI, The League of Nations mandated that Britain administer Palestine. The London administration was quite ineffective, in part, due to the contradictory promises which were made to the Arabs, to the Zionists and to France, the other colonial power which divided the territory with Britain.

Roberto Savio

The Philistines settled in the region around 1200 BC. Toward the end of the 11th century BC, the Israelites succeeded in driving them out of much of their territory, but they remained independent along the coastal region. And although they never completely dominated the whole area, the demonym of this people comes precisely from the word peleset (Philistine) and hence the territory Filasṭin, Falasṭn or Filisṭin (Palestine).

Three thousand years later, the conflict seems to lack resolution. The Israelis have never accepted the existence of a Palestinian State.

For their part Palestinian leaders continue to employ inviable rhetoric, which has led to their losing many opportunities. The corruption of which they are accused, is based in reality, but Israel has a relatively dark history.

Arab Sultans and Sheikhs are people with a medieval mindset, those for whom religious fanaticism and money is uniquely important. Trump likes them, because in some ways they resemble him. The Israelis have worked out how to take advantage of all this so as to eliminate the possibility of a Palestinian state.

Result: Palestinians will have to live under Israeli control. They will be second-class citizens, and the internal arrangement of Israel will change as the ultra-orthodox Haredin have a higher population growth rate than Arabs or other Jewish factions.

Arabs are 20% of the population, while Haredin jewish sect already constitutes twelve percent of the population. At the time of the creation of the State of Israel, the Haredin were only 0.2%. These are medieval clans living in a special world. For example, they have won the right to not attend school, as they only study holy scriptures. They do not do military service and by law they do not work; they’re basically maintained by the State.

Benjamin Netanyahu survives thanks to the ultra-orthodox parties. The future of Israel is not a peaceful future. It is a country that is going to turn more and more toward the right, which will have to continue to use force against the Palestinians, who will become an exclusively internal problem, as they will be abandoned by other Arabs. They are going to live under appalling social and economic conditions, and we are going to see how Israel increasingly takes the apartheid path.

Netanyahu’s recent victories portend a dark future. One has visited the region too often now to offer a positive prognosis. Through all this, Trump motivates alliances with the Sunni religious fundamentalists led by Saudi Arabia, united against the Shiites, led by Iran.

Iran, the ancient Persian civilisation, is much more tolerant than the Sunnis. The problem is that it has been captured by a group of fanatics who took advantage of the unpopularity of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, leading to them seizing power from the Shah in 1979. They are unpopular, but they are holding their ground.

It should be remembered that the theocratic regime was installed with decisive help from the West.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile in France to Iran on a plane provided by the conservative government of French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. Iran is another mistake made by the United States, a country whose foreign policy is always short-term, again failing to understand the reality on the ground.

Triggering an escalation to remove the Shah, employing the clergy, created a regime that eventually turned against the US, something Reza Pahlaví would have never done. It is the same mistake committed in Afghanistan, when they financed a movement against the Russian occupation, creating phenomena such as Bin Laden, which ended up turning in another direction.

By the way, this is the same mistake made by Israel when it supported Al Fatah at first, so as to weaken Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).

The Mullahs are not at all popular, but they are maintained by the support of the peasants and by a powerful repressive apparatus. No doubt at some point they will be taken out in a bloody internal crisis, and Iran will return to normality.

In this respect I wish to stress three points:

a) Iran has top-level universities, great films, excellent architecture and a high level of scientific prowess:
none of which can be found in the Sunni world.
b) In Teheran there are synagogues and christian churches,
something that is lacking in the Sunni world.
c) Of all the terrorist attacks that have taken place to date in Europe and in the United States,
there has not been a single Shiite terrorist.
And we should bear in mind that Iran has been under sanctions for 40 years.

Moral: the political disaster which is the Middle East is one of governance, in which the ‘West’ and Trump carry many responsibilities. So too the Europeans who installed Kings, Princes, Emirs and Sheiks when they divided up the Ottoman Empire.

And Trump, with his son-in-law, who, despite being Jewish, is capable of reasoning in Arab terms, by reinforcing this World of petrodollars and of medieval thought.

Throughout this panorama the Palestinians remain a people without a homeland who lack nationality, and the Israelis have their answer prepared: they don’t accept the peace plan, and then do not have leaders who seek peace.

However, persisting in maintaining millions of people resentful and poor is not an intelligent play. It is also clear that in both intellectual and artistic circles there is little Israel support for such a formula.

Falling into this trap is best explained by Netanyahu’s efforts to maintain power at any cost, and so selling his soul to the far-right, also accompanied by a left which has become a merely symbolic force…

Publisher of OtherNews, Italian-Argentine Roberto Savio is an economist, journalist, communication expert, political commentator, activist for social and climate justice and advocate of an anti neoliberal global governance. Director for international relations of the European Center for Peace and Development.. He is co-founder of Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency and its President Emeritus.

Excerpt:

In a world shaken by so many problems, it is difficult to look at 2020 and not make some kind of holistic analysis. While enormous progress has been made on many fronts, it is clear that the tide has turned, and we are now entering – or have already entered – a new low point in the history of humankind..

Roberto Savio

Since the end of the last decade, we have seen also another change in a vital environment: democracy. With the fall of Berlin Wall in 1989, everybody was told that the threat of communism had now gone. As Francis Fukuyama famously wrote, it was the end of history. Capitalism and market would unify the world, and lift all boats, it was said at the time.

Then came the big financial crisis of 2008-2009 which cost governments (and therefore people) 12 trillion dollars and it became clear that only some boats were being lifted. Budget trimmings affected especially welfare, education and health, while at the same time some people were becoming fabulously rich. World debt doubled, (it now stands at 325 trillion dollars), and suddenly nationalistic, xenophobic and right-wing parties sprouted everywhere. Before the crisis of 2009, there was only one, in France. Even Nordic countries, long-time symbol of civism and tolerance saw the arrival of extreme right-wing governments.

The thirty years between the fall of Berlin Wall and the financial crisis, left a culture of competition, individualism and loss of values – a culture of greed. And the ten years between that crisis of and our incoming decade saw the rise of a culture of fear. Immigration became the catalyst We were being invaded, Islam was not compatible with our society, our jobs were being stolen, crime and drugs were coming in and the same leaders who do not believe in climate change became the guardians of Christianity, enacting restrictive laws to the applause of citizens, regardless of human rights. In the last two decades, trade unions have become irrelevant, and laws have been introduced that support the making of jobs precarious and reductions in social protection. People started having fear, looking at the uncertain future of their children.

Historians affirm that the two main engines of change in history are greed and fear. We enter the decade of the 2020s with both. Worse, many analysts believe we do so with hate.

The fact is that two flags that we thought had been discarded by history are making a comeback.

One is the flag ‘in the name of God’. We think of ISIS and Al Qaeda, but this is the basis of the image of Putin, Orban, Trump, Bolsonaro and Salvini. The use of religion by the right wing has been able to rally the poor. Theologian Juan Josè Tamayo has called politicians with bible in hand the Christo-neo-fascist alliance. In the last elections in Costa Rica, evangelical pastor Fabricio Alvarado won with a campaign based on the defence of Christian values and neoliberalism, against abortion and the paganism coming from Europe. This is precisely the electoral theme of Orban in Hungary, Kacynsky in Poland and Putin in Russia.

In Brazil, the evangelical church was vital in getting Bolsonaro elected. In El Salvador, the new president Nayib Bukele asked an extreme right-wing evangelical pastor to offer a prayer during his inaugural ceremony, and there is a draft law that would make the Bible compulsory reading in all schools. You will all remember how, after the overthrow of Eva Morales by the army, the new president of Bolivia Jeanine Áñez and her supporters went around with a bible in their hands at all ceremonies.

And let us not forget that Trump was elected because of the support of the evangelical church, which has 40 million faithful. He moved the US embassy to Jerusalem to get their support. Evangelicals believe that when Israel will recover all the territory of the biblical time, Christ will come to earth for a second time, and they will be the only ones that will be rewarded. The other country which moved its embassy to Jerusalem, Guatemala, was also the result of the move of an evangelical president.

Theologian Tamayo speaks of an international of hate: hate against gender equality, against LGTBs, against abortion, against immigrants. Those who propagate hate defend reinforcement of the patriarchal family, the submission of women, they despise what is not traditional, they mistrust science and statistics, they deny climate change, and they hate Muslims, Jews and blacks. What is being totally ignored in all this is the problem of social inequalities, the growing economic gap for reasons of ethnicity, culture, gender, social class, sexual identity, and so on.

Tamayo observes that this is becoming a new international movement, which is now coming to Europe, as the recent Spanish elections show. Vox, the extreme right-wing party, created just four years ago, now has 52 seats in the Parliament, and is the third largest party, like AFD in Germany. The party of Italy’s Salvini, with his rosary beads, has become the number one party, and he could become prime minister at any moment. And we know well of the very large conservative front against the Pope in the Catholic Church which also wants to save traditions, is against LGBTs, is for a patriarchal family, etc., etc. All this is about using religion, fear and hate for political gains.

And what about the flag ‘in the name of the nation’? Well, the best example is Benjamin Netanyahu who has passed a law which makes being a Jew the requisite for Israeli citizenship. This is how Narendra Modi in India is trying to deprive Muslims (170 million) of Indian citizenship; it is how the government in Myanmar is treating over one million Rohingyas. Those cases join religion with the fight against minorities and different religions in the name of the nation. China has now launched a campaign for a Chinese dream (also persecuting Uighur Muslim minorities). This is exactly the same strategy as that of Trump, who calls for the American dream. The United States has no allies, and anybody who makes money in trade with the United States is an adversary, be it Canada or Germany. “America First”, which in fact means “America Alone”.

So, the flags “in the name of God” and “in the name of the Nation” frequently overlap. Italian political scientist and economist Riccardo Petrella observes that in recent decades, a third flag has appeared with a large audience: ‘in the name of money”, and also that in the last two decades corruption has become another universal countervalue.

In its last report, Transparency International, the organisation which fights and denounces corruption, analyses how corruption is weakening democracy. Freedom House, a conservative US foundation, found that since 2006, 113 countries have seen a net decline in their freedom score, while only 62 have seen some improvement. The Economist says that democracy was stagnating in 2018, after three consecutive years of deterioration. Of the 62 countries which transitioned from authoritarian rule to some form of democracy, in the last quarter of the 20th century, half of them have seen their level of democracy stagnate or even falter. Transparency international highlights that while fight against corruption is high on the populists’ platform, when in power they tend to weaken democratic institutions, and engage into corruption like their predecessors. It cites the cases of various country, from Guatemala to Turkey, from the United States to Poland and Hungary. When corruption seeps into the democratic system it corrupts leaders. Economic corruption has increased in the last forty years, after the “greed is good” campaign, as the market has substituted man as the centre of society. It reaches the entire public sector, besides obviously the private sector.

Two-thirds of humankind now have no trust in police and other public services, because they are considered corrupt, and they believe that corruption is so diffuse that it cannot be eliminated.

We have become accustomed to hearing about corruption in the last two decades, because it is in the news every day. We have slowly become trained to look as natural things that are at all no natural: a good sign of the extent to which we have lost a moral compass.

If you ask children today if wars and poverty are natural, they will probably answer yes. And, as adolescents, they will also probably consider corruption as natural.

It is therefore evident that two fundamental environments for humankind are in danger. One in the short term is the natural environment. The conditions of life on the planet can worsen dramatically, and we have all the forecasts. We have only the coming decade to try to reverse the trend of climate change, be it natural (some say) or man-made (all scientists). But then the question is: how long do we have to protect our political environment, which runs our economic, social and cultural life, before that also goes into an irreversible decline?

Of course, a bloody dictatorship is less dramatic than seas rising seven metres, temperatures 3 degrees, or l0osing all our glaciers, and many rivers and water sources. Now that we have all the data, why do citizens not act for the survival of their environment?

On the other hand, 2019 will remain in history the year of mass demonstrations. In 21 countries, in Latin America, Africa, Asia, Europe, millions of people went out on the street to protest against corruption, social injustice, the gap between political institutions and citizens, the fear and decline of social welfare as a political priority, Young people, who have deserted political parties and elections, have been frequently at the forefront. They are at the head of the campaign for a sustainable world, where an adolescent, Greta Thunberg, has brought together young people from all over the world. But the system does not appear to be really listening to them, unless they become violent as in Chile, Paris, Baghdad or Hong Kong.

These reflections bring us to three conclusions.

The first is that, not by accident, the enemies of the fight to defend our natural environment are also the enemies of our political environment. they do not care if the first is destroyed, because they are intertwined with corporations, gas and oil companies, farmers who want to take over land (like the case of Brazil and Amazonia), or coal companies, like in Poland and Australia. But they want to twist the political environment in their favour, for their power. Orban of Hungary has campaigned for am illiberal democracy. Bolsonaro has gone further, talking about the good old days of the military dictatorship. And all of them, from Trump to Salvini, look on international cooperation, multilateral agreements and any initiative that reduces the freedom of a country for peace and justice (like the United Nations or the European Union) as enemies. They are all in favour of building walls, forgetting that the Second World War taught us to abolish them.

The second is that democracy is in danger, for the same reasons that the environment is also in danger. There is no ability and will among populists to reach any internal agreement. Would it be possible today to create the United Nations, or sign the Declaration on Human Rights? Certainly not just as there is no will to fight climate change.

The third, therefore, is what is going to happen in the new decade we are now entering. It looks like it will be a decisive decade. In just a few years, we must take action on how we will deal with two existential issues: how to remain in our present environment, and how we will live together.

All this will be decided by voters. And this raises an issue: is it legitimate to believe that fascism, xenophobia and nationalism are the answer to our problems? Humans should learn from their mistakes (like all other animals do). And we should have learnt from the two world wars that those beliefs are not an answer but the roots of war and confrontation.

So, here a final reflection. According to Steven Pinker, the Canadian cognitive scientist, writing in The Economist, in the last seven years humans have become healthier, live longer, are more secure, richer, freer, more intelligent and educated. This trend should continue. But humans have evolved, because they have dedicated themselves mainly to the advantages of reproduction, survival and material growth not because of wisdom or happiness.

The first urgent step is to reconcile progress with human nature. We have cognitive abilities, and also the ability to cooperate and be emphatic, unlike other animals. Between the Age of Enlightenment and the Second World War, we made important progress on science, democracy, human rights, free information, market rules and the creation of institutions for international cooperation. This trend cannot be stopped, argues Pinker; it is now in our genes.

Well, in ten years we will know if all this is in the human genes or is just one of the many passages of history. Also, because in 2022, Bolsonaro and Orban should leave office: Erdogan in 2023; Netanyahu, Modi, Putin and Trump in 2024. So, in just four years (a microsecond in human history), we will know how the world is, and what damages are irreversible or not, and if we have made any progress in halting the climate crisis. But Trump, etc, have been elected…

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Nov 15 2019 (IPS)

This year the Worldwide Web is thirty years old. For the first time since 1435, a citizen from Brazil could exchange their views and information with another in Finland.

The Internet, the communications infrastructure for the Web is a little older. It was developed from the ARPANET, a US Defense Department project under the Advanced Research Projects Agency; the military designing it to decentralize communications in the case of a military attack.

That network enabled scientists to communicate over email in universities. Then in 1989 Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in Switzerland invented the Hyperlink and the Worldwide Web (the Web) rapidly moved from scientists automating information sharing between universities and research institutions to the first Websites now available to the general public.

In 2002 the first social media sites began as specialised websites. LinkedIn launched in 2003 then FaceBook in 2004, Twitter in 2006, Instagram in 2010 and so on…

Will the Internet become a tool for participation? How will this be done? These are questions that political institutions, if they really care for democracy, must address as soon as possible. The Zuckerberg era must make this choice now, in a few years time it will already be too late…

My generation regarded the arrival of the Web as a great prospect for democracy. We come from the Gutenberg era, an era that in 1435 changed the world. From manuscripts drafted by monks to be read by a few people in monasteries, the invention of reusable movable type meant that in just 20 years already eight million copies of printed books went all across Europe.

Among many other things it also meant the creation of information. People who heretofore had merely a scant horizon beyond their immediate surroundings, could suddenly access information about their country, and even the entire world. The first newspaper was printed in Strasbourg in 1605. From then until 1989, the world was filled with information.

Information had a very serious limit. It was a vertical structure. Just a few people sent news to a large number of recipients; there was little feedback. It wasn’t participatory, it required large startup investments, it was easily used by economic and political powers.

In the Third World, the media system was part of the State. In 1976, 88% of World news flows emanated from just three countries: the US, the UK and France. International news agencies based in these three countries included Associated Press (AP), United Press International (UPI), Reuters and Agence France Press (AFP).

The world’s media were dependent on their news services. Some alternative news agencies, like Inter Press Services, were able to put a dent in their monopoly. But what this Western media published, by and large was a biased window on the world.

Then came the Internet, and with it, came horizontal communication. Every receiver was also a sender. For the first time since 1435, media were no longer the only window on the world. Like-minded people could take part in social, cultural and economic interactions.

This change was evident in the United Nations Woman’s World Conference in Beijing, 1995. Women created networks prior to the conference, and came with a common plan of action. Governments were not so prepared, so the Declaration of Beijing was a turning point, one which was entirely unlike the bland declarations from the previous four World Conferences.

Another good example is the campaign to eliminate anti-personnel landmines, started by the Canadian activist Jody Williams in 1992. This soon blossomed into a large coalition of Non-Governmental Organizations from more than 100 countries.

Under mounting pressure Norway decided to introduce the issue to the UN, where the US, China, and other manufacturers of landmines like the USSR, tried to block the debate, declaring that they would vote against it.

Roberto Savio

The activists did not care, and 128 countries adopted the Mine Ban Treaty in 1997 with the US, China and the USSR voting against. A vast global movement was more powerful than the traditional role of the Security Council. The Internet had become the tool to create world coalitions.

Those are just two examples of how far the Internet could change the traditional system of Westphalian state sovereignty as defined at the Conference of Westphalia in 1648. The Internet spanned national frontiers to bring on a new era.

Let’s say, for the sake of symbolism, that the Internet brought us from the Gutenberg Era, to the Zuckerberg Era, to cite the inventor of Facebook and a leading instance of what went wrong with this medium.

The Internet came upon us with an unprecedented force. It took 38 years for the radio to reach 50 million people: television took 13 years; and the Web just four years. It had a billion users in 2005, two billion in 2011, and it now has three and a half billion users, three billion of those using social media.

So the two traditional pillars of power, the political system and the economic system, also had to learn how to use the Internet. The US provides a good example. All of American media (national and regional publications) involves printing 50 million copies daily.

Quality newspapers — both the conservative broadsheets like the Wall Street Journal, and progressive ones like the Washington Post or the New York Times — together print ten million copies a day. Trump has sixty three million followers on Twitter; they read Trump’s tweets but don’t buy newspapers.

The Web has had two unforeseen developments. One was the dramatic reinforcement of the consumer society. Today advertising budgets are ten times larger than budgets for education, and education only lasts a few years compared with a lifetime of advertisement.

With the development of social networks, people — now more consumers than citizens — have become objects for marketing goods and services, and recently also for political campaigns. All systems of information and communications extract our personal data, selling us on as consumers.

Now the TV can see us while we watch it. Smartphones have become microphones that listen in on our conversations. The notion of privacy is gone. If we could access our data, we would find out that we are followed every minute of the day, even into our bedrooms.

Secret algorithms form profiles of each and every one of us. Based on these profiles platforms provide us with the news, the products, and the people that these algorithms believe we will like, thus insulating us in our own bubbles.

Artificial intelligence learns from the data that it accumulates. China, with 1.35 billion people, will provide its researchers with more data than Europe and United States together. The Internet has given birth to a digital extractive economy, where the raw material is no longer minerals, but we humans.

The other development that went awry is that the digital extractive economy has created unprecedented wealth.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was recently divorced from his wife. In the settlement she received 36 billion dollars yet Bezos remains among the 10 richest people in the world. This is just one story from an increasingly sad reality of social injustice, where 80 of the world’s richest persons hold the same wealth as nearly three billion poor people.

A new sector is evolving, the “surveillance capitalism” sector, where money is made not from the production of good and services, but from data extracted from people.

This new system exploits humans to give to the owners of this technology, a concentration of wealth, knowledge and power without precedent in history. The ability to develop facial recognition and other surveillance instruments no longer lies in the realms of science fiction.

The Chinese government has already given every citizen a digital number, where all their ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behaviours converge. If a citizen goes below a level, their children will not be allowed to go to a good school, and the citizen themselves, though they may still be able to travel by train, won’t have access to planes.

These technologies will soon be in use all over the planet. London town now has 627,000 surveillance cameras, one for every fourteen citizens; in Beijing it’s one for every seven.  A study conducted by The Rand Corporation estimates that by 2050, Europe too would also have one camera for every seven citizens.

The interrelationship between democracy and the Internet is now creating a belated awareness in the political system. The European Parliament has just released a study, about the negative impact of the Internet. These impacts are:

1.        Internet Addiction
   There is unanimity among doctors and sociologists that a new generation is coming, one which is very different from the previous one. Over 90% of those aged 15-24 uses the Internet, as against 11% for those over 55. Young people spend 21 hours per week on the PC, and 18 hours on a smart phone. This leaves little time for social and cultural interaction. 4.4% of European adolescents now show pathological Internet use “that affects their lives and health”. The American Academy of Psychology has officially included Internet Addiction as a new ailment. Magnetic resonance studies of those with Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD) show that they exhibit the same brain structure alterations as those who suffer from drug or alcohol addiction.
2.        Harming cognitive development
   A particular warning is given about children under two years of age. More than 20 minutes a day of screen use reduces some of their neural development. People pushed to isolation tend to develop symptoms of distress, anger, loss of control, social withdrawal, familial conflicts, and an inability to act in real life. Internet users in tests were faster than non-users at finding data, but they were less able to retain data.
3.        Information Overload
   The condition of having too much information hampers the ability to understand an issue, or to make effective decisions, an important issue for managers, consumers, and social media users. According to Microsoft, attention span for a title has gone from 12 seconds in 2000 down to 8 seconds in 2016. The attention span for reading has gone from 12 minutes to 8 minutes. Two new terms can be used: one, the ‘popping brain’, describes a brain less adept to adapt to a slower pace of real life and then there is ‘Neuroplasticity’; i.e. the ability to alter one’s behaviour after a new experience. Frequent immersion in virtual worlds can reduce neuroplasticity and also make it more difficult to adapt to the slower pace of real life. The need to compete in speed between social media channels is well known. For example Amazon estimates that one second of performance delay would cost 1.16 billion losses per year in sales.
4.        Harmful effects in knowledge and belief
   The fact that social media deliberately tends to gather together users with similar views, tastes and habits, is fragmenting society in a negative way for democracy, resulting in closed systems that don’t allow for alternative viewpoints. Adolescents no longer discuss significant subjects. They go to their virtual world, and if they come across somebody from another group, they tend to insult each other. The Internet is full of fake news and misleading information, and users have great difficulty distinguishing accurate from inaccurate information. Echo chambers appear to be far more pervasive, and may unite those with more extreme and partisan political and ideological positions, therefore undermining possibilities for civil discourse and tolerance, supporting radicalization.
5.        Harming public/private boundaries.
   The Internet blurs the distinction between the private and the public. Private life becomes public. This is especially negative for teenagers who lose the concept of privacy, for example by sending private photos across the Internet. One important observation is that teenagers now get their sexual education from pornography, where women are always an object to satisfy men’s sexual phantasies. This is in turn creating a lack of respect for women, and a new generation that risk, for new reasons, returning to a patriarchal society. Group violations of teenage girls are clearly a result of this trend.
6.        Harming social relationships
   The Internet is clearly a powerful instrument to create new communities. However, when used negatively, it can also damage communities, because of the migration to Internet of many human activities such as shopping, commerce, socialising, leisure, professional activities and personal interaction. That migration creates impoverished communication, incivility and a lack of trust and commitment.
7.        Harming democracy
   The Internet has been a powerful tool for participation, and therefore for democracy. However the study notes with concern that a growing number of activities are also harmful to democracy. These include: a) The incivility of many online political discourses, b) Political and ideological polarisation, uniquely possible using the Internet. c) Misinformation, and, in particular, fake news, d) Voter manipulations through profiling based on harvested social media information. We all know what happened in the US elections with Cambridge Analytica data, gathered by Facebook, and how thousands of false web users and bots now heavily interfere in elections.

We should add to this study some other considerations. The first is that finance now is now also run by algorithms. The algorithms do not only decide when to sell or buy shares, but now also decide where to invest.

The Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) last month reached 14,400 billion dollars in trades, more than that traded by humans. This trend will continue with the development of artificial intelligence and soon finance will become even more dehumanized.  Even when Internet users invest themselves they too will be directed by machines and algorithms.

A second consideration is that young people read less and less. Reading a book is very different to scrolling a screen. We are experiencing a progressive reduction in levels of culture. It’s not uncommon to have university students that make grammar and spelling mistakes.

Let us remember that when the Internet was still new, its proponents told us: it is not important to know, rather it is important to know how to find. We are more and more dependent on search engines, learning less and less, and we are unable to connect that data in a personal holistic logical system.

There is clearly a need for regulation to reduce the negative aspects of the Internet and to reinforce positive values. The owners of social media platforms are now under increased scrutiny so they have taken the road of self-regulation.

Twitter, for instance, has decided that it cannot be used for political purposes. Zuckerberg is an exponent of market myths telling us that good news will automatically prevail over fake news. Except that platforms help users to read and find only what they like, to maintain our attention, providing us what is striking, unusual and provocative. This is not a free market.

The Zuckerberg era is clearly creating an entirely different generation, very different from the generations of the Gutenberg era. This raises many questions, from privacy to freedom of expression (now in private hands), from who will regulate, what to regulate and how.

A five year-old child is now very different from a Gutenberg five year-old. We are in a period of transition. The meaning of democracy is changing. International relations are moving away from the search for common values via multilateralism, to a tide of nationalist, xenophobic and selfish views of the world.

Terms like peace, cooperation, accountability, participation and transparency are becoming outdated. What is clear is that the present system is no longer sustainable. Policies disappear from debate, now referred to only as ‘politics’. Vision and paradigms are getting scarce.

Over and above all of this the threat of climate change is looming; yet last year toxic emissions from the five largest countries increased by 5%. Young people are largely absent from political institutions as is shown by the vote on Brexit where only 23% of the 18-25 age group participated.

At this very moment we have large demonstrations in thirteen countries all over the world. In those streets young people do participate, frequently demonstrating rage, frustration and violence. If we cannot bring back horizontal communication to the Internet and we do not free it from the commercial fracturing of young people, the future is hardly rosy.

Yet as the marches against Climate Change clearly demonstrate, if young people want to change the world, values and vision will return. It is evident that the Internet can be a very powerful tool. But who will redress these failings? Will the Internet become a tool for participation? How will this be done?

These are questions that political institutions, if they really care for democracy, must address as soon as possible. The Zuckerberg era must make this choice now, in a few years time it will already be too late…

Publisher of OtherNews, Italian-Argentine Roberto Savio is an economist, journalist, communication expert, political commentator, activist for social and climate justice and advocate of an anti neoliberal global governance. Director for international relations of the European Center for Peace and Development.. He is co-founder of Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency and its President Emeritus.

Donald Trump addresses the UN's General Assembly. Credit: UN Photo/Cia Pak

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Oct 7 2019 (IPS)

It is very likely that the idea of impeaching Donald Trump will be a boomerang. Trump fans are listening to a furious campaign which smacks of coup d’etat and call his accusers traitors who deserve to go to jail.

In the first three hours after the announcement of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, that an impeachment process would be launched, Trump received a million dollars, five million in 24 hours, and 8.5 million in two days. His campaign received 50,000 new donors.

Trump won the election by just under 80,000 votes. It should be borne in mind that the US electoral system does not elect the president by the majority of the votes of its citizens, but by delegates that each State elects to vote the president. For historical reasons related to how the Union was created, the less populated and less developed states have proportionately more delegates than the large and wealthy states.

Roberto Savio

Trump ran his campaign in the less developed and less populous states, and in practice ignored the big cities and the most populous states, like California. In the popular vote, that is of citizens, Democratic candidate Hilary Clinton won by three million votes.

I think the Democrats have done Trump a great favour. In any case, even if the impeachment passes in the House of Representatives (where the Democrats have a majority), it has very little chance that it will pass in the Senate where, again for historical reasons linked to the creation of the United States of America, each state has two senators, regardless of its population.  Wyoming, with 578,000 inhabitants, has two senators, as does California, the most populous state in the country, with 37.2 million people.

And it is precisely the less developed states and those with smaller populations that allow Republicans to have the majority in the Senate. For the impeachment to be successful, a two-thirds majority of senators would be needed, which is highly unlikely.

I think the Democrats have done Trump a great favour. In any case, even if the impeachment passes in the House of Representatives (where the Democrats have a majority), it has very little chance that it will pass in the Senate

The only possibility is to increase the number of voters, who do not exceed 50% of those who have the right to vote. But will the impeachment have this impact? Are the citizens of the less developed states going to increase their electoral participation in protest at Trump’s actions? There is no evidence of this, and much will depend on who the Democratic candidate is going to be.

The camapign of demonising Joe Biden is going to have some impact. And the progressive candidates, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, are the kind of politicians who seem too elitist in the states that vote for Trump. They are very conservative regions, and Trump has the unconditional support of the Evangelical Church, which is estimated at 40 million parishioners, while the Catholic Church is very conservative.

Obviously, if there is an economic crisis, this could have a transverse impact since Americans traditionally vote with their pockets. But, for the moment, 90% of Republican voters – as well as his parliamentarians – remain loyal to Trump.

Herein lies the fragility of democracy, when it is based on non-democratic rules. Boris Johnson was elected prime minister, not by the British people, but by around 160,000 members of the Conservative Party. The difference is that Johnson has had to expel 21 members of his party, all high-profile parliamentarians.

He has been blocked on his personalist and authoritarian path by the Supreme Court, which has annulled his decision to prorogate Parliament. In the United States, no like-minded parliamentarian has criticised Trump, and the Supreme Court has a Republican majority, which will change the American legal system considerably.

The lesson that comes out of all this is that democracy works if it has laws that guarantee the balance of powers and there is a conscious and interested citizenship in the common good, not divided in a partisan way, where the other is considered an enemy and not one that has different ideas.

The case of Brexit and Trump are good examples. But let’s not forget the case of Hungary, where Viktor Orban, after being democratically elected, developed a xenophobic policy against migrants, carried out tight control of the press, the National Election Commission and the judiciary, enriched his faithful with funds from the EU, changed the entire electoral system accommodating it to his party and then declared himself follower of an illiberal democracy.

Given the possibility that the united opposition will win the municipal elections in Budapest on October 13, Minister Gergely Gulyas, chief of staff of Orban, has warned that in this case, the government would cut funding to the capital city.

The style has been similar to that of Hitler and Mussolini, who came to power in a democratic way and then eliminated democracy by identifying an enemy of the people, in whose name they said they spoke: Jewish power.

Today the main targets of the populist and xenophobic right for raising its electoral quotas are immigrants.

Brexit was largely due to the announced arrival of millions of Turks, who were not even in the European Union. Trump made the Mexican and Central American “invasion” the strong point of his defence of the American people, along with the Chinese threat. If the voter swallows these mythologies, democracy is certainly in danger.  Trump and Johnson are just the tip of the iceberg.

Publisher of OtherNews, Italian-Argentine Roberto Savio is an economist, journalist, communication expert, political commentator, activist for social and climate justice and advocate of an anti neoliberal global governance. Director for international relations of the European Center for Peace and Development.. He is co-founder of Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency and its President Emeritus.

When all is said and done, it appears that Thomas Hobbes, the 17th century English philosopher who had a dire vision of man, was not totally wrong.

From the frivolous to the serious, in just a week we have had four items of news which would not happen in a normal world. An English porn beauty with 86,000 followers on social media has put bottles of the water she bathes in on sale at 30 pounds a bottle and has sold several thousand bottles.

Roberto Savio

There are so many signs of barbarisation that they would fill a book… and, as Euripides famously wrote: Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.

It is not a popular task, but we have to look at the reality and observe that, in the most scientifically and technologically developed period of history, we are living in times of precipitous barbarisation.

Social inequality has become the basis for the new economy. People have now lowered their expectations and are prepared to work part-time in a precarious job, where young people (according to the International Labour Organisation) can hope for a retirement pension of 600 euro a month. This has been accepted by the political system. We even have a study from Spain according to which, in the present housing market, nearly 87% of people need 90% of their salary just to rent a house.

Today, for many, a salary means survival, not a dignified life. The new economy has developed the so-called gig economy: you work to distribute food, but you are a co-entrepreneur without any of the rights of an employee, for an amount that will never allow you to marry. Children have grown accustomed to look at phenomena such as poverty or war as natural. And now politics are not based on ideas but on how you can successfully exploit the guts of the people, waving banners against immigrants (when we are witnessing a rapid fall in the birth rate) and splintering countries between ”We” who represent the people and “You” enemy of the country. The United States is the best example, where Republicans consider Democrats enemies of the United States. And this brings us to a central question: have Trump, Italy’s Matteo Salvini, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and company not been elected democratically? And they are the symptom or the cause of the “populocracy” which is replacing democracy?

It is not possible to offer a sociological or historical study here. Let us just use a bite: we have gone from the Gutenberg era into a new era – the Zuckerberg era.

Those who greeted the arrival of the Internet with enthusiasm also did so because it would democratise communication and therefore bring about greater participation. The hope was to see a world where horizontal communication would replace the vertical system of information which Gutenberg made possible. Information was, in fact, a support for states and business that used it to reach citizens, who had no recourse to feedback. With Internet, people could now speak directly throughout the world and the propaganda which accompanied its arrival was not considered relevant: it is not important to know, it is important to know where to find It. Well, we have all the statistics on how Internet has affected the general level of culture and dialogue.

The attention span of people has declined dramatically. The majority of Internet users do not stay on an item more than 15 seconds. In the last five years, book volumes have been shortened by 29 pages. Today, articles longer than 650 words are not accepted by columnists’ services. The last meeting of editors of international news agencies decided to lower the level of news from the level of 22 years to that of 17 years. In Europe, the percentage of people who buy at least one book a year now stands at 22% (in the United States it is now 10.5%). According to a recent study in Italy, only 40% of the population is able to read and understand a book. In the same country, 13% of libraries have closed in the last ten years. A very popular transmission in Spain was ”59 seconds” which saw a number of people debate round a table; at the 59th seconds their microphones would disappear. Today, the dream of a TV interviewer is that the person interviewed will give a shorter answer than the question. Newspapers are for people over forty. And there is a unanimous complaint about the level of students entering the university: not all are free from mistakes of orthography and syntax. And the list could continue practically ad infinitum.

The problem of barbarisation has major relevance for political participation. The Gutenberg generations were accustomed to dialogue and discussion. Today, 83% of Internet users (80% under the age of 21), do so only in the virtual world they carved out for themselves. People of Group A gather only with people of Group A. If they come across somebody from Group B, they insult each other. Politicians have been able to adjust rapidly to the system. The best example is Trump. All US newspapers together have a circulation of 60 million copies (ten million those of quality, both conservative and progressive). Trump has 60 million followers who take Trump’s tweets as information. The do not buy newspapers, and if they watch TV it is Fox, which is Trump’s amplifier. No wonder that over 80% of Trump’s voters would vote for him again. And the media, which have lost the ability to offer analysis and cover processes, not just events, take the easy path. Let us follow famous people and make the famous more famous. Analytical journalism is disappearing. In the United States it exists thanks to grants … in every European country, there are few quality papers left, and the largest circulation goes to tabloids which spare their readers the effort of thinking. The Daily Mirror in Britain and Bild in Germany are the best examples.

Internet has made everybody a communicator. This is a fantastic achievement. But in this increasing barbarisation, people also use the Internet for transmitting false information, stories based on fantasy, without any of the quality controls that the media world used to have. And artificial intelligence has been taking over, creating many false accounts, which now interfere in the electoral process, as was proven in the last US elections. We have to add to this that the algorithms used by the owners of the Internet aim to trap the attention of users in order to keep them as much as possible. This month, El Pais published a long study entitled “The toxic effects of YouTube”, where it shows how its algorithms push the viewer to items that are of fantasy, pseudoscientific and of great attraction.

This is due to the fact that the owners have become fabulously rich by transforming citizens into consumers. They find out our identity, and they sell it to companies for their marketing, and also for elections. Those owners have unprecedented wealth, never achieved in the real world: not only in that of production, but even in the world of finance, which has become a casino with no control. The entire world of production of services and goods, man-made, is now close to a trillion dollars a day; that same day, financial flows reach 40 trillion dollars. Jeff Bezos ‘s divorce gave his wife 38 billion dollars. That is equal to the annual average income of 20,000 dollars of 19 million people. No wonder that 80 individuals now possess the same wealth as 2.3 billion people (in 2008, they were 1,200 individuals).

According to historians, greed and fear are great engines of change in history. That was also true in the Gutenberg era. But now, they have triggered a combination of both in a short period of time. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the doctrine of liberal globalisation arrived with such strength that Margaret Thatcher (who with Ronald Reagan ushered in the new vision of individual profits and elimination of social goods) famously talked of TINA: There Is No Alternative.

The entire political system, including Social Democrats, accepted riding a system of values based on greed and unfettered competition at individual level, at state level and at international level. It took twenty years to understand that the poor have become poorer, and the rich richer, and that states have lost much of their sovereignty to multinational corporations and the world of finance. It is worth noting that, in 2009, in order to save a corrupt and inefficient financial system, the world spent 12 trillion dollars (the United States alone, 4 trillion). Since that rescue, banks have paid the impressive amount of 800 billion dollars in penalties for illicit activities.

The financial crisis of 2009 has triggered a wave of fear. Let us not forget that until 2009, there were no sovereignist, populist, xenophobic parties anywhere, except for Le Pen in France. Soon old traps such as “in name of the nation” and “the defence of religion” were resurrected by politicians able to ride fear. A new scapegoat – immigrants – was found and populocrats are now undermining democracy everywhere.

Populocracy is the new wave. Former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi ushered in a new language, and that language has now been updated by Salvini, Trump and so on. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are the new medium and now the medium is the message. The old elite had not found a new language.

The Zuckerberg era is an era of greed and fear. Zuckerberg is now attempting to create a global currency, the Libra, to be used by his 2.3 billion users. Until now, states were the only entities able to emit money, a symbol of the nation. Zuckerberg’s currency is based entirely on the Internet and will have no control or regulations. In case of a default, we will have a world crisis without precedent. In the Gutenberg era, this was not possible.

But who has made able Jeff Bezos to give 38 billion dollars to a former wife? Who has elected Trump and Salvini and company, who speak on behalf of the nation and the people, and turn those who do not agree into enemies of the nation and the people, creating an unprecedented polarisation, accompanied by an orgy of revolt against science and knowledge, which have supported the elite, and must now be put aside for the good of people.

This process of barbarisation should not obscure an old proverb: every country has the government it deserves. It is called democracy. However, the traditional elite has no code of communication with the new era. The answer will come from citizen mobilization.

A young Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, has done more with her stubbornness to raise awareness about impending climate change than the entire political system. Even Trump (albeit for electoral reasons) has now declared that climate change is important.

Today, there many “points of light“ appearing in the world. The elections in Istanbul are a good example, as are the mobilisation in Hong Kong, Sudan and Nicaragua, among many others. Let us hope we will reach a point where people will take the reins of the process and awake the world from the precipitous course of barbarisation. Even Thomas Hobbes concluded that humankind will always, soon or later, find the right path, and give itself good governance. He thought that an elite would always be able to lead the masses.

Well, elites are now the Greta Thunbergs of the world.

Publisher of OtherNews, Italian-Argentine Roberto Savio is an economist, journalist, communication expert, political commentator, activist for social and climate justice and advocate of an anti neoliberal global governance. Director for international relations of the European Center for Peace and Development.. He is co-founder of Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency and its President Emeritus.

Social Democrats, who had been steadily disappearing following the crisis of 2008, have been making a small comeback in the last year. Now they are in power in Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Finland and, most recently, in Denmark.

But the statistics are daunting. The recent European elections gave members of the Socialist group 20% of the vote, against 25% in 2014, and the erosion from the 34% achieved in 1989 and 1994 is clear. The latest success, in Denmark, with 25.9% of the vote, was lower than in 2015. In Finland, they received 17.7% of the vote, just two-tenths more than the Alt-Right. And in Sweden, Stefan Löfven won his mandate with the lowest vote in decades. In countries like the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Italy, they are becoming irrelevant.

Roberto Savio

There is now a debate about the Danish model. Mette Frederiksen, leader of the Social Democrats, has adopted a very radical approach against immigrants, practically identical to the vision of the Alt-Right: deportation of immigrants to a desert island (a la Australian); confiscation of jewels and other valuables they bring with them; the prohibition of burkas and niqabs in open spaces. In 2015, nearly 60,000 migrants reached the country, but only 21.000 were given asylum; in 2017, just one-quarter of those who applied received asylum. At the same time, Frederiksen promised, among others, to increase welfare, subsidies to the poorest part of the population and incentives for young people (whom she wants to stop smoking: she has promised to increase the cost of cigarettes radically).

The Danish model is based on a simple fact. Today Europeans are governed by fear. Fear about the future, the arrival of Artificial Intelligence and robots , which could lead to the disappearance of 10% of current jobs: just the automation of cars would leave millions of taxi drivers, bus drivers, truck drivers and so on jobless (something that immigrants could never be responsible for). The so-called New Economy openly declares that labour is a small component in industrial production. The excess of available workers means that the days of a fixed job are over. This, of course, contradicts the fact that the population is in steep decline. According to the International Labour Organisation, Europe will need at least 10 million more people to remain competitive in 2030.

When feelings, and not ideas, become the basis of politics, and it is the gut and not the brain that decides, we have entered the realm of mythologies and left reality out of the picture.

Take Italy. The large majority of Italian workers now vote for Matteo Salvini, leader of the Northern League and deputy prime minister and Minister of the Interior. Salvini has made fear the central theme of his permanent electoral campaign. As Minister of the Interior, he has spent just 17 days in his ministerial office and the rest on the road. He has defined immigrants as the main threat to the security of Italians. He holds mass rallies, kissing the rosary or the Bible, and explaining that Italy is a slave of the European Union. He has introduced new security laws, which make it easier to possess a weapon. And he has launched an open campaign against the Pope and his calls for solidarity and inclusion. He suggests that the Pope could take all refuges into the Vatican, and he has made an alliance with the conservative wing of the Church, asking Pope Benedict to come back. He has doubled his votes, and he is on the way to becoming Italy’s next Prime Minister. He is now challenging the European Union with the declaration that he will not accept the 3% limit to the budget deficit and claims that he is acting on behalf of the Italian people, that Italians come first and Eurocrats seconds. This is a battle that he is going to lose. The European heads of governments, not the Commission, established the limit to the budget deficit. And his fellow sovereigntists, like Sebastian Kurz of Austria or Viktor Orban of Hungary, will never agree to making any sacrifice to allow Italy to run a budget deficit.

Italy is a good example for understanding how reality is no longer important and is not the basis for politics. Tito Boeri, an international economist and outgoing Director of the National Institute of Social Security (a well-respected institution), has just published an article entitled ‘The managers of fear’. Italians are now convinced that there is one immigrant for every four Italians: actually, there is one for every twelve. Polls show that Italians (and this is valid by and large for all Europeans) are convinced that there are four problems with immigrants: 1) they will take over their work: 2) Italians have to finance the welfare of immigrants that do not work out of their own pockets; 3) they make towns less secure; and 4) immigrants bring contagious diseases with them. Well, says Boeri, nearly 10% of immigrants have creates companies. Every immigrant who is an entrepreneur employs 8 workers, and the labour of immigrants is highly concentrated in activities that Italians have abandoned. They provide 90% of the workforce in rice fields, 85% in the garment sewing industry and account for 75% of fruit and vegetables pickers. Wages in these sectors have not increased in the last 20 years: they were low, and they remain low.

But the most important fact (and this is also true for all of Europe) is that today one Italian in four is over the age of 65, compared with one immigrant in 50. In Italy, there are 2 pensioners for 3 people who work. How could the pension system survive without immigrants? Yet the over 65s are now those who vote for the Alt-Right. This imbalance is destined to grow. To maintain the current system, 83% of a salary goes to the pension system. In the future, how much will it cost the falling number of workers to sustain those who have retired? Already 150,000 young people, most highly qualified, are leaving Italy every year.

What about crime? Statistics show that crime has been diminishing at the same time as the number of immigrants has been growing. And what about contagious diseases where we have statistics from the World Health Organisation: Turkey is the country that has received most immigrants (over four million) in a short period of time. No data exist that show an increase in contagious diseases. In Europe, Germany has been the nation that received most immigrants in a short period of time, yet there are no data showing any increase in contagious diseases.

Fear, according to historians, together with greed, is one engine of change of the course of history. When did fear start? With the economic crisis of 2008, brought about by irresponsible finance, the only global sector of the world without control. The crisis made clear that globalisation was a failure. Instead of lifting all boats as its propagandists proclaimed, it lifted few boats, and made those unprecedently rich: now 80 individuals possess the same wealth as 2.3 trillion people. In fact, greed preceded fear. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the world embarked on an orgy of private over public. The State was considered the enemy of growth. All social costs were slashed, welfare and education in particular, because they were considered non-productive. Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil is still doing the same: he has cut the budget of universities and has announced that he wants to “discourage” philosophy and sociology, in favour of “practical studies” like business, engineering and medicine. Gain came to be considered a central virtue. Companies were allowed to seek maximum profit by delocalising in cheaper countries, large companies to put local shops out of business, salaries were reduced, and trade unions marginalised. On its neoliberal path, globalisation was considered unstoppable.

The tide was so strong that it was called pensée unique. At first, the left had no answer. But then British Prime Minister Tony Blair came up with an alternative proposal in 2003. Given that globalisation is unstoppable, let us ride it and let us try to tame it: the Third Way. That, in fact, meant accepting globalisation. The result was that the social democracy tamed very little, and the losers of globalisation no longer felt defended by the left. Globalisation made all that was remunerable mobile: finance, trade, transportation. The State was left only with responsibility for what was not movable: education, health, pensions and all social costs.

This was accompanied by a considerable reduction of national incomes, as globalisation was able (and is still able) to hide profits from national tax systems. According to some estimates, there are 80 trillion dollars in fiscal paradises, one of the main reasons for the decline of national incomes. There was much less money to distribute. The public debt started to pile up. As I write, it now stands at 58,987,551,309,132 dollars (see the Economist debt clock for today’s figure). That has increased the debt servicing to pay and reduced the amount available for current expenses. Nobody talks of this Sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of countries and their citizens. No wonder the European Union introduced a measure to limit national deficits. Italy must already pay 30 billion euro every year for its deficit. To increase the deficit, as the government proposes, in order to gain votes is utterly irresponsible.

It is worth noting that before the crisis of 2008, there were no Alt-Right parties in Europe, except for that of Le Pen in France. However, it was just a matter of time before somebody started to ride fear in every country, that the decline of the traditional parties started and that there was no answer to the massive tide of neoliberal globalisation. Immigrants began to come in handy for stoking fear, and all the victims of globalisation switched to the new champions.

Now, it is a commonplace to say that right and left no longer exist. In fact, the fight is between sovereigntists – which means nationalists tinged with xenophobia and populism – and globalists, or those who still believe that international cooperation and trade are vital to growth and peace. This debate on the present ignores that the left is an historical process, that began with the first industrial revolution at the beginning of the 19th century, An incalculable number of people gave their lives in order to have social justice, curb the exploitation of workers and introduce the values of a modern and just society: equity, participatory and transparent democracy, human rights, and peace and development as values for international relations. These were the banners of the left. This historical treasure needs to be linked to present times.

The right- left dialectic has not disappeared. Just look at the growing environmental movement today which has gone into that divide. From Trump to Bolsonaro, climate change is a left-wing operation while, if you read ‘Laudato Si’, the encyclical of Pope Francis (which few do, unfortunately), you will see that the fight against climate change is above all a question of social justice and human dignity. In that sense, the Green parties are taking over part of the battles of the historical left.

And this brings us to a central issue: is solidarity an integral part of the legacy of the left?

I ask because Frederiksen obtained victory in Denmark, abandoning solidarity and using nationalism and xenophobia. Of course, she is giving her voters ample assurances that she will restore privileges for her citizens, and it is clear that this is now a winning formula, like the Third Way was for Tony Blair in the British elections in 1997. Except that it bows to globalisation, as the Third Way did. It bows to nationalism, populism and xenophobia, the new pensée unique for so many people in the world. Will it have a durable effect for those who call themselves left-wing?

Roberto Savio is publisher of OtherNews, Italian-Argentine Roberto Savio is an economist, journalist, communication expert, political commentator, activist for social and climate justice and advocate of an anti neoliberal global governance. Director for international relations of the European Center for Peace and Development.. He is co-founder of Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency and its President Emeritus.

The terrible feeling I had on waking up and seeing the Italian voting results at the recent European elections was that my country was suddenly full of strangers. How could the majority of Italians reconfirm a government which has been the most inefficient in history, quarrelling on everything every single day and looking with total indifference to the looming problem of how to establish the next budget without clashing with the European Union or squeezing Italian citizens? Its irresponsible debate on the Italian finances has now led to a spread (difference of value) of 290 points with the Germans.

Roberto Savio

Then, of course, you realize that Salvini is not alone, and that probably my generation, which is based on the values enshrined in the Constitution (solidarity, social justice, equity, peace and international cooperation) is unable to understand today’s times. On October 31, 2017, Corriere del Trentino published an interview in which I claimed that we needed populists in government in Europe as soon as possible, so it would soon become evident that while their denunciations are correct, they would have no answer to the problems. And when the interviewer observed that the next elections to come were the Italian elections, I replied that as an Italian I was sad, but as a European I was happy, because the Italian populists would fail miserably.

Well, under normal logic, they have failed. The chaotic government has realised few points of its programme, and Italy is the European country close to 0% growth. But the majority of the Italian population has seen things otherwise … so this opens up a crucial question.

Those who are fighting for democracy (look at Poland and Hungary with the progressive elimination of checks and balances, courts, media, teaching system, etc.); for transparency and accountability (think of US President Donald Trump’s refusal to disclose his tax declarations); for social justice (today just 80 billionaires own as much as 2.3 billion people), peace (the arms race reached an unprecedented 1.7 trillion dollars in 2018), and so on, do they really understand why we are becoming a minority in many countries and globally?

Looking at Trump’s very probable re-election, at Marine Le Pen’s gains over Emmanuel Macron in France, are we sure that we understand the new politics, and that we can provide a valid answer? The question is all the more important because the tide is impressive. In the wings behind those in power (the Trumps, Orbans, Kaczynskis, Erdogans, Putins, Salvinis, Bolsonaros, Dutertes and so on) are those in waiting (like Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, Jussi Halla-aho and so on).

Of course, all those respond to different realities. If we call the new wave nationalists, we should then add Narendra Modi, Shinz? Abe, Xi Jinping and the very large majority of the world’s citizens.

But, at least in Europe, they call themselves sovereigntists. This makes it easier to understand them, as they basically share a number of points: a) nationalism, tinged with racism); b) xenophobia, within which they include minorities and LBGTs); c) use of moral superiority to depict the adversary as an enemy of the people, whom they represent; d) fight against any international treaty and structure, which they claim have taken away the sovereignty of their country; and e) echoing Trump: my country first. So, the fight is not between left and right, it is between those who are for their nation and those who are associated with globalisation.

This, by the way, is a gross manipulation. Nations are the basis on which we build international relations and are the basis for our identity. Nationalism is an extremism built on a legitimate concept. And the principles on which United Nations, for instance, was built was the concept of development, which is exactly the opposite of globalisation; the concept and strategy for eliminating national sovereignty to make the maximum use of free flow of capitals and investments and support the transnational system. Development was a concept based on the idea that, in the end, everybody taking part in it was going to be more: globalisation on the idea that, in the end, everybody would have more.

A world in which the cost of advertising per capita surpass that of education, and the financial system reaches volumes 40 times superior to those of production of good and services, is a world clearly against the concept of development. To have fiscal paradises with at least 40 trillion dollars, whose taxes – if paid to nations – would be more than the total cost of all long-term programmes of the United Nations, clearly does not fit with sovereigntism.

And let us also remember that before the economic crisis of 2008, created by a corrupt banking system, there were no sovereigntist parties in sight anywhere, except for that of Le Pen in France. Yet, the new political system has hardly fought against the dramatic power of finance: Trump’s first year of government had a cabinet with the largest participation of bankers in American history (later replaced by military figures).

But we have no space here for a conceptual debate. Just let us call the attention to the fact that voters seem to have reached a point where they disregard the most basic element of political action: do not trust those who have lied to you, regardless of any political inclination. I will take just three examples: Italy, Great Britain and Lithuania.

As already said, Italy is now in recession, with no growth in sight. The government has already tried to ignore the limit imposed by the European Commission that deficits should not surpass 3% of the budget deficit. This was in fact imposed by the Council of Ministers. It is worth recalling that the Council, formed by governments, is the body which takes the decisions, which are left to the European Commission to implement. The European Parliament was created to introduce the much-needed principle of checks and balances. But politicians from every side conveniently presented unpopular measures and law that they approved in the Council’s meeting as coming from the Commission.

Salvini and Di Maio have already had to make an ignominious retreat and cut the deficit of the Italian budget after trying to force the Commission to accept an unbalanced budget. Now Salvini claims that, siding with the other European sovereigntists, he will force the Commission to change the rules, to accept the next Italian budget, which ignores not economics but mathematics.

There was a recent TV debate between the recently appointed Deputy Minister of the Economy Laura Castelli, a young business administration graduate, and Carlo Padoan, a respected economist, university professor, member of the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the World Bank. When Castelli said that she would not fear it if the spread between Italy and Germany continued growing because that had no impact on the real economy and the growth of interest on the enormous Italian debt, a startled Padoan tried to correct her. After a while, the moderator tried to change the subject, observing that Padoan was a world authority on the subject. Castelli’s answer was emblematic of the distrust of the New Politicians with the elites: Why? Because he has studied more, does that mean he knows more than me?

Well, it seems Italians trust Castelli more than Padoan. After the elections, Salvini announced that he is going to allocate 30 billion euro for tax reductions, a clear gift to the northern Italy’s business sector. That means find at least 80 billion euro of income for the next budget. This is clearly impossible, without an increase in taxes and a serious cut in current expenses. As usual, education, research and health will be affected, unless the European Union agrees that the 3% rule be put aside.

Well, here is an easy prediction: Salvini will find out that his fellow travelling companions, the sovereigntists of Austria, the Netherlands, the Nordic countries, the countries of Eastern and Central Europe, not to forget Germany, will not agree to put their money to save the Italian budget. Will that show Italians that living in mythologies instead of realities is not helpful?

Salvini won on the fear of immigration. Well, according to the United Nations, the Italian population has been in decline since 2015. Last year, it lost 160,000 people, and projections say it will lose 1.8 million people by 2025. Italy now has 5 million foreigners, which includes 500,000 students, Italians born of foreign parents. There are an estimated 670,000 illegal foreigners, against whom Salvini took no real action: his winning electoral card was to close ports to immigrants. Yet, under the previous government, immigration was as low as 119,000 people in 2017 and 20,120 at mid-September 2018. Immigrants make up 7.5% of the total Italian population, which was estimated at 59.9 million (of which 71.8% urban) in 2018. According to the official statistics, Italy has 1,673 deaths per day and 1.353 births … and 22% are 65 or over, with only 13.5% under 15.

African and Arab immigrants account for 1.5% of the Italian population, and 2.5% are Europeans. Yet, according to a poll, Italians think that immigrants make up between 15 and 25% of the population. And they believe that the large majority are Muslim, when they are orthodox.

Clearly, without immigration, the Italian economy and the pension system are not viable. But this is unacceptable to say … and it does not help to say that in Japan, the country where identity and culture are defended as untouchable, the aging population and loss of productivity has obliged Abe to accept 230,000 immigrants this year.

The second example is Great Britain, home of the mother of parliaments, considered a politically civilised country. Well, everybody knows the Brexit saga. But what is impressive is that in the recent European elections Nigel Farage won more votes than the Conservative and Labour parties together. He created the Brexit Party just six months ago. He was fundamental in forcing the famous Brexit referendum in 2016. That referendum was based on much clearly false information, and Farage admitted so after winning. Among them, one made by Farage was that 76 million Turks were joining Europe and would invade Great Britain: Turkey has no chance of joining the European Union. Boris Johnson claimed that every week Great Britain was giving the European Union 350 million euro, which should go instead to reinforcing the country’s National Health Service: another figure that was so false he is being brought to court. The British gave Farage 31.6% of the votes (Labour 14.1% and Conservatives 9.1%) and Boris Johnson is in pole position to be the next Prime Minister. Of course, there are many explanations for that, but all exclude any consideration of the eligibility of proven liars.

The third example is Lithuania, which had general elections just before the European elections. Lithuania had 3.7 million people at the end of the Soviet Union. By 2018 this was down to 2 million because of steady emigration, especially by young people. The Farmers and Greens Union party brandished the anti-immigration flag and won easily. Last year, the “invasion” was in fact of 54.000 people, of whom 69% were returning Lithuanians. Of the real immigrants, all basically from Eastern and Central Europe, the Arab-Africans were a grand total of 208, of whom 120 have already left the country. As an excuse for the Lithuanians, we can say that they have a history of invasions, repression and resistance, and identity is a strong feeling, like elsewhere in Eastern and Central Europe.

By the way, eastern Germany is the heartland of the extreme Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) and it has few immigrants, unlike western Germany where the AfD did poorly). But, from any logical viewpoint, it is hard to believe that feelings and not reality could play such primary role. Of course, there are many difficult questions. Look at Ukraine, where 73% of the voters elected an untested comedian, Volodymyr Zelenksy. That shows that feelings are in fact reality. But then why in the United States, cradle of feminism, were 43% of Trump’s voters women, who elected a clear champion of misogyny and a well-known womaniser?

In other words, reality is no longer a factor in elections. Other factors like feelings are more important. And while we have no space to present a serious analysis of this, let us just offer some considerations on which to reflect.

1) Historians agree that greed and fear are probably the most important elements of change. If that is so, let us remember that with the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and ideologies declared dead, the winners introduced globalisation as the route for which there were no alternatives (TINA, Margaret Thatcher). This was embedded in the so-called Washington Consensus, which reduced the role of the State as much as possible to give free way to the movement of capital. Social costs were considered unproductive, then came elimination of the difference between deposit banks and investment banks (Clinton 1999), which gave birth to the finance that we now suffer from. Among other changes for unregulated greed, let us not forget Tony Blair’s Third Way, an acceptance of globalisation from the left, to give to it a human face and make it less damaging. The result has been a separation of the European left from its base, and the progressive disappearance of a value-based debate, which put humans at its centre, in favour of the new values: competition, individual success, wealth as the basis of social relations, markets as the centre of the international relations.

2) That was accompanied by a decline of multilateralism, peace and international cooperation. The United States was the main engine for the creation of the United Nations, with an engagement to provide its headquarters and pay 25% of the budget. But, in 1981, Ronald Reagan took a distance, declaring that his country could not accept having one vote like others, and it would not accept binding resolutions from a majority of smaller countries. And then Trump came with the last straw, with the ‘America First’ campaign, which means in fact ‘America Alone’, preaching that the United States had no friends or allies to limit its action. This was the final act against multilateralism.

3) In 2008, a world economic crisis spread worldwide from the US banking system, creating a wave of fear, unemployment, reduction in salaries, loss of jobs and precarity that the political system was largely unable to address because its global dimension went beyond national capacity of response, accompanied by a sharp decline in political competence. This was accompanied by a rise in corruption, as politics became short-term and directed towards administrative problems, without any ideological framework.

4) Trump has created a ripple situation, with the New Right (or Alternative Right, as Steve Bannon calls it), free from the moral and ethical considerations that emerged from the Second World War. The New Right can conduct politics based on greed, and much more fear, using immigrants and minorities as the enemy to fight, for defending national identities and histories. This narrative has created new divides: rural against urban, elite the enemy of real people, any international agreement as a straitjacket of the nation, recovery of a glorious past as the basis for the future. Trump has legitimised behaviour previously considered unacceptable, and during his very probable second term he will change even more the world that we have created from the ruins of the Second World War.

5) Internet has gone wrong. Instead of being the new instrument for horizontal communication and sharing, it has become a creator of fragmented and virtual worlds, where people group along partisan lines, no longer exchange views and ideas. It is an arena for insults and hate, run by false identities with fake news, and where citizens are sold as consumers by a number of logarithms, based on maximisation of profit. It has created the largest fortunes in human history, multibillionaires who do not feel accountable to social values and interests. This has helped to create the loss of quality in the political debate, and the use of feelings and guts, instead of political rationality. Trump has 60 million followers on Twitter, more than all American media combined. They do not buy newspapers, and believe whatever Trump says. This will lead to his re-election, unless some serious blunder occurs, but with the bar of tolerance being raised continuously.

Let us stop here. There are, of course, many more points of reflections. But whatever reflection we make, let us remember that political ideas come and go in history. Certainly, sovereigntism is not as structured as communism or fascism. It was normal for politicians to write books. Now, Trump even brags that he does not read them, to avoid having his ideas influenced. The New Right is basically content free, although expert in mobilising people’s feelings. So, this wave will also finish.

The question is: will humankind be able to create a values-based political system again? And, before that happens, will the New Right with its extreme nationalism lead to wars and blood? Looking at the mobilisation on climate change, led by a young girl from Sweden, a winning card in the European elections, there are reasons for hope (but now climate change has become a left-wing issue).

We face a dramatic risk: if we fail, once the mythology of sovereigntism collapses in the face of an unsolved dramatic reality, people who have lost hope and trust in politics will tend to look for the way out of chaos in a Man of Providence, as Pope Pius XI called Benito Mussolini.

Publisher of OtherNews, Italian-Argentine Roberto Savio is an economist, journalist, communication expert, political commentator, activist for social and climate justice and advocate of an anti neoliberal global governance. Director for international relations of the European Center for Peace and Development.. He is co-founder of Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency and its President Emeritus.

Since the powerful march of hundreds of thousands of students in 1,000 towns against climate change, an unexpected campaign of delegitimation, ”demystification” and demonisation has started against Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager who started the movement. After searching the media, social media and websites, this campaign can be divided into four different groups.

Roberto Savio

The second group can be called the jealous. These are the climate scientists who have written everywhere that they started to fight climate change even before Greta (who is now 16) was born. How is it possible that they have been ignored and now a little girl with no preparation is able to mobilise people all over the world? No self-criticism of the fact that they have not been able to inspire and communicate with students. Besides, Greta did not campaign as an expert. Her message in Davos, in Brussels, everywhere, was: Please listen to the scientists. An old Chinese proverb goes: never fight your allies.

The third group is the purists. They have been redistributing reports by Swedish journalists everywhere which delve into Greta’s background, discovering that her parents are active ecologists, that her father has always supported her, and that she has been influenced by a famous activist who has been behind her every step. They claim that in order to believe Greta, it would therefore have been necessary for her parents to have been indifferent to climate issues, and that she should have been totally alien to ecological circles. And this campaign continues, even though all Swedish journalist are unanimous in declaring that Greta has not been an instrument of anyone, and that she is only following only her commitments. Also because, by grace of the gods, she has a mental condition called Asperger’s Syndrome, which makes her a very single-minded person, indifferent to recognitions, compliments and compromises. So, in a letter to Le Figaro, one of the purists asks if it is logical to put hundreds of thousands of students from all over the world “under the guide of a zombie”. This category also includes many complaining that Greta is not denouncing the fact that Sweden is making money by selling weapons. Greta has denounced no one, so those responsible are quite happy. Greta has not started any campaign against finance because she does not understand that only by subduing finance can you change climate. And so on, according to the lenses through which her critics look at her.

And of course, there is the most legitimate group, the paternalists. This is a physiological group comprising those who think that young people have no idea about real life, and nothing serious will come out of the students’ movement, unless they listen to their elders. Their place is in school, not on the streets, they do not have the maturity to understand themes which require a scientific preparation. Exemplary is a letter published in Corriere della Sera, in which somebody observes that young people hardly read books any longer, use smartphones all day long and ignore classical music or theatre – they lack the gravitas necessary for real change. An extreme example of how paternalism is the twin of patriarchalism was a comment made by a well-dressed adult in a group observing the students marching for climate change: “I wonder how many of those girls are still virgin.” Asked about the relationship between virginity and climate change, the answer was: ”Well, until a girl is virgin, she can still have illusions, but not after.”

Those various reactions against a young girl who is simply asking to grow up in a sustainable world is clearly representative of how much society has changed in the last decade. We have come a long way. The period after the Second World War was characterised by the need to reconstruct, to make sacrifices, to make Europe an island of peace, to believe that politics were a participatory tool for changing society for the better. Social elevator, the certainty of young people that they would be better off than their parents, was everybody’s belief. Political rallies saw millions of people on the streets, with hopes and commitments. We all know how that world of idealism collapsed. With the destruction of the Berlin Wall, ideologies were the first to go. The keyword was pragmatism. But it was a pragmatism prisoner of the neoliberalism philosophy which was untouchable. As Margaret Thatcher famously said, There Is No Alternative (TINA). Social costs were unproductive, and finance took on a life by itself, no longer linked to the word of production. The state was pared down to the minimum. We should remember that Reagan proposed the abolition of the Ministry of Education and full privatisation of healthcare. The United Nations was considered obsolete: trade, not aid. For three decades, from Reagan (1981) to the great financial crisis of 2008, the motto was: compete, become rich, at national and Individual level. Politics become a mere administrative activity, devoid of long-term vision. The arrival of Internet changed society from an interactive and connected thread of relations based on platforms to share, into a net of parallel virtual worlds in which to seek refuge and avoid public action. The media followed by downgrading the complexity of information, concentrating on events and ignoring processes. TV basically passed into the field of entertainment with programmes that were shaping popular culture, like Big Brother, or the L’Isola dei Famosi (Island of the Famous). Greed was considered good for society and praised by Hollywood. We were all living in a financial bubble that burst in 2008. It was then clear that politics no longer controlled finance, but vice versa. According Bloomberg, in order to bail out the banking system, the United States had to spend 12.8 trillion dollars, Europe spent 5 trillion dollars, 1.6 trillion just to stabilise the euro. China spent 156 billion, and Japan over 110 billion. Nobody knows for sure how much it cost the world to save its banking system, which was (and is), without any control or regulatory body. If the amount paid to bail out the banks had been distributed to the 7.5 billion people of the world, they would each have received 2,571 dollars. Enough to start a frenzy of acquisitions, especially in the South of the world, with an enormous leap in production. It would have practically solved all the world’s social problems indicated as the Millennium Goals by the United Nations in an agreement subscribed to by all countries. But, by then, the banks were more important than people … and for their illicit activities, the ungrateful banks have paid in fines totalling over 800 billion dollars since their bailout. Let us remember that greed was already being praised in Hollywood in 1987 by Gordon Gekko in the famous film ‘Wall Street’. Gekko famously says: “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good”. It is no coincidence that at the time of the financial crisis of 2008, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, said: ”It is perhaps time to admit that we did not learn the full lesson of the greed-is-good ideology.” And the following year, in a speech to the Italian Senate, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone said: We have gone from free market to free greed.” And many manifestations of global civil society, like the World Social Forum, have been denouncing the submission of politics to finance, and how greed has become a value.

But after the thirty years of greed-is good came the major financial crisis of 2008, due to the irresponsibility of the financial system. That crisis brought an additional negative social impact which was fear: fear of unemployment, fear for the future, fear of terrorism. It became clear that the social elevator that had worked since the end of the Second World War had stopped, with millions of young people from all over the world stuck in it. The American dream itself was in crisis. And a new decade came, one of fear. As usual in cases of fear, a new narrative emerges. After the thirty years of greed, we have now a decade of fear. Neoliberalism, TINA, have lost any credibility. All political parties have betrayed the hopes of their voters. The people have been left out by the elites, by those in the system. So, since 2008, nationalist populist parties that claimed to defend the people flourished all over Europe, where before the crisis they had been practically non-existent (except for Le Pen in France). They continue to flourish. In the last Dutch elections, a new populist party, The Forum for Democracy, won 16 seats in the Senate. Its leader, Thierry Baudet, has discarded the bewitched invention of climate change, idolatry of the sustainable, indoctrination of the left. This is a position common to all populist parties. Their success has been to direct the fear against the different: different religions, different customs, different cultures … in other words, immigrants. Xenophobia has joined nationalism and populism.

Every year there has been a decline in real revenue, in dignified jobs. Traditional political parties have lost credibility and electorates have switched to new politicians, not part of the elite, who speak on behalf of the people and look to the glorious past as the basis for the future, ignoring any technological development. The social divide, taken as the basis by the new political culture, went into full destructive speed: in just ten years, 28 people concentrated in their hands the same wealth as 2.3 billion people. This is money taken away from the general economy; it means that for every billionaire there are thousands of impoverished people. In just the last year, the 42.2 million people in the world with more than one million dollars in financial assets, grew by 2.3 million This is why Pope Francis says that behind every large property there is a social mortgage.

It took a long road to abandon the world which came out of the Second World War an arrive at the present one: a world where phenomena that are abnormalities, like war and poverty, are now considered normal by most young people. Corruption, which has of course always existed, has now become another natural fact. Democracy, which was considered the central foundation of society, is now considered a debatable possibility, with Orban, Salvini and company promoting illiberal democracy.

Fear and greed have changed our society. We are in the middle of a transition, to where nobody knows. What is clear is that the present system is no longer functional and requires very serious corrections. The tide of nationalism, populism and xenophobia is taking us backwards to miseries that we had forgotten, instead of forwards. Electoral campaigns are not based on programmes but on discrediting opponents. When Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, disagreed with Trump, the latter’s Trade Secretary said that there must be a special place in hell for the Canadian PM. TV debates have become a school of incivility. The question is: are we entering a new era based on incivility? For the first time in the history of the British parliament, the various opponents are unable to find a way out from a referendum based on facts that where all lies.

We must recognise that we are living in a world where positive things are few and apart. A political, cultural and social climate where nothing is accepted as legitimated, hiding the truth, and manipulated by the enemy. An era of transition, that should be called “the era of evil think”.

The reaction to Greta Thunberg and her mobilisation is a good example of “evil think”. Instead of raising sympathy and support, this young girl is being submitted to this new culture of “evil think”. And yet she is campaigning for survival of the planet, the only one we have, and where we must all live together, regardless of our myths, religions, parties and nationalities. She says: do not ask my generation to solve the problem of climate change, because when we have grown up, it will be already too late. When she reaches the age of 50, there will be 10 billion people, basically all living in towns. But in just ten years, when she will be 26, humankind will need 50 percent more energy and food, and 30 percent more water, an element which is already scarce in a great part of the world, and which is a source of income for private companies. No wonder she is trying to stimulate action!

Save the world NOW is a message that has been able to mobilise students from all over the world. In the era of “evil think”, instead of supporting her, there are those looking at what she eats, what her dogs eat, and what is behind her and manipulating her. In other words, we are in an era in which we are not able to think positively: an era shaped by greed and fear, and with what today’s culture has given us: evil thinking. It is a safe bet that if Greta had sold sportswear, she would have been accepted as a normal phenomenon, and nobody would look at whether she was eating bananas or apples. This is a good index of how we have lost the ability to dream and go forward.

Roberto Savio is publisher of OtherNews, Italian-Argentine Roberto Savio is an economist, journalist, communication expert, political commentator, activist for social and climate justice and advocate of an anti neoliberal global governance. Director for international relations of the European Center for Peace and Development.. He is co-founder of Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency and its President Emeritus.

If we ever needed proof of how the political system has become self-referential and unable to update itself, the latest student march in more than 1,000 towns is a very good example.

Of course, politicians referred to it in declarations and, in a totally demagogic gesture, Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Community and an old political fox with a lot of mileage, even kissed the hand of Greta Thunber. She is the 16-year-old Swedish girl who, frustrated with the pace of government action to deal with climate change, launched a “school strike for climate” last year, setting off an international youth movement and widespread demonstrations in an unprecedented initiative on climate change. We are fortunate that the Asperger’s syndrome Greta suffers from brings little empathy and greater determination, so is totally improbable that she will be co-opted by  flattery and recognition.

Roberto Savio

It was interesting to see the reaction of politicians.  In the Italian Parliament, for example, insiders report that the reaction was one of “in any case they do not vote, they are too young”.

It should be recalled that in its 2017 budget, the Italian government earmarked 20 billion dollars to save four Italian banks and just two billion dollars for subsidies and support to young people. School principals from Germany to Italy declared that the duty of students is to study, not take part in demonstrations, and – as usual – a conspiracy theory circulated that because climate change is  too complex an issue for young people to understand, Greta was clearly a puppet in the hands of adults.

Newspapers dwelt on the relations between her family and climate change campaigners to show that she had been used. Maybe so, but it is now too late to discredit her. She acted on her initiative, on goals that were hers, and the hundreds of thousands of students around the world were not copying her … she has awakened a chord that was already there.

The fact is that when masses of students from all over the world mobilise around a utopia (a concept which has totally disappeared in the political world), adults become uncomfortable. It measures the distance between what we are now and what we were when young; the world was more idealistic then than now, and we all had some hope and engagement.

That distance is quite large … many of us have betrayed those ideals or put them to sleep. The way out is scepticism and paternalism.  We know the reality, we know what dreams are, and young people should listen to our experiences. In May 1968, Tristan Tzara, the father of Dadaism, shouted to the marching students from his balcony: ”Criez, criez, vous serez tous des notaires” (Yell, shout, you will all be notaries). And for those of us who have not betrayed ideals and commitments, there is the sad realisation that we are a failed generation, a generation that was unable to implement its vision of a better society.

The difference is that when we were young, the most existential threat was the atomic bomb, and we took part in many marches. Today, that threat is not only coming back to haunt us with abolition of the  Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), but there is a new existential threat: climate change.

What is very impressive is that many students speak of how they are changing their lifestyle: from not using plastic bottles, to reducing  meat consumption and using less water when they brush their teeth. This change of lifestyle goes far beyond climate change, it goes to the heart of our consumption society and its values, a society in which advertising budgets are greater than those for education,

And the fact that the heavy users of Internet, the first willing victims of commercialisation of the Net, start to doubt the use by Google, Twitter and other platforms of people as consumers and not as citizens is a significant fact. They are now ignoring advertising. Automakers are very sad that the car is no longer a status symbol among young people … Nike, jeans and smartphones are today’s status symbols and their impact on climate is much smaller.

Extremely interesting are the reflections of a high-level staff member of the World Economic Forum in Davos: We view with great sympathy the mobilisation  of civil society .. thanks to them, several gaps in the field of medical assistance, museum and art care, and many social problems, are being taken care of … this has a dual positive effect: it reduces social tensions, and it keeps volunteers busy, and out of political engagement. In other words, civil society activists are seen as hamsters: running all the time, and going nowhere.

The time has perhaps come for our generation to make three considerations.

The first is that we would do well to remember that until the crisis of 2008, with the exception of Le Pen in France, populist, xenophobic and nationalist parties were marginal. Now they are everywhere, except for Portugal, and they are frequently in power, as in Italy, Austria, Poland and Hungary, or in the government coalitions of several countries, including the Nordic countries. Nobody at that time could have thought of rabid nationalists like Trump, Bolsonaro, Duque, Modi , Duterte,  Abe or Xi, or how the multilateral system, based on the idea of peace and cooperation, would be disintegrating.

Now we know what capitalism and finance mean when they are unchecked. We now have a financial system that is 40 times more powerful that the world of industry and services, and without any control. Since 2008, banks have been fined over 800 billion dollars for illegal practices.

Nobody foresaw a world where 40 peoples would possess the same wealth as 2.3 billion people, a world where in just one minute the family owner of the Walmart supermarket chain makes the equivalent of the yearly salary of its employees. Over the last decade, fiscal paradises have hidden at least 30 trillion dollars from the fiscal system: six times the budget of the US government. Countries are now unable to act globally, while finance does so daily, unfettered.

The last decade has seen a steady deterioration of democracy, of social justice, of concern to secure a future for the young and halt the existential threat to the planet, to humans, animals and plants.

There have been only two new changes. One is the arrival of women on the political scene, with millions mobilising against injustice and patriarchism. Has that enormous mobilisation brought about any change in legislations and budgets? Hardly. On the contrary, the prestige of dinosaurs like Putin, Trump, Kaciesnky, Orban,  Salvini, Le Pen and company has been reinforced; they are the defenders of the values of the Western civilization, against dissolution of the family and the advancement  of woman (associated in the same breath with lesbians, gays and transgenders in a revealing logic). The second is the arrival of young people who are mobilising … so far, the extreme right has made no comment. Yet, touching on climate change, alternative energies and lifestyle is bound to create opposition soon or later. A strange destiny that of the extreme right; it is now against peace, development and social justice as central values. In a short space of time it will be against woman, and now it will be against young people.

The second consideration.  In fact, the main value of this campaign by young people is that it has put the political system in front of its responsibilities. “We have no time”, and it is true. We are all mesmerised by the Treaty of Paris on climate change, with the participation of all countries of the world.  However, it is important to see how the Treaty was conceived.  To make a tent large enough to accommodate everybody, the rules are: every country will decide what targets it will adopt; and every country is responsible for checking implementation of its engagement. What would happen if we did that with taxes? Citizens would decide how many taxes they would pay, and all would be responsible for seeing that  they complied.

Well, on the basis of the engagements taken until today, global temperature will increase by 3.5 degrees Centigrade compared with 1840. Scientists have always insisted that a reasonable limit is 1.5 degrees Centigrade, after which they speak of irreversible changes. Paris adopted the goal of 2 degrees Centigrade  to make things easier.

Then Trump left the Treaty, explaining that climate change is a Chinese hoax to block American development. He has cancelled all legislation on climate control created before him, to the point that he is now opening all national parks to fossil fuel extraction. Of course, this pleases people like the Koch brothers who own almost all the coal mines; the petrochemical companies; the workers displaced by the fight against climate change, like miners. And it pleases the large numbers of Americans who see China as the main threat, and believe that America is a victim of international exploitation, especially by its allies (Canada, Europe, Japan), Trump’s withdrawal has given a perfect alibi to countries like Poland (coal) and Saudi Arabia (oil) and others for ducking the issue.

So governments now say that in 2020, when the first conference on implementation will be held, they will assess the situation. But the students are here to remind us that,  according the vast majority of scientists, unless we change the present trend, by 2030 we will be over the famous threshold, of 1.5 degrees centigrade, and they are calling for an unprecedented effort. But climate change is now is considered a left-wing issue,  and  times are not really the best. In other words, there are many chances that we will reach 2020 and we will still be debating. The very important Laudatio Si encyclical from Pope Francis, who links climate to social justice, migration, technological progress, and so in a holistic approach, has been largely ignored.

Young people are asking us to act now. As Greta said at Davos: when we arrive in society, the damage will already have been done. This is an intergenerational call, and it  is very important and powerful. “Parents, if you say you love us, why you do not take care of our future?“ Should young people take a lesson from the violence of the Yellow Jackets in France to be heard, instead of peaceful marches?

Now to the third consideration. The climate movement comes after several others grassroots movements. The most traumatic was the protest against the World Trade Organisation in Chicago in 1999, when thousands protested against unchecked capitalism imposed by the Washington Consensus (a holistic neoliberal view of international and national  relations, based on extreme reduction of the role of the state and unfettered capitalism). This Consensus,  subscribed to by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the US Treasury,  changed the trend  from cooperation to competition and success. Social costs were unproductive, only trade and finance were the tools for the world. Margaret Thatcher famously said: there is no society, only individuals.

Then, in 2001, in Porto Alegre, the World Social Forum was created, a meeting place for sharing practices and views as an alternative to Davos, and started a process of conferences with several hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world. This process continues today, albeit with a major loss of steam. Ten years later, in 2011, the Movement of the Indignados started in Madrid, asking for change to the democratic and financial system, and spread to 68 towns of Spain, lasting until 2015. Anti-system parties came out in 2013, and stood at the European elections of 2014.  Podemos gathered 1,253,837 votes and won four seats. The others did not make it: Partido X received 105.561 votes, the Movement of Citizens Democratic Renewal 105,688 and Recortes Zero 30,827.  Had they stood together, they would have won seven seats. But a proverb says that the left unites only in front of a firing squad.

But many other citizens’ movement took to the streets.  In 2011, there was Occupy Wall Street against greed, corruption, social inequality and the power of finance and corporations over political institutions, joined by several hundreds of thousands of people.  Some see the Arab Spring, and the massive protests of Algiers as part of the same revolt. But it is instructive to see how the political system read those events. They were classified as anarchist movements. Horizontalism (they elected no leader), autonomy from existing institutions and defiance, demonising the rich and introducing class warfare, were considered proper of anarchists who rejected the political system.  So the content of demonstration was obscured by how they structured themselves.

It is a fact that by acting without the rules of organisation that political parties apply has been a huge handicap. Podemos, the only survivor of the Indignados wave, like the 5 Star Movement in Italy, structured itself as a political party. Like it or not, laws are made in parliament, and external protests, large as they might be (just think of the women’s movement), can be perfectly ignored, no risk except for recurring elections. But the political system today is not a free one. It is conditioned by finance, corporations, trade, armaments and technological developments (many more people will be made jobless by artificial intelligence than by migrants). The political system is hardly the representation of citizens in the old sense. There are 32,000 lobbyists in the US Congress, and 16,000 in the European Parliament: not really a symptom of unfettered democracy. The Koch brothers, who donate hundreds of millions of dollars to the Republican Party at each election, have a vote like the unemployed black guy from the suburbs. Do they compete at an equal level?

Now, the student movement is asking those in power to introduce urgent changes on their behalf. Until now the system has been able to ignore requests from peoples’ movements, and let them fritter away, “Students do not vote” was the main comment from the system after the last large demonstration.

Yet, the students are denouncing an existential threat, which will reach the brothers Koch, as well the black unemployed (but remember, the weakest will be affected much more). If the system does not listen to the voices of young people, the gap between political institutions and citizens will increase. And history tells us that voices from the street can be ignored once, twice, many times, but not for ever.

Young people are those who see clearly that climate change jeopardises their future, already affected by precarious jobs, unemployment and a difficult future in which pensions will be minimal. They see growing injustice and lack of participation. They represent a revolt based on idealism and hard facts. They are also a minority because of our changing demography. If the political system ignores this latest mass movement, it will take an unprecedented risk. What happens will be something that will shape history, If the young people are be ignored, democracy will be in great peril … killing idealism is a very great responsibility.

Publisher of OtherNews, Italian-Argentine Roberto Savio is an economist, journalist, communication expert, political commentator, activist for social and climate justice and advocate of global governance. Adviser to INPS-IDN and to the Global Cooperation Council. He is co-founder of Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency and its President Emeritus.

Executive Director of the Geneva Centre, Ambassador Idriss Jazairy (left), and IPS Inter Press Service founder Roberto Savio

By Ambassador Idriss Jazairy and Roberto Savio
GENEVA and ROME, Mar 12 2019 (IPS)

For over 70 years, the UN system has been perceived as the guardian of peace and development in the world. However, multilateralism today is undeniably under strain. The effectiveness of global institutions and of global policymaking is questioned, and alliances are fraying.

Often, in times of transition, drawing lessons from the past is a good way to find solutions and inspiration for the way forward. In this regard, it is important to remember the inspired leaders of the UN system who have propelled forward the concept of multilateralism over the years. It is therefore important to evoke the legacy of Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Maurice Strong, but also of UNICEF’s Jim Grant, as they all represent visionary UN figures who contributed greatly to the evolution of multilateralism.

The UN started as an alliance of the victors of WWII. Alliances shift. This is a reminder that when war-like situations occur in the real world, power politics of those victors may take over. They may either draw multilateralism to their side as in the Korean War, or go to war without multilateral approval, as in the case of the invasion of Iraq.

In the 1960s, while keeping the structure of a victors’ club, the UN became, for 2 decades, a universal organization defending the goal of self-determination and of the removal of obstacles to development. A significant moment in this regard was the signing of the Principles governing international trade relations and trades policies, which ultimately led to the Final Act of UNCTAD I in 1964. There was a general feeling of « reshaping the international order » and writing history. Indeed Juan Somavia, later Director General of the International labour Organization participated, with one of the co-signatories of this editorial, under the editorship of Nobel Prize winner Jan Tinbergen, in writing an eponymous book for The Club of Rome.

In December 1977, the General Assembly decided to create a Committee of the Whole (COW), to bring back to the fold of the UN the North-South dialogue which had been uneventfully shunted to the CIEC in Paris. Ambassador Idriss Jazairy led the work of the COW as its first chairman COW throughout 1978, with the goal of negotiating on substantial issues and producing action-oriented conclusions on North-South relations. Thorvald Stoltenberg, the Norwegian Minister who passed away recently, succeeded him in this position, and, with his generosity and open-mindedness, successfully pursued the endeavours of the COW towards increased North-South dialogue.

Thus the multilateral climate in the ‘70ies was cooperative. Negotiations were about adjustments to external and international policies. But the situation changed thereafter. Even our solace of a peace dividend after the end of the Cold War as confirmed by the General Assembly Declaration on the Right to Development of 1986, became a chimera.

The UN focus changed later on to respond to the strategic priority of the WWII victors by proclaiming in 1995 an indefinite extension of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), without any counterpart from the nuclear States. The 2005 UN Summit also endorsed the « responsibility to protect » (R2P) leading inter alia to the Security Council Resolution 1973 imposing a no-fly zone on Libya in 2011. States volunteering to implement this resolution exceeded their mandate however, and brought about regime change. Resort to force under Chapter VII, requires henceforth smarter mandates and greater accountability for implementation. Likewise R2P should not be abused, as in Libya, or ignored as in Gaza. Weaponisation of humanitarianism is another wanton outgrowth of R2P.

Both the Millennium and the 2005 Summits concentrated efforts thereafter on domestic reforms of governance including in the field of human rights. Created by the United Nations General Assembly in 2006 by resolution 60/251, the UN Human Rights Council intended to be a more cooperative body than its predecessor, the « naming and shaming »-oriented United Nations Commission on Human Rights.

Giving the UN a handle on domestic policies is however a fraught issue. The implementation of reforms domestically, in order to be legitimate, must be a people-driven process. As multilateralism includes domestic policy evaluation in its purview, it must also become increasingly people-driven. In fact, the current outburst of populism springs from the feeling that ordinary people are kept out of the search for solutions that concern them to problems « without passports » as Kofi Annan used to call pandemics, environmental degradation, non-proliferation, immigration etc.

So whither the democratisation of multilateralism? Firstly, through breaking the logjam on Security Council reform. Secondly, through the empowerment of citizens worldwide, in compliance with « We, the people… » of the UN Charter. This peoples’ representation will continue to suffer from legitimacy impairment so long as their entities remain predominantly headquartered in advanced countries. Democracy requires the involvement of a much larger number of credible international NGOs actors headquartered in the South as well.

Multilateralism is, in fact, a vision of international relations, based not of force, but on international law; not on short-sighted economic interests, but on a long-term strategy of international cooperation. It is the quite obvious policy: if we reduce conflict and competition, we reduce tensions, and we push for a civilized world. Competition and force have been the fuel for the last two world conflicts. But as the famous etiologist Konrad Lorenz has observed, man is the only element of the Kingdom of animals who never learns from his mistakes. Nowadays, we do not only have the multilateral system in disarray. We do not have an international system, but we have countries that do not recognize their allies, and are ignoring existential threats, like climate change (“a Chinese hoax”), or nuclear resurgence.

But new waves are appearing, and they are not a repetition of the past. Never had we such formidable women mobilization before. Students are following the example of a young Swedish girl who is scolding the elites in Davos and the chairmanship of the European Union, with regard to climate change, to remind them that they are mortgaging her future. All these new actors in international relations, believe deeply in Peace and Cooperation. A new multilateralism is coming, made by citizens and not by governments. In history, humankind has always been looking for a better world. Maybe we headed towards a new salutary turn, which will save us from tensions and wars.

In short, to paraphrase Churchill on democracy, multilateralism may be the worst form of interaction between nations, except for all the others. The UN has got the principles right as now with the 2030 Agenda. But leadership is crucial to achieve success. Those we commemorate today as great leaders, such as Dag Hammarskjold, stood on the outside frontiers of universalism, erring more, as it were, on the side of General than on that of Secretary, in marshalling innovation towards more human justice and wellbeing. One lost his life for it, another, his second term. They were true leaders.

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Feb 21 2019 (IPS)

I have been a member of the first international party: the Transnational Radical Party, founded in 1956 by Marco Pannella and Emma Bonino. Then in 1988, I was a witness of the large protest, in Berlin West, against the meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, a precursor of the “Battle of Seattle” in 1988, where 40.000 protesters disrupted the annual meeting of the two world’s financial institutions. I was even detained for a day by the police, even if was just a witness: my condition of foreigner made me automatically suspect.

Roberto Savio

And I was a witness of the Nobel prize Joseph Stigliz address to the protesters of “Occupy Wall Street”, in 2011. In the same year, I was part of the creation of the Word Social Forum, in Porto Alegre. And I have been carefully following the arrival of the new International nationalist and populist wave, since Orban’s arrival in Hungary in 2019, Kaczynski in Poland in 2015, Brexit in 2016, Trump in 2016, and totally different movements like now the Yellow Jackets in France.

Therefore, I have decided that I can be more useful as a practitioner than as a theoretician in the cultured an interesting debate that Paul Raskin has opened on a world political party. But I still remember that during the debate on the New International Information Order in the seventies, at a very important conference in Berlin of academicians, I spoke as practitioner (I was the founder of Inter Press Service, the fourth international news agency), and when I finished, the German chairman of the conference observed: “what Roberto had said works in practice. But the question is: would it work in theory”?

The Transnational Radical Party choose a human rights agenda, as Pannella did in Italy with the Italian radical party. The abolition of the death’s sentence, the depenalization of light drugs, the freedom of medical choice, including euthanasia, the end of female mutilation in Africa and Arab countries, the importance of scientific research free of religious dogma as part of bioethics, the creation of the United States of Europe, a multicultural, inclusive and environmentally concerned Europe. It called for the inclusion of Israel in the European Community, and made public campaigns on Tibet, the Uighurs, the Montagnard (a Vietnamese Christian minority), and the Chechens. This agenda of Human Rights was able to link intellectuals and activists from many countries (especially Europe and Latin America). But it never became a mass movement, and it dissolved itself in 1989. It was highly affected by the May 68, which fought against centralizing structures, and indicated that the fights should become individual, and free from any command.

The World Social Forum was the closest thing to a world movement. It was based on a much broader agenda, which was the build up an alternative to what the World Economic Forum, Davos, represented. Global finance, unchecked capitalism, economic agenda over the social agenda, the alliance of corporations to control politics and governance: a Forum where unelected people met to take decisions over the course of the world. It come out from a visit in 1999 in Paris by two Brazilian activists, Oded Grajew who was working in the field of social responsibility of companies, and Chico Whittaker, who was in the Social Network of Justice and Human Rights, an initiative of the Brazilian catholic Church. They were incensed by the tv coverage of Davos, and the following day the went to meet Bernard Cassen, coordinator of of Le Monde Diplomatique, who encouraged them to organize a Counterdavos, but not in Europe, but in the South. They came back, organized a committee of eight Brazilian organizations, in February if 2.000, got the support of the government of Rio Grande do Sul, and in the 2001 the first Forum was held in Porto Alegre, at the same time of Davos. We were thinking that 3.000 people would come (the equivalent of Davos), instead there were 20.000 participants.

The impact was so great, that the Brazilian committee organized a consultative meeting the following year in Sao Paolo, about the continuation of the WSF. They invited a number of international organizations, and at the second day they appointed all of us as the International Council. The Council was born, therefore, not out of a planning to organize a really representative structure. The efforts done to rebalance the composition, never went far. Lot of organizations wanted to be member of the Council, without any criteria of representative and strength, and the Council become soon a large list of names, with few participating, and changing at every council, which left to the Brazilians (Chico Wittaker especially), the de facto ability to have a heavy weight in the process.

The WSF had a large number of meetings. There was the yearly WSF itself, who always had close to 100.000 participants (the one of 2005 150.000), The WSF moved out of Latin America, first in Mumbai, with the participation of 20.000 Dalits (the untouchables). Then in Africa and so on. The march against the American invasion in Iraq, saw a march of 15 million people all over the world.

George Bush dismissed that as a focus group, and the war went on. In addition to the yearly WSF, two other main events were created. The regional WSF, and the thematic Wsf, where under this umbrella people could meet beside the central one Then, local WSF could be held in any country, as part of the general WSF process. A most probable estimate is that the WSF, from 2001. Has joined together over 1 million people, who paid their travel and lodging costs, to share experiences and dream together for a better world.

Some points of this enormous process (that I do not see now replicable to the idea of a party), must be kept into account for our debate.

Civil society is made by many threads. We have no time to go over this, but Boaventura de Sousa Santos, the Portuguese sociologist and anthropologist who has more studied the WSF (and he is also departing in disagreement with the inability of updating from Chico Wittaker and others) has written an interesting study on the “translation” which was necessary to put together those threads.

Woman organizations, for instant, are concerned about the patriarchal society. But indigenous organizations are worried about the exploitation by white colons. Human rights organizations, have different agenda from those dealing with environment. To understand each other, and share and work together, a process of translation of those priorities, to think holistically, went on. It is what is called now identity. Any world party has to answer this question, because there are no indigenous organizations in Europe, and there are no activists on the impact of infrastructures in Asia or Africa. In other worlds, while it is easier to build a mass participation against a common enemy, it requires a lot of dialogue for building up a movement. Certainly, the WSF was fundamental for creating the awareness that a holistic approach is necessary to fight injustice, climate change, an uncontrolled finance, the growing social injustice, etc. And that is an important point in the creation of a world party.

All over those 63 years, from the creation of the Transnational Radical Party, in all movements which have been created, and now in the Yellow jackets, there is a common.

Fact. For the immense majority of the participants, the notion of a party is linked to power, corruption and lack of legitimacy. In the WSF it was its final irrelevance. As the Talmudist, led by Chico Wittaker have opposed: any political declaration from the WSF, because it could divide the movement; any creation of spokesman on behalf of the WSF; the idea of horizontality as the main basis for the governance of the WSF, the WSF as a space for meeting, not for organizing actions. Actions could be done by those participating making up alliances, but the WSF could not make declarations or plans of action. The International Council was not a governing body, but just a facilitating structure. The lack of organizations made that media did not come any longer, as they had no interlocutors, as spokesman were forbidden. Even a declaration on something which could not create any scission, like condemnation of wars, or appeals on climate action were forbidden. The result is that the WSF become like spiritual exercises: useful for those who participates, they come out with more individual strength, but without any impact on the world.

This is an extremely important handicap for a world party. Those who would be in principle its largest constituency, reject the notion of a part, which automatically creates structures of power, opens to corruption od ideals, and leave Individuals without participation and representation. The Yellow Jacket Is a sobering lesson of this. The political world has lost legitimacy, participation, and young people. It is totally separated from culture, research, and intellectualism. A world party, to be real, cannot be based on a few people. It must address and solve those issues.

For these among many, three considerations are important.

The first, Internet has changed the participations in politics. Space and time ae not the same. Tine has become fluid and short. Tweets, Facebook, etc. are much more important than media. Bolsonaro was elected through social media. This is a general phenomenon, from Salvini in Italy, to the Arab Spring, to Brexit. All American media have 62 million copies. Of these, quality papers (WSJ, NYT, WP,etc.), have just ten million copies. Trump tweets have 49 million followers. We know that only 4% buy newspapers, and they look only Fox news, which is an extension of his tweeters. So, when Trump makes absurd claims, like that when he visited Queen Elizabeth, he could not go to the center of London, because there were so many people waiting for him, that this was the advice of the Police, when in fact there were 200.000 people in the streets protesting his visit, those 49 million believed him blindly. The quality media publish a fact checker, which has dramatic figures about his lies and misguided truth. His followers will never read those, and if they see it they will not believe them. We need to be able to get into this kind of mobilization. I, for one, I am not able to use efficiently Twitter. And Aldo Moro the Italian PM assassinated by the Red Brigades (which were used by a stronger force), would not be able either. And politics jump from a short period on an item, to another one. Gone is the ability to follow process. We only follow events. And the same is happening with media.

The second, as a consequence of this, Internet went the wrong way, as far as politics are concerned. Instead of becoming an element of participation, has become an element of atomization. A whopping 73% of its users declare that they carve their own world, a virtual world, that they can build on their wishes. As a result, debate among people (especially young people), has waned. Users go into Internet, dialogue with like-minded people, and insult others. The result is that young people vote less and less, with results like Brexit, where 88% of adults voted, against 23% of young people, who demonstrated against the result of the referendum the day after, with onlookers shouting them: you did not vote and now you protest?

The third, there is now a divide between towns and country side, which is just the point of the iceberg of a much significant divide: between those who feel left out by globalization, and think it went in favor of those living in towns, the elites (intellectuals are considered a part), and those who were not victims. It is just enough to look where Trump got his voters in 2018, and no significant support in the towns. He lost the popular vote by two million. But the peculiar American voting system, a heritage of the process of unification of American states, gives today a disproportionate representation to the smaller and least developed American States. But the same was behind Brexit, and it is happening worldwide.

This has brought an unprecedented situation. Those who feel left behind, are now legitimized to mistrust elites. Ignorance has been for a long time a reality in every country.

But now there is the arrogance of ignorance. Yellow jackets revolt against elites, with Macron as a symbol, is shared by the followers of Trump, Salvini, Le Pen, Bolsonero, etc.

And is ironic that the political system, considered everywhere the main enemy, is in fact the most ignorant in modern times. Once, if Nelson Mandela, Adlai Stevenson, Olaf Palme, Allende and Aldo Moro would meet, they would have some books on which to talk. It would be highly improbable among even parliamentarians, let alone Trump, May and Merkel…

This bring us to a consideration, and the conclusion. The consideration is to reflect what happened to degrade politics and policy. My own reading: there were a sum of factors, all at the same time. The Berlin’s wall fall, brought to the Tatcher’s Tina (there is no alternative). It was the end of ideologies (the end of history), those cages that brought us to wars. The cry was to be pragmatist. But when politics become just the solution of a single problem, without a long term and organic vision of the step you are taking, you are being utilitarian, which is a different perspective. At the same time, we had the Washington Consensus, among the IMF, the WB, and the American Treasury, of how to run the world. The benefits of globalization would lift all boats. Anything which was not productive, was to be curbed: social costs, education (Reagan even wanted to abolish the Ministry), health, which were unmovable and should be privatized. The public system, the state, all what was movable (trade, finance, industry) was to be globalized. Microeconomies were out. It took 20 years for the IMF and the WB, to belatedly restore the role of the state as a regulator, beyond the market. But by now the genie is out of the bottle. Finance has taken its own life, is over the economic production. And the unprecedented concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands is just a symbol, which adds the exasperation of the losers.

But very important was the Third Way theory of Tony Blair, who decided that as globalization was inevitable, the left could ride it, and give to it a human face. The result is that the left lost his constituency, and workers now vote for the new populist parties, which are growing everywhere. The debate left-right, which was largely an ideological debate, has disappeared. Why people should feel passionate about a politic which has become basically an administrative matter?

And this brings us to the conclusion. To create a world party, we must find a banner under which people would come. I think that, in today world, the right does not need to structure Bannon attempt to join all populist and xenophobe parties, is valid as long they have a common enemy: Europe, the multilateralism. But if you push people to nationalism and competition, it will go the way of the much proclaimed unity between the Austrian Prime Minister, Sebastian Kurz, and Salvini, who declared themselves brothers, united against the common enemy, the European Union. But as soon they come across a concrete theme, how to deal with immigrants, their competing interests was the of their brotherhood. I have no doubt that next European elections in May, will see a strengthening of the anti-European forces. But from that to the end of Europe…

Therefore, this growing tide will exhaust itself, when it will be clear that their program of making the national past the future, will last until they take the power, and will become visible that they have no answers: this is what the Italian government is proving now.

Echoing Gramsci, a party should be able to rally masses, for a common goal. This goal, according the reality, should be able to interpret and rally the majority of people. Today, the common denominator has been globalization. Many historians think that the engines for change in history have been greed and fear. Since 1989, we have been educated to greed, which has become a virtue: and since the crisis of 2008 (a direct result of greed), fear has become a strong reality. Immigrants are now the scapegoats, when they have always been a resource. When, in American history, a wall with Mexico could have justified the longest government’s shutdown?

What bonded people together, until 1989, were values it is enough to read any constitutions to find those values: justice, solidarity, ethics, equality, law as the basis of society, and so on. Today we live in a world where nobody speaks of values (unless you take market as a value), and less of all the political world. It would be a long walk, but a world party should be based on values, the defense of international cooperation as a warrant for peace, and on the fact that competition and greed make few winners, and many losers.

We must think that there are millions of people in the world engaged at grassroot level, hundreds of times more than the WSF. Our challenge is to connect with them. This, I am afraid, is a long walk. But unless we connect with those who are working to change the present trend, and we must simply made clear that we are not the elites, but we consider us equally victims, and we share the same enemy. Finally, those are people who read and reflect..And we share the same values…But can we find the language to do that? Communication is the basis for participation…

Excerpt:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Jan 17 2019 (IPS)

After Theresa May’s defeat in the British parliament it is clear that a new spectre is haunting Europe. It is no longer the spectre of communism, which opens Marx’s Manifesto of 1848; it is the spectre of the failure of neoliberal globalisation, which reigned uncontested following the fall of the Berlin Wall, until the financial crisis of 2009.

Roberto Savio

In 2008, governments spent the astounding amount of 62 trillion dollars to save the financial system, and close to that amount in 2009 (see Britannica Book of the Year, 2017), According to a US Federal Reserve study, it cost each American 70,000 dollars.

Belatedly, economic institutions left macroeconomics, which were until then used to assess GNP growth and started to look at how growth was being redistributed. And the IMF and the World Bank, (also because of the prodding of civil society studies, foremost those of Oxfam), concluded that there was a huge problem in the rise of inequality.

Of course, if the 117 trillion dollars had gone to people, that money would have led to a jump in spending, an increase in manufacturing, services, schools, hospitals, research, etc. But people were totally absent from the priorities of the system.

Under the Matteo Renzi government in Italy, 20 billion dollars went to save four banks, while in the same year total subsidies for Italian youth could be calculated at best at 1 billion dollars.

Then after the crisis of 2008-9, all went haywire. In every country of Europe (except for Spain, which has now caught up), a populist right-wing party came to life, and the traditional political system started to crumble.

The new parties appealed to the losers of globalisation: workers whose factories has been delocalised for the cheapest possible place to maximise gains; small shop owners displaced by the arrival of supermarkets; those made redundant by new technologies, by Internet like secretaries; retired people whose pensions were frozen to reduce the national deficit (in the last 20 years public debts have doubled worldwide). A new divide built up, between those who rode the wave of globalisation and those who were its victim.

Obviously, the political system felt that it was accountable to the winners, and budgets were stacked in their favour. Priority went to towns, where over 63% of citizens now live. The losers were more concentrated in the rural world, where few investments were made in infrastructure. On the contrary, in the name of efficiency, many services were cut, railway stations closed, along with hospitals, schools and banks.

In order to reach work, people often had to go several kilometres from home by car. A modest increase in the cost of petrol fuelled the rebellion of the ‘yellow jackets’. It did not help that out of the 40 billion that the French government obtains from taxes on energy, less than one-quarter went back into transportation infrastructure and services.

Universities, hospital and other services in towns suffered much less, were points of excellence, public transportation was available, and a new divide arose between those in towns and those from the rural world, those with studies and education and those who were far away and atomised in the interior.

A new divide had come about, and people voted out the traditional party system, which ignored them. This device brought Trump to power and led to the victory of Brexit in the United Kingdom. This divide is wiping the traditional parties, and bringing back nationalism, xenophobia and populism. It is not bringing back the ideological right wing, but a gut right and left with little ideology …

All this should be obvious.

Now, for the first time, the system is turning its attention to the losers, but is too late. The left is paying the dramatic illusion of Tony Blair who, considering globalisation inevitable, decided that it would be possible to ride its wave. So, the left lost any contact with the victims, and kept the fight on human rights as its main identity and difference with the right.

That was good for towns, where gays and LGBTs, minorities (and majorities like women), could congregate, but it was hardly a priority for those of the interior.

Meanwhile, finance continued to grow, become a world by itself, no longer linked to industry and service, but to financial speculation. Politics became subservient. Governments lowered taxes on the who stashed the unbelievable amount of 62 trillion dollars in tax havens, according to the Tax Justice Network. The estimated yearly flow is 600 billion dollars, double the cost of the Millennium Goals of the United Nations.

And the Panama Papers, which revealed just a small number of the owners of accounts, identified at least 140 important politicians among them from 64 countries: the prime minister of Iceland (who was obliged to resign), Mauricio Macri of Argentina, President Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine, a bunch of close associates of Vladimir Putin, David Cameron’s father, the prime minister of Georgia, and so on.

No wonder that politicians have lost their shine, and are now considered corrupt, or useless, or both.

In the current economic order, Emmanuel Macron acted rationally by lowering the tax on the rich people to attract investments. But he totally ignored that for those French who have difficulty in reaching the end of the month, this was proof that they were being totally ignored. And sociologists agree that the real ‘Spring’ of the yellow jackets was their search for dignity.

Ironically, British parties, and especially the Conservative and Labour parties, should be thankful to the debate on Brexit. It is clear that the United Kingdom is committing suicide, in economic and strategic terms. With a ‘hard’ Brexit, without any agreement with the European Union, it could lose at least seven percent of its GDP.

But the divide which makes Brexit win with all towns, the City, the economic and financial sector, academics, intellectuals and all institutions has confirmed the fear of those of the interior. Belonging to the European Union was profitable for the elites, and not for them. Scotland voted against, because it has now a different agenda from England. And this divide is not going to change with a new referendum.

That the cradle of parliamentarian democracy, Westminster, is not able to reach a compromise is telling proof that the debate is not political but a clash of mythologies, like the idea of returning to the former British Empire. It is like Donald Trump’s idea of reopening coal mines. We look at a mythical past as our future. This is what led to the explosion of Vox in Spain, by those who believe that under Franco life was easier and cheaper, that there was no corruption, woman stayed in their place, and Spain was a united country, without separatists in Catalonia and the Basque Country. It is what Jair Bolsonari in Brazil is exploiting, presenting the military dictatorship at a time when violence was limited. Our future is the past …

So this divide – once in one way or another the United Kingdom solves its Brexit dilemma – will pass into normal politics, and will bring about a dramatic decline, like elsewhere, of the two main traditional parties. Unless, meanwhile, populist, xenophobe and nationalist parties take over government and show that they do not have the answer to the problems they have rightly identified.

In that sense, the Italian experience could be of significant help … look how the government has performed with the European Union.

Excerpt:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Jan 8 2019 (IPS)

The person most qualified to write the foreword for the latest work by Riccardo Petrella, In the Name of Humanity, would actually be Pope Francis, who, using other words but speaking of values and making denouncements, has often argued what the reader will find in its pages.

I quote him, because words like “solidarity”, “equality”, “social justice” or “participation” – now used only by Pope Francis I – have now disappeared from today’s political vocabulary. I was called to this task because I have spent my life in favour of information that would give citizens the tools to be conscious actors. But the reason why from a “professional” I have become an “activist” in the campaign for world governance is precisely because I see information as directly responsible for the drift in which we find ourselves.

Roberto Savio

Riccardo Petrella is a central point of reference for those who have not yet given up on seeing the governance of globalisation in terms of values and ideals. Riccardo has behind him a long series of struggles for a different economy and has denounced the dangers of neoliberal globalisation from the outset.

We owe it to him if the theme of “commons” began to be debated, in particular that of water as a public good, at a time when the Italian government of Silvio Berlusconi was pushing for its privatisation.

He did so in an era – the period immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall – which today seems distant but which was of exceptional intellectual and political violence. Anyone who did not blindly adhere to the “single thought” introduced by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the U.S. Treasury (the so-called Washington Consensus) was seen as either a nostalgist of the Soviet era or a dangerous subversive.

Petrella, with few other economists, had the strength to oppose the Washington Consensus, deriding the general inebriation which reached levels that today seem impossible. I still remember a conference held by IPALMO in May 1991 in Milan, where the then director general of the World Trade Organization, Renato Ruggiero, described the world as still blocked by the concept of nation or regional agreements (such as the European Union and the North American Free Trade Agreement) now overtaken by the course of history.

Globalisation was to have eliminated all frontiers, we were to have had a single currency, there were to be no more wars and the benefits of globalisation were to have rained down on all the citizens of the world, something that the theory of development and redistribution had failed to do. It took a generation of disappointed and marginalised people for the truth to become evident.

This book is the result of forty years of study, research, and social and academic engagement by Riccardo, gathered here in an organic way. It is a holistic engagement, with a humanist vision of the economy, of society and of the consequences of the crisis that dominates us.

Reading it, faced with the wealth of data and reflections it offers, the African proverb comes to mind: “When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground”. But beyond the contents, what makes the book stimulating is that it communicates a moral engagement and a human empathy rare in this era of transition from a world that is unsustainable to one that is inevitable, but which we cannot yet see well. In his Letters from Prison, Antonio Gramsci wrote that “in the interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”.

Petrella analyses these symptoms in a meticulous but clear way, and they are symptoms for which today’s politics and finance certainly have no answer. The book is an organic work, analysing each symptom on the basis of data and proposals, helping us to walk in the shadow evoked by Gramsci.

Finally we see that there are alternatives to the drift of a world of finance which – in the search for profit – comes into collision with the very productive economy of which it was only to have been a lubricant. And in turn politics, like the productive economy, is subject to the world of finance. Today, the production of goods and services, that is, the sphere in which men and women play a role, accounts for one-fortieth of financial transactions. Greed has led banks to engage in more and more criminal actions: since the Great Crisis of 2008, major banks have paid a total of 220 billion dollars in fines …

According to numerous historians, the course of history has been changed above all by two factors: Greed and Fear. After the fall of the Berlin Wall it even came to be said that history had ended, as Francis Fukuyama wrote, and that we were entering a post-ideological world.

The unification of the world into a single winning ideology, capitalism, was to have led to the end of clashes, in a united international reality dedicated to economic growth. What Fukuyama did not see is that capitalism without controls was to take the world back in time.

On this Petrella offers incontrovertible data and echoes Oxfam when it says that in 2020 social inequalities in Britain will be equal to those of the era of Queen Victoria, when an unknown German philosopher was writing some chapters of Das Kapital in the Reading Room of the British Museum … The statistics on inequality are known to all: in the last two decades, capital has become increasingly concentrated in a few hands and a large part of humanity sees its level of life, health and education decrease, to the point that the International Monetary Fund is even beginning to whisper that inequality is a brake on growth.

As for Fear, it took the Brexit to start seeing the rapidly growing nationalist, xenophobic and populist drift in European countries (and also in the United States with Donald Trump). Fear has transformed countries that once were a symbol of civic-mindedness and tolerance – like the Netherlands and the Nordic countries – into racist countries that even confiscate the few personal jewels of refugees (Denmark).

In just two years, the advance of the extreme right in Austria, France, Germany, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary – until now considered a series of local coincidences – is finally creating a debate in traditional parties that have no concrete response to the causes of Fear.

Also because, as Petrella says, we are faced with a system that is a factory of poverty, which is not a natural phenomenon but a creation of the system itself. The challenges to be solved all derive from wrong answers.

Peace is being tackled with an increase in military engagement, the environment with ecological devastation, democracy with the privatisation of political power. Justice is witnessing an increase in injustice, the economy is in a financial and speculative drift, and the sense of life of citizens – who have lost the value of solidarity and accept the commodification of all that surrounds them – is crumbling. No concern is voiced that more is being spent per person on marketing in the world than on education …

The drift in which we find ourselves is affecting democracy, which has become a formal process, devoid of the conscious and active participation of citizens. In the Name of Humanity observes what should now be clear to all and is certainly not to the system in power: we are at a global impasse that no one, with the paradigms in place, is able to solve.

In an analytical but communicative way, this is the starting point for the list of Gramsci’s shadows: the lack of representation of humanity, the use of God, Nation and Money to transform into destroyers those who are still convinced of being constructors; and the data of the global impasse. Herein lies the importance of the book.

The analysis of the transitional era in which we find ourselves is roughly divided into two schools of thought. The first is that of those who believe that the current system is perhaps in crisis but that the answer may come from politicians – perhaps new ones – who, in every country, are able to give concrete and efficient answers with bold reforms. The second, and growing, school of thought argues that the current system is the cause of the problems to be solved and that without deep changes in vision and strategies the drift will continue.

This latter school of thought – which, moreover, is followed only by a small number of victims, many of whom are on the margins of society or are so frustrated as to take refuge in individual pessimism without hope – is a school strong in analysis and denunciation but poor in proposals.

And it is here that the book offers its own positive originality: an organic and holistic plan of proposals which invoke a pact for Humanity as the basis for the re-foundation of society. A re-foundation that declares poverty illegal, that leads to disarmament and the end of speculative finance … However, in order to achieve this re-foundation, it is necessary to return to talking about values and finding a consensus and world participation around them, because without common values it is not possible to build together and without a global response national or local actions serve little. This book, as well as being an analysis, is also a manual for action.

In this sense it is important that In the Name of Humanity sees the light in a moment of generational sacrifice. My generation, overwhelmed by Greed and Fear, by selfishness and the decline of politics, lives parameters of retirement and security that young people can only dream of.

The British referendum clearly demonstrated how the older generations are above all self-referential and feel no inter-generational responsibility. The elderly voted 65% for Brexit, deciding the future of young people, who were 75% in favour of Remain. This is the result of the absence of common values and the dramatic lack of policies for engaging young people, while those of fiscal rigour and priorities for the survival of the financial system abound – the most emblematic demonstration of current priorities.

To save banks from the 2008 crisis, it is estimated that so far the contribution to finance has amounted to eight trillion dollars. Youth policies do not exceed 500 million dollars.

It is no wonder that young people take refuge in a pessimistic individualism, creating their own communities only virtually on the Internet; that they lack representation and participation and, above all, for the first time in modern history, idols and points of reference.

Petrella’s book is an important instrument for young people because it transmits a message of hope that does not exist today. It is not inevitable that the world will continue like this. We have the instruments to change it. But to do that we have to go back to talking about values and going back to speaking with and understanding each other. In the Name of Humanity should be distributed free in schools …

Fifteen years have passed since the first meeting of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, where we – protagonists of different stories – gathered to denounce the unsustainability of neoliberal globalisation.

The scepticism and rejection that accompanied the WSF process have not prevented the Washington Consensus from today being just a discredited instrument of the past and the proponents of globalisation from admitting that the denunciations of the WSF had a real basis. As Petrella says, we can only emerge from the crisis with bold measures.

This book will be received as a utopia, or rather a chimera, by the beneficiaries of the current system. In 15 years time, it will be interesting to see how many will have been forced to admit that the analyses and the actions that Petrella proposes were not so far from the course of history.

Those who shoot at the stars can take heart from a Sri Lankan legend … there was a young boy who shot an arrow at the stars every night and was laughed at until one day the king organised an archery contest and that boy won because he was the one who shot furthest!

Excerpt:

Rita Levi-Montalcini, the Italian Nobel laureate honoured for her work in neurobiology, once gave a splendid conference with the title “The imperfect brain”. There she explained that man has a brain that is not used completely, while the reverse is true for the cockroach.

In the growing fog that envelops the planet and its inhabitants, looking at things from the point of view of a cockroach would probably give us a new perspective. Also because the cockroach survived the atomic bomb in Nagasaki, it is 300 million years old, and it is distributed around the planet in over 4,000 species. All things that give it a great advantage over man.

Roberto Savio

Obviously, both are part of the animal kingdom. But man does things that other animals do not. For example, torture. Man has a level of consciousness and intelligence that no other animal possesses. But he does not, for example, learn from mistakes, which all other animals do.

Today, 70 years after its adoption, we are celebrating the Declaration of Human Rights, but we are recreating all the conditions that led to the Second World War, so much so that we talk about the “New Thirties”.

We have returned to waving the well-known flags of “In the name of God” and “In the name of the nation”, flags under which millions of people died.

We have been questioning ourselves about the climate since the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED). Rio de Janeiro gave rise to the Kyoto Protocol for the control of climate change which, despite its good intentions, has had negligible results. Finally, after years of negotiations, we managed to convene the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 21) in Paris in 2015, with the participation of all the world’s countries.

For it to happen, every country was left free to set its own goals for reducing carbon monoxide emissions and responsible for monitoring their application. (Just think what would happen if we left citizens the same rules for their taxes). We now know that the result of the commitments made in Paris is leading to a 3.6°C increase in the planet’s temperature. Since 1992, the work of climate scientists has been to calculate how far the temperature can rise from the days of the Industrial Revolution without causing too much damage.

The consensus is 1.5°C, and that at more than two degrees the consequences of heating become irreversible and escape man’s control. For example, the permafrost of Siberia would melt, releasing a quantity of methane, an element 25 times more harmful than carbon monoxide. And the Paris agreement does not include methane, which is already massively produced by livestock farms, planes, ships and much more.

This month will go down in history as the date on which the international system formally entered into crisis and the revolt of the excluded can no longer be ignored, with Trump as a central protagonist.

Long before the Rio Conference, in 1988, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) had created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which brought together the climate scientists of 90 countries to present reports on the state of the climate. These reports have progressively identified human activity as responsible for the increase in temperature, obviously with the opposition of the fossil, oil and coal sectors.

But the figures speak clearly. CO2 emissions have continued to increase, even after the Paris Conference. And the latest report of the 2018 “emissions gap report” sounds a brutal alarm: at the current rate, we need to triple efforts to stay within the famous 1.5 degree mark, because we will get there within the next 12 years. Only 57 countries are on the correct path.

Now we have entered into the realm of myth. That of indefinite development, in which science and the market will be the saviours of the planet. The Trump administration has even presented a report to the annual Conference of the Parties (COP) defending fossil fuels, with the support of producer countries (Russia, Saudi Arabia, etc.).

As for science, there is no doubt that it is playing a positive role. But science has become a market variable. If its findings are not used, they count for little. And history shows us that the free market uses them only if they can give immediate profits and do not create conflict with the sources of profit already in use. An easy example is that of the automotive industry.

Without the progressively introduced regulations, we would have cars that are much inferior to those of today if we were to increase their safety and efficiency, and reduce their pollution. And the myth of the efficiency of the free market, which has been left without checks and controls since the fall of the Berlin Wall, has created some winners, but many losers, who wear yellow jackets and bring revolt to Paris.

To keep to the theme, total subsidies to the fossil industries currently amount to 250 billion dollars a year, while those in the renewables sector now stand at 120 billion… and the Joint Research Centre (JRC), the European Commission’s science and knowledge service, has calculated that inaction on climate change will cost Europe 240 billion euro a year, with southern Europe as the major victim.

Then the worst that could happen to the climate happened: it became no longer a problem of survival of the planet, but a political confrontation.

Trump withdrew from the Paris agreement for three reasons: i) to undo what his predecessor Barack Obama had done, which is one of Trump’s automatic reflexes; ii) to satisfy the North American fossil world, which runs from unemployed miners to the billionaires of the fossil sector like the Koch brothers, who invested (their declaration) 900 million dollars in the last US presidential elections – a good example of democracy in a country where corporations have the same rights as citizens); and iii) to oppose any international agreement because America must play its role of great power without being harnessed into any multilateral agreement.

And his world echoes him: the new Brazilian foreign minister, Ernesto Araújo, has declared that “climate change has been used to increase the regulatory power of states over the economy, and the power of international institutions over nations and their population, as well as slowing economic growth in democratic capitalist countries, and promoting the growth of China.”

And here, by mechanical logic, the battle against climate change has become a thing of the left (as have peace, solidarity and social justice). It is the thesis by which Trump withdraws from the Paris agreements and has declared that he does not believe the three reports of his administration on climate change, including one of 1,700 pages.

And since he has become a specialist in putting Draculas to administer the various blood banks that for him represent the various administrations inherited from Obama, the administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is opening national parks and protected areas to the exploitation of fossil companies, just like newly-elected Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro declares he wants to open the Amazon to deforestation and the production of soy.

Moreover, this is the common thread that connects us with two other major events of December 2018 – the United Nations conferences in Katowice, Poland (on climate change), and Marrakech, Morocco (on migration). These, along with the revolt of the “yellow jackets” in France, mean that this month will go down in history as the date on which the international system formally entered into crisis and the revolt of the excluded can no longer be ignored, with Trump as a central protagonist.

UNFCCC Secretariat | COP24 opening plenary

The Marrakech conference was about adopting a document of principles on migration, for coordinated action, with respect for the human rights of migrants. It ended up leaving every state to establish its own policy. It was a non-binding document, which was not even signed.

In Marrakech, the United States revolted, issuing a statement which, among others, stated: “We believe the Compact [Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration] and the process that led to its adoption, including the New York Declaration [for Refugees and Migrants], represent an effort by the United Nations to advance global governance at the expense of the sovereign right of States to manage their immigration systems in accordance with their national laws, policies, and interests.”

This was enough for the quick formation of a coalition of sovereignists, xenophobes and populists who boycotted the agreement. After Austria, here come Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Croatia, Switzerland and Trump’s allies, such as Israel, Australia and Chile. And it is here that migration, like the climate, becomes something that is of the left… and the Belgian government loses the far-right party of Flemish autonomy and is forced to redo its coalition, because it decides to participate in the Marrakech conference. And Germany and Italy pass the buck to their parliaments. All this over a non-binding document of principles!

What is apparently incomprehensible is that a serious debate about migration continues to be avoided. The great phenomena of migration, like that of Syria, were caused by international intervention to change the regime, without even thinking about the aftermath of invading.

Obviously there are those who flee from poverty, and not only from conflicts. But this distinction is becoming increasingly blurred. According to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), every two seconds one person is expelled from their territory due to conflict and persecution: the result is an unprecedented total of 68.5 million migrants in the world. Of these, 24.5 million are refugees, and more than half are under the age of 18.

The number of authoritarian states has been on the increase over the last 10 years, and those fleeing from them has also been increasing, also for political reasons. But those who flee for ethnic, religious or political reasons are refugees (and not economic migrants, who have no rights). And there are 10 million people (like the Rohingya in Myanmar) who are denied nationality, and do not have access to basic rights, such as education, health and freedom of movement: they do not legally exist.

And now comes a new category that does not exist legally: that of environmental refugees who, according to the European Union number 258 million people, forced to leave their homes for climatic reasons. But this is a whole new and difficult discussion. While it is clear who are the victims of a hurricane or an earthquake, it is more difficult in the case of desertification.

Let’s think about the case of island countries like the Maldives where an increase of just one metre in sea level would be enough for them to disappear physically. You can send an immigrant who comes to another country to escape hunger back to Senegal for example, but where do you send back people who no longer have their country?

One of the laws of physics is that of communicating vessels. Africa will double its population in a few decades. Nigeria alone will grow to 400 million inhabitants. Sixty percent of Africans are under 25, compared with 32 percent for North Americans, and 27 percent for Europeans.

According to the United Nations, Europe will need at least twenty million immigrants to maintain its pension system and its competitiveness. Even Japan, which has always struggled to keep its identity and ethnic and cultural purity intact, is opening its doors without fanfare in the face of the aging of its citizens.

European statistics are public, but ignored. In Italy, immigrants totalling five million out of a population of 60.6 million have produced 130 billion euro, 8.9 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, an amount larger than the GDPs of Hungary, Slovakia and Croatia. And Italy now has seven births against 11 deaths. In the last five years, 570,000 new businesses out of six million have been created by immigrants in Italy, and the complaint of entrepreneurs, especially in agriculture, is that an Italian workforce cannot be found.

At global level, according to William Swing, former director-general of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), although immigrants account for only 3.5 percent of the world’s population, they produce nine percent of the world’s GDP. But this is not what people believe.

According to a survey by the European Union on the myths and reality of immigration, Italians believe that immigrants account for 20 percent of the population while the figure is actually 10 percent. They believe that 50 percent are Muslims while they are really 30 percent, and that 30 percent are Christians while they are 60 percent. They also believe that 30 percent of them are unemployed while the figure is 10 percent, not far from the national average.

These Italian myths are actually shared by the whole of Europe, and with Trump by the United States. Fox News, Trump’s television arm, now refers to immigrants as “invaders”, and Trump wants to erect the most expensive wall in history, after the Great Wall of Chinese, to keep out criminals and drug traffickers.

And here comes the central theme of this article, which is too short to deal with issues that are apparently unrelated to each other in an effective way. Who elected the Trumps, the Salvinis, the Orbans, the Bolsonaros, and who sees peace and the fight against climate change as leftist positions, international cooperation as a plot in favour of the Chinese and immigrants as invaders? Well, the Catalan nations where a far-right party, born from nothing, won 400,000 votes can be very useful for understanding the revolt of the “yellow jackets” in France.

In Andalusia, the arrival of Vox has messed up all the cards. It took votes from the electorate of the right-wing parties, the Popular Party and Ciudadanos. After 23 years of governing the region, the PSOE, the Social Democrats, has lost control. How did it happen? In order of importance, the arguments of the voters were: 1) Vox fights against immigrants, who are an invasion;2) the party fights corruption, which is instead widespread in traditional parties; 3) it wants a strong government, because with the struggle for the independence of Catalonia Spain is becoming dismembered; and 4) why should a Spaniard go hungry, or be evicted for not paying rent, when food and a roof are being given to arriving immigrants? There was a heavy female vote, despite the anti-gay statements and anti-feminist slogans such as WOMEN IN THE HOME.

Now the place where Vox took more votes than any other party is the town of El Ejido, in the province of Almeria, which has become the nursery of Spain. It has a population of 86,000, of whom one-third are foreigners and one in five is Moroccan. These work in the nurseries surrounding the town, in precarious conditions and exploited. Unemployment is lower than the Spanish average. The town has no library, and a total of 600 newspapers a day are sold. It is evident that immigrants, many of them not registered, do a job that Spaniards do not want to do. If one-third of the population was to leave, that would be the end of prosperity. And who employs immigrants, at 41 euro for eight hours of work (35 for those who are not registered)? They are Spanish citizens. The situation is identical for immigrants in the south of Italy, exploited by local farmers who say that they manage to survive with cheap labour. Otherwise, they would have to shut down.

In other words, immigration has become a myth. America first has become Spain First, Italy First, and so on. The mayor of Almeria sums the situation up: Vox is the voice of anger.

How was this anger reached? It was not born today, but has been created over three decades. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the threat of communism has disappeared, social concerns have fallen, and the market has replaced man as the central element of society. Spending that is not immediately productive (health, education, assistance for the elderly) has been progressively decreased. The rich, because they are productive, receive a progressive reduction in taxation, unlike the poor.

Globalisation has led the rich to become richer, and the poor poorer; it has delocalised businesses and reduced the purchasing power of the middle class, while finance has grown in a world of its own, free from business. The class of craftsmen/women and small traders is disappearing, if it has not already disappeared, devoured by the likes of IKEA and supermarkets.

Cities become increasingly important, and the countryside increasingly empty and poor. A farmer’s product is sold to intermediaries for one-quarter of the final price. Where voters once identified themselves with a factory, with a trade union, with a community of peers, today they are atomised in a vacuum without incentives. And because, after the end of the Soviet Union, the new ethics is to become as rich as possible (today 80 people possess the same wealth as 2.3 million people) and the value of individual competition is increasing the frustration of the losers. Finally, the financial crisis of 2008.

The arrival of the Fourth Industrial Revolution with technological development, which is eliminating technology that has not been updated from the market, creates a situation of fear and insecurity; the losers no longer feel represented in politics, which seen at the service of the elites and in the hands of a self-referential, corrupt political class, which is directed to satisfying above all the world of the city, the elites, the system. Institutions are perceived as serving the system, and the same fate awaits international institutions, the European Union and the United Nations. Anti-politics is born, and the wave is ridden by parties born largely after the 2008 financial crisis. The struggle of anti-politics against politics becomes stronger than the division between right and left.

This struggle leads, for example, to Brexit, where cities vote to remain in the European Union and the countryside to leave, something that was repeated recently in the Polish elections. It is the same policy of fear and redemption of the losers that led to the power of Trump, who lost in the cities, in the rich states, and won among the poor, in the rural world, in the world of closed factories and abandoned mines, among voters motivated by rancour, anger and fear.

In all small cities, the phenomenon is the same. An investigation in Montauban, one of the most active towns in the “yellow jackets” revolt with less than 60,000 inhabitants, found that there were 27 butchers before the arrival of Carrefour. There are four left. The same happened with greengrocers, with many clothing stores and craft workshops after the arrival of supermarkets. In all, around 900 shops had closed down. Respected citizens considered middle-class suddenly found themselves marginalised and ignored.

Through television, they basically see programmes from cities and a world that is changing in which they have no future. Is it any wonder that this turns into resentment towards the system and those who belong to it? Le Monde has published a table on salaries, which shows that those in a higher intellectual profession earn an average of 2,732 euro a month, which falls to 1,672 for farmers, artisans and traders, but plunges to 1,203 for those in precarious activities. And the “yellow jackets” revolt was triggered by a 10 euro cent increase in the tax on diesel fuel. One of the demonstrators’ slogans was: ‘Macron fears the end of the world, we fear the end of the month’.

Now, to remain in France, Macron has failed to understand that for the losers rational analysis of efficiency increases their estrangement. Life is above all a human fact, and no one is concerned with this aspect any longer. Schumpeter’s model – that the efficiency of the market creates a process of economy that grows thanks to the market’s capacity for creative destruction – is for the losers proof that the system is made only for the winners, and that neither they nor their children will ever have the ability to escape the situation in which they have come to find themselves through no fault of their own.

The ‘Yellow Jackets’ movement has been very successful, because many categories feel ignored. When frustration increases with the passing of the years, of governments, and is reduced only to an economic problem of subsidies, the passage to violence, from dignity that is awakened, is unstoppable. And those who present themselves as “the man of providence”, capable of listening and understanding, opening fights against corruption, for the restoration of law, for traditional society, for the world in which everything went well – from the old independent Britain to the great factories and steel mills of the United States – will have unshakable support.

In reality, there was once a social contract, also regulated by intermediary forces such as trade unions, by a sense of hope and collective identity, such as being a worker or a railwayman. This sense of community has disappeared, almost all places of aggregation have disappeared, such as clubs or dance halls, replaced today by the halls of supermarkets and discos, to which only young people have access.

It would also be necessary to open a chapter on the impact of technology, with internet and social media, which instead of leading to greater communication, have led to a self-referential and narcissistic world, where each one organises their own virtual world, escapes from real society, creating aggregations among peers and no longer dialogue with others. Another instrument that is felt as exclusion for generational reasons.

Even though the revolt of the ‘Yellow Jackets’ was made possible by Facebook, which brought together hundreds of thousands of people aggregated against the common enemy: the system, which ignored and marginalised them. However, it should be clear that robotisation and artificial intelligence will put more people on the margins of society than immigration ever will, with new priests of the system, technicians who will manage the world of artificial intelligence.

It is thus now clear that without social justice, we will not go far. Macron who lifts taxes from the rich to attract investments to France lives in a world that is different from that of most of its citizens. And above all, in a world of numbers and Excel tables. A world in which “men of providence” will lead us inexorably towards a war.

Exploiting fear and injustice works politically for obtaining votes. The battles of the losers of globalisation have been opened by social movements, by the World Social Forum. But who uses them is not the left, which with Tony Blair’s ‘third way’ thought it could ride the wave of globalisation, when it only managed to lose its base: the battle of the losers is used by right that is not ideological but of the gut.

Creating a new social pact as existed before the fall of the Berlin Wall is not easy. Money – which is no longer there – is necessary. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) tells us that world debt exceeds 182 trillion dollars. In just one year, it has increased by 18 trillion dollars. Since the 2007 crisis, it has increased by 60 percent. We are all living on credit, and Macron, who now would like to use social justice to restore peace, has no funds to do so.

Moreover, as always in a world that has lost its compass, the money would be there. Every year, countries’ tax authorities collect 150 billion dollars less than they could because of tax havens that could easily be outlawed in a very short time. It is always the same: if we could introduce social justice as the first objective, it would be easy, even on a global scale.

The United States, for example, spent the absurd sum of 5.9 trillion dollars in military operations and armaments after the attack on the Twin Towers. In 2017, 1.719 billion dollars were spent on armaments worldwide, a figure never before reached in history. And if military expenses could be considered necessary by some, I do not see who defends the spending for corruption: in the last year, according to the United Nations, this amounted to one trillion dollars, and the money stolen in governments another 2.6 trillion. Another proof of the efficiency of the free market!

And now let’s go back to our cockroach. According to scientists, we are heading towards the sixth crisis of extinction of the animal and plant kingdom. Extinction is a natural phenomenon, affecting one to five species each year. But scientists estimate that the current rate is at least a thousand times higher, with dozens of species every day. It is believed that by the middle of the century at least 30 percent of existing species will have disappeared.

Obviously, the cockroach is not one of these. It is estimated that a building in New York has at least 36,000 cockroaches.

But men have come to the conclusion that it is necessary to find a way to give animal proteins in a different, more sustainable way, and that the path to follow is to eat insects. There are cultural resistances (not in China and other countries), but they can be overcome with an appealing presentation …

And our cockroach can only desire that the bunglers of the animal kingdom, called men, get out of the way as soon as possible. The entire animal and plant kingdoms, and probably also the mineral one, are asking for this.

Certainly, without man, in the space of twenty years the planet would become ideal for nature…

Kofi Annan. Credit: UN Photo/Evan Schneider

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Sep 14 2018 (IPS)

This testimony to Kofi Annan, former UN Secretary-General, comes a month after his death. Much has already been written, and it is now superfluous to recall his efforts for peace and international cooperation. It is better to place his figure in a crucial context: how the great powers progressively reduced the figure of the UN Secretary-General and charged a high price from those who tried to keep the system’s independence.

First of all, it must be remembered that the United Nations was born – to a considerable extent – due to the strong propulsive drive of the United States. The United States, the great winners of the Second World War [with 416,800 soldiers and 1,700 civilians dead, compared with over 20 million Soviet Union soldiers and civilians], wanted to avoid the recurrence of a new world conflict. It therefore sought the construction of a multilateral system, able to maintain – through peace in a ruined world – its economic and military hegemony intact. It pledged to contribute 25 percent to the budget of the organisation, agreed to house its headquarters and ceded national sovereignty to an unprecedented extent.

This special arrangement took the first heavy blow through the hand of US President Ronald Reagan who, at the North-South Summit held in Cancun, Mexico, in 1981, shortly after his election, said he considered the United Nations a straitjacket for American interests. He argued that it was not acceptable that his country had only one vote like any other country, and was forced by majority votes (often from developing countries) to follow paths far from US policy. Since then Washington’s policy has been to attempt to reshape the political weight of the United Nations, and it has constantly sought to have a “manager” as Secretary-General who would take account of American weight.

After Javier Perez de Cuellar, a quiet Peruvian diplomat who by nature and training avoided confrontation, had succeeded Kurt Waldheim – Secretary-General at the time of the Cancun summit – the United States began a process of disengagement, which came to a halt with the arrival of George W. Bush, a moderate from the old school, who took a more positive view of the United Nations as a place to assert American power.

Then came the fall of the Berlin Wall and the vote of the UN General Assembly could not be exploited by the socialist bloc. An Egyptian diplomat, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, had taken over from Perez de Cuellar, supported by Washington because Egypt was considered a traditional US ally.

Boutros-Ghali turned out to be surprisingly independent. A profound campaign to relaunch the United Nations began, with several World Conferences being organised on topics ranging from Climate to Population, from Human Rights to Gender Equity, and with a social summit in Copenhagen, which established a strong pledge agenda. Boutros-Ghali set an Agenda for Peace, an Agenda for Development, and many other initiatives that the United States could not desert. As a result, an American veto in 1996 prevented a second term for him (despite the favourable vote of the other 14 UN Security Council members: Boutros-Ghali  was the only Secretary-General to serve just one mandate).

When Bill Clinton became US President, his mandate was not at all unequivocal. He was openly internationalist, and he officially declared, with regard to the Rwanda War, that the United States would ban any peacekeeping operation that did not directly benefit US foreign policy. He was also the one who abolished the 1933 Segall-Glass law, which strictly kept separated deposit banks from speculation banks. As a consequence of that , speculative finance boomed and citizens deposits started to be used to grow capital, giving supremacy to finance over economy and politics.

There are many factors behind the crisis of the United Nations but the progressive withdrawal of the United States from multilateralism is its fundamental cause. The United States no longer needs the United Nations under President Donald Trump's desire for a policy not only of America First, but of America Alone. After Reagan and Bush, Trump is the third nail in the coffin.

With the veto on Boutros-Ghali, the American administration, represented by Madeline Albright, ex-US Ambassador to the United Nations and promoted to Secretary of State thanks to her battle against Boutros-Ghali, wanted to give a signal: the United States was ready to ban a UN Secretary-General who did not respect Washington’s voice. Albright’s proposal was accepted and a respectable Ghanaian official, Kofi Annan, was appointed Boutros-Ghali’s successor by the Security Council.

It was at this point that the greatness of Annan came to the fore. The man who had been considered a man linked to Washington embarked on a process of deep UN administrative reform, in order to make it more transparent and efficient. He received the Nobel Prize in 2001, together with the UN Organization, “for his work for a better organized and peaceful world”: confirmation of his prestige and authority at the highest level.

However, in 2001, George W. Bush was elected President of the United States. His agenda’s priority was American supremacy in a changing world, taking over much of Reagan’s spirit. Whoever had Kofi Annam’s confidence could have heard how Bush wanted Annam’s unconditional support, despite his resistance.

Bush began his mandate with the decision to bring down the President of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, for his invasion of Kuwait the previous year, despite American warnings. In 2003, because he did not have the support of the Security Council, which was not convinced there was sufficient evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (France ‘s refusal to believe the US Administration was particularly firm), Bush invented the “Coalition of the Willing”, an alliance of various states promoted with the support of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and invaded Iraq without UN legitimation, with the results we all know.

Kofi Annan denounced the invasion, and in 2004 declared it illegal. American retaliation was rapid.

In 2005, an assistance programme was set up: the United Nations sold the country’s oil in order to provide food and medications to civilians. Under the pressure of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, the American right-wing invented a scandal, which targeted the United Nations and Annan (through his son) undermining the organisation’s credibility. An inquiry commission headed by former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker declared that American and British companies, and Saddam Hussein himself, benefited from the illegal transactions, but it did not help. By then image of the United Nations had been irreparably compromised.

Annan showed extreme dignity, and quit his position in 2006, taking action for peace and international cooperation. It was emblematic of his personality when the Arab League and the United Nations entrusted him in February 2012 with mediation to end the civil conflict in Syria. It took him just five months to quit the job, declaring that the conflict had then become internationalised, and that no one was interested in peace.

Between 2007 and 2016, South Korean diplomat Ban Ki Moon held the office of UN Secretary-General. It is said that Bush’s instructions to the American delegation were: choose the most innocuous. And even though the end of the Bush presidency in 2009 was followed by that of Barack Obama who believed in an American policy based on cooperation and détente, Ban Ki Moon’s secretariat left a minimum legacy of actions.

Today, the United Nations is a kind of ‘Super Red Cross’, focusing on sectors that do not affect governance of the economy or finance but politics on refugees, education, health, agriculture and fishing, and so on. Trade and finance, the two great engines of globalisation, are now outside of the United Nations which is no longer a place for debate and consensus for humanity. The Davos Economic Forum attracts more leaders than the UN General Assembly.

There are many factors behind the crisis of the United Nations but the progressive withdrawal of the United States from multilateralism is its fundamental cause. The United States no longer needs the United Nations under President Donald Trump’s desire for a policy not only of America First, but of America Alone. After Reagan and Bush, Trump is the third nail in the coffin.

The latest Secretary-General, António Guterres of Portugal, has a political career at the highest level, having also been his country’s prime minister. He was chosen by the General Assembly (an unprecedented fact), and imposed on the Security Council. Stuck by Trump’s promise to withdraw the United States from the United Nations, he had to avoid any position that would increase the decline of the United Nations thanks to this immobility.

It is clear that the crisis of multilateralism and the return to nationalism is an international phenomenon. Not only the United States, but China, India, Japan, the Philippines, Myanmar, Thailand, and several European countries, including Italy, are re-discovering the old traps: in the name of God, in the name of the Nation and now in the name of Money, using nationalism, xenophobia and populism to cancel the European project.

Is it reasonable to remark that those who are missing are the Kofi Annans, those who place values and ideals above all else, shunning personal interests and not interested in holding on to their positions, in order to invite citizens to a debate of ideas by those who dare to resist in this era of sleepwalking.

Excerpt:

The Italian Navy rescues migrants in the Mediterranean Sea. Credit: Italian Coastguard/Massimo Sestini

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Jul 17 2018 (IPS)

According to the latest statistics, the total flow of immigrants that reached Europe so far in 2018 is 50.000 people, compared with 186,768 last year, 1,259,955 in 2016 and 1,327,825 in 2015. The difference between reality and perceptions is so astonishing, we are clearly witnessing one of the most brilliant manipulations in history.

Roberto Savio

The latest survey carried out of 23,000 citizens of France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States shows an enormous level of disinformation. In five of those countries, people believe that immigrants are three times higher than they actually are.

Italians believe they account for 30% of the population when the figure is actually 10%, an average which is lower than the media of the European Union. Swedes are those closest to reality: they believe immigrants account for 30%, when in fact the figure is 20%.

Italians also believe that 50% of the immigrants are Muslim, when in fact it is 30%; conversely, 60% of the immigrants are Christian, and Italians think they are 30%.

In all six countries, citizens think that immigrants are poorer and without education or knowledge, and therefore a heavy financial burden. Italians think that 40% of immigrants are jobless, when the figure is close to 10%, no different from the general rate of unemployment.

Meanwhile, the 7th report on the economic impact of immigration in Italy from the Leone Moressa Foundation, which based its research on Italian Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) data, has presented some totally ignored facts.

The 2.4 million immigrants in Italy have produced 130 billion euros, or 8.9% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) – an amount larger than the GDP of Hungary, Slovakia and Croatia. In the last five years, out of a total of nearly 6 million Italian companies, 570.000 – or 9.4% of the total – were started by immigrants. Tito Boeri, president of Italy’s national pension agency INPS, has told Parliament that immigrants give 11.5 billion euro to the system, more than what they cost. He also stressed that Italy is going through a demographic crisis, with only seven births for every eleven deaths.

The old right was not against immigrants, also because they provided cheap labor. It was mildly nationalist but was never xenophobic (Jews apart). The alternative right is not interested in statistics and economics. It is interested only in stirring fear, to get to power.

Well, Matteo Salvini, the emerging Italian leader, who has based all his political success on making immigrants the greatest threat facing Italy, answered on Twitter: Boeri lives on Mars. And that was the end of the story. For more than 50% of Italians, Salvini’s tweet was more conclusive than real statistics.

The same happened with the outgoing Director General of the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), William Swing, who quoted a study conducted by the IOM and McKinsey Global Institute which “determined that although only 3.5% of the world’s population are migrants, they are producing nine percent of the global wealth measured in GDP terms, which is more than four percent than if they stayed at home”. This made no impact on Trump electors, white rural and red collars, who are convinced that immigration is a threat to the country, even though they all have immigrant roots.

In other words, facts are irrelevant. Perceptions count more.

Let us take Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel is being weakened by the immigration issue, barely escaping a revolt of her Minister of the Interior, Horst Seehofer, who is leader of the Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian sister party of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Merkel’s party.

The shy and timid Trump was glad to come to Seehofer’s help, tweeting that the people of Germany are “turning against” their government over the issue of migration, which has led to an increase in crime. The fact that Germany has witnessed a strong decrease in crime is, of course, irrelevant for someone who has made more than 3,750 false statements over his 38.187 tweets (as of July 14).

Now, Trump’s tweets have 53,111,505 followers (as of July 15). The total circulation of the 1,331 dailies newspapers in the United States is close to 62 million, but the total circulation of the 100 largest dailies is below 10 million copies. So, whatever they write is massively overwhelmed by Trump’s tweets.

Trump is not alone in his campaign … he has allies in Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Italy’s Matteo Salvini, Poland’s Jaroslaw Kazynscky, Austria’s Sebastian Kurz, Slovakia’s Peter Pellegrini and the Czech Republic’s Milos Zeman, all in power. Then, in the wings, we have Marine Le Pen in France, Nigel Farage in Great Britain and so on for nearly every European country, with the exception of Spain and Portugal. All together, they have been using immigration, nationalism and xenophobia as the tool of the new “alternative right” for success.

Let us go back to the case of Germany. Bavaria, which is threatening Berlin’s government, is the richest state in Germany, with a population of 12.2 million people. Munich is the third largest city, after Berlin and Hamburg, with 1.4 million people, is the second largest employer in the country, and has attracted immigrants, which are all together less than 200,000. The local daily, Suddeutsche Zeitung, estimates Muslims at 32.000.

Alternative for Germany (AfD), the extreme right-wing party that won 13% of the vote (and 92 seats in parliament) in the last elections, is essentially based on an anti-immigrant platform. In a poll in March it narrowly surpassed the centre-left Social Democrats for the first time in history. The poll, by INSA and commissioned by the newspaper Bild, showed AfD support at 16% compared with the SPD’s 15.5% – a  new low for what has traditionally been one of Germany’s largest parties.

In the last polls, AfD appears to win over CSU in Bavaria, where Muslim immigrants are rare. But the main base for AfD comes from the old East Germany, where immigrants are one-quarter of those in West Germany. So, there is no rational link between reacting to the presence of immigrants and votes. AfD wins more votes where there are fewer immigrants.

The CDU is now running frantically towards extreme right-wing, xenophobic positions in order not to lose out to the AfD. It will probably lose anyway since history shows that voters always prefer to vote the original than copies. But Germans, and Bavarians, are thought to be rational people.

The statistics are clear. Each year there are 300,000 less working people. Of the 80.6 million Germans, only 61% is of working age. In 2050, this will shrink to 51%, and those older than 65 will increase from 21% to 33%. The birth rate in Germany is 1.5%, while a birth rate of 2.1% is necessary to keep the population at the same level. The huge influx of immigrants has increased the birth rate to a modest 1.59%. Immigrants tend to imitate local trends and do not have many children.

Therefore, it is clear to all that within two decades productivity will decline dramatically (some say by 30%) because of less people working, and there will be not enough payers to keep the pension and social security systems going. It will be the end of the German locomotive.

The same consideration applies throughout Europe, which has a statistical birth rate of 1.6, meaning that it will lose close to one million people each year. The UN Population Division considers that Europe should have an influx of 20 million immigrants just to maintain its course. This is clearly impossible in today’s political system.

With impeccable observation, Spanish philosopher Adela Cortina has noted that football players, artists and rich people, even those who are Muslims, like princes are most welcome in Europe. Those who are not welcome are the poor. So, she wrote a book on why we are not faced with real xenophobia. What we face, she wrote, is aporofobia, a term she coined using the word ‘apora’, the Greek word for ‘poor’. In fact, this defence of European civilisation is an updated version of colonialism.

And yet we have plenty of data about the positive impact of immigration. The last is a very complex study over 30 years of immigration, carried out by the very respected French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and published by Science Advances, on the 15 European countries which received 89% of demands for asylum in 2015, the year of the great influx from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

After four years, partly due to the length of the bureaucratic process, GNP rises by 0.32%. Impacts on the fiscal system are also relevant. Prof. Hippolyte D’Albis, one of the authors, observes that initially immigrants are of course a cost, but this public money is reinvested in society, and for ten years they produce more wealth than the general population. After ten years they melt into the general statistics.

It is obvious that the dream of people who come in Europe to escape hunger or war is to find a job as soon as possible, pay taxes and contributions to ensure their stability and future, and work hard. At least for a decade.

And it is interesting to see the difference between the new right and the old right. The old right was not against immigrants, also because they provided cheap labor. It was mildly nationalist but was never xenophobic (Jews apart). The alternative right is not interested in statistics and economics. It is interested only in stirring fear, to get to power.

People gathered in the United States to protest against immigrant children being taken from their families last month. The protesters called for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to be abolished. Officials estimate that up to 10,000 children are held in poor conditions in detention centres in the U.S. Credit: Fibonacci Blue

Reality is fake news. Trump has claimed that the 250,000 demonstrators opposed to his visit to Great Britain and kept him out of the centre of London, were in fact his supporters. You need not be only a narcissist, you also need to reverse reality.

The question, therefore, is what has happened to people? Trump’s changing the intention of 250,000 demonstrators would once have attracted ridicule. Not now: for Trump’s supporters, his tweets are undisputed truth.

His meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un brought the vaguest of results, He walked out of the Iran deal, which had several pages of agreement, saying it did not address issues. At the July NATO summit in Brussels, he attacked everybody, and then said that all had engaged to increase to their military budget  to 4% (the United States stands at 3.6%). In his visit to the United Kingdom, he scolded beleaguered Prime Minister Theresa May, defended a hard Brexit and saluted resigning Minister of Foreign Affairs and hard Brexiter Boris Johnson as his favorite. He told May that he had not come to negotiate, but to obtain what he wanted. He then met Russian President Vladimir Putin, said that the United States was responsible for the bad relations between the two countries, that Putin was to be believed when he said that there was no Russian meddling in the 2016 US elections, and that the intelligence agencies and the Department of Justice, with the probe into those elections by special counsel Robert Mueller, were an American disgrace. When in US history has a president scolding his allies and praising enemies of the United States raised not even an eyebrow from the Republican US electorate, which is now Trumpian over and above anything else?

The fact of the matter is that, as a survey released in June last year by Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) shows, the concept of democracy itself is in danger.

The survey asked more than 3,000 scholars and country experts to evaluate each of 178 countries on the quality of core features of democracy. At the end of 2016, most people lived in democracies. Since then, one-third of the world population, or 2.5 billion people, have gone through “autocratisation”, in which a leader or group of leaders begins to limit democratic attributes and rule more unilaterally.

Four of the most populous countries – India, Russia, Brazil and the United States – have been affected by autocratisation. Other large countries in democratic decline in the past !0 years include Congo, Turkey, Ukraine and Poland.

The United States fell from 7th to 31st place in just two years. The US Congress does not like to be able to put reins on the president, the opposition party appears unable to have any influence over the governing party, and the Judiciary is becoming much more partisan than balanced. The US Supreme Court looked like a counterweight to the Executive, but now its ranking has slipped to 48th place.

A poll by the McKinsey Institute found that today a full 41% of Americans would not mind not living in democracy if the leader they liked were to remain in power beyond the constitutional term.

It is fact that people elect those they like, and therefore any country has the leader its voters elect, be it Putin, Erdogan, Orban, Trump … and not centuries ago Mussolini and Hitler. If they want to listen to saviours sent by God, who care nothing about reality, that is their right. We can only mourn the growing somnambulism of people.

The serious problem is that this view of the world will only bring with a disaster in the not too distant future. It is really urgent, for example, to create an immigration policy, to establish criteria for those that the industrialised countries need to be able to to remain in global competition.

This will not happen. All immigrants are presented as a threat, just as a cynical road to power, regardless of reality. Africa’s population will double in the next few decades. Nigeria will grow to 400 million, the present population of Europe. Sixty percent of Africa’s population is now under 25, compared with 32 percent in the United States and 27 percent in Europe.

Are Europeans going to machine gun the immigrants, (as some xenophobes are already asking) and decline to a region of old people, with little if no pension and a non-existent social system? Is Europe going to lose its original identity, and the values that are enshrined not only in the European constitution, but also in those at national level?

The French Parliament has eliminated the term “race” from its constitution, and the Portuguese government will give Portuguese citizenship to immigrants who have a stable job after one year.

On the other hand, the government of the Netherlands, with the support of parliament, has decided that will refuse to allow children born by Dutch parents enrolled with ISIS to return on the grounds that those children have been born and raised in a climate of hate and violence, and thus constitute a danger for Dutch society.

The Netherlands was once a symbol of tolerance, and for centuries refugees went there, fleeing from religious or political conflicts. Today, the Netherlands has a population of 17.2 million people, with a high standard of living. How many such ISIS children are there? The astounding number of 145! Would it not be possible to find 145 families where those children – who have no responsibility for their situation – could forget the horrors they went through and enjoy the benefits of their nationality which, by international law, is considered non-waiverable? Meanwhile, the United States is separating more than 5.000 children from their immigrant parents.

Under this unprecedented face of the West, is this the new Europe and United States that their citizens want?

Excerpt:

Donald John Trump, 45th and current president of the United States, has been seen in many illustrious circles as an anomaly that cannot last. Well, it is time to look at reality.

If we put on the glasses of people who have seen their level of income reduced and are afraid of the future, Trump is here to stay, and he is a result and not a cause.

Roberto Savio

His critics are the media (which a large majority of Americans dislike), the elite (which is hated) and professionals (who are considered to be profiting at the expense of the lower section of the middle class).

There is now a strong divide with the rural world, the de-industrialised parts of the United States, miners with their mine closed, etc. In addition, white Americans feel increasingly threatened by immigrants, minorities, corporations and industries which have been using the government to their advantage. At every election their number shrinks by two percent.

Let us not forget that Trump was elected by the vote of the majority of white woman, in a country which is the bedrock of feminism.

I know that this could create some irate reactions. The United States is home to some of the best universities in the world, the most brilliant researchers as shown by the number of Nobel prizes awarded , very good orchestras, libraries, museums, a vibrant civil society, and so on. But the sad reality is that those elites count, at best, for no more than 20 percent of the population.

In 80 percent of cases, TV news is the only source of information on international affairs. Newspapers are usually only local, with exception of a few (Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, in all less than ten), and have a readership of 35 percent of the population.

You have only to travel in the US hinterland to observe two striking facts: it is very rare to meet somebody who knows geography and history even minimally, and everybody is convinced that the United States has been helping the entire world for which nobody is grateful.

An investigation by the New York Times found out that Americans were convinced that their country has been giving at least 15 percent of its budget for support and philanthropy. In fact, in recent decades the real figure has been below 0.75 percent. At the same time, it has a number of institutes of international studies of the highest level with brilliant analysts, plus a large number of international NGOs. But only 34 percent of the member of the Senate, and 38 percent of members of the House of Representatives have a passport…

The country is divided into two worlds. Of course, the same happen in every country, and in Africa or Asia the division between elite and low-level population is even more extreme. But the United States is an affluent country, where for more than two centuries efforts have been made on the fronts of education and integration in a country which has also been called the “melting pot”, and where it is widely believed that it is the best – if not the only – democracy in the world.

Trump, therefore, has an easy and captive electorate, made up of strong believers, and we cannot understand why, if we do not go over the history of American politics, which is in fact parallel to the political history of Europe. The calls for a lengthy analysis which is what is missing in today’s media, and in which recent US politics can be divided (very roughly) into three historical cycles.

The first, from 1945 to 1981), saw the political class convinced that the priority was to avoid a new world war. For this, institutions for peace and cooperation had to be built, and individuals were to be happy with their status and destiny.

Internationally, that meant the creation of the United Nation, multilateralism as a way to negotiate on the basis of participation and consensus, and international cooperation as a way to help poor countries develop and reduce inequalities. Domestically, this was to be done by giving priority to labour over capital. Strong trade unions were created and in 1979 income from labour accounted for 70 percent of total income. A similar trend was also the seen in Europe.

The second cycle ran from 1981 to 2009, the year Barack Obama was named president. On behalf of the corporate world, Ronald Reagan had launched the neoliberal wave. He started by shutting down the trade union of air traffic controllers, and went on to dismantle much of the welfare and social net built over the previous four decades, eliminating regulations, giving free circulation to capital, creating unrestricted free trade, and so on.

That led to delocalisation of factories, the decline of trade unions and their ability to negotiate, and a very painful reduction of the labour share of wealth, which fell from 70 percent in 1979 to 63 percent in 2014, and has continued to decline ever since.

Unprecedented inequalities have become normal and accepted. Today, an employee at Live Nation Entertainment, an events promotion and ticketing company, who earns an average of 24, 000 dollars would need 2,893 years to earn the 70.6 million dollars that its CEO, Michael Rapino, earned last year.

Reagan had a counterpart in Europe, Margaret Thatcher, who dismantled trade unions, ridiculed the concept of community and common goods and aims (“… there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families …” ), partly followed by Gerard Schroeder in Germany. Globalisation became the undisputed new political vision, far from the rigid ideologies which had created communism and fascism, and were responsible for the Second World War. The market would solve all problems, and governments should keep their hands off.

Reagan was followed by Bush Sr., George H. W. Bush. who somewhat moderated Reagan’s policies. While he started the war with Iraq, he did not go on to invade the entire country. And he was followed by a Democrat, Bill Clinton, who did not challenge neoliberal globalisation but tried to ride it, showing that the left (in American terms) could be more efficient than the right. To give just one example, it was Clinton who completed deregulation of banks by repealing the Glass-Steagall Act which separated savings and investment banking. That led to the transfer of billions of dollars from savings to investments, or speculation, with the result that today banks consider customer activity less lucrative than investments, and finance has become a sector that is totally separate from the production of goods and services. There are now 40 times more financial transactions in one day than output from industry and services, and finance is the only sector of human activity without any international control body.

Markets are now more important than the vote of citizens given that, in many cases, it is they that decide the viability of a government. Furthermore, this has become a sector with no ethics: since the financial crisis of 2008, banks have paid a whopping amount of 321 billion dollars in penalties for illegal activities.

Clinton’s conviction that the left could be successful also had its counterpart in Europe, like Reagan had Thatcher. It was Tony Blair, who constructed a theoretical design for explaining the submission of the left to neoliberal globalisation: this was the so-called Third Way which was, in fact, was a centrist position that tried to reconcile centre-right economic and centre-left social policies.

However, it became clear that neoliberal globalisation was in fact lifting only a few boats and that capital without regulation was becoming a threat. Social injustices continued to increase and legions of people in the rural area felt that towns were syphoning off all revenues and that the elite was ignoring them, and unemployed workers and the impoverished middle class no longer felt old loyalties to the left, which was now considered representative of the elite and professionals.

In the United States the Democratic Party, which also held a neoliberal view with Clinton, began to change its agenda from an economic approach to one of human rights, defending minorities, Afro-Americans and immigrants, and advocating their inclusion in the system.

The fight was no longer between corporations and trade unions, and Obama was the result of that fight, the champion of human rights also as an instrument of international affairs. In fact, while he had a brilliant agenda on human rights, he did very little on the social and economic front, beside the law on national health. But his alliance of minorities and progressive whites was a personal baggage, who could not pass on to an emblematic figure of the establishment like Hillary Clinton.

That led to a new situation in American politics. Those on the left began to see defence of their identity (and their past) as the new fight, now that the traditional division between left and right had waned. Religious identity, national identity, fight against the system and those who are different, become political action.

It should be stressed that the same process happened in Europe, albeit in a totally different cultural and social situation. Those left out deserted the traditional political system to vote for those who were against the system, and promised radical changes to restore the glories of the past.

Their message was necessary nationalist, because they denounced all international systems as merely supporting the elites who were the beneficiaries. It was also necessarily to find a scapegoat, like the Jews in the thirties. Immigrants were perfect because they aroused fear and a perceived loss of traditional identity, a threat in a period of large unemployment.

The new political message from the newcomers was to empower those left out, those who felt fear, those who had lost any trust in the political class, and promise to give them back their sovereignty, reject intruders and take power away from the traditional elites, the professionals of politics, to bring in real people.

Since the end of the financial crisis in 2008 – which brought about even further deterioration of the social and economic situation) – those parties known as populist parties started to grow and they now practically dominate the political panorama.

In the United States, the Republicans of the Tea Party, radical right-wing legislators, were able to change the Republican party, pushing out those called compassionate conservatives because they had social concern. In Europe, the media were startled to see workers voting for Marine Le Pen in France, but the left had lost any legitimacy as representative of the lower incomes; technological change led to the disappearance of social identities, like workers.

In a period of crisis, there was no capability for redistribution. The left had now found itself in the middle of a crisis of identity and it will not emerge from it soon.

Let us now come to today. In November 2016, to universal amazement, (and his own) Trump was elected president of the United States, and just four months later, in March 2017, Brexit came as a rude awakening for Europe. The resentful and fearful went to the polls to get Great Britain out of Europe. The fact that the campaign was plagued by falsehood – recognised by the winners after the referendum – was irrelevant. Who was against Brexit? The financial system, the international corporations, the big towns like London, university professors: in other words, the system. That was enough.

Here, I have deliberately lumped together the United States and Europe (the European Union) to show that globalisation has had a global impact. A United States, which had been the creator and guarantor of the international system, started to withdraw from it under Reagan when he felt that it was becoming a straitjacket for the United States.

This started the decline of the United Nations: on American initiative, trade was taken away from the United Nations and the World Trade Organisation (WTO) was created. Globalisation has two engines, trade and finance, and both are now out of the United Nations, which has become an institution for health, education, children, woman and other non-productive sectors, according to the market. It is no coincidence that Trump is now fighting against the globalisation that United States invented, and one of its main enemies is the WTO.

An old maxim is that people get the government they deserve. But we should also be aware that they are being pushed by a new alliance: the alternative right alliance. In all countries it has the same aim: destroy what exists. This network is fed at the same time by Russia and the United States. American alt-right ideologues like Steve Bannon are addressing European audiences to foster the end of the European Union, with clear support from the White House. The populists in power, like Viktor Orban in Hungary or Matteo Salvini in Italy (as well those not in power, like Le Pen) all consider Trump and Vladimir Putin as their points of references. Such alliances are new, and they will become very dangerous.

And now we come to Mr. Trump. After what has been said above, it is clear why he should be considered a symptom and not a cause, while his personality is obviously playing an additional important role. It should be noted that he has not lost any important battle since he came to power. He has been able to take over the Republican party completely, and it is now de facto the Trump Party.

In the primaries for the November 2017 elections (for all House of Representative seats and 50 percent of those of the Senate), he intervened to support candidates he liked, and their opponents always lost. In South Carolina, conservative Katie Arrington, who won against a much stronger opponent, Mark Sanford, declared in her acceptance speech: our party is the Trump party.

Trump knows exactly what his voters think, and he always acts in a way that strengthens his support, regardless of what he does. He is a known sexist, and is now involved in a scandal with a porno star? He has moved the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and he now has the support of the evangelists, a very large and puritan Protestant group which is an important source of votes. (Interestingly, Guatemala and Paraguay which decided to move their embassies to Jerusalem are also run by evangelists.)

Trump has refused to disclose his incomes and taxes, and he has not formally separated himself from his companies. In the United States, this is usually is enough to force people to resign.

He has removed from his cabinet all the representatives of finance and industry he had put in on his arrival (in order to be accepted by the establishment) and replaced them with right-wing hawks, highly efficient and not morons, from National Security Advisor John Bolton to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. He has managed to obtain Gina Hastel, a notorious torturer, as director of the CIA with the votes of Democrats.

He has turned his back on a highly structured treaty with Iran (and other four major countries) to forge a totally unclear agreement with North Korea, which creates problems with Japan, an American ally by definition. He has decided to side with Israel and Saudi Arabia against Iran, because that move has the support of a large American sector.

In addition to narcissism, what moves Trump are not values but money. He has quarreled with all historical allies of the United States and he is now engaging in a tariff war with them, while starting one with China, simply on the basis of money. However while erratic, Trump is not unpredictable. All that he has done, he announced during his electoral campaign.

Trump believes he is accountable to no one, and has created a direct relationship with his electors, bypassing the media. According to The Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog, which keeps track of Trump’s many misstatements, untruths and outright lies, he exceeded 3,000 untrue or misleading statements in his first 466 days – on average, 6.5 untruths a day. Nobody cares. Very few are able to judge.

When a president of United States announces that he is abandoning the treaty with Iran, because they are the main financier of ISIS and Al Qaida, the lack of public reaction is a good measure of the total ignorance of most Americans.

Americans have no idea that Islam is divided between Sunni and Shiite, and that the terrorists are Sunni and based on an extreme interpretation of Islam, Wahhabism, or Salafism. Iranians, who are not Arabs, are Shiite, and are considered apostate by the Sunni extremists; Iran has lost thousands of men in the fight against ISIS.

This ignorance helps Trump win Republican voters, no matter what.

The fact that Trump knows exactly what his voters feel and think feeds his narcissism. After his meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, at a press conference he said of previous US presidents: “I don’t think they’ve ever had the confidence, frankly, in a president that they have right now for getting things done and having the ability to get things done”.

He does not tolerate any criticism or dissent, as his staff well knows. The result is that he is surrounded by yes men, like no president before. His assistant for trade, Peter Navarro, has declared that there should be a special place in hell for foreign leaders who disagree with Trump.

According to the large majority of economists, the tariff war that he has now started now with US allies plus China will bring growth down all over the world, but nobody reacts in the United States. It is all irrelevant to his voters. He now has a 92 percent rate of confidence, the highest since the United States has existed.

Considering all he has done in less than two years against the existing order leads us to consider that the real danger is that he will be re-elected, and leave office only in 2024. By then, the changes in ethics and style will have become really irreversible.

With many candidates in various countries looking to him as a political example, he will certainly be able to change the world in which we have grown and which, albeit with many faults, has been able to bring about growth and peace.

It is true that the traditional political system needs a radical update, and it does appear able to do so. Meanwhile, it is difficult to foresee how a world based on nationalism and xenophobia – with a strong increase in military spending worldwide, and many other global problems from climate change to no policy for migration, and a global debt that has reached 225 percent of GNP in ten years – will be able to live without conflicts,

What we do know is that the world which emerged from the Second World War, based on the idea of peace and development, the world which is in our constitutions, will disappear.

Democracy, can be a perfect tool for the legitimacy of a dictator. This is what is happening in the various Russias, Turkeys, Hungarys or Polands. A strongman wins the elections, then starts to make changes to the constitution in order to have more power. The next step is to place cronies in institutional positions, reduce the independence of the judiciary, control the media, and so on. That is then followed by acting in name of the majority, against minorities.

This is not new in history. Hitler and Mussolini were at first elected, and today many “men of providence” are lining up.

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Apr 10 2018 (IPS)

It is now clearly evident that w e are in a period of transition, even though we remain uncertain as to its outcome.

The political, economic and social system that has accompanied us since the end of the Second World War is no longer sustainable.

Roberto Savio

Today’s eighteen-year-olds, according to projections of the International Labour Organization, will retire with an average pension of 632 Euros a month.

Despite official warnings, we are, with great indifference, breaching the 2 degrees centigrade temperature limit beyond which our planet will undergo irreversible changes.

Our financial system today operates largely disentangled from the economy in a parallel world privy of international controls, and where financial transactions on any given day are forty times higher than the production of goods and services around the planet.

The main banks have paid, since 2009, over $800 billion in fines for illegal operations. We must also note that political participation (voting in elect ions) has declined, from an average of 86% in 1960, to 63.7% today.

A profound analysis is very complex and involves all aspects of our life. But it is possible to identify important points for reflection and debate and on which we can jointly explore.

Hopefully they will also lead us to reflect on other points, since the theme of the crisis is in fact holistic and touches on all aspects of our lives. Reflect ions such as these are always subjective. What follows are facts that this writer experienced personally.

REFLECTION NO. 1: The crisis has distant roots.

It was in 1973 that the United Nations General Assembly unanimously adopted a global governance plan, which aimed at reducing inequalities among its members: it was called the New International Economic Order. This plan was born with the support of the United States (even though originally launched by Mexico and Algeria).

The post-war international system, including the United Nations, was put together on the initiative of the United States, by the principal victors of the Second World War.

They were keen on preserving peace and pursuing development, after a war in which they lost about half a million soldiers out of a total population of 140 million people (in comparison, Germany lost more than 15 million out of 78 million inhabitants, and more than two million civilians, against none in t he United States and twenty million in the Soviet Union).

The United Nations was therefore born with Washington’s commitment to contribute 25% of its budget (contrast this with the present day when the T rump administration threatens US withdrawal).

But until the Cancun Summit in 1981, which brought together the twenty-two most important heads of state in the world (communist countries excluded), we lived with the illusion of the end of inequality, based on a world democracy, where the majority of countries decide the course to follow for the common good.

At Cancun, the newly elected US President Ronald Reagan announced that the United States no longer accepted to be subject to the rules of an abstract world democracy.

The United States was an exceptional country, and on this basis would decide her foreign and economic policy.

Attending the same meeting was the UK Premier, Margaret Thatcher, who would become Reagan’s most important European ally.

In Cancun, a different vision of the world was born: society does not exist – only individuals (Thatcher). It is not the factories polluting, but the trees (Reagan). Poverty produces poverty: wealth produces wealth. As such, the rich should be taxed as little as possible because they distribute wealth.

REFLECTION NO. 2: Shortly after Cancun, in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell and with it, the end of ideologies, the straitjackets that gave us both Nazism and Communism.

The driving idea that followed was that we must be pragmatic. Politics must solve concrete problems, not pursue utopias. But the solution of a given problem without consideration for the final vision of the society (right or left, does not matter) is actually called utilitarianism; and politics aimed at administration and not at ideas reduces political participation and increases corruption.

Without programs driven by ideals, the politician’s personality (possibly telegenic), measured on TV and not in the streets, became the main tool for electoral campaigns supported by marketing campaigns, not ideas or programs.

REFLECTION NO. 3: At the same time, neoliberal globalization became the single most powerful guiding thought – think of Thatcher’s TINA “There is n o alternative”.

It was based on the socioeconomic and political model of the so-called Washington Consensus, the development paradigm imposed by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the US Treasury. It envisaged the adoption of the following reforms: macroeconomic stabilization, liberalization (of trade, investment and finance), privatization and deregulation.

It eliminated the barriers of national protection everywhere, reduced non-productive expenditure (education, health, social assistance), and promoted free competition among states.

Known as Kissinger’s dictum: “the new paradigm of American supremacy”, developing countries were forced to submit to the economic rules imposed by the North.

Kissinger did not see that once free trade was imposed, China and other countries would emerge as winners.

It is interesting to note that before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the term globalization does not appear in the media.

REFLECTION NO. 4: The reaction of the left to this “pensee unique” was the “Third Way” which was successfully proposed and promoted by Tony Blair.

In substance, it argued that it was time to abandon the old ideas of the le ft and ride the wave of globalization, accepting the lack of alternatives.

Social democracy, from Blair (in UK) to Renzi (in Italy), sought to transform itself into a transversal party, one that embraced the center, with an active policy on concrete facts stripped of outdated ideological cages.

The result? The parties of the left were abandoned in droves by their voter s, and the 2008 crisis, largely due to the absence of controls on American banks and subsequently those in Europe (and with left-leaning governments in power in most Western countries), eliminated its ability to redistribute surpluses.

Blue-collar workers and middle classes in crisis, all victims of globalization, sought new defenders who promptly appeared in the form of Le Pen, Farage, Wilders and so on, and today will still vote for Salvini and the 5 Star Movement (in Italy).

REFLECTION NO. 5: Numerous historians believe that greed and fear were amongst the main engines of change in history.

Riccardo Petrella, in his latest book “In the Name of Humanity”, believes t hat these engines were made using three traps: In the name of God, in the name of the nation and in the name of profit.

There is no doubt that since the fall of the Wall, the values of globalization (competition, profit, individualism, exaltation of wealth), together with t he disappearance of social justice, solidarity, transparency, equity, etc. from political debate have created an ethics based on greed.

And twenty years later, in 2009, the economic and financial crisis, first in the United States with the sub-prime collapse, and then in Europe with sovereign bonds, gave way to a second cycle – that of fear.

REFLECTION NO. 6: The cycle of fear, in whose grip we are fully now (without having abandoned that of greed, and the traps of God, the Nation and Profit are once again being put to good use) has led to the emergence of a new right – which is not based on ideas, but emotions.

Brexit and Trump are easy-to-see phenomena. But the phenomenon is much deeper. We are in a liquid society, not structured around ideologies or class. And in such societies, it is easy for leaders, riding the waves of fear and greed, to easily rise to the forefront.

The 2009 crisis kicked off the massive immigration from countries invaded b y the West, to depose dictators and automatically introduce democracy (but the disintegration of Yugoslavia, a modern and European country, after Tito’s death, should have warned us).

Democracy did not immediately take over – rather we have seen chaos, civil war, bloodshed and destruction. In 2003, George W Bush began the invasion of Iraq.

In 2011, civil war broke out in Syria and rapidly became a confrontation between Arab, European, American and Russian forces (leading to over six million displaced persons and over half a million dead).

In 2013, Sarkozy pushed for an invasion of Libya ostensibly to depose Gaddafi.

From the ruins of Iraq we have seen the emergence of ISIS, terrorism in the name of God, for a return to original Islam (Wahhabism, financed by Saudi Arabia in excess of 80 billion dollars in the last twenty years).

All of this took place fifteen years after the veterans of the US-funded war against the Russian occupation in Afghanistan gathered together as Al-Qaeda under B in Laden to launch the first attack in history on American soil.

As the famous cartoonist El Roto in El Pais remarked, “we send bombs and they send us refugees”. The resultant refugees are caught in the jaws of two traps: in the name of God and of the country.

Today in Europe, the identity and sovereignty parties are the second largest political force, outnumbering the socialists. If European elections were held today, the radical right would have forty million votes.

It is in government in Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Austria, but it also plays a key role in the governments of the Netherlands and now, Germany, since the AFD won 92 seats in the last elections.

Viktor Orban of Hungary has launched the so-called “illiberal democracy”, Poland denounces the secularism of the European Union and has called for a great m arch with the populists and sovereigns of all Europe, to the cry of “In the name of God”.

The Visegrad Group (Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, and now Austria) denounces the capitulation of Europe to Islam and is creating an East-West fracture of a Europe, which joins the North-South fracture on the vision of economy: austerity or solidarity.

But there is something new. The United States is intervening in Europe, openly supporting nationalist and xenophobic right-wing parties, which at the same time look not only to Trump but also to Putin (who is also intervening in Europe an elections), as a point of reference.

As Italy’s Salvini shouted at an electoral campaign rally at Piazza del Popolo in Rome “good work Putin and Trump”.

As a result, in a rapidly aging Europe (for example, in Italy young people between 18 and 25 years are only 3% of those entitled to vote), immigration has become a great flag of the populist and xenophobic right wing.

Meanwhile, the International Monetary Fund has launched a warning: Europe needs to rapidly absorb 20.5 million immigrants, to support its pension system and productivity.

Statistics show that immigrants contribute to the system more than they cost; they constitute the great majority of the new small businesses; that their dream is to be quickly integrated into the system. But there is no debate on migration, and what kind of immigrants to welcome.

They are now all seen as dangerous invaders, intent on destroying European identity, on crime, and taking work away from European citizens, the latter victims of intense unemployment.

Even Trump, in a country made up of immigrants, has made immigration control one of his battle cries. A tragic phenomenon is that young people, much les s so than pensioners, are no longer politically active.

Since time immemorial, young people burst onto the political scene to change the world they found. Had they voted, Brexit would not have happened.

But the political system, by and for the elderly, ignores them. In Italy, t he Renzi government allocated 30 billion Euros to save four banks. In the same year the total in the budget for Italian youth was a paltry two billion.

From the creation of the United Nations in 1945, we have gone from a global population of 2.5 billion people to 7.5 billion people today.

The growth will stop only in 2050, when we will be 9.5 billion people. In the period to 2050, Africa will double her population. Either we are able to find accords to govern mobility flows according to needs, or we will have to shoot on immigrants, as some already propose.

REFLECTION NO. 7: Intellectuals and political scientists are increasingly surprised by the passivity of citizens who seem completely anaesthetized and no longer react to anything, even if politics goes against their interests. The history of Brexit, for instance, has been the subject of many analyses.

How is it possible that the most depressed areas, which received so much from Europe, voted to leave Europe?

How is it that Poland, the largest recipient of European funds (three times the Marshall plan) votes against Europe?

How is it possible that Trump, who promised to drain the swamp from the special interests in favour of the people ignored by the same special interests and government, now is a firm ally of big capital and the military (not excluding his family interests) and the voters remain faithful?

Today 92% of those who voted for him say they are ready to re-elect him.

There are many possible interpretations to this paradoxical situation. But as Talleyrand said, every people has the government it deserves.

And we should recognize that since the 2009 crisis, the political class has lost the most credit. We should be examining the impact of reality shows like “Big Brother” TV since 1989: the feeling of extraneousness from political power.

Like the shelter of a virtual space, like the Internet, it has contributed to an individualism that is the result of frustration and the lack of debate on ideas.

The macroscopic example of this anesthesia is climate change. Citizens see it every day in their daily lives: impressive photos of disappearing glaciers, snowfall in the Sahara, hurricanes, forest fires, storms …

They also have all the data of the scientific community, which in Paris, obliged the world’s governments to sign an insufficient agreement without controls. But they do not need to study, to know.

They can also see how governments speak, but do not act. They continue to spend to finance the fossil (fuel) industry three times what they invest in the renewable energy industry.

Italy even called a referendum to continue exploiting the oil fields in the South. The Spanish government is fighting its electricity producers, who want to c lose their coal-fired power stations.

In the same Spain, pensioners have organized an impressive march to defend their pensions: but no country has announced a march to raise awareness on the climate peril we face.

On the surprising absence of citizens’ reactions to vital problems, one could write a lot. And this is the basis of the epochal change in which we find ourselves.

REFLECTION NO. 8: The impact of technology: Let us consider the impact of the imminent fourth industrial revolution.

Let us recall: the first was at the beginning of the 1800s, when mechanization replaced the individual work, with mechanical looms taking over. It was easy to recycle the workers, who passed from the frame of the house to that of the factory.

The second was at the end of the 1800s, thanks to the use of machines powered by mechanical energy and the use of new energy sources such as the use of steam which led to the birth of, and development of railway networks, the construction of steam ships and faster means of communication, to important discoveries in the chemical and medical fields, to the assembly line, electricity, telephone, etc.

Even here, thanks to the transfer from the fields to the factories, humans remained vital for production. And the political battles born out of the desire for a fair recognition of work done gave way to what we now consider modern politics.

The Third Revolution began after the end of the Second World War, where technology increasingly changed the way people work, culminating in the internet revolution today.

And we are now on the cusp of the fourth revolution, which is based on Artificial Intelligence and robotics.

Today this accounts for 17% of the production of goods and services but it is estimated that this will be 30% by 2030.

The automation of the transportation sector will lay waste to six million jobs as taxi drivers, truck drivers, drivers of public transport in Europe find their services no longer needed. This automation will totally change the transport system, the automotive industry, insurance companies, etc.

But this time, will the taxi drivers be able to recycle themselves in a society that will privilege technological knowledge over traditional work?

We are rushing headlong towards a structural problem, which politics, with its short-term horizons, seems determined to ignore.

Will this transition risk increasing unemployment, fear, social and political tensions? It is just an example of how large the gap between politics, technology, finance and globalization has become.

REFLECTION NO. 9: The crisis of multilateralism: From the ruins of the Second World War, the conscience was born that only through multilateral cooperation could one seek lasting peace, after the tragedies provoked by nationalism and the idea of domination over others.

International organizations such as the United Nations, with all its agencies and funds, from UNICEF to FAO, from the World Health Organization to the International Atomic Energy Agency, were born; and in Europe the great project of the European Community, together with all the regional projects, from ASEAN to the Organization of African Unity, the Organization of American States, Mercosur, etc.

Today, the whole multilateral system is in crisis. Trump’s trade wars are destroying the multilateral trade system.

From Roosevelt’s world democracy to Reagan’s free trade and competition, we have moved on to American interests only, America first.

Next on the horizon are monetary wars. The idea of competing and not cooperating, greed as a value to replace the value of cooperation, which helps the weak and controls the powerful is ending.

But just as Kissinger did not see that free competition would one day turn against the United States, Trump does not see that opening a politics of confrontation could turn against the United States one day. Russia, China and the United States are returning to the era of gunboat policy, which seemed to have disappeared.

The present and the immediate future seem a dangerous re-enaction of the Thirties, which resulted in the Second World War.

Are those who vote for nationalism aware of this? As Pope Francis says, we are already in a fractional Third World War … we have exceeded the number of refugees at the time. To wars in the name of the homeland in Africa, we are adding those in the name of God, from Rohingya to Burma, to Islamic terrorists … we have spent decades breaking down walls, and we are creating more than before …

The future seems to go against the interests of humanity, which now knows planetary threats that did not exist in the 1930s, from climate to nuclear, in a process of social and economic Darwinism whose outcome we can only imagine.

REFLECTION NO. 10: It is evident that the final reflection is the need to find a governability of globalization and the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It is not true that we lack ideologies.

Neoliberal globalization is an ideology of an unprecedented force, which ha s produced new phenomena, such as global finance, a multinational system stronger than governments, where the example of the use of Facebook to use citizens as merchandise, to influence political and commercial choices, shows us how profound the crisis of democracy is.

We are entering a dystopian world described by the pioneers of science fiction: the world of Orwell and Clark, based on the machines and power of the few.

Only ten years ago, the ascent to total power like Xi in China, Erdogan in Turkey or Putin in Russia was unthinkable. Both Brexit and Trump were unthinkable.

It was unthinkable that tax havens could amass the colossal figure of 80 trillion dollars. It was unthinkable that eight people could have the same wealth as 2.3 billion people. It was unthinkable that Norway would see a winter whose temperatures would be close to those of spring.

Ten years ago, the financial crisis opened a period of deep and dramatic transformations. With this rhythm of the acceleration of history, as Toynbe e called it, where will we be in ten years?

We must immediately find a dialogue between everyone, which can only be based on the rediscovery of common values, on the construction of peace and cooperation, on international law as a basis for relations between states, and rediscover the sense of sharing, peace and social justice as the basis for cohabitation, which brings man back to the center of society – not capital, finance or greed, and which frees us from fear.

Will we be able to find the way to do it?

In these 10 reflections, I have found it useful to consider where we have come from and contemplate as to where we are headed.

We are called upon to reflect keenly as to our fate: ours is a society that is increasingly becoming barbaric, one in which we read and dialogue less.

We spend twice as much on advertising as we do on education; the average voter is today lost and without a compass to guide them.

The reader is not obliged to agree with me. You are welcome to your own views and reflections. After all, what matters is that we reflect!

Excerpt:

For every industrial robot introduced into the workforce, six jobs are eliminated.

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Feb 19 2018 (IPS)

Amazon has recently introduced Amazon Go, a shop where the customer enters, chooses a product from the shelves, charges the price on a magnetic card and swipes it on the way out, transferring the charge to the customer’s bank account . No queues, no cashiers, fast and easy, and the first shop in Seattle has been a roaring success.

Putting products back on the shelves will soon be fully automated, with robots doing the work previously done by humans. Floor cleaning is already done by a robot, and the aim is to have a fully automated shop, where no human can make mistakes, fall ill, go on strike, take holidays or bring their personal problems to work.

The US petrol industry calculates that the staff required at each well will be reduced from 20 to five within three years. Also within three years it is expected that small hotels will have a fully automated reception – guests arrive, swipe their credit card and a machine supplies the room.

Roberto Savio

We are already accustomed to automated telephone for bookings and reservations, and we ourselves now do tasks at an airport which were previously done by clerks, such as checking in.

Contrary to what many think, self-drive vehicles are just around the corner, and car makers think they will be on the market by 2021.

In the United States, according to the ABI Research company, the number of industrial robots will jump nearly 300 percent in less than a decade. The National Economic Research Bureau has reported that for every industrial robot introduced into the workforce, six jobs are eliminated.

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has released a “policy brief” indicating what this robotic revolution would mean in Africa, Asia and Latin America. “If robots are considered a form of capital that is a close substitute for low-skilled jobs, then their growing use reduces the share of human labour in production costs. Adverse effects for developing countries may be significant.”

In May 2016, the World Bank’s Digital Dividend Report, calculated that replacing low-skilled workers with robots in developing countries would affect two-thirds of jobs.

China is destined to become the biggest user of robots. China is aiming to become the global leader in high-tech. To take just one example, Foxconn, the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer, reduced its workforce last year from 110,000 to 50,000 in Kunshan, thanks to the introduction of robots. The time of cheap imitations is gone, with China now registering more patents than the United States.

Economists call this wave of automation the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The first started, at the end of the 18th century, with the introduction of machines to do handicraft work, such as in textiles. Its impact become visible in 1811, when the followers of a fictional Ned Ludd started to destroy textile equipment because it left thousands of weavers jobless.

The second industrial revolution occurred in the middle of the same century, when science was applied to production, introducing engines and other inventions, creating the real Industrial Revolution. That meant rural populations migrating to towns to work in the factories. The third revolution in the middle of the last century is considered to be the introduction of the Internet, which once again changed forms of production. Gone were the jobs of secretaries in companies, lino typist in newspapers, accounting, documentation, libraries, archives and other hundreds of professions made obsolete by the ‘net’.

We see the Fourth Industrial Revolution in our daily life. But it is like climate change – we all know it exists, it is before our eyes. We have all the data showing an increase in hurricanes, disappearing glaciers, extreme weather conditions, hotter summers than have been recorded since we began measuring temperatures.

Yet, the outcome of the 2015 Paris Climate Change Conference means that the world is now geared to producing an increase of three degrees centigrade, while scientists unanimously agree that exceeding 1.5 degrees centigrade would be extremely dangerous.

We even have a president of the United States who withdrew from a non-binding Paris Agreement, declaring that climate change is a “Chinese hoax”. Then his appointment of Scott Pruitt – a person who says that global warming is “positive” – as Director of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).is like putting Dracula in charge of a blood bank.

The political approach to automation is similar. The 2016 World Economic Forum in Davos was dedicated to the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The founder and director of the Forum, economist Klaus Schwab, even went to to the effort of writing a book on the subject for the meeting: it is a book in which he expresses his concern.

Previous industrial revolutions had liberated humankind from animal power, made mass production possible and brought digital capabilities to billions of people. This Fourth Industrial Revolution is, however, fundamentally different. It is characterised by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, affecting all disciplines, economies and industries, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human.

We need to take a concerted global approach in the world, to make the positive override the negative impacts. The theme was practically ignored at Davos 2016, because politicians now only discuss themes in the short term: what has to be dealt with during their period in office.

At Davos in 2016, Schwab called for leaders and citizens to “together shape a future that works for all by putting people first, empowering them and constantly reminding ourselves that all of these new technologies are first and foremost tools made by people for people.”

Clearly, that goes against the tide of nationalism, the new vision for the United States, India, Japan, China, Philippines, Hungary, Poland, Great Britain, Turkey and so on.

Well, like it or not, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is here. Today automation already accounts already for 17 percent of production and services. It will account for 40 percent within 15 years, according to World Bank projections.

But we should also take into account the surprising seeds of development of artificial intelligence (AI) – also known as machine intelligence (MI) – which is intelligence demonstrated by machines, in contrast to the natural intelligence (NI) displayed by humans and other animals.

We already have robots which can be reprogrammed and their functions changed. Without going into the vitally important relationship between AI and societies, it is important to note the most vibrant debate today concerns how our economy is mutating into an economy of algorithms and data and how this is impacting on politics.

Austrian economist and thinker Karl Polany saw this coming when he made a simple observation: capitalism, without controls and regulations, does not create a market economy but a market society where whatever is necessary for survival has a price, and that is submitted to the laws of the market.

In that kind of society, the state has no alternative but to sustain the system with laws, courts and police to protect private property and to secure good functioning of the market.

The explosion of social injustice, privatisation of common goods and fiscal support for the richest are all consequences of Polany’s analysis. Add to this monopolisation of data by a few giant companies, like Facebook or Amazon, and their impact in the social, cultural and economic sphere, and you can see where we are going. We have become data ourselves, and we are on the market.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution will further reduce the centrality of the human being, who has already been replaced by the market ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall…

All this opens up another crucial issue. Labour was once considered an important cost factor in production, and it was the extent to which workers had rights to the resulting benefits that sparked the creation of trade unions, the modern Left and the adoption of universal values such as social justice, transparency and participation, which were the basis of modern international relations.

The relationship between machines and distribution of the benefits of production has inspired several thinkers, philosophers and economists over the last centuries. It was generally assumed that a time would come in which machines would eventually do all production and humankind would be free of work, maintained from the profits generated by machines.

This was, of course, more a dream than a political theory. Yet today, all managers of artificial intelligence and robotic production argue that the superior productivity of robots will reduce costs, thereby enabling greater consumption of goods and services, and this will generate new jobs, easily absorbing those displaced by machines.

The data we have do not show that at all. According to the Economic Report of the President of the United States, there is an 83 percent chance that those who earn 20 dollars an hour could have their job replaced by robots. This proportion rises to 31 percent for those who earn 40 dollars per hour.

Given that the new economy is an intelligence economy based on technical knowledge, people have a future if they are able to adapt to that kind of society, and the new generations are much more attuned to this. But what will a taxi driver who has had no technical education do to recycle himself?

The statistics show that today, when people lose their jobs at a certain age, any new job they may find will almost always be for a lower remuneration. So robotisation will affect the lower middle class above all, and a new generational divide will be created.

Over the years, a number of economists and influential people have expressed the idea of a universal basic income (UBI), arguing that there is a need to cushion society from tensions, instability and unemployment by giving all citizens a fixed income in order that they would be able to have a dignified life. In addition, by spending their UBI, they would generate wealth and increase demand, which would therefore stimulate growth and make for a just and stable society.

Martin Luther King was an early proponent, like neoliberal economist Milton Friedman. Now the billionaires of Silicon Valley like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, venture capitalist Mark Andreessen and Democratic Party senator Bernie Sanders have all expressed support for the UBI idea.

Meanwhile, Andrew Yang, an American entrepreneur and founder of Venture for America, is a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate running on a UBI platform. Yang notes that in the 2016 presidential elections, Donald Trump did particularly well in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, states which have lost four million jobs because of automation: “The higher the concentration of robots, the higher the number of disgruntled people who vote for Trump.”

Yang plans to cover the two trillion dollars that UBI would cost (half of the US budget) with a new VAT tax and taxation on the companies who profit from automation. Of course, in the United States the idea that people who do not work should receive public money is the closest thing to communism, and UBI faces formidable cultural obstacles. But Yang says that otherwise in a few years there will be “riots in the streets: just think of the one million truck drivers, who are 94 percent male with an average high school education, suddenly all jobless.”

The above leads to a few considerations and a concrete proposal.

The first consideration is that Trump and all the other politicians who want to restore a past glorious future totally ignore this debate (unfortunately, it is not part of any political debate). Calling for restoring jobs in mines and fossil fuels, for example, fails to recognise that technological developments have already led to the loss of many jobs, and will continue to do so. So, the rallying of disgruntled people, as was the case in Britain with Brexit, is a consequence of the poverty of the political debate, where traditional political parties (especially on the Left), instead of explaining clearly the world in which we now are, and the one in which we are heading, are trying to piggyback on the feelings of the victims of neoliberal globalisation, often taking up the banners of nationalists.

The second political consideration is that migration has become a major theme in elections. Trump was elected on a strong anti-immigrant platform, which continues in his administration. Governments in Hungary, Austria, Poland, Czech Republic and Slovakia are based on refusal of immigrants. All over Europe, from the Nordic countries to France, Netherlands and Germany, anti-immigrant feelings are conditioning governments.

In order to take votes away from the xenophobic Matteo Salvini (leader of the right-wing Lega Nord) in the Italian elections (scheduled for March 2018), the old fox of Silvio Berlusconi (former Italian prime minister) has promised that he will expel 600.000 immigrants if he wins the election.

The fear is that immigrants are stealing jobs and resources from citizens in the countries in which they live. However, statistics from the European Union tell us otherwise. The number of non-EU citizens living in Europe (some for a long time) is now 35 million, of whom about eight million are Africans, and seven million Arabs out of a total of 400 million. Those figures also include illegal immigrants.

All statistics show that more than 97 percent of immigrants are totally integrated, that they pay on average more taxes than locals (of course, they worry about their future) and to date those who do not have a job are about 2.3 million people who are still awaiting a decision on their juridical status.

There is not a single study claiming that immigrants have taken the jobs of Europeans in any significant way. It was the same story with the entry of woman into the labour market. An increasing proportion of women have joined the labour force over the last 30 years, but these increases have not coincided with falling employment rates for men. A study on Brexit demonstrated that immigrants had helped to increase GDP, and that the increase in productivity meant a global increase in employment. But we have reached a point where nobody listens any longer to facts, unless they are convenient…

And now the concrete proposal. It is clear that the real threat to employment for the large majority of citizens comes from robotisation, not immigration. No employed person has been fired to be replaced by an immigrant, unless we talk of non-qualified jobs that Europeans do not want in any case.

Truck drivers, taxi drivers, bus drivers and school drivers, to take some examples, do not fear for their jobs because of immigration. Within a very few years, their jobs will become obsolete in any case, and there will be no plans or preparations for that. When the problem explodes, politics might start looking at it.

Perhaps the more responsible thing to do – rather than stoking fear with populism and xenophobia – is that we start to come to terms with the real problem that our society is facing: automation.

And here is a simple proposal: somebody who takes a robot is making money because of its superior productivity, and he is firing somebody. After having paid the robot during usually a couple of years, he might be imagined to have a 100 percent benefit from the firing of a human being. Well, he will not have 100 percent but 60 percent because he will continue to pay the social costs of the human being fired: pension, taxes and health insurance.

That is not as costly as UBI, it is easy to organise and administer, and it will be a way to realise in part the old utopian dream that machines will work for humankind. Can a political debate be started?

Excerpt:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Jan 8 2018 (IPS)

This year, we will have 3 million tourists each day wandering the world. This massive phenomenon is without precedent in human history and is happening (as usual), with only one consideration in mind: money. We should pause and take a look at its social, cultural and environmental impact and take remedial measures, because they are becoming seriously negative if things are left as they are.

Roberto Savio

Sameer Kapoor listed for Triphobo Trip Planner a list of 20 places that have been ruined, due to excess of tourism. Antarctica is getting an alarming level of pollution. The famous Taj Mahal, a monument of love from the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan to the memory of his wife, Mumtaz, has changed its shining milky white marble into a yellow shade. Mount Everest is strewn with trash from invading visitors.

The Great wall of China has been so mistreated by the massive invasion of tourists that it has begun to crumble in places The famous beaches of Bali are littered with trash; traffic is in a gridlock and roads and footpaths are in a dangerous state of disrepair.

Macchu Picchu has a such large number of visitors that archaeologists are worried about preservation of the site. Once there was a train to a small village, Aguas Calientes, to then continue by foot or mules. Now you can reach the enigmatic and sacred Inca citadel by air conditioned bus, and Aguas Calientes is now a town of 4.000 people with five star hotels. The famous Australian Coral Reef Barrier, has lost already one third of the corals.

The Galapagos islands, where Charles Darwin conceived his famous theory of natural selection, has so many visitors impinging on his fragile eco balance that in 2007 UNESCO placed it on the list of endangered World Heritage Sites but to no avail. The Parthenon has many visitors taking pieces of rocks and ruins, and drawing or carving on ancient pillars, that special police squad had to be created.

The wonders of Angkor Wat, in Cambodia, is suffering the same fate, together with the Colosseum in Rome, where every week somebody gets caught for chipping away pieces of columns, or graffiting the pillars.

But maybe the best example of the negative impact of tourism is Venice. The town has now officially 54.000 residents. They were 100.000 in 1970. Every year 1.000 residents leave for the mainland, because rents and cost of life keeps going up, and the hordes of tourist make life impossible for the residents. The number of sweepers and cleaners employed by the city has to go up continuously. Giant ships continue to go over the delicate microsystem of the lagoon and their lobby is very strong. They insist that without their megaships landing at the centre of the town, 5.000 jobs would be in danger.

There is now a clear conflict between those who live off tourism and those who have other jobs. Like in Barcelona, residents now stage demonstrations against mass tourism. Venice will become a ghost town, like the village of Mont Saint Michel, the medieval village in Normandy, jammed by thousands of visitors, to see the famous high-speed sea tide. At night, 42 people sleep there.

What is impressive is the speed of the phenomenon since 1950 when the total tourist numbers were 25 million, two thirds to Europe meant 29.76%of the tourists , Africa a mere 1.98% and the Middle East 0.79%, like Asia and Pacific. 66 years later, tourist numbers rose to 1.2 billion, Europe is down to 50%, Americas to 16.55%, Africa is at 4.52%, while the Middle East is at 4.7%. And Asia Pacific? It is now at 24.2%.

What is more impressive is to look further – at 2030, for which we have all the data (from the United Nations World Tourism Organization). Well, in a short time, we will go up to 1.8 billion: 5 million tourists every day. Europe is again down, to 41%, Americas down to 14%, Asia up to 30%, Africa to 7% and Middle east to 8 %. A totally inverted world in respect to 1950.

Tourism is already today the largest employer in the world: 1 person every 11. China has surpassed the US as the largest nationality. In 2016, they have spent 261 billion US dollars, and they will spend 429 billion in 2020.

UNWTO points to the fact that in 2025, China will have 92.6 million families with an income between 20.000 and 30.000 dollars per year; 63 million with an income between 35.000 and 70.000 dollars per year; and 21.3 million, with an income between 70.000 and 130.000 dollars. A large part of them is expected to travel and spend money. How many people speak Chinese and know anything about their idiosyncrasis ?

But any other consideration beside money, is totally absent in this debate. For instance, a large part of the jobs is in fact only seasonal, and poorly paid. Most of the money does not stay in the place where it is spent, but goes back to big companies and food imported for the tourist’s habits.

It is calculated that in the Caribbean, a full 70% goes back to US and Canada. Culture and traditions are influenced as outsiders come. Local culture and traditions become just a show for foreigners, and can lose roots. Hotels are built just for tourism in the most beautiful spots, degrading habitat and nature.

Price increases in local shops, because tourists are often wealthier than the local population. It is sufficient to go to a town which is out of the tourist’s circuits, to see the difference. In fact, now there is a growing search for “intact” places, different from “tourist’s places.

Tourist restaurants have become synonymous with poor food and high prices. And a tourist place is one that has lost its identity to conform with the demands of tourists. It has been the proliferation of Mc Donalds, Pizza Huts and other fast food joints, often in the most beautiful parts of towns, that pushed Petrini, in an old village with gastronomic tradition, Bra in Piedmont, to start a movement called Slow Food movement. The movement defends the freshness of materials, that must be local, preserving the original and traditional cuisines, and defending local products form the ongoing homogenization. It has now over 100.000 members in 150 countries, which defends identity against globalization.

Florence can well be a good example of how tourism is uprooting the locals’ identity and tradition. It was since the Renaissance, a place of art and culture. It was a must for cultured tourists and the forebearers of today’s tourists: German, British and French visitors, until the Second World War. A city of elegance, antique dealers, art shops, handcrafts and a very recognized Florentine cuisine.

Now it is full of tourist’s shops, jeans places, cheap standardized handcraft, a lot of pizzeria and tourist restaurants. The concierge of the classical Hotel Baglioni, when questioned about the decay of the town, had a simple answer: “Sir, we are a town of merchants. We did create the letter of change, the banks, and the international trade. Here come people who looked for art and antiques. Today we are awash with people who want to buy blue jeans and cheap stuff. We provide with what people want.” And for those living, in Rome, the main street via del Corso has suffered the same transformation.

It is scary to think what will happen when in the not so far 2020, 100 million Chinese will travel worldwide, with Europe as their first destination. Anybody who had a Chinese visitor (or from a different culture),knows how difficult it is for him to understand what he sees.

One of the main artistic European buildings are churches, and for a totally different religion they are strange places. It makes no sense to a Chinese what is Romanesque or Baroque, as they do not have any equivalent at home. And the classical tourist tour is now for about a week, in which they see at least 5 towns. This is the equivalent for a European to visit the temples in Tibet, without having studied Tibetan Buddhism, which is very different from other branches of Buddhism. Or, for that matter, visit the Egyptian temples without some knowledge at least of the Egyptian cosmology, the reigns of death, and the Pantheon of Gods. What will be remembered is the size of the pyramids, the smell of the incense in Buddhist temples, and other mere esthetical impression. That has nothing to do with culture and art.

To talk about the negative impacts of tourism, opens inevitably the question of classism. The more cultured you are, the more you can get from your travels. Does that mean that only cultured people (that until the second world war, also meant affluent: today the two concepts have split, may be for ever), should travel? Is tourism not a way to enrich and educate, so it should be on the contrary an important tool for the less cultivated?

I do not think that there is an easy answer to this issue. What I know, is that only a small minority of those visiting the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, or the Potala Palace in Lhasa, or the valley of the kings in Egypt, have a book in their hands, that they have bought to prepare themselves. They depend on their tour guides, who confess that they do not even try to teach, but only to show what their tourists can all understand. That means that when you are in the Sistine Chapel, you are nearly unable to move, while the custodians try to move people on, so to make space for the waiting line of visitors. Among that crowd, there are some people who can place the difference between Michelangelo and Matisse, and would certainly benefit from some more time, while this is irrelevant for others.

It is clear that we cannot let 1.8 billion people wander in the world, without introducing some global regulations on how to limit the negative aspects of tourism, and relating it not only to money, but to education, culture and personal development.

To come in touch with different cultures, civilizations, foods, habits and realities should be an occasion that should not be left only to money. A paradox is that we are fighting against immigrants, because of different cultures, but we accept gladly the same people if they come as tourist and not as refugees. And the other paradox is the two parallel words which coexist: one, the real, about poverty and violence that we read in newspapers; and another of the same place, which exists only for tourists, about the beautiful beaches, wonderful nature, and fantastic hotels.

Right now, you can visit the Vatican after its closing, with a modest fee of 100 Euro per person, in quiet and small numbers. Is the future of tourism made with two tracks, where money will be the dividing factor ?

It is obvious that we should link tourism to education and culture. A proposal is simply to ask every tourist, when he buys a tour, an airline ticket, or asks for a visa, to buy and read a very simple and schematic book (they do not exist until now), which can be read and understood in no more than 10 hours about what he or she is going to visit.

A small commission formed by one teacher of history, one of geography, and one of art, is established in any small or large cities, where now lives the large majority of the population. In all of them there are schools with these studies. They conduct a small exam, and charge a small fee for a certificate, to justify their extra work.

Tourists can choose to go to the commission or not. Few extremely simple questions such as – which is the capital of the countries you are going to visit ? Is the country independent ? Is it a monarchy or a republic ? How does it makes its money ? Its monument and art have different moments in history? The commission would give two certificates. One would give access to museums and monuments for the first two hours of the day, and only those with the certificate could then enter. After those two hours , everybody with the two certificates can enter. But this would enable those who can understand and enrich themselves, to have some time in peace and quiet.

This would make two tracks of tourism, not based on money. And this could generate a demonstration effect, where tourists would probably dedicate sometime to prepare themselves. I asked one former director general of UNESCO what he thought of a such proposal. His answer was – it is a great idea, but where is the political will to support this or, for that matter any international agreement ?

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Money, coins and bills. Credit: IPS

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Jan 2 2018 (IPS)

Among Bloomberg’s many profitable activities is a convenient Bloomberg Billionaires Index that has just published its findings for 2017. It covers only the 500 richest people, and it proudly announces that they have increased their wealth by 1 trillion dollars in just one year. Their fortunes went up by 23% to top comfortable 5 trillion dollars (to put this in perspective, the US budget is now at 3.7 trillion). That obviously means an equivalent reduction for the rest of the population, which lost those trillion dollars. What is not widely known is that the amount of the circulation of money stays the same; no new money is printed to accommodate the 500 richest billionaires!

In fact, Forbes, the magazine for the rich, states that there are over 2.000 billionaires in the world, and this number is going to increase and increase fast. China has now overtaken the US, by having 594 billionaires as compared to the US’s 535 – and every three days a new millionaire is born. There is even an exclusive club of billionaires, the China Entrepreneur Club, which admits members only by the unanimity of its 64 members at present. Together they have 300 billion dollars, the 4.5% of the Chinese GNP. As a norm, the Chinese wealth is a family affair, which means that in 10 years they will leave a heritage of 1 trillion dollars, most probably to their sons; and the amount of inherited wealth is going to rise to three trillion dollars in 20 years.

We know from a large study by the French economist Thomas Piketty covering 65 countries during modern times, that the bulk of wealth comes from inherited money. That because, as we all know, money begets money. And Reagan started his campaign: “Misery brings misery, wealth brings wealth”: therefore, we must tax rich people less than poor people. But Trump’s tax law just adopted in the US, cuts taxes to companies, increasing the US deficit by 1.7 trillion dollars over ten years. Nobody is noticing that the US deficit is already at $18.96 trillion or about 104% of the previous 12 months of the Gross Domestic (GDP).

This tax reform will have a deep impact on Europe, by shifting there many of the costs of the reform, through balance of payments and trade. The five most important ministers of finance of Europe, UK included, have written a letter of protest, obviously much to the glee of President Trump, who perceives only the US as winner, and all others as losers.

Roberto Savio

Let us start with the world’s debt. I do not remember to have seen a single article on that in the closing year. Yet the International Monetary Fund has alerted: gross debt of the non-financial sector has doubled in nominal terms; since the end of the century to 152 trillion dollars. This is a record 225% of the world GDP. Two thirds come from the private sector, and one third from the public sector. But this increased from below 70% of the GDP last year now to 85%, a dramatic rise in such a short time.

In fact, the respected Institute for international Finance estimates that at the end of this year the global debt, private and public added, would have reached a staggering 226 trillion dollars, more than three times global annual economic output… This doesn’t seem to interest anyone. But let us take the state of the American economy, and a proud President boasting about the index of growth, now estimated at 2.6%. Well, this shows the inadequacy of the GDP as a valid indicator. Growth is a macroeconomic index. If 80% goes to a few hands, and the crumbs to all the others, who pay most of taxes, it is not an example of growth, it is just a problem waiting to explode.

What is more, nobody is thinking about the increase in deficit. The total private debt at the end of the first quarter of 2017 was 14.9 trillion, with an increase of 900 million dollars in three months. While salaries increased from 9.2 billion dollars in 2014 to 10.3 billion dollars in the second quarter of 2017, the debt of families rose from 13.9 billion dollars to 14.9, an increase of one billion dollars, in just four months.

Which growth are we talking about? In fact, we have 86% of the population facing an increasing debt, but poorer at the same time, because of the concentration of wealth in just 1% of the population’s hands. This should be a cause of concern for any administration, left wing or right-wing: in fact, it is not surprising that the 400 richest men of the US, led by Warren Buffet, have written to Trump telling him that they are doing fine and that they do need a tax rebate; and that he should worry about the poorest part of the population.

Now a favourite way of avoiding taxes, is to place money in tax havens, where between 21 and 30 trillion dollars are ensconced. The Tax Justice Network reports that this system is “basically designed and operated” by a group of highly paid specialists from the world’s largest private banks (led by UBS, Credit Suisse, and Goldman Sachs), law offices, and accounting firms and tolerated by international organizations such as Bank for International Settlements, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the OECD, and the G20.

The amount of money hidden away has significantly increased since 2005, sharpening the divide between the super-rich and the rest of the world. And this is why there was a lot of pressure to oblige banks to open their accounts to fiscal inspector, and pressure on the Bahamas, Hong Kong, Panama and other third world countries.

Now, another good example of the reigning hypocrisy: The last meeting of the Ministers of Finance of the European Union (Ecofin), has not been able to take a decision on something heinous: several member countries (Luxemburg, UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Malta and Cyprus), host tax havens on their territories. The Queen of England has invested 10 million pounds in an English tax heaven. And two US states, in particular Delaware, have tax havens that are impenetrable even to the CIA and FBI. Tax havens such as the Cayman Islands, Jersey and the Bahamas were far less permissive, researchers found, than states such as Nevada, Delaware, Montana, South Dakota, Wyoming and New York. “[Americans] discovered that they really don’t need to go to Panama”, said James Henry of the Tax Justice Network. Ecofin has decided that they will continue to bang Third World countries, until they decided what to do at home.

So, the West proclaims principles of transparency and accountability, as long as it can impose these on others. But there is a paradox for the western governments: if those tax havens were closed, as the majority of the deposit comes from the West, they would be able to get much more taxes. To take just the case of the US: Reed College economist Kim Clausing estimates that inversions in tax havens and other income-shifting techniques reduced Treasury revenues by as much as $111 billion in 2012. And, according to a new Congressional Budget Office projection, the corporate base erosion will continue to cut corporate tax receipts over the next decade. It must be clear therefore that if governments let their revenues from the corporations and high earners shrink, they are not acting in the interest of the average citizen.

So, let us draw our conclusions. Nobody is paying attention to the world debt. It is increasing beyond control, but we are leaving the problem to the next generations, hoping that they will address it. We are mortgaging them with debt, with climate change, and whatever else is possible, to avoid any sacrifices on our part now. Our motto seems to be: Let us protect the riches, and expect less from them and more from the others. In 1952, corporate income taxes funded about 32 percent of the US government. That shrank to 10.6 percent by 2015. While tax havens aren’t the sole cause of this shift, it’s worth noting that the share of corporate profits reported in tax havens has increased tenfold since the 1980s. And now comes from Trump the giant tax gift for companies.

This policy, hidden to citizens, and never legitimized by any formal act of law, is now becoming evident because of the giant increase of inequality, which has no precedence in history. According to Oxfam, Great Britain will have more social injustice in 2020, that at the times of Queen Victoria. The world is moving faster to financial investments and transactions, and not the production of goods and services, which do not fetch instant rewards. It is estimated that with one trillion dollars you can buy the world production of a day of goods and services. That same day, the financial transactions reach 40 trillion dollars. That means, that for every dollar generated by human hands, there are 40 dollars created by financial abstractions.

Globalization is obviously rewarding capitals, not human beings. Well, this is having an impact in politics, and not the best one. There is everywhere an increasing number of losers, especially in rich countries, also because of technological development, and shift in consumption. A classic example are the coal mines that Trump wants to resurrect, to make America great again. But coal is inexorably being phased out because of climate concerns (even if not fast enough), and automatization reduces considerably the number of workers to be employed. Robots will in 2040 be responsible for 42% of production of goods and services, up from the present 16%. Which means around 86 million of new unemployed, in the West alone, according to the International Labour Organization. Those left out from the benefits of globalizations look at the winners, whom they see well connected to the system. This results in the globalization of resentment and frustration, which in a few years has led to the rise of the rightist parties in all European countries, triggered Brexit, and Trump. Once upon a time, the left was the banner-bearer of the fight for social justice. Now it is the right!

Finally, globalization has lost its shine – but not its power. Now, the debate is about how to de-globalize, and what is worrying is that the debate is not about how to bring the process to the service of humankind, but how to deploy populism and nationalism, and xenophobia, to “let us make US great again”, to the increase in clashes and conflicts.

International organizations like the IMF and the World Bank – who have been claiming for two decades that market is the only basis for progress, that once a totally free market is in place, the common man and woman would be the beneficiary – have switched the reverse gear. Now they are all talking about the need for the state to be again the arbiter for regulations and social inclusion, because they have found out that social injustice is a brake not only for democracy, but also economic progress. But despite all the mea culpa, they are rather late in the day. The genie is out of the bottle, and the powers that be do not even try to put it back. Utter hypocrisy, vested interests, and the lack of vision have regrettably replaced policy.

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The premises of a school inundated by floodwater. Shibaloy in Manikganj district, Bangladesh. Credit: Farid Ahmed/ IPS

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Dec 27 2017 (IPS)

On 20 December, Europe’s 28 Ministers of Environment met in Brussels, to discuss the plan for reducing emissions prepared by the Commission, to comply with the Paris Agreement on climate change. Well, it is now clear that we have lost the battle in keeping the planet as we have known it. Now, of course, this can be considered a personal opinion of mine, devoid of objectivity.

Therefore I will bring a lot of data, history and facts, to make it concrete. Data and facts have good value: they focus any debate, while ideas do not. So those who do not like facts, please stop reading here. You will escape a boring article, as probably all of mine are, because I am not looking to entertain, but to create awareness. If you stop reading, you will also lose a chance to know our sad destiny.

As common in politics now, interests have won over values and vision. The ministers decided (with some resistance from Denmark and Portugal), to reduce Europe’s commitment. This is going in the Trump direction, who left the Paris Agreement, to privilege American interests, without any attention to the planet. So, Europe is just following.

Of course, those alive now will not pay any price: the next generations will be the victims of a world more and more inhospitable. Few of the people who made to Paris in 2015, solemn engagements in the name of all humankind to save the planet, will be alive 30 years from now, when the change will become irreversible. And it will be also clear that humans are the only animals who do not defend nor protect their habitat.

While we talk on how to reduce the use of fossils, we are doing the opposite. At this very moment, we spend 10 million dollars per minute, to subsidize the fossils industry. Just counting direct subsidies, they are between 775 billion dollars to 1 trillion, according to the UN

First of all, the Paris’ Agreement was adopted by the 195 participating countries, of which 171 have already subscribed to the treaty, in just two years. Which is fine, except that the treaty is just a collection of good wishes, without any concrete engagement.

To start with, it does not set up specific and verifiable engagements. Every country will set its own targets, and will be responsible for its implementation. It is like to ask all citizens of a country to decide how much taxes they want to pay, and leave to them to comply, without any possible sanction.

Europe engaged in Paris in 2015, to reach 27% of renewable energies (by scaling down the use of fossils), fixing a target of 20% for 2020. Well, from 27%, it went down to 24.3%. In addition, the ministers decided to keep subsidies for the fossils industry, until 2030 instead of 2020, as planned. And while the proposal of the Commission was that fossils plants would lose subsidies if they did not cut their emissions to 500 grams of CO2 per ton by 2020, the ministers extended subsidies until 2025.

Finally, the Commission proposed to cut biofuels (fuels made with products for human consumption, like palm oil) to 3.8%. Well, the ministers, in spite of all their declarations about the fight against hunger in the world, decided to double that, at 7%.

Now let us go back to the real flaw of the Paris Agreement. Scientists took two decades to conclude with certitude that climate change is caused by human activities, despite a strong and well financed fight by the coal and fuel industry, to say otherwise.

The International Panel on Climate Change, is an organization under the auspices of the UN, whose members are 194 countries, but its strength comes from the more than 2.000 scientists from 154 countries who work together on climate. It took them from 1988, (when the IPCC was established), to 2013, to reach a definitive conclusion: the only way to stop the planet deteriorating more rapidly, emissions should not exceed 1.5 centigrade over what was the Earth’ temperature in 1850.

In other words, our planet is deteriorating already, and we cannot revert that. We have emitted too much gas and pollution, that are at work already. But by halting this process, we can stabilize it, but never cancel what we did cause, at least for thousands of years.

The Industrial revolution is considered to start in 1746, when industrial mills replaced individual weavers. But it started in great scale in the second half of the 19th century, with the second industrial revolution.

This involved the use of science in the production, by inventing engines, railways, creating factories, and other means of industrial production. We started to register temperatures in 1850, when this was done with thermometers.

So, we can see how coal, fossils and other fuels started to interact with the atmosphere. What the scientists concluded was that if we went over 1,5 centigrade of the 1.850’s temperature, we would irreversibly cross a red line: we will not be able to change the trend, and climate will be out of control, with very dramatic consequences for the planet.

Roberto Savio

Paris conference is a final act of a process who started in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, with the Conference on Environment and Development, where two leaders have now passe away, Boutros Boutros Ghali and Maurice Strong, ran the first summit of heads of state on the issue of environment.

Incidentally, it is worth remembering that Strong, a man who spent all his life to make environment a central issue, did open up the conference for the first time to representatives of civil society, beyond governmental delegations. Over 20.000 organizations, academicians, activist come to Rio, starting the creation of a global civil society recognized by the international community.

In 1997, as a result of Rio Conference, the Kyoto Treaty was adopted, with the aim to reduce emissions. The results show that during the nearly two decades bringing to Paris, the results are very modest. Coal went from 45,05% in 1950, to 28.64 in 2016, also because of new technologies, but petrol increased from19.46, to 33.91 and renewables were a negligible reality.

So, Paris was left with a very urgent task, after having lost already two decades. And according to the World Bank, in 2014 , there are 1,017 billion people without electricity, with Africa where only 20% of people has access to electricity. For all these people we should provide renewable energy, to avoid a dramatic increase of emissions.

Paris was supposed to be really a global agreement, unlike Tokyo. So, to bring as many countries as possible on board, it is a little known dirty secret that the UN decided to put as a goal not the very tight 1,5 centigrade as a target, but a more palatable 2 centigrade. But unfortunately, the consensus is that we have already passed the 1.5 centigrade. And the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), has estimated that the engagements taken by the countries in Paris, if not changed, will bring us to 6 centigrade, an increase that according to the scientific community would make a large part of the earth inhabitable.

In fact, in the last four years we had the hottest summers since 1850. And in 2017 we have the highest record of emissions in history, because they have reached 41.5 gigatons. Of those, 90% comes from activities related to human actions, while renewables (cost for which has now become competitive with fossils), still cover only 18% of the energy consumed in the world. And now let us move to another important dirty secret.

While we talk on how to reduce the use of fossils, we are doing the opposite. At this very moment, we spend 10 million dollars per minute, to subsidize the fossils industry.

Just counting direct subsidies, they are between 775 billion dollars to 1 trillion, according to the UN. The official figure just in the G20 is 444 billion. But then, the International Monetary Fund accepted the economists’ view that subsidies are not only cash: it is the use of the earth and society, like destruction of soil, use of water, political tariffs (the so-called externalities, the cost which exists but are external to the budget of the companies).

If we do that, we reach the staggering amount of 5.3 trillion: they were 4.9 trillion in 2013. That is 6.5% of the global Gross National Product…and that is what it costs to governments, society and earth, to use fossils.

That was nowhere in in the news media. Few know the strength of the fossils industry. Trump wants to reopen the mines, not only because that brings him votes by those who lost an obsolete job, but because the fossils industry is a strong backer of the Republican party.

The billionaire Koch brothers, the largest owners of coal mines in the US, have declared that they have spent 800 million dollars in the last electoral campaign. Someone might say: these things happen in the US but according to the respected Transparency International, there are over 40.000 lobbyists in Europe, working to exercise political influence.

The Corporate Europe Observatory, which studies the financial sector, found out that it spends just in Brussels 120 million a year, and employs 1.700 lobbyists. It found that they lobbied against regulations, with more than 700 organizations, which outnumbered trade unions and civil society organizations, by a factor of seven.

The power of the fossils industry explains why in 2009 governments helped the sector with 557 billion dollars, and only 43 to 46 billion dollars to all renewable industry (International Energy Agency estimates).

It is clear that citizens have no idea that a part of their money is going to keep alive, with good profits, a sector which is well aware that they are key in the destruction of our planet.

A sector that knows well that they are now emitting 400 particles of CO2 per million, when the red line was considered 350 particles PM. But people do not know, and this is a spectacular feast of hypocrisy that goes on.

The UN, in 2015, conducted an extensive poll, with the participation of 9.7 million people. They were asked to choose as their priorities six themes out of 16. The first of the themes presented was climate change. Well, the first one chosen, with 6.5 million of preferences, was “a good education”. The second and third, with over 5 million of preferences, were “a better health system”, and “better opportunities for work”. The last of the 16 themes, with less than 2 million, was the “climate change. “And this was also in the preferences of the least developed countries, who are going to be the major victims of climate change.

The 4.3 millions poorest participants, from the least developed countries, put again education first (3 million preferences); climate change was last, with 561.000 votes…Not even in Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia, islands which could disappear, climate change was at the first place. This is an ample proof that people do not realize where we are: at a threshold of the survival of our planet, as we have known it for several thousand years.

So, if citizens are not aware, and therefore not concerned, why should the politicians be? The answer is because they are elected by citizens to represent their interests, and they can make more informed decisions.How does this ring in your ears? With lobbyist all over fighting for interests, what can be well sold as jobs and stability?

Holstein cows in a feedlot. Credit: Bigstock

And now, let us bring a last dirty secret, to show how far we are from really addressing the control of our climate. In addition to what we said, there is a very important issue, that has even been discussed in Paris: the agreements are entirely about the reduction of emissions by the fossils’ industry. Other emissions have been left entirely out.

Now, a new documentary, the Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret, produced by Leonardo di Caprio, has ordered several data presented by vegans, on the impact of animals in the climate change. They are considered somehow exaggerated. But their dimensions are so big, that they add anyhow another nail to our coffin.

Animals emit not CO2, but methane which is at least 25 % more damaging than C02. There is recognition by the UN, that while all means of transportation, from cars to planes, contribute to 13% of emissions, cows do with 18%…

And the real problem is the use of water, a key theme that we have no way to address in this article. Water is considered even by military strategist to be soon the cause of conflicts, as petrol has been for a long time.

One pound of beef uses 2.500 gallons of water. That means that a hamburger is the equivalent of two months of showers…! And to have 1 gallon of milk, you need 100 gallons of water. And people worldwide, use one tenth of what cows need.

Cattle uses 33% of all water, 45% of the earth, and are the cause of 91% of the Amazon deforestation. They also produce waste 130 times more than human beings. Pig raising in the Netherlands is creating serious problems because theirs waste acidity is reducing usable land. And consumption of meat is increasing in Asia and Africa, very fast,it is considered a mark of reaching the choices of rich societies.

Beside this serious impact on the planet, there is also a strong paradox of sustainability for our human population. We are now 7.5 billion people, and we will reach soon 9 billion. The total food production worldwide could feed 13 to 14 billion people. Of this a considerable part goes wasted, and does not reach people (theme for an article by itself). But the food for animals could feed 6 billion people.

And we have one billion people starving. This is proof how far we are from using resources rationally for the people living on earth. We have enough resources for everybody, but we cannot administer them rationally. The number of obese has reached the number of those starving.

The logical solution in this situation would be to reach an agreement on a global governance, in the interest of the planet of humankind. Well, we are going in the opposite direction. The international system is besieged by nationalism, who make increasingly impossible to reach meaningful solutions.

Globally, 75 percent of coral reefs are under threat from overfishing, habitat destruction, pollution and acidification of the seas due to climate change. Credit: Bigstock

Let us conclude with a last example: overfishing. Its now two decades that the World Trade Organization (which is not part of the UN, and was built against the UN) tries to reach an agreement on over- fishing with mega nets, who scoop up an enormous quantity of fishe: 2.7 trillion, of which they keep only one fifth, and they throw back four fifth.

Well, at the last WTO conference on the 13 December in Buenos Aires, governments were again not able to reach an agreement on how to limit illicit fishing. Big fishes are now down at 10% of 1970.And we are exploiting one third of all stocks.

It is estimated that illegal fishing puts between 10 billion and 23 billion on the black market, according to a study by 17 specialized agencies, with a full list of names. And again, governments spend 20 billion per year to finance the increase of their fishing industry…another example of how interest win on the common good.

I think now we have enough data, to realize the inability of governments to take seriously their responsibilities, because they have the necessary information to know that we are going toward a disaster.

In a normal world, Trump’s declaration that Climate control is a Chinese hoax, and it is invented against the interest of United States, should have caused more global emotion.

Also, because while Trump’s internal policies are an American question, climate is affecting all the 7.5 billion in the planet, and Trump was elected by less than a quarter of eligible voters: nearly 63 million. Too little to take decisions which affect all humankind.

And now European ministers are following, as a proverb says, money speaks and ideas murmur.. And there are many who are preparing to speculate on climate change. Now that we have lost 70% of the ice of the North Pole, the maritime industry is gearing to use the Northern Route, which will cut cost and time by a 17%.

And the British wine industry, since the warming of the planet, is increasing production by 5% each year. The vineyards planted in Kent or Sussex, with a calcar soil, are now bought from producers of Champagne, who plan to move there. The UK is already producing 5 million bottles of wine and sparkling wines, which are all sold. This Christmas, local sparkling wine will exceed champagnes, caves, prosecco and other traditional Christmas drinks.

We have all seen, at no avail, the increase of hurricanes and storms, also in Europe, and a record spread of wildfires. The UN estimates that at least 800 million people will be displaced by climate change making uninhabitable several parts of the world. Where they will go? Not to the United States or Europe, where they are seen as invaders.

We forget that the Syrian crisis came after four years of drought (1996-2000) which displaced over a million peasants to the towns. The ensuing discontent fuelled the war, with now 400.000 dead and six million refugees.

When citizens will awake to the damages, it will be too late. Scientists think that it will become clearly evident after thirty years. So why do we worry now ? That is a problem for the next generation, and companies will continue to make money until the last minute, with complicity of governments and their support,so, let us ride the climate change tide.

Let us buy a good bottle of British champagne, let us drink it on a luxury cruise line over the Pole, and let the orchestra play, as they did in the Titanic until the last minute!

Excerpt:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Dec 14 2017 (IPS)

At the outset my thanks to Dr Hanif Hassan Ali Al Kassim, and Ambassador Idriss Jazairy who lead the Centre for Human Rights Advancement and Global Dialogue for organizing this panel discussion at a critical moment in history. The Centre, is one of the few actors for peace and cooperation between the Arab world and Europe. As a representative of global civil society, I think it will be more meaningful if I speak without the constraints of diplomacy, and I make frank and unfettered reflections.

Roberto Savio

President Trump could be a good case study on the relations between politics and populism. Just a few days ago the United States has declared that they are withdrawing from the UN Global Compact on Migration. This has nothing to do with the interest or the identity of United States, which has built itself as a country of immigrants. It has to do with the fact that this decision is popular with a part of American population, which is voting for President Trump, like the evangelicals. I have here to show the message they are circulating, after the declaration of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. This is what it is said in the Bible. If we recreate the world described in the bible, Jesus will make his second coming to earth, and only the just will be rewarded. And therefore they think that Trump brings the world closer to the return of Christ, and therefore he acts for the good of their beliefs. Evangelicals are close to thirty million, and they strongly believe that when the second coming of Jesus will happen, he will recognize only them as the believers who are on the right path. Trump is not an evangelical, and he has shown little interest in religion. But, like each of his actions, he is coherent with his views during the campaign, which brought together all the dissatisfied people catapulting him into the White House. Everything he does, is not in the interest of the world or of the United States. He is just focused on keeping the support of his electors – those who do not come from big towns, academia, media and the Silicon Valley. They come mainly from impoverished and uninformed white electors, who feel left out from the benefits of globalization. They believe those benefits went to the elite, to the big towns and to the few winners, and believe that there is an international plot to humiliate the United States. So, climate change for them and Trump is a Chinese hoax ! During the first year, Trump can well have a shocking approval rating of 32%, the lowest in history for a President of United States. But 92% of his voters would re-elect him. And as only 50% of Americans vote, he can conveniently ignore general public opinion.

It is not the place here to go deeper into American political trends. But Trump is a perfect example to see why a large number of Europeans, or even countries like Poland, Hungary and Czech Republic, are ignoring the decisions of the European Union on migrants, and why populism, xenophobia and nationalism are on the rise everywhere.

Fear has become the tool to get to power.

Historians agree that two main engines of change in history, are greed and fear.

Well, we have been trained, since the collapse of communism, to look to greed as a positive value. Markets (no man or ideas), was the new paradigm. States were an obstacle to a free market. Globalization, it was famously said, would lift all boats, and benefit everybody. In fact, markets without rules was self-destructive, and not all boats were lifted, but only yachts, the bigger the better. The rich became richer, and the poor poorer. The process is so speedy, that ten years ago the richest 528 people had the same wealth of 2.3 billion people. This year, they have become 8, and this number is likely to shrink soon. All statistics are clear, and globalization based on free market is losing some of its shine.

But meanwhile we have lost many codes of communication. In the political debate there is no more reference to social justice, solidarity, participation, equity, the values in the modern constitutions, on which we built international relations. Now the codes are competition, success, profit and individual achievement. During my lectures at schools, I am dismayed to see a materialistic generation, who do not care to vote, to change the world. And the distance between citizens and political institutions is increasing every day. The only voices reminding us of justice and solidarity, and are voices from religious leaders: Pope Bergoglio, the Dalai Lama, Bishop Tutu, and the Grand Mufti Muhammad Hussein, just to name the most prominent. And with media who are now also based on market as the only criteria, those voices are becoming weaker.

After a generation of greed, we are now in a generation of fear. We should notice that, before the great economic crisis of 2009 (provoked by greed: banks have paid until now 280 billion dollars of penalties and fines), xenophobe and populist parties were always minorities (with exception of Le Pen in France). The crisis created fear and uncertainties, and then immigration started to rise, especially after the invasion of Libya in 2001 and Iraq in 2013.We are now in the seventh year of the Syrian drama, which displaced 45% of the population. Merkel is now paying a price for her acceptance of Syrian refugees, and it is interesting to note that two thirds of the votes to Alternative Fur Deutschland, the populist and xenophobe party, comes from former East Germany, that has few refugees but an income, which is nearly 25% lower. Fear, again, has been the engine for change of German history.

Europe was direct lyresponsible for these migrations. A famous cartoonist El Roto from El Pais, has made a cartoon showing bombs flying in the air, and migrant’s boats coming from the sea. “We send them bombs, and they send us migrants”. But there is no recognition of this. Those who escape from hunger and war are now depicted as invaders. Countries who until few years ago, like the Nordic ones, were considered synonymous with civic virtues, and who spent a considerable budget for international cooperation, are now erecting walls and barbed wire. Greed and fear have been so successfully exploited by the new nationalist, populist and xenophobe parties, that now they keep growing at every election, from Austria to the Netherlands, from Czech Republic to Great Britain (where they created Brexit ), and then Germany, and in a few months, Italy. The three horses of apocalypse, which in the thirties were the basis for the Second Wold War: nationalism, populism and xenophobia, are back with growing popular support, and politicians openly riding them.

But what is shocking is that we have now a new element of division: religion, which is widely used against immigrants and should instead unite us. Religion has always been used to get power and legitimacy. Common people never started the wars of religion in Europe but by princes and kings. A few years ago we did commemorate the expulsion first of the Jews, and then of the Moors, from Spain, where they lived in harmony and peace with the Christians, forming a civilization of the three cultures. And a few weeks ago, there was a great march in Warsaw, ignored by the media, with 40.000 people, many coming from all over Europe and the United States. They marched in the name of God, crying death to the Jews and Muslim.

But while Protestant, Catholic, Muslim and Jew religious leaders engage in a positive dialogue for peace and cooperation, a number of self-proclaimed defenders of the faith, are bringing fear, misery and death. And it should be clear that we have no clash of religions. It is a clash of those who use religion for power and legitimacy. And they ride an unrealistic historical dream. To return to a world, which is gone, where mines will reopen, the country will go back to its former glory: a world, that dreams not of a better future, but of a better past. Africa is going to double its population, with 80% of its population under 35 years; while in Europe it will be just 20%. There is no hope for Europe to be viable in a global economy and in a competitive world, without substantial immigration. Yet, to speak about that in the political debate, is now a kiss of death.

In conclusion, I must stress that we face a sad reality, which cannot be ignored any longer, even if it is not politically correct. Ideals have always been used to gain support, even from those who did not believe them. And historians teach us that in modern times humankind has fallen into three traps: In the name of God, to divide and not to dialogue; in the name of the nation, often to rally support and bring citizens to wars; and now, in name of the profit. I think it is time to make new alliances, and launch a great powerful campaign of awareness on the false prophets, with mobilizations of media, civil society and legitimate politicians, to educate citizens that immigration must be regulated, as it is a necessity, with which Europe must live.

We must establish policies, and even after Trumps leaves the global Compact, like he left the Paris Agreement on climate change, he will remain an isolated voice, while citizens will strive for a better world, with no fears, based on common values. We must take an unpopular but vital action for education and participation. It will be unpopular and difficult we know. But if we do not take this road, human beings, who are the only ‘animals’ who do not learn from past mistakes, will again go through blood, misery and destruction.

Excerpt:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Oct 21 2017 (IPS)

The Austrian elections show clearly that media have given up on contextualising events. To do that, calls for a warning about Europe’s future, as a vehicle of European values is required. Europe has been weakened by all the recent elections, with the notable exception of France. Common to all, France included, were some clear trends, that we will hastily, and therefore maybe imperfectly, examine.

Roberto Savio

In every election, since the financial crisis of 2009, the parties we have known to run their country since the end of the Second World War, are on the wane ( or practically disappearing, like in the last French elections). In Austria, the far right Freedom Party of Austria (FPO) secured 26 per cent of the vote, just a few votes behind the Social Democrats who took 26.9 per cent of the votes. The social democrats have been in power practically since the end of the war. And the other traditional party, the conservative Austrian People’s Party (OVP), won the elections with 31.5 per cent. Together the two parties used to have more than 85% of the votes. In the Dutch elections held in March, Geert Wilder’s far-right Party for Freedom PVV, came second after the ruling People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy VVD, at the expense of all other parties. And in September in Germany, the far right anti immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) enjoyed historical success, becoming the third party while the two traditional parties, Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union of Germany CDU and the social democrat Social Democratic Party of Germany SPD, suffered the worst results in more than a half a century. According to polls, next year Italian elections will see a populist movement, with the 5 Stars taking over the government.

Austria is the best example to understand how European national politics have changed. It is important to note that no right wing party was really visible in Europe, (except Le Pen in France), before the financial crisis of 2009. That crisis brought insecurity and fear and in the same year the Austrian far right, under the charismatic leadership of Jorg Haider, got the same percentage of votes as of today. And the conservative Prime minister of the time, Wolfgang Schlussel broke a taboo by bringing the Freedom Party into the government. Everybody in Europe reacted with horror, practically isolating Austria. And the FPO, lost all its lustre in the government, going down to 5%, and with the death of Haider even further down. There Are no gasps of horror now in Europe over any far right wing parties getting in to govern.

What has fuelled the decline of the traditional parties

The traditional parties were facing already a loss of participation and trust by the electors at the end of the last century but in 2009 Europe imported the financial crisis which racked the US in 2006. And, 2009 saw hardship and unemployment all over Europe. And that year Greece became the battleground of two visions in Europe. The Southern countries wanted to push out of the crisis with investments and social relief, while the bloc of Northern countries, led by Germany, saw austerity as the only response. Germany wanted to export it’s experience: they were doing well thanks to an internal austerity reform started by Schroeder in 2003, and they did not want to take on other reforms at any cost.

Greece was just 4% of the European economy and could have been rescued without problems. But the German line won and today Greece has lost 25% of its properties; pensions went down by 17%, and there is a massive unemployment. Austerity was the response to the crisis for all of Europe and that aggravated fear and insecurity.

It is also important to remember that until the invasions of Libya, Iraq and Syria, in which Europe played a key role (2011- 2014), there were few immigrants and this was not a problem. In 2010, immigrants numbered 215.000, in a region of 400 millions. But during the invasions, a very fragile balance between Shite and Sunni, the two main religious branches of Islam, collapsed. Civil war, and the creation of ISIS in 2015 pushed many to try to reach Europe to escape the civil wars. So, in 2015 more than 1.2 million refugees, the majority coming from countries in conflict, arrived in Europe, which was not prepared for such a massive influx. And, if we study the elections before then, we can see that the far right parties were not as relevant as they are now.

Therefore it should be clear that austerity and immigration have been the two main factors for the rise of the right wing. Statistics and data show that clearly. Statistics also show that immigrants, of course with exceptions, (that media and populism inflates), basically want to integrate, accept any kind of work, and are law abiding and pay their contributions, which is obviously in their interest. Of course the level of instruction plays a crucial role. But the Syrians who come here were basically middle class. And of course it is an inconvenient truth that if Europe did not intervene in the name of democracy, the situation would be different. NATO estimates that more than 30 billion dollars have been spent on the war in Syria. There are now six million refugees, and 400.00 dead.

And Assad is still there. Of course, democracy has a different value in countries which are closed and rich in petrol. If we were serious about democracy, there are so many African countries which need intervention. Book Haram has killed seven times more people than ISIS; and Mugabe is considering running for re-election after dominating Zimbabwe for nearly four decades. But you will never hear much on those issues in the present political debate.

How the far right is changing Europe

Nigel Farage is the populist who led a far right party, the UK Independence Party (UKIP) which fought for leaving Europe. UKIP received the greatest number of votes (27.49%) of any British party in the 2014 European Parliament election and gained 11 extra Member of the European Parliament MEPs for a total of 24.[55] The party won seats in every region of Great Britain, including its first in Scotland.[56] It was the first time in over a century that a party other than Labour or Conservatives won the mosti votes in a UK-wide election.

But Farage lost the elections held just before Brexit, in June 2016. His declaration to the media was: Infact, I am the real winner, because my agenda against Europe now is the basis for politics in all the traditional parties. Brexit did follow.

And this is what is happening now everywhere. The Austrian elections did not see only the FPO rise. They also saw the conservative OVP taking immigration, security, borders and others part of the far right agenda of the populist agenda in the electoral campaign. A full 58% of the voters went for the far right or the right, with the social Democrats also moving more to the center. The new Dutch governement took a turn to the right, by reducing taxes on the rich people, and to companies. The same turn to the right can be expected by the new coalition led by Merkel, with the liberals aiming to take over the ministry of Finance. Its leader, Christian Lindner, is a nationlist and has several times declared his aversion to Europe. In that seense, he will be worse than the inflexible Schauble, who just wanted to Germanize Europe, but was a convinced European. And it is interesting that the main vote for the far righ party AfD came from East Germany, where immigrants are few. But in spite of investing the staggering amount of 1.3 trillions Euro in the development of East Germany, important differences in employment and revenues with West Germany remain. No wonder that the President of South Korea has warned President Trump to avoid any conflict. They have decided a longtime ago, looking at the German reunification that they would not have the resources required by annexing with success, North Korea.The rocketman, as Trump calls Kim, after the decertification of Iran, can claim that the only way to be sure that US will not intervene, is to show that he has a nuclear intercontinental ability, because US does not respect treaties.

Those considerations done, a pattern is clear everywhere. The agenda of the right wing has been incorporated in the traditional parties; they bring in the governing coalition, like Norway did , or they try to isolate them , as did Sweden. This does not change the fact that everybody is moving to the right. Austria will now tilt to the Visegrad group, formed by Poland , Hungary, Czech and Slovakia, which are clearly challenging Europe and looking to Putin as a political model ( all the right wing does).

The only active European voice is Macron, who clearly is not a progressist guy either. The real progressist, Corbyn, is ambigous about Europe, because the Labour Party has a lot of eurosceptic.

The new German government has already made clear that many of it’s proposals for a stronger Europe are not on the agenda, and austerity remains the way. Unless a strong growth comes soon (and the IMF doubts that), social problems will increase. Nationalism never helped peace, development and cooperation. Probably , we need some populist movement to be in the government to show that they have no real answers to the problems. The victory of 5 stars in Italy will probably do that. But this was the theory also for Egypt. Let the Muslim Brotherhood take the government , and it will be a failure. Pity that the General El Sisi did not let this happen. Our hope is that we do not get any El Sisis in Europe.

If only young people went back to vote, this would change the situation in Europe…this is the real historical loss of the left in Europe.

Excerpt:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Sep 29 2017 (IPS)

Generally, media have failed to analyse why the result of German elections is the worst possible. Merkel is not a winner, but a leader now in a very fragile position, who will have to make many compromises and pay now for her mistakes. Let us make at least the most important four points of analysis.

Roberto Savio

Point One: the decline of traditional parties

Now for some years, the traditional parties who have run their countries since the end of the Second World War are becoming irrelevant. The last French elections saw the practical collapse of the Socialist and Gaullist parties, with the arrival of a totally unknown candidate, Macron, who has now 60% of the seats in the Parliament. The same happened earlier in the Austrian presidential elections.

This process has now started in Germany. Merkel’s party, the CDU, had the worst performance since its creation. And its sister party, CSU (the Bavarian CDU) has lost a staggering million votes. The same has happened to the SPD, who saw the lowest approval since modern times. The two parties, who had in the last elections 67.2% of the votes, now got just 53.2%. And, as everywhere else, the missing votes went to parties who were recipients of discontent, and the desire to punish the establishment was evident. Linke, a radical left-wing party, got an additional 0.6%, by voters rejecting the increasing social inequality, and did not believe that SPD would be different from the CDU on this issue. The Green got an additional 0.5%, by those who were incensed by Merkel’s promise to increase defense costs to 2% of GDP, to please Trump. But the big winner was the AfD, an extreme right wing party, who was the conduit for people’s dissatisfaction on immigrants, on the European Union, and other nationalist and populist themes. AfD got 12.6 % of the votes, becoming the third party and with 96 members of parliament. AfD got 980.000 votes from the CDU, 470.000 from the SPD, 400.000 votes from the Linke. But, much more importantly, 1,200.000 votes from people who did not vote in the last elections. In a poll, 60% of them said that they were “disappointed with the present political situation’. At the same time the poll company Infratest Dimap, found out that 84% considered Germany’s economic situation “good”, when this was 74% four years ago, and a mere 19% eight years ago. The elections were not clearly on economy, but about immigration and the loss of German identity.

Therefore, Macron’s victory over Le Pen is not the end of the populist wave. And few doubt that if Macron loses his appeal (as it is already happening), and his fight for social reforms is stopped by mass manifestations, Le Pen would win the next elections. And the antisystem parties all over Europe did not win in the last elections, but they did not lose eithe. Now they are the needle of the balance in all Nordic countries, and can declare, like Farage , the founder of the anti-Europe party UKIP, when he lost in the last British election: it is irrelevant, our message has become part of all the political system. And Brexit was the best example that he was right…all parties in the Nordic countries had to incorporate points of the populist, especially on immigration.

It has been generally ignored that it is the middle class, the main actor in this change. Social inequality in Europe has constantly grown, and many from the middle class are impoverished or afraid. Germany is a good example. While unemployment went down with Merkel from 11% to 3.8%, those close to the poverty line went from 11% to 17% of the total. Merkel went from a public deficit of 100 billion dollars, to a surplus of 20 billion, but at the same time poverty doubled to 10%, and there are 2 million people who have two jobs to help them reach the end of the month. And the pensioners who live below the poverty line , have increased by 30%. A full 15.7% of Germans now live under the poverty line. Of these, nearly 3 million are children.

Are the fears and frustrations of the middle class only who have pushed Brexit and Trump ? The economist Homi Kharas, specialized on the middle class, considers that 43% of the world population (some 3.200 million) now form the world middle class. It grows every year by 160 million. What is common to them is that especially the lower middle class have high expectations from the government and they put economic growth before anything else. They are helped by the Internet and social media, to be aware of their rights, and of the risks. In rich countries, massive education helps awareness. In developing countries, the pressure on governments is equally strong. The best example is China. Between 2002 and 2011, there has been a strong increase in protests and loss of trust in the public institution, despite a period of economic growth. The fact is that to keep growth and social justice together, you need resources. And this a problem for the left. Its genetic message is redistribution and participation. How to do this when we are in a world of diminishing resources?

Point Two. The antisystem becomes an entrenched system

Bill Emmot, the ex-director of the Economist, has written: “we live in a period of political turmoil. Parties less than a year old have taken power in France and in the megalopolis of Tokyo. A party less than five years old is heading the polls in Italy. The White House is hosting a billionaire who never had any political experience. And we should add that before the crisis of 2009, no populist or xenophobe party was represented in Parliament.

We have therefore little experience on how antiparty system behaves when they are in power. But if we look at the United States, Poland and Hungary, clearly they are trying to put under control the public institutions, not because of the values of democracy that brought them to power, but a new campaign on fears and greed: globalization, immigration, automatization’s displacement of jobs, inequality, racism, and “my country first”. And the antisystem parties, who all have sent congratulatory message to the AfD, look to Putin as the political model to follow (except Poland for obvious reasons). But Urban of Hungary speaks openly of “illiberal democracy” as the main reason to combat the EU (and Poland of values of Catholicism against a secular Europe).

It is legitimate then to think that when the AfD, Le Pen, and company will come to power, (if the trend toward antisystem is not stopped), we are going to see a serious decline of democracy…also because we have Japan, India, China, Turkey, Philippines, just to name a few, who are nationalists, xenophobe and tend to project their vision, as the Russian hackers did in the last elections.

We must look at the youth’s decline in participation in politics as a new phenomenon extremely worrying. The priorities in budget allocations go increasingly to the older generations, which vote. It is important to note that the large majority of young people do not vote for the antisystem parties, but abstain. If young people did vote, we would not have Brexit and Trump. In the German elections, only 10% of those between 18 and 24 voted for AfD: all other age groups did so, and we must go to the oldest age group, those over 70 years to see a decline, to just 7% of the vote . But 69 per cent of the oldest voted for CDU and SPD, against 41% of the youngest. So, the theory that young people are moving to the right is a myth. They prefer to abstain…but the problem remains. Their abstention is helping both the system to stay, and the antisystem to win. But take Italy for example, run by a centre left party, the PD. They have just approved an incentive for youth unemployment (close to 30%), after giving 30 billion dollars to bail out four regional banks. The antisystem M5S, which is now heading the polls, has made the fight against the financial system a priority. If you were young, educated and unemployed, what would be your choice?

Point Three: German elections are a disaster for Europe

The appeal of an integrated Europe has been on the wane for a while. It became fashionable to present the European institutions as a bunch of unaccountable bureaucrats, out of touch with reality, intent on discussing the size of tomatoes. In fact, it is the Council of Ministers, formed by representative of the States, who take the decisions: EU can only implement them. But it becomes politically convenient to go back from Brussels and present decisions, especially those unpopular, as a diktat imposed on your country. This, of course, is just one of the many reasons for the decline of Europe as a political project. But is useful to remember this game, because it shows the irresponsibility of the political class. There was never a real unity behind the European project. Every country looked only for dividends, and now, not even for that (as the example of Poland and Hungary, very large recipients show). So, where is Europe heading?

There are in fact three visions of Europe. One is the vision of Juncker, the head of the EU. It calls for strengthening the European institutions, and reinforcing the social goals, until now left behind the economic and commercial priorities. It’s not that Juncker is a progressive: he just realizes without doing that, the anti-European parties will have an easier life. His view is of strengthening Europe as a super national entity, with the states conceding more power, for better functioning. Then there is the vision of Macron, who goes in the same direction, but from a country that has always jealously defended its national sovereignty. Yet he realizes that in this competitive world, no European country can go far, and a strong Europe is therefore necessary. Then there is Merkel’s Europe, which is basically toward a federation of countries, where decisions are taken by the states, (with Germany as the strongest), with the EU implementing them. Since Macron came to power, he has been championing the revival of the French-German entente, which is necessary for a viable Europe. Macron and the south of Europe have been asking for socialization of European revenues, so as to sustain the weakest and have a common growth, creating a European Monetary Fund to overcome crisis, a super minister of finance and economy, a common European defence and several social measures to give back faith to the European losers in Europe.

Well, this is exactly what Germany has vetoed every time. Germans do not want to share their revenues with losers. In this debate, there is a strong religious and moral argument: the protestant ethic against catholic culture of easy pardon. Greece was the field to affirm the doctrine of ordo liberalism, the German view of economics, where easy-going and lack of discipline must be punished. This was also a warning to other countries, like Italy, Spain and Portugal. The result of sanctions on Greece, which was just 4% of the European economy, is that after seven years there is at least 20% unemployment, a loss of 25% of the Greek economy, a reduction of the pensions of nearly 40%, and 20% of the population under poverty line. It should not be forgotten that a large component of the bail out loans went first to the banks (mainly German), to pay the large credits they had with the broken Greek state, and not to the citizens. And that now airports and ports are under German administration.

The face of this imposition of austerity, which is a very important component of the anti-European wind, had the face of the implacable and crippled minister of Finance, Schauble. But there was no doubt that he was pro Europe, even if of a Europe based on the German model. But now he has moved to be the President of the Parliament, to leave his place to the chairman of the FPD, the liberal party, Christian Lindner, who is an avowed anti-European. FDP is against the euro, wants Greece out of the Euro, wants a strong policy on refugees: in other words, he is much on the right. Merkel, the extremely prudent Chancellor , will certainly not be able to meet the expectations of Macron and Juncker. Europe will again be on standby. Italy will be probably run by a young PRime Minister (from the antisystem M5S) a totally untested 31 year old, who has announced that he would like to leave the Euro, and limit Brussels power. The tide against Europe has not been stopped at all, contrary to media enthusiasm.

Point Four: Merkel’s responsibilities

There is no doubt that the massive immigration of one million of Syrians, has given a strong weapon to Afd, and the liberals, to help them gain power. But time will prove that it was a wise decision, greeted by the German economy. Statistics show that Immigrants are model citizens, pay their taxes, and bring a net benefit to the country who receives them. Of course, we see only the story of criminals and rapists, that xenophobe parties use with success, because in difficult times to find a scapegoat is easy and convenient. But Merkel just rode the German idiosyncrasy, without doing any statist’s effort to mobilize citizens to a vision. She knows that the secret dream of Germans is to be a Swiss: no participation in the world (other than business), no experiments, no risks. She has become the embodiment of that idiosyncrasy – she is glad to be called Mutti, the mother. Other than the immigrants, she took only another risk, which was to abandon nuclear, after the disaster of Fukushima. Therefore, she did nothing to raise the awareness of the citizens on their European responsibilities. She shielded them from any sacrifice for being Europeans, refused any request by the EU, the IMF and the Wold Bank to spend the huge surplus that Germany made with intra-European trade. Her position was: we will keep the money we made with our hard work. And Schauble was just her instrument. Now, as a result of her odd coalition government she will ask the European Central Bank post for a German hawk, Jedemans, from the Bank of Germany: a good company to Christian Lindner. Dark days are coming for Europe; Merkel is the best illustration of the difference between the Germany of Bonn, run by idealist and committed politicians, with the Germany of Berlin, who is just a selfish entity, without vision. And after spending 100 billion a year, for 20 years, East Germany remains hopelessly behind, and it is where AfD took his largest share of votes.

On the night after the elections, the candidate for SPD, Martin Shultz, said looking into her eyes: Mrs Merkel, you are the great loser. You are the one responsible for the victory of AfD. Let us hope that willingly or not, Mutti will be also the one responsible for the end of the European dream.

Excerpt:

Politicians are so busy fighting for their jobs, they hardly seem to notice that they risk going out of business. Democracy is on the wane, yet the problem is nowhere in Parliaments. Common to all is a progressive loss of vision, of long term planning and solutions, with politics used just for power.

Roberto Savio

In English, there are two terms: politics, which is term for the machinery, and policy, that is the vision. In Latin languages, there is only one, politics, and that is now becoming the adequate term also for English-speaking countries, from May’s UK to Trump’s US.

In a few years, we have seen an astonishing flourishing of authoritarian governments. Turkey’s Erdogan may be the best example. He was elected in 2002, and hailed as proof that you could be a Muslim and also a champion of democracy. At the end of the decade, he started to take a more fundamentalist and authoritarian approach, until in 2013 there was the famous crackdown on thousands of protesters, protecting a Park in Istanbul intended to be razed for a supermarket.

Since then, the tendency to use power has accelerated. In 2014, Erdogan was accused, along with his son, of corruption (three sons of cabinet ministers were also arrested). He blamed it on the Gulenist Movement, a spiritual movement led by an earlier ally, Fethullah Gulen, who now lives in the US. And when in 2016 some military factions attempted a coup against him, he used the coup as a reason to get rid of Gulenist and other dissidents. It has put 60,000 people in jail, and he has dismissed from public employment a staggering 100,000 people.

What is reminiscent of Stalin and Hitler’s practices is how those 100,000 have been treated. They have been banned from private employment, and their passports as well the ones of their families have been revoked. When asked how they will survive, the government’s reaction was to scoff that even eating roots would be “too good” for them.

We’re talking of hundreds of judges, tens of thousands of teachers, university professors, who have been dismissed without any hearing and without any formal imputation. Europe’s reaction? Empty declarations, and since then Erdogan has become more authoritarian.

He has built a Presidential Palace of 1,150 rooms, larger than the White House and the Kremlin, where there is a three-room office dedicated to taste his food to avoid poisoning. The palace cost between 500 million euro (the government’s declaration), and 1 billion dollars (opposition’ estimates).

It could be said in Europe’s defence that Turkey is not a member of the European Union, and his actions have made it extremely unlikely that membership in the EU is possible. But Poland and Hungary not only are members of the EU, but also the main beneficiaries of his economic support. Poland joined the EU in 2004, has received more than 100 billion dollars in various subsidies: double the Marshall Plan in current dollars, the largest transfer of money ever done in modern history.

Yet the government has embarked in a firm path to dismantle democratic institutions (the last, the judicial system), and even the sleepy EU has been obliged to warn that it could take away the right of Poland to vote, to the total indifference of the government. Yet nobody has formally proposed to cut the subsidies, which are now in the budget from 2014 to 2020 another 60 billion dollars – half of what the world spends for development aid for nearly 150 countries.

Hungry is run since 2010 by Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who campaigns for “an illiberal democracy”, and, like Poland’s PM Szydlo, has refused to accept any immigrants, in spite of EU subsidies. Hungary, despite its small population (less than 10 million, versus Poland’s 38 million) is the third largest recipient of EU’s subsidies, or 450 dollars per person.

One third of the world population lives on less than that. In addition, the European Investment Bank gives a net subsidy of 1 billion euro, and Hungary received 2.4 billion euro from the balance of Payment Assistance Program. The two countries have formed with Slovakia and Czechia, the Visegrad group, which is in a permanent campaign against the EU and its decisions. Needless to say, subsidies to Slovakia and Czechia largely surpass their contributions.

Are Erdogan, Orban, Szydlo and dictators? On the contrary, they are democratically elected, like Duterte in the Philippines, Mugabe in Zimbabwe, Maduro in Venezuela and other 30 authoritarian presidents in the world. But in Europe this is new. And it is also new to see an American President, Donald Trump, present an agenda of isolationism and international confrontation, who was also regularly elected.

A poll at the end of his first semester revealed that his voters would re-elect him again, with the Republican support going down only from 98% to 96%. Nationwide, his popularity has declined to 36%. If elections were held today, he would likely get a second term.

Which brings us to wonder why we still consider elections equivalent to democracy? Because this is how the people can express themselves. But people certainly do not like corruption, which in polls anywhere is considered the most prominent problem of modern governments.

However, unless it reaches a totally systematic level, like in Brazil, studies don’t show a strong correlation between corruption and electoral punishment. Corruption, in politics, has been used by populists, who has promised to get rid of it to the electorate: exactly what Trump did in his campaign, while now his conflict of interest and lack of transparency with his private interests have no precedent in the White House.

That brings us to the next question. If ideologies are gone, and politics have become mainly a question of administrative efficiency and personalities, what is the link between a candidate and his voters, and whose support persists despite everything, like those who voted for Erdogan, Trump, Orban and Szydlo?

Perhaps it is time that we start to look to politics with a new approach. What did we learn from the last few years’ elections?

That people are aligning themselves under a new paradigm, which is not political in the sense we have used until now: it is called IDENTITY. Voters now elect those with whom they identify, and support them because in fact they defend their identity, no matter what. They do not listen to contradictory information, which they dismiss as “fake news.” Let us see on what this identity issue is based: the new four divides.

There is first a new divide: cities against rural areas, small towns, villages, hamlets. In Brexit, people in urban areas voted to stay in Europe. The same goes for those who voted against Erdogan, who is unpopular in Istanbul, but very popular in the rural areas. In the US, those who vote d for Trump were largely from the poor states. The same has happened with Orban and Szydlo. None would be in power if the vote was restricted to the capital and the major towns.

There is a second new divide: young and older voters. Brexit would not have happened if all young people cared to vote. Same with Erdogan, Trump, Orban and Szydlo. The problem is that young people have in serious percentages stopped to be active in politics because they feel left out, and look to parties as self-maintaining machines, ridden with corruption and inefficiency.

Of course, this plays in favour of those who are already in the system, which perpetuates itself, without the generational lift for change. Italy found 20 billion dollars to save four small banks while the total subsidies for young people are 2 billion euro. No wonder they feel left out.

There is the third divide, which is also new, ideologies of the past were basically more inclusive, even if of course the class system played a significant role. The third divide is between those who have finished at least high school, and those who did not. This is going to increase dramatically in the next two decades, when the robotization of industry and services will reach at least 40% of the production.

Tens of millions of people will be left out, and they will be those with less education, unable to fit in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Elites look with disdain at the choices of electors who are considered ignorant and provincial, while the latter in turn consider the elite winners who reap whatever they can, and marginalize them.

Finally, there is a fourth divide, which is very important for the values of peace and cooperation as a basis for a world governance. It is the divide between those who see the return to nationalism as the solution to their problems (and therefore hate immigrants), and those who believe that their country, in an increasing competing world, can be better if it integrates in international or regional organizations.

Two extremely simplified examples: Europe and the US. There was a survey done by the EU among the nine million Erasmus, or the students who with a scholarship from that exchange program went to make lives in other countries. They have had more than 100,000 children by marrying somebody met abroad: the real Europeans.

In the poll, they were at 92% asking for more Europe, not less Europe. And in the US, the classic Trump voters, as white (a demographic group in decline: at every election 2% less of white vote), who did not get beyond secondary education, who do not read newspapers or books, coming from the poorer states. People who lost their jobs, often after closure of factories or mines, strongly believe that they are victims of globalization, which created social and economic injustice.

This is a consequence of the fact that during two decades, only macroeconomic indexes have been used, like the GNP. Social indicators were largely shunned. How the growth that GNP indicated was divided was not a concern for the IMF, World Bank, the EU and most politicians, who blindly believed that market was the only engine for growth and would solve social problems: only now have they tried to brakes on, too late. The world has seen an unprecedented explosion of inequality, which is helping nationalism and xenophobia to become a central part of the political debate.

Nationalism is not confined to Trump, Erdogan, Orban and Szydlo, and to Brexit. China, India, Japan, the Philippines, Israel, Egypt, Russia, and other countries are now run by nationalist and authoritarian governments. This bring us to a very simple conclusion. Either the transition to an unknown new political system, that will certainly replace the present unsustainable system, will be based on the values of social justice, cooperation and peace (probably updating the present international organizations), or it is difficult to see how we will avoid conflicts, wars and bloodshed.

Why is man the only animal who does not learn from previous experience?

By Roberto Savio
ROME, May 16 2017 (IPS)

Immediately after the vote on Brexit, thousands of young people marched in the streets of England to show their disagreement over the choice to leave Europe. But polls indicated that had they voted en masse (only 37 percent voted), the result of the referendum would have been the opposite.

Roberto Savio

The European Parliament conducted research on the European elections of 2014 in the 28 member countries. While the youngest Europeans (18-24) are more positive about the European Union than the oldest (55+), far fewer of them turned out to vote. Turnout was higher among the oldest respondents.

Some 51 percent of the 55+ voted, while only 28 percent did in the 18-24 age group. This is relatively unchanged since the 2009 elections. And young people were more inclined to decide on the day of the elections, or a few days before (28 percent compared with the +55 group).

Already in 2014, 31 percent of the younger group said they never voted, against 19 percent of the 55+ age group. Yet, the younger the age, the more people had the feeling of being Europeans: 70 percent for the 18-24 year-olds, and 59 percent for the 55+ group.

It could be said, of course, that European elections are a special case. But a look at the past national elections in Europe confirms this trend. In the Austrian presidential elections of 2016, youth participation was at 43 percent. In 2010, it was 48 percent.

In the Dutch parliamentarian elections of 2017, the age group 18-24 vote was at 66 percent: it was 70 percent in 2012. In the Italian referendum of December 2016, the youth abstention was 38 percent, against 32 percent of the general population. And in the recent French presidential elections, the data are consistent: 78 percent abstention for the 25-34 age group; 65 percent for the 24-35; a solid 51 percent for the 35-49; and then 44 percent for the 50-64, with only 30 percent for those 65 and over.

In Israel, just 58 percent of under 35s, and just 41 percent of those under 25, voted in 2013, compared with 88 percent of over 55s. In Britain and Poland less than half of under 25s voted in the last general elections, compared with 88 percent of over 55s.

The growing youth abstention has significant implications. Let us take the last American elections that brought Donald Trump to the White House. The so-called Millennials, those of the age group 18-35, now make up 31 percent of the electorate. The Silent Generation (those 71+) are now 12 percent of the voting pool, and Generation X (36-51) makes up about 25 percent of the electorate.

Bernie Sanders’ run was based on 2 million votes from the 19-24 age group – voters who basically abandoned the elections after his loss in the primaries. Young people’s abstention rate, close to 67 percent, made the Millennials equivalent to the Silent Generation, and lost its demographic advantage. Millennials had a favourable view of Sanders at 54 percent, against 37 percent of Clinton. Just 17 percent of young people had a positive view of Trump.

Had only millennials voted, Clinton would have won the election in a landslide, with 473 electoral votes to Trump’s 32.

The first obvious observation is that if the traditional intergenerational rift disappears, we will have little change in politics, as older voters are usually more conservative. And the second obvious observation is that citizens’ participation will progressively shrink, as the young will age.

What is worrying is that we have too many polls on the reasons behind the political disenchantment of young people to think that the political system is unaware. On the contrary, many political analysts think that parties in power don’t mind abstentions in general terms. It shrinks the voters to those who feel connected, whose priorities are clear and simpler to satisfy, as the older generations feel more secure than the younger ones.

And the theme of young people is disappearing in the political debate, or is merely rhetorical. A good example is that the Italian government devoted in 2016 a whopping 20 billion dollars to save four banks, while it dedicated a total of 2 billion dollars to create jobs for young people, in a country which has close to 40 percent youth unemployment.

For youth, the message is clear: finance is more important than their future. So they do not vote, and they are less and less a factor in the political system.

Spending on education and research are the first victims (together with health) when austerity hits. The results are evident. In Australia (where 25 percent of the young people said that “it does not matter what kind of government we have”), those over 65 pay no tax on income under 24,508 dollars. Younger workers start paying taxes at 15,080 dollars.

In rich countries the world over, people over 65 have subsidies and special discounts, such as on the cinema and other activities. Not the young people…. But when somebody with a message for the young comes into the picture, participation changes. In Canada, just 37 percent of the 18-24s voted in the election of 2008, against 39 percent in 2011. But when Justin Trudeau campaigned on a message of hope in 2015, youth participation rose sharply to 57 percent.

What is a real cause of concern for democracy, as an institution based on the waning concept of popular participation, is that young people are not at all apolitical. In fact, they are very aware of priorities like climate change, gender equality, social justice, common goods, and other concepts, much more than the older generation. At least 10 percent of young people volunteer in social groups and civil society, against 3 percent of the older generations.

They feel much more connected to the causes of humanity, have fewer racial biases, believe more in international institutions, and are more interested in international affairs. A good example is Chile. In 2010 general abstention was 13.1 percent. In 2013 it went to 58 percent. Youth abstention was 71 percent. If young people would vote, they could change the results.

Simply, they have given up on political institutions as corrupt, inefficient, and disconnected from their lives. A report last year found that 72 percent of Americans born before the Second World War thought it was “essential” to live in a country that was governed democratically. Less than a third of those born in the 1980s agreed.

We must note that the decline of participation in elections is a worldwide phenomenon, not just among young people, but also the general population. The last elections at the writing of this article were in the Bahamas; only 50 percent of the population went to vote. In Slovenia abstention is now at 57.6 percent, in Mali 54.2 percent, in Serbia 53.7 percent, in Portugal 53.5 percent, in Lesotho 53.4 percent, in Lithuania 52.6 percent, in Colombia 52.1 percent, in Bulgaria 51.8 percent, in Switzerland 50.9 percent…and this in regions as different as Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia…the crisis of political participation goes from the cradle of the parliamentarian system (Great Britain), 24 percent abstention, in 1964, to 34.2 in 2010 to Italy (7.1 percent in 2063, and in 2013 24.8 percent).

There is a general consensus among analysts that the damages of globalization and the discrediting of political parties are the major causes for the decline in participation. Yet the winners never take into account the reasons of the losers. The victory of Macron in the last French elections was well-received in Germany, but as soon as the new president started to speak about the need to strengthen Europe, for instance by creating a European finance minister, the immediate reaction was: Germany is not going to place one cent of its well-earned surplus with Europe to the service of other countries: those who spend their money on women and drinks and now expect solidarity form the North of Europe (the Dutch President of Eurofin, Jeroen Dijsselbloem).

How long it will it take to get the winners inside the European Union to understand that the political crisis is a global one, and must be addressed urgently? Voter turnout has been dropping precipitously in Germany, from over 82 percent in 1998 to only 70.8 percent in 2009. As at the last election, this year the number of non-voters is expected to surpass the number of voters in favor of the most successful party.

Manfred Güllner, the head of the Forsa polling institute, warns of a non-voter record. “There is reason to fear that fewer than 70 percent of eligible voters will go to the polls,” he says. If the non-voters were included on a conventional TV graphic, they would have the highest bar in the chart. They should actually be touted as the true winners of the election — if it weren’t for the fact that this also represents a defeat for democracy.

Excerpt:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Feb 21 2017 (IPS)

Let us stop debating what newly-elected US President Trump is doing or might do and look at him in terms of historical importance. Put simply, Trump marks the end of an American cycle!

Roberto Savio

The United States emerged from the Second World War as the main winner and founder of what became the major international institutions – from the United Nations to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – with Europe reduced to the role of follower. In fact, under the Marshall Plan, the United States became the force behind the post-war reconstruction of Europe.

As winner, the main interest of the United States was to establish a ‘world order’ based on its values and acting as guarantor of the ‘order’.

Thus the United Nations was created with a Security Council in which it could veto any resolution, and the World Bank was created with the US dollar as the world’s currency, not with a real world currency as British economist and delegate John Maynard Keynes had proposed. The creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) – as a response to any threat from the Soviet Union – was an entirely American idea.

The lexicon of international relations was largely based on Anglo-Saxon words, and often difficult to translate into other languages – terms such as accountability, gender mainstreaming, sustainable development, and so on. French and German disappeared as international languages, and lifestyle became the ubiquitous American export – from music to food, films and clothes. All this helped to reinforce American myths.

The United States thrust itself forward as the “model for democracy” throughout the world, based on the implied assertion that what was good for the United States was certainly good for all other countries. The United States saw itself as having an exceptional destiny based on its history, its success and its special relationship with God. Only US presidents could speak on behalf of the interests of humankind and invoke God.

The economic success of the United States was merely confirmation of its exceptional destiny – but the much touted American dream that anyone could become rich was unknown elsewhere.

The first phase of US policy after the Second World War was based on multilateralism, international cooperation and respect for international law and free trade – a system which assured the centrality and supremacy of the United States, reinforced by its military might,

The United Nations, which grew from its original 51 countries in 1945 to nearly 150 in just a few decades, was the forum for establishing international cooperation based on the values of universal democracy, social justice and equal participation.

In 1974, the UN General Assembly unanimously adopted the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States – the first (and only) plan for global governance – which called for a plan of action to reduce world inequalities and redistribute wealth and economic production. But this quickly became to be seen by the United States as a straitjacket.

The arrival of Ronald Reagan at the White House in in1981 marked an abrupt change in this phase of American policy based on multilateralism and shared international cooperation. A few months before taking office, Reagan had attended the North-South Economic Summit in Cancun, Mexico, where the 22 most important heads of state (with China as the only socialist country) had met to discuss implementation of the General Assembly resolution.

Reagan, who met up with enthusiastic British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, stopped the plan for global governance dead in its tracks. I was there and saw how, to my dismay, the world went from multilateralism to the old policy of power in just two days. The United State simply refused to see its destiny being decided by others – and that was the start of the decline of the United Nations, with the United States refusing to sign any international treaty or obligation.

America’s dream and its exceptional destiny were strengthened by the rhetoric of Reagan who even went as far as slogan sing “God is American”.

It is important to note that, following Reagan’s example, all the other major powers were happy to be freed of multilateralism. The Reagan administration, allied with that of Thatcher, provided an unprecedented example of how to destroy the values and practices of international relations and the fact that Reagan has probably been the most popular president in his country’s history shows the scarce significance that the average American citizen gives to international cooperation.

Under Reagan, three major simultaneous events shaped our world. The first was deregulation of the financial system in 1982, later reinforced by US President Bill Clinton in 1999, which has led to the supremacy of finance, the results of which are glaringly evident today.

The second was the creation in 1989 of an economic vision based on the supremacy of the market as the force underpinning societies and international relations – the so-called Washington Consensus – thus opening the door for neoliberalism as the undisputed economic doctrine.

Third, also in 1989, came the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the “threat” posed by the Soviet bloc.

It was at this point that the term “globalisation” became the buzzword, and that the United States was once again going to be the centre of its governance. With its economic superiority, together with the international financial institution which it basically controlled, plus the fact that the Soviet “threat” had now disappeared, the United States was once again placing itself at the centre of the world.

As Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, once said, “Globalisation is another term for U.S. domination.”

This phase ran from 1982 until the financial crisis of 2008, when the collapse of American banks, followed by contagion in Europe, forced the system to question the Washington Consensus as an undisputable theory.

Doubts were also being voiced loudly through the growing mobilisation of civil society /the World Social Forum, for example, had been created in 1981) and by the offensive of many economists who had previously remained in silence.

The latter began insisting that macroeconomics – the preferred instrument of globalisation – looked only at the big figures. If microeconomics was used instead, they argued, it would become clear that there was very unequal distribution of growth (not to be confused with development) and that delocalisation and other measures which ignored the social impact of globalisation, were having disastrous consequences.

The disasters created by three centuries of geed as the main value of the “new economy” were becoming evident through figures showing an unprecedented concentration of wealth in a few hands, with many victims – especially among the younger generation.

All this was accompanied by two new threats: the explosion of Islamic terrorism, widely recognised as a result of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the phenomenon of mass migration, which largely came after the Iraq war but multiplied after the interventions in Syria and Libya in 2011, and for which the United States and the European Union bear full responsibility.

Overnight, the world passed from greed to fear – the two motors of historical change in the view of many historians.

And this is brings us to Mr. Trump. From the above historical excursion, it is easy to understand how he is simply the product of American reality.

Globalisation, initially an American instrument of supremacy, has meant that everyone can use the market to compete, with China the most obvious example. Under globalisation, many new emerging markets entered the scene, from Latin America to Asia. The United States, along with Europe, have become the victims of the globalisation which both perceived as an elite-led phenomenon.

Let us not forget that, after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, ideologies were thrown by the wayside. Politics became mere administrative competition, devoid of vision and values. Corruption increased, citizens stopped participating, political parties became self-referential, politicians turned into a professional caste, and elite global finance became isolated in fiscal paradises.

Young people looked forward to a future of unemployment or, at best temporary jobs, at the same time as they watched over four trillion dollars being spent in a few years to save the banking system.

The clarion call from those in power was, by and large, let us go back to yesterday, but to an even better yesterday – against any law of history. Then came Brexit and Trump.

We are now witnessing the conclusion of Pax Americana and the return to a nationalist and isolationist America. It will take some time for Trump voters to realise that what he is doing does not match his promises, that the measures he is putting in place favour the financial and economic elites and not their interests.

We are now facing a series of real questions.

Will the ideologue who helped Trump be elected – Stephen Bannon, chief executive officer of Trump’s presidential campaign – have the time to destroy the world both have inherited Will the world will be able to establish a world order without the United States at its centre? How many of the values that built modern democracy will be able to survive and become the bases for global governance?

A new international order cannot be built without common values, just on nationalism and xenophobia.

Bannon is organising a new international alliance of populists, xenophobes and nationalists – made up of thee likes of Nicholas Farage (United Kingdom), Matteo Salvini and Beppe Grillo (Italy), Marine Le Pen (France) and Geert Wilders (Netherlands) – with Washington as their point of reference.

After the elections in the Netherlands, France and Germany this year, will know how this alliance will fare, but one thing is clear – if, beyond its national agenda, the Trump administration succeeds in creating a new international order based on illiberal democracy, we should start to worry because war will not be far away.

Excerpt:

George W. Bush, the Republican bridge between Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump as U.S. president, declared that the United States was the only democracy in the world. The election of Trump now makes this traditional American rhetoric impossible. Trump received 3 million votes less than his opponent Hilary Clinton ….

Roberto Savio

Each state is entitled to two senators – both Wyoming with 635,000 inhabitants and California with 39 million. The nine most populous states of the Union are home to just over 50 percent of the total population. The 25 least populated states house less than one-sixth. California has more inhabitants than 21 of the least populated states. But in the Senate, just 26 of the Union’s 50 states with slightly over 15 people of the American people have the majority vote.

The same happens with the election of the President. The vote of the citizens elects representatives not calibrated according to voters but to states, which elect the President. Trump was basically elected with the votes of the inhabitants of rural areas and declining industrial areas, representing the country’s numerical minority.

According to all constitutionalists, a democracy is based on the balance among the legislative, executive and judicial branches. This balance has ceased to exist since the time of Ronald Reagan. In a country where only 50 percent of people vote, political polarisation has led to a structural conflict between the legislative and the executive branches of the system.

The Supreme Court, which is supposed to defend the rights of citizens, has become a political arm of the President who appoints the judges. With a Republican majority, it sanctioned the victory of George W. Bush – not Al Gore – in the presidential elections of 2000, bypassing the popular will. And in 2010 it decided that companies have the same rights as citizens and can therefore finance election campaigns, just like citizens.

As a result, the Koch brothers, lords of fossil fuel, can vote individually as citizens but contribute 900 million dollars to conservative Republican candidates. A presidential election costs at least two billion dollars. And a senatorial election 40 million. These are figures that marginalise the ordinary citizen. Do we not then have an oligarchy rather than a democracy?

Basically, democracy ceases to be real if citizens no longer believe in the political system. And this is not just the American way, but also that of Europe.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, with the end of ideologies, politics has lost vision and long-range strategy, to become a basically administrative fact, with a substantive increase in corruption. Citizens, and especially young people, do not feel part of the system. From being participatory mechanisms, political parties have become self-referential.

And to political disaffection, we should add the discovery that the neo-liberal economic model of the free market has in no way led to the growth announced for all, but has instead increased to an unprecedented extent the gap between the rich (increasingly fewer) and the poor (increasingly more numerous).

Today, just eight men own the same wealth as the 3.6 billion people who make up the poorest half of humanity, according to an Oxfam report. Since the crisis of 2008, at least four trillion dollars have been invested in the global financial system. In Italy, the state is investing 20 billion euros in the rescue of the Monte dei Paschi di Siena bank, a sum that would solve the problems of the country’s education and health sectors. Banks meanwhile have paid 220 billion in fines for illegal activities. Not a single banker has been sent to prison, neither in Europe nor in the United States. And salaries can easily exceed a million dollars …

This disastrous ethical, political and social framework is compounded by mass immigration which, it should be recalled, is the result in large part of US and European military interventions in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen.

That’s why, as Pope Francis eloquently says, people are looking for a saviour.

The crisis of 2008, born in the United States from the fiasco of junk mortgages, and then transferred to Europe through speculation on state securities, gave rise to saviours in almost all European countries, a process which was crowned with Brexit. Now they’re on the attack.

Heartened by the victory of Trump, a meeting was held in Koblenz, Germany, on January 21 of right-wing xenophobic and populist candidates at the next Dutch, French and German elections, who have formed the Europe of Nations and Freedom Group in the European Parliament. Present for Italy was Matteo Salvini who is calling for Italian elections in June, and who declares that the three founding countries of Europe – France, Italy and Germany – will soon shatter the chains of the European Union and refound the Europe of Nations.

It is interesting to note that all look to Vladimir Putin as a point of reference, the call for a conservative and traditional church, the defence of family values against recognition of the rights of homosexuals, and the call for national values. And the impact on politics is important.

In Italy, Trump’s predecessor Silvio Berlusconi says we must no longer speak of parties, which have become unpopular, but of movements. And Beppe Grillo of Italy’s 5-Star Movement, who today would win the Italian elections, has declared that Trump and Putin are a heritage for humanity.

As background to this Western context, we have a China, a Japan and an India ruled by nationalists. And a Philippines with a president elected on the promise to kill 60,000 people, victims of drugs. And a Latin America undergoing a profound political crisis, evident in a different way from Brazil to Venezuela, from Colombia to Bolivia, from Ecuador to Central America. And an Africa, with a population that will increase from a population of one billion to two billion in just three decades, which continues to have frequent democratic crises and inadequate responses to the economic and social needs of the continent.

But the real news is that the Anglophonic world has decided to abdicate its historic role in favour of democracy and multilateralism. It should be recognised that we have so far lived in a very Anglophonic world. Until the First World War, the world lived under Pax Britannica, which had colonised 25 percent of the planet. And after that, we had almost a century of Pax Americana. The creation of the United Nations and international institutions, the concepts of gender equality, action against climate change, as well as neo-liberal globalisation, all came mainly from the Anglophonic world.

In just a few months, the Brexit vote has taken Britain back in time, and the United States under Trump is moving from a global policy to one with a purely national dimension. All this is taking place in a multi-polar world, where China can now find unforeseen opportunities, like the other emerging countries so far framed in a world order governed by the United States and its European allies.

But now, suddenly, the United States is actively engaged in destabilising traditional allies. It should be noted that Trump’s strategist Stephen Bannon has said that part of his task at the White House is to strengthen European xenophobic parties and movements, and he cites Nigel Farage, the architect of Brexit, as the European model to work with. Trump’s statements against the European Union, NATO, the United Nations and international agreements are known.

The Trump Revolution will not be easy, and will hopefully create a mobilisation in defence of the values through which we have had 70 years of international cooperation. The development of greed – and replacement of the person as the centre of society by the market – has certainly emptied the world order of its idealistic content.

But what will this new world order be, based on nationalism, fear and greed? What is certain is that a style of governing that belies the data of reality foments tension and hatred as political tools, fights against culture, intellectuals, the press, women, minorities, homosexuals and neighbours, and will have a profoundly negative impact on politics and society, ethics and democracy, in the world.

So, the real question is: will Trump have one term, or two? If his electorate, which is basically localist, and thus ignorant of the world, does not understand that it has been used by Trump and so re-elects him, we will certainly enter an era of tension and fear, clashes and conflicts, in which it will not be pleasant to live. And we will see what happens in Europe and the rest of the world without international cooperation, which leads to peace and development ….

With the inauguration of Donald Trump on Jan. 20, the new leadership of the most powerful nation has signaled it is breaking away from the rest of the world. Here, a few thoughts…

a) Those who voted Trump are generally totally unaware of what happens beyond their immediate surroundings. So it will take a long time before they will realize that Trump is not about their real interest. This means that the polarization and the division of the U.S. will continue for a long time to come. And in the end, disillusionment and frustration will result in a further decline of democracy, and with a possible new populism coming up.

Roberto Savio

b) The American democratic system is incomprehensible for us foreigners. We understand the history, the constitution, everything. But we think that a system where somebody who with 3 million votes less than his opponent becomes president, on the basis that this was adequate two centuries ago, needs to be updated urgently. And then you find out that this is not possible, because the smaller states are majority, and can block any constitutional change, like direct democracy. This, for us, looks like an inadequate democratic system.

c) Since the Supreme court did install George W. Bush, and then gave a vote to the corporations because they have equal rights as the people, we foreigners look at the Supreme Court as a partisan place, not as the Supreme institution that is there to act in defense of the citizens. Add to this the permanent fight between the legislative, judicial and executive, and instead of the balance of power that the founding fathers wanted, we have a dysfunctional democracy.

d) Elections now cost over 2 billion dollars. To be elected in the senate, you need a war chest of least 40 million dollars. You have two brothers who can invest in the elections 800 million dollars. That is not democracy, it is oligarchy.

All this are structural problems, and for me Trump is the proof that democracy in the U.S. is in crisis. Yet, I ceased to discuss this with my American friends, because they are not only convinced to be in a democracy, but many, as George W Bush said, the only democracy….

Maybe Trump will bring debates and reflections on the state of democracy in the US. But I doubt that the system will be able to evolve. Especially if Trump stays eight years….

But that said, a crisis of democracy is when people stop believing in it. And in Europe this is what is happening, and Brexit is a clear signal of that. Today the European leaders of populist and xenophobe parties met in Coblenz, to coordinate themselves, in view of the next elections in the Netherlands, France and Germany. And here two points, to echo somehow David:

1) All the right wing parties look to Putin as a point of reference. Defence of the family, religious values, national interests and identity, etc. Putin has been funding Le Pen, and Wilders, Farage, Salvini and so to look on him as a leader: not only Trump.
2) Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, has declared that part of his job is to create an international Alliance of populist and xenophobe parties, and he has indicated Farage as the example of a European whom the White House is looking up to.

My conclusion: we are in for a hell of a time. And the best example that we have is that the compass is lost and that we all live in an Anglo world, with values of democracy, human rights, common gods, sustainable development, woman empowerment and so on, which all come from the Anglo world. Pax Britannia lasted until 1914. It was replaced by Pax Americana. And in 11 months, both countries abdicated their role in the world…knowing well that we are in a multipolar world, with China, India and so on in the race…this is simply crazy…