Oil extraction in the Orinoco Belt, southeastern Venezuela. The crude extracted from this rich basin is very heavy and requires blending with diluent oil for refining—a process previously handled by U.S. company Chevron, which must now cease operations in the country. Credit: PDVSA

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Apr 25 2025 (IPS)

Reduced to a marginal oil producer over the past decade, Venezuela has suffered another blow as United States president Donald Trump ordered punitive measures to blockade and further restrict the country’s oil exports.

Venezuelan crude will likely navigate the fringes of global oil trade and finance, flowing toward Asian markets as the government seeks to avoid financial suffocation—possibly without ruling out new negotiations with Washington."Revenues will drop significantly because PDVSA will struggle to produce, obtain diluents, and won’t have the capacity to invest in projects." — Francisco Monaldi

“Venezuela has been very hostile to the United States and the Freedoms which we espouse. Therefore, any Country that purchases Oil and/or Gas from Venezuela will be forced to pay a Tariff of 25% to the United States on any Trade they do with our Country,” Trump wrote on his media platform Truth Social on March 24.

Simultaneously, Trump revoked licenses allowing U.S. firms Chevron and Global Oil Terminals, Spain’s Repsol, France’s Maurel & Prom, India’s Reliance, and Italy’s Eni to operate in Venezuela.

The foreseeable outcome “will be a drop in oil production—possibly over 100,000 barrels per day—with lower revenues and difficulties in placing crude on the black market,” Francisco Monaldi, a fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute’s Center for Energy Studies, told IPS.

Venezuela, which once produced three million barrels (159 liters each) per day in the early 2000’s, has seen a decline since 2013, falling below 400,000 barrels in 2020.

Until the beginning of this century, Venezuela was a major oil producer and exporter, thanks to the vast reserves in the Maracaibo Lake basin in the west. Although underground reserves remain enormous, production has declined, and the country has lost its leading role in the global hydrocarbon market. Credit: Mdnava / Fe y Alegría

This is a stark contrast to its history as the world’s second-largest producer and top exporter a century ago, a co-founder of OPEC in 1960, and still home to the largest crude reserves—over 300 billion barrels.

The collapse of the industry and state-owned PDVSA resulted from a mix of dwindling investments, neglected maintenance, erratic management, and bad deals—all amid economic and social collapse and intense political strife.

Moreover, corruption has reached such heights that several former Energy Ministers and presidents of PDVSA have been imprisoned, while others are fugitives abroad. According to the Venezuelan chapter of Transparency International, the amounts that “evaporated” without ever reaching state coffers add up to tens of billions of dollars.

Additionally, Washington imposed escalating sanctions on Venezuelan political and military leaders, with severe effects on PDVSA’s supplies and operations, the Central Bank, and other state entities.

GDP shrank to a quarter of its early-2000s level, hyperinflation reached six digits, income-based poverty hit 90%, and eight million Venezuelans—one in four—left the country.

However, since 2022, Washington’s green light for Chevron and other foreign firms helped production recover to 760,000 barrels per day in 2023, 857,000 in 2024, and 913,000 in March 2025, according to OPEC’s secondary sources.

Chevron accounted for 25% of this output, with PDVSA handling the rest. The U.S. firm also facilitated the import of 50,000 barrels of diluent daily to blend with Venezuela’s heavy crude, In order to improve and facilitate refining.

“It is assumed PDVSA will take over Chevron’s fields, but a drop is inevitable,” Andrés Rojas, editor of Venezuelan oil journal Petroguía, told IPS.

An oil tanker docks at the Waidiao terminal in Zhejiang province, eastern China. The Asian giant is the primary destination for Venezuelan oil, and this flow may increase as Venezuela loses its U.S. market due to new sanctions imposed by President Donald Trump. Credit: Zhejiang Municipal Government

The impact 

Monaldi explains that of Venezuela’s 700,000 daily exportable barrels, half went to “licensed destinations” (mainly the United States, Europe, and India), while the rest went to China (as debt repayment) and Cuba.

Economist Asdrúbal Oliveros, head of Ecoanalítica, consulting firm, estimates Venezuela will lose over US$3 billion this year from Chevron’s withdrawal, leaving external revenues at no more than US$13 billion for its 29 million people.

Government “revenues will plummet because PDVSA will struggle to produce (due to shortages of materials and spare parts), secure diluents, and invest in projects,” Monaldi said.

The expert explains that PDVSA will have to return to the black market, using practices such as transferring crude oil at sea or in the Strait of Malacca in Southeast Asia to vessels different from those originally dispatched.

This way, the oil reaches its destination, usually China, labeled as being produced in Malaysia or another part of the world.

However, these distant and complicated routes have the dual effect of increasing costs—including freight and insurance—and reducing revenue, as the oil must be sold at discounts of 30% or more compared to prices on the regular market.

Meanwhile, the trade, economic, and financial shock triggered by Trump’s tariff storm this month is driving oil prices down, with current benchmarks like West Texas Intermediate (WTI) at US$63 and North Sea Brent at US$67 per barrel.

Oil transfers between tankers take place offshore or near international trade hubs, such as the Strait of Malacca in Asia. This method, though riskier and costlier, is used as a black-market mechanism to evade sanctions like those imposed by Washington on Venezuela. Credit: Verdemar

Black market challenges 

In April of this year, two oil tankers—the Bahamian-flagged Carina Voyager and the Marshall Islands-registered Dubai Attraction—loaded 500,000 and 350,000 barrels of crude, respectively, at Venezuelan terminals. The oil was initially meant to be transported by Chevron to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

However, the vessels had to turn around and return to Venezuelan ports after state-run PDVSA realized it would not be able to collect payment for the shipments due to Washington’s sanctions. The cargoes will now be diverted to Venezuela’s top Asian client: China.

“PDVSA has done this since 2019 with Russian and Iranian support, using two or three intermediaries to deliver the loads,” Rojas noted.

In addition to the higher costs stemming from intermediaries, longer distances, and increased risks, Rojas points out that Venezuelan crude is heavier than benchmark Brent and WTI oils, meaning its price per barrel is roughly US$10 lower.

Monaldi notes that even if China disregards Washington’s threat to hike tariffs on Venezuelan oil imports—or Malaysia, where much of this black-market trade flows—risk premiums will rise, and Venezuela will bear the brunt by receiving insufficient diluents for its heavy crudes.

The Carina Voyager, one of the Bahamian-flagged tankers chartered by Chevron in April to transport Venezuelan crude to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast, had to turn around and return its cargo. PDVSA made the decision after realizing payment would be impossible due to Trump’s sanctions. Credit: Sun Enterprises

“The situation is extremely complicated, and this will likely push the Venezuelan economy—which had been experiencing modest growth in recent years (2.6% in 2023 and 5.0% in 2024, according to the Venezuelan Finance Observatory)—back into recession, possibly as early as 2025,” the expert warns.

Monaldi adds that the recession will come alongside a sharp depreciation of the bolívar against the dollar (already over 50% since January) and, consequently, higher inflation, which Ecoanalítica estimates could reach 189% this year.

In this new game, even American oil importers lose out—they had benefited from cheaper Venezuelan crude, which allowed them to free up United States oil volumes for higher-priced exports to third countries, Rojas noted.

He also points out that Chevron’s withdrawal “hurts communities like Soledad” (a town of 35,000 in southeastern Venezuela), where a health center relied on support from the corporation as part of its social responsibility program.

And, as a final blow to Venezuela’s setbacks, two South American neighbors—once net importers of its oil—have now joined the thriving club of exporters welcomed by Washington: Brazil, which produces 3.4 million barrels per day, and Guyana, now pumping 650,000 barrels daily.

The two White House hopefuls debated on ABC television on September 10, 2024, but their mentions of Latin America were mainly dedicated to the issue of migration. Credit: Michael Le Brecht II / ABC

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Oct 24 2024 (IPS)

Migration, trade, the defence of democracy, the confrontation with China and the collapse of multilateralism are issues that shed more doubts than certainties on Latin America’s expectations of the imminent presidential elections in the United States.

Interest and tension have grown after dozens of polls and bookmakers have shown similar chances of victory for Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump, particularly in a few decisive states.“After Washington's retreat from the wars it got into in the Middle East, there is resistance among people to getting involved in the world's problems, which weakens the liberal democratic order”: Vilma Petrash.

Latin America has been treated by many US administrations as its ‘backyard’, but it is now commonplace that Washington’s international priority lies far from the region.

Nevertheless, “we should not underestimate the ways in which Democrats and Republicans are different”, warned Tullo Vigevani, former professor of international relations at Brazil’s Paulista State University.

“For example, their proposals and policies are very different on the environment, in general and in relation to Latin America; on renewable energy and biofuels – particularly in the case of Brazil – and regarding human rights and some authoritarian trends in the region”, Vigevani told IPS from Sao Paulo.

Even if some governments are more sympathetic to Harris or Trump, Vigevani believes that both Washington and the region’s capitals will seek understandings and a relationship as normal as possible, after the 5 November election.

Migrants in the Mexican border city of Tijuana approach the barrier that closes access to the United States. Credit: Alejandro Cartagena / IOM

Migration rules

Among the campaign issues, such as economy and employment, taxes, health, wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and the opposing personalities of both candidates, migration stands out, with Latin American countries being the main expellers of migrants to the United States.

“It is a sensitive issue for Americans, whether they are Democrats, Republicans or independents. It affects the immigrant population, the millions of refugees, and therefore the countries of Latin America,” Vilma Petrash, a Venezuelan professor of political science and international relations at Miami Dade College, told IPS.

Of the 336 million people living in the United States, 46.2 million were of foreign origin in 2022, according to the non-governmental Pew Research Center; 49% are already U.S. citizens, 24% are legal permanent residents, and the rest, more than 11 million people, are unauthorised immigrants, eight million of whom are from Latin American and Caribbean countries.

In fact, the United States is currently home to 65 million ‘Hispanics’, as Latin Americans are called in the country, according to different reports, and they have become a desired prize for the two candidates.

Trump, who pushed for the construction of a wall on the southern border during his presidency (2017-2021), now offers massive deportations of illegals – one million immediately, according to his vice-presidential candidate, James Vance -, and to contain irregular border immigration even by using the military.

They are “the enemy within”, Trump has said, and has stigmatised migrants: he said that criminals from Venezuela have left their country for the United States, “leaving Caracas as one of the safest cities in the world”, or that Haitians “are eating the pets” in the northern industrial state of Ohio.

Harris, who is the current vice-president and lead programmes with which president Joe Biden also tried to address causes of migration, such as poverty in Central America, has said that the immigration system “needs reform”, without going into details.

Whichever side wins, the controls will predictably increase, and Washington’s announcement that it will not renew in 2025 the temporary stay permits (parole), which allow Venezuelans, Haitians, Cubans and Nicaraguans to enter and remain in the United States for two years, was a warning sign.

The US aircraft carrier USS Nimitz sails through the Arabian Gulf. Credit: US Army

The United States isolates itself

The migration issue shows the United States’ willingness to isolate itself, to withdraw, instead of taking a proactive approach, as a great global power, to solving problems in the region and the world.

According to Petrash, “after Washington’s retreat from the wars it got into in the Middle East, there is resistance among people to getting involved in the world’s problems, which weakens the liberal democratic order. Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ policies are a case in point”.

The expert said from Miami, in the southeastern state of Florida, that there is also a lack of consensus over foreign policy, and in general over governance, to the point that a part of the population still, countering evidence, supports the version that it was Trump and not Biden who won the election four years ago.

While Biden has consistently supported Ukraine in the war against Russia, and Israel’s current military offensive in the Middle East, his political action in favour of democracy in Latin America has been weaker, and Harris would continue this, although with revisions, according to Petrash.

This is despite the certainty that, for example, among the alternatives for containing regional migration, in which the exodus of more than seven million Venezuelans in the last decade stands out, is to promote a solution to the democratic crisis in that country.

As a result of its policies and omissions, its polarised political confrontation and doubts about its electoral system, and the rise of isolationism, the United States “would have to regain the moral stature necessary to help stem democratic backsliding in the region”, says Petrash.

These setbacks are expressed in left-wing governments with authoritarian tendencies, such as those in Nicaragua and Venezuela, but also in sectors that have backed right-wing presidencies such as those of Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022) in Brazil and the current administrations of Javier Milei in Argentina and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador.

Bolsonaro, Milei and Bukele have openly identified with Trump, whose sector harbours a far-right conservative current. For Petrash, this could favour a rapprochement with Latin American countries where there is a democratic backlash.

Unloading wind turbines from China at the port of Bahía Blanca, Argentina. It shows China’s penetration into the renewable energy sector in the Southern Cone, where it is already a major trading partner. Credit: Port of Bahía Blanca

China moves forward

Petrash points out that the United States’s international retreat was acute in Latin America, “its natural strategic zone”, after the failure of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) initiative in 2005. “It abandoned its vision of free trade in the region and let China move forward with its enclaves,” she said.

China, “an economic, political and ideological rival, has sold itself as successful authoritarianism, and has taken advantage of Washington’s absences in Latin America to advance its quiet, pragmatic diplomacy,” says Petrash.

Trade between China and Latin America reached US$480 billion in 2023 after increasing 35-fold in 2000-2022, while the region’s total trade with the world increased four-fold, according to the  Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). Nevertheless, trade with the Asian giant is still far from the region’s trade with the United States, which in the same year amounted to US$1.14 trillion.

Relations between Latin America and China “have grown and even strengthened in strategic areas such as new materials for energy production, lithium batteries -South America has large reserves of the mineral-, or artificial intelligence”, Vigevani states.

Certification of Brazilian meat for export. Brazil is the largest exporter of beef and poultry, and very active in the World Trade Organization. Credit: Abrafrigo

Brazil and Mexico

Meanwhile, Brazil is concerned about Washington’s disdain – which will be evident if Trump wins – for multilateral institutions, starting with the United Nations and the proposed renewal of its Security Council in order to make it effective.

For Vigevani, this distancing from multilateralism is illustrated by the blockade, which Washington has maintained since 2020, on the appointment of new members to the dispute settlement body of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), initiated by Trump and continued by Biden.

“Even if relations with Brazil and Latin America in general look normal, this United States refusal raises doubts for the future, because it is saying it is not interested in multilateral organisations,” said Vigevani.

In the case of a Trump victory, the Brazilian professor points out, there are also unanswered questions about what his war and peace policies will be.

An example is the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. Trump has said that “ending this war quickly is in the best interest of the United States” and that he can achieve “a peace agreement in one day”, without offering further details, said Vigevani.

“It is important because, despite the war, Brazil has a strong relationship with Russia, and a very active participation in the Brics group (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa),” Vigevani recalled.

According to Petrash, with Trump’s international policy, “the great power can be the bull in the china shop, and even more, the bull isolating itself in the china shop”.

At the other end of the region is Mexico, a partner of Canada and the United States in the trade agreement known as USMCA, which replaced in 2020 the North American Free Trade Agreement that has existed since 1994.

Along with maintaining the 3150-kilometre southern border of the United States, a destination for hundreds of thousands of migrants who cross the region each year, Mexico faces the campaign promise from both Harris and Trump that they intend to revise the USMCA as soon as they reach the White House.

Trump is expected to introduce tariffs and protectionist barriers, for example on Mexican production involving Chinese parts or technologies, and Harris is expected to increase environmental and labour requirements that favour industries with United States labour.

Whichever side wins, “with the new American policy of bringing companies back to the United States or to its partners in the USMCA, possibly the biggest issue now is the end of globalisation and the return to a developmentalist nationalism”, summarised Vigevani.

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 Farhang Jahanpour
OXFORD, Nov 18 2020 (IPS)

American democracy has survived a dangerous virus, and it has even come off the ventilator, but whether it will be restored to full health or will suffer for a long time (like a long Covid) from the negative effects of the virus of personality cult, chauvinism, populism, racism, militarism and, yes let’s say it, fascism, remains to be seen.

So far, President Trump has refused to accept that he has lost the election, and instead of conceding he has alleged massive fraud and vote rigging. Instead of conceding, on November 17the he fired Christopher Krebs, the director of the federal agency that vouched for the reliability of the 2020 election.

Trump continues to claim that the election was stolen from him. His personal lawyer Rudi Giuliani has been engaged in desperate efforts in the courts to prove his boss’s unsubstantiated claims, so far without success. As late as November 15th, Trump tweeted: “He [Biden] only won in the eyes of FAKE NEWS MEDIA. I concede NOTHING! We have a long way to go. This was a RIGGED ELECTION!” [Caps as in the original].

Whether ultimately Trump will be forced to concede and move on, his repeated claims of vote rigging and a stolen election have discredited US democracy and have undermined the US reputation as a law-abiding country with a smooth transition of power


In the midst of a deadly pandemic which so far has infected more than 11 million and killed nearly a quarter of a million Americans, the largest number in the world by far, Trump’s refusal to cooperate with the incoming administration to stem the tide of the infections and the resulting economic recession is highly irresponsible.

However, whether ultimately Trump will be forced to concede and move on, his repeated claims of vote rigging and a stolen election have discredited US democracy and have undermined the US reputation as a law-abiding country with a smooth transition of power. There have already been many clashes between Trump’s supporters and opponents, and tension may increase and result in violence before he leaves office.

Four years ago, when the reality TV star and property developer Donald Trump, who had never held any elected office, pushed all his competitors aside and elbowed himself into the White House, despite all the predictions and despite having received three million votes fewer than his opponent, many people were wondering whether the US Constitution’s famed checks and balances would work.

As he broke every rule in the book, blasted the media, sidelined Congress, appointed partisan justices to the Supreme Court, openly criticized the US security services, pulled out of many international treaties, alienated many democratic allies and cozied up with a bunch of authoritarian rulers, it seemed that checks and balances had failed.

The longstanding fear of Trump’s use of force to stay in power, his constant belittling and insulting of his opponent, his encouragement of his base to stick by him, and various attempts to outlaw or at least delegitimize postal votes had caused a great deal of concern among ordinary citizens and even politicians and pundits about a peaceful transition of power.

However, American voters took the matter into their own hands and by voting him out of office as one of only five one-term presidents over the past 100 years they have restored grounds for hope and optimism, but whether the next administration can repair all the damage that has been done to democracy and the rule of law will remains to be seen.

President Trump’s efforts to hold on to power have been unlike anything that Americans have experienced in recent memory, and they resemble the efforts of some rulers in third-world banana republics where the defeated candidates resort to force to subvert the will of the people. “What we have seen in the last week from the president more closely resembles the tactics of the kind of authoritarian leaders we follow,” Michael Abramowitz, the president of Freedom House, which tracks democracy, told the Times. “I never would have imagined seeing something like this in America.”

Apart from undermining democracy at home, Trump and his aides may also engage in some catastrophic adventures abroad before leaving office. According to a New York Times’s scoop, in a meeting with his senior advisors on November 12th, Trump asked them if there were options for a US strike on Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment facilities.

Apparently, they opposed Trump’s course of action because it could kick off a major war in the last weeks of his presidency. The fact is that Iran has not engaged in an illegal activity and has carried out civilian uranium enrichment under the IAEA supervision in keeping with the Iran nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) which Trump violated, and as a part of his “Maximum Pressure”, imposed crippling illegal sanctions on Iran.

Therefore, not only would an attack on those facilities have constituted a war crime, it would also have resulted in massive casualties among civilians living near those installations. A 2012 study found that a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities would kill between 5,000 and 70,000 people from the release of 1%-20% of the uranium hexafluoride gas at the Isfahan facility. However, if 50% or more of the gas were released the radioactive fallout would be proportionately larger. Even contemplating such an attack shows the extent of his irresponsibility and even criminality.

Another cause for concern is that even if there is a peaceful transition, the long-term effects of the election are still unpredictable. The vote was not a clear, one-sided repudiation of Trump’s authoritarian tendencies and a return to the rule of law. Although the Biden-Harris ticket prevailed by an almost five million votes margin, Trump too received more votes than he did in 2016.

He continues to have a devoted base, and even after seeing the disastrous record of his rule during the past four years, nearly half of the voters voted for him again. This shows that although Trump was defeated by a small margin, Trumpism is still alive and well, and may pose a serious threat to democratic governance during the next four years.

The Democrats lost seats in the House and, contrary to predictions, failed to gain a majority in the Senate. The runoff elections in Georgia on January 5th may reduce the Republican majority in the Senate but the situation is far from ideal. So, it is still premature to predict the end of Trumpism and a return to political health.

The recent election has highlighted some flaws in the US’s electoral system. Although both Al Gore in 2,000 and Hillary Clinton in 2016 received more popular votes than their rivals they failed to be declared president on the basis of the number of Electoral College votes. This clearly goes against the principle of one-person one vote, and the majority vote deciding the outcome.

The Electoral College is a remnant of the debates in the summer of 1787. The Constitutional Convention debated three options about how to elect a president, election by Congress, selection by state legislatures and a popular election. It should be remembered that at that time the right to vote was generally restricted to white, landowning men.

The choice of the Electoral College was to provide a buffer from what Thomas Jefferson referred to as the “well-meaning, but uninformed people” who “could have no knowledge of eminent characters and qualifications and the actual selection decision.”

Surely, in the age of universal education and mass communication, those condescending arguments are no longer valid. The return to the principle of the majority vote will put an end to this anomaly among democratic countries.

Drop box outside the Maricopa County Recorder’s office in Phoenix, Arizona. Credit: Peter Costantini.

The whole system of voting also needs changing. At the moment, there is no uniform pattern of voting and different states have their own rules. As a result, there have been unnecessary disputes about postal votes, votes received too late, etc. In most other democratic countries there are clear rules of voting and the results are often announced shortly after the end of the election.

The third problem is the duration of transition from one administration to the next with the possibility of mischief by an irresponsible incumbent. In Britain, for instance, the outcome of the election is usually known by the following day when the transfer of power takes place, and the new prime minister moves into 10 Downing Street as the previous one leaves.

These are surely issues for consideration before the next presidential election. However, whatever happens, the fact remains that American democracy has been dealt a major blow as the result of Trump’s populist and authoritarian rule, and it will need a great deal of hard work, national unity and determination to reverse the trend. Sadly, the raging pandemic, the worsening economic recession and a divided society will make that task very difficult.

Farhang Jahanpour is a former professor and dean of the Faculty of Languages at the University of Isfahan and a former Senior Research Scholar at Harvard. He has also taught at Cambridge and Oxford universities. He also served as Editor for Middle East and North Africa at the BBC Monitoring from 1979-2001.

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.

Considered essential to the U.S. economy, as Donald Trump himself now acknowledges, Mexico's seasonal farmworkers are exposed to the coronavirus pandemic as they work in U.S. fields, which exacerbates violations of their rights, such as wage theft, fraud, and other abuses. CREDIT: Courtesy of MHP Salud

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Apr 21 2020 (IPS)

As the high season for agricultural labour in the United States approaches, tens of thousands of migrant workers from Mexico are getting ready to head to the fields in their northern neighbour to carry out the work that ensures that food makes it to people’s tables.

But the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic, of which the U.S. has become the world’s largest source of infection, threatens to worsen the already precarious conditions in which these workers plant, harvest, process and move fruits and vegetables in the U.S.

Exposed to illegal charges for visa, transport and accommodation costs, labour exploitation, lack of access to basic services and unhealthy housing, Mexican seasonal workers driven from their homes by poverty must also now brave the risk of contagion.

Evy Peña, director of communications and development at the non-governmental Centro de los Derechos del Migrante (Migrant Rights Centre – CDM), told IPS from the city of Monterrey that the COVID-19 pandemic is exacerbating violations of the rights of migrant workers.

“Temporary visa programmes are rife with abuse, from the moment workers are recruited in their communities. They suffer fraud, they are offered jobs that don’t even exist in the United States. It’s a perverse system in which recruiters and employers have all the control. There are systemic flaws that will become more evident now,” the activist said.

In 1943, the United States created H2 visas for unskilled foreign workers, and in the 1980s it established H-2A categories for farm workers and H-2B categories for other work, such as landscaping, construction and hotel staff.

In 2019, Washington, which had already declared them “essential” to the economy, granted 191,171 H-2A and 73,557 H-2B visas to Mexican workers, and by January and February of this year had issued 27, 058 and 6,238, respectively.

Two emergencies converge

Now, the two countries are negotiating to send thousands of farmworkers within or outside of the H2 programme, starting this month, to ensure this year’s harvest in the U.S. The Mexican government has polled experts to determine the viability of the plan, IPS learned.

The migrant workers would come from Michoacan, Oaxaca, Zacatecas and the border states. The plan would put leftist President Andres Manuel López Obrador in good standing with his right-wing counterpart, Donald Trump; generate employment for rural workers in the midst of an economic crisis; and boost remittances to rural areas.

For his part, Trump, forced by a greater need for rural workers in the face of the pandemic and under pressure from agriculture, abandoned his anti-immigrant policy and on Apr. 1 even issued a call for the arrival of Mexican migrant workers.

“We want them to come in,” he said. “They’ve been there for years and years, and I’ve given the commitment to the farmers: They’re going to continue to come.”

U.S. authorities can extend H-2A visas for up to one year and the maximum period of stay is three years. After that, the holder must remain outside U.S. territory for at least three months to qualify for re-entry with the same permit.

On Apr. 15, Washington announced temporary changes allowing workers to switch employers and to stay longer than three years.

A Mexican migrant worker works at a vineyard in California, one of the U.S. states most dependent on seasonal labour from Mexico in agriculture, and which has now urged President Donald Trump to facilitate the arrival of guest workers from that country so crops are not lost. CREDIT: Kau Sirenio/En el Camino

The most numerous jobs are in fruit harvesting, general agricultural work such as planting and harvesting, and on tobacco plantations, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

Migrant workers traditionally come from Mexican agricultural and border states and their main destinations are agricultural areas where there is a temporary or permanent shortage of labourers.

Jeremy McLean, policy and advocacy manager for the New York-based non-governmental organisation Justice in Motion, expressed concern about the conditions in which migrants work.

The way the system works, “it’s not going to be easy to follow recommendations for social distancing. Hundreds of thousands of people are going to come and won’t be able to follow these recommendations, and they will put themselves at risk. It could spell another wave of infection and transmission,” he warned IPS.

“This population group has no health services and no medical insurance. If they fall ill in a remote area, what help can they get?” he said from New York.

On Mar. 26, the U.S. Embassy in Mexico reported that it would process without a personal interview the applications of those whose visas had expired in the previous two years or who had not received them in that time, under pressure from U.S. agribusiness.

Trapped with no way out

The migrant workers’ odyssey begins in Mexico, where they are recruited by individual contractors – workers or former workers of a U.S. employer, fellow workers, relatives or friends, in their hometowns – or by private U.S. agencies.

Although article 28 of Mexico’s Federal Labour Law, in force since 1970 and overhauled in 2019, regulates the provision of services by workers hired within Mexico for work abroad, it is not enforced.

It requires that contracts be registered with the labour authorities and that a bond be deposited to guarantee compliance. It also holds the foreign contractor responsible for the costs of transport, repatriation, food for the worker and immigration, as well as the payment of full wages, compensation for occupational hazards and access to adequate housing.

In addition, it states that Mexican workers are entitled to social security benefits for foreigners in the country where they are offering their services.

Although the Mexican government could enforce article 28 of the law in order to safeguard the rights of migrant workers who enter and leave the United States under the visa programme, it has failed to do so.

In its recent report “Ripe for Reform: Abuse of Agricultural Workers in the H-2A Visa Program”, the bi-national CDM organisation reveals that migrant workers experience wage theft, health and safety violations, discrimination, and harassment as part of a human trafficking system.

Recruitment without oversight

For Mayela Blanco, a researcher at the non-governmental Centre for Studies in International Cooperation and Public Management, the problem is the lack of monitoring or inspections of recruiters and agencies.

“In Mexico there are still many gaps in the mechanisms for monitoring and inspecting recruitment. There is still fraud,” she told IPS. “How often do they inspect? How do they guarantee that things are working the way they’re supposed to?”

There are 433 registered placement agencies in the country, distributed in different states, according to data from the National Employment Service. For the transfer of labour abroad, there are nine – a small number considering the tens of thousands of visas issued in 2019.

For its part, the U.S. Department of Labor reports 239 licenced recruiters in that nation working for a handful of U.S. companies.

Data obtained by IPS indicates that Mexico’s Ministry of Labour only conducted 91 inspections in nine states from 2009 to 2019 and imposed 12 fines for a total of around 153,000 dollars. Some states with high levels of migrant workers were never visited by inspectors.

Furthermore, the records of the federal labour board do not contain any reports of violations of article 28.

Mexico is a party to the Fee-Charging Employment Agencies Convention 96 of the International Labour Organisation (ILO), which it violates due to non-compliance with the rights of temporary workers.

Peña stressed that there is still a gap between the U.S. and Mexico in labour protection and said workers are being left behind because of that gap.

“Countries like Mexico see temporary visas as a solution to labour migration and allow the exploitation of their citizens. The H2 programme is about labour migration and governments forget that bilateral solutions are needed,” she said.

In response to the pandemic and its risks, 37 organisations called on the U.S. government on Mar. 25 for adequate housing with quarantine facilities, safe transportation, testing for workers before they arrive in the United States, physical distancing on farms and paid treatment for those infected with COVID-19.

Blanco emphasised the lack of justice and reparation mechanisms. “The more visas issued, the greater the need for oversight. Mexico is perceived as a country of return or transit of migrants, but it should be recognised as a place of origin of temporary workers. And that is why it must comply with international labour laws,” she said.

McLean raised the need for a new U.S. law to guarantee the rights of migrant workers, who are essential to the economy, as underscored by the demand reinforced by the impact of COVID-19.

“We pushed for a law to cover all temporary visa programmes so that there would be more information, to avoid fraud and wage theft. But it is very difficult to get a commitment to immigration dialogue in the United States today,” he said.

But the ordeal that migrant workers face will not end with their work in the U.S. fields, because in October they will have to return to their hometowns, which will be even more impoverished due to the consequences of the health crisis, and with COVID-19 in all likelihood still posing a threat.

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.

Nobel Peace Laureate Jody Williams won the prize for her work to eradicate landmines in 1997. She is pictured here speaking at a youth protest at the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates held in Merida, Mexico. Courtesy: Albany J Alvarez/ Nobel Women’s Initiative

By Anna Shen
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 26 2019 (IPS)

On Monday, United States President Donald Trump continued to float the idea that he should be awarded a Nobel Prize, but that it would never happen because the system was rigged.

Nobel Peace Laureate Jody Williams, who won the prize for her work to eradicate landmines in 1997, would likely agree Trump would never win – but not because the system was rigged, but because under his leadership she said: “We have swung into the dark ages.”

Speaking at the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates, in the heart of the Yucatan, in Merida, Mexico, she was asked which conflict she was most concerned about, and she replied, “Trump. He is a global crisis in and of himself.”

“He is pulling out of treaties on the climate, recharging the nuclear weapons that the U.S. has, and modernising the weapons arsenal. We don’t need more nuclear weapons,” she said, adding that everything he does is about ruining institutions.

Trump-like behaviour has spread everywhere, she continued. “Around the world, Trump has given voice to xenophobia, hatred, racism and emboldened several leaders like him. In Brazil and Italy, the leaders are the same,” she said.

Williams had much to speak about, including Trump, the state of world peace, why women are critical to the global peace process, and how to engage youth.

In an interview after the Summit, she stopped to give her thoughts — before continuing on to Rome for meetings at the Vatican to discuss killer robots and artificial intelligence, which she is increasingly concerned about because “nobody is talking about them.”

Excerpts from her interview:

Inter Press Service (IPS): You are chairing the Women’s Nobel Initiative (NWI). Why and how did that come about?

Jody Williams (JW): In 2004, Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi and I were in Nairobi for an international landmine meeting.  She had started an NGO to protect children from landmines on the border between Iraq and Iran. A handful of Nobel women, in support of women’s rights, met with Nobel Laureate Waangari Maathai.

All six of us decided to use whatever influence we had to shine a spotlight on grassroots women’s organisations working on sustainable peace. We believe that if there is no justice there is no peace, and if there is no equality there is no peace. Women are critical to the peace process globally.

The Nobel Women’s delegation focuses on women because nobody listens to women. We have worked in the Democratic Republic of Congo with women, and at the height of Bangladesh’s Rohingya crisis. We have done a lot in Mexico, especially to protect indigenous land in Ateneco, where, in 2001, government officials wanted to take over, some would say steal, the lands of the farmers of Atenco.

This was to build a new international airport near Mexico City. Forty-seven women were raped, and the men who organised defending the land were imprisoned for four years. Others spent years in hiding. Suddenly, the women found themselves thrust into the role of leadership.

Over the next years, the Nobel Women’s Initiative became involved in supporting the efforts of the women of Atenco by lending our voices to amplify theirs.  It seemed to help. I went to Atenco to show further support on behalf of NWI and other Nobel Laureates supporting their efforts.

At one point the women protested, and with indignation they came – How dare you take our land and imprison our men? They were setting a precedent for “public protest” that this was their land and they wanted to keep it.

Finally, the cases of the 12 men came to the Supreme Court in mid-2010 and at a strategic moment, I was able to return, meet with the Justices themselves and other public officials – and then be there when the court decided to set the twelve political prisoners free. It was unreal. Amazing. Just think about the precedent set by freeing the men, something that underscored the freedom of assembly and all, but for one acquittal.

Later, I was able to go back to Atenco to see the women we’ve supported in their struggle to defend their land and their rights. Also, I got to meet the twelve men.  They are strong, dignified, and proud of their struggle to defend their land and their livelihoods. They even gave me my own machete. It is not a weapon, but more of a symbol, as it something used to slash in the fields.

IPS: Why are women essential to the peace process globally?

JW: I ask — why aren’t women needed? I followed the route of Syrian refugees up through Balkans to Germany – through Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Germany and met with Syrian women who had formed an organisation to push for peace and for reconciliation.

During a press conference, a young man stands up and asks: ‘What is the role of women in the peace process?’ I gave him a death stare. I asked him: ‘What is the role of men?’ He is dumbfounded, fascinated in positive way, as if he was hit by a bolt of lightning. He replied that he had never thought about that way.

If all sectors of society are not involved in peace negotiations, the root causes of the conflict are not addressed. In El Salvador’s peace agreement, three-quarters of it was given to separating combatants and disarming the guerillas and trying to help them with a political party.

There were only a few pages talking about the root causes of the problem. The thought was that once all of this is done, they would try to look at the root. But the problem is that we need to look at those causes now. How do you have a full-blown agreement and get buy-in during the process?

Women — who are trying to hold their families together — have a lot to say about the peace process. Our role as women is everything — community, life, keeping people together. You don’t have to love everyone, but accept they are different, as long as they are not breaking the law.

IPS: How can we solve the climate crisis?

JW: When I think about ways to address solve the climate crisis immediately, it is about redefining security. It is not about having more bombs, but making sure that we continue to exist and live on this planet, and that we stop destroying it every day.

We should be protesting the government’s budgets on the military. If we think about it, trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars are spent building weapons of war. If you are constantly planning for war, then you have to practice and invade somebody.

I am proposing that governments reduce military budgets by 25 percent and put it into a fund to save the planet. If they did reduce, we would have enough money to save the planet and fulfil every one of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

We also have to put at the forefront our corporations, whose bottom line is making money and is not worrying about a better planet. We need to raise our voices in companies, tell them that if they do care about what they are doing to destroy the planet, and if they don’t change, we won’t buy their stuff. It takes a community to come together and not buy their stuff. It’s doable. All these elements can change this planet quickly.

We have to work together. No one person changes the world and I don’t care who pretends they do. It takes collaboration and communication about what we are doing to make a difference. Together we can. A small group of people working together can do a lot on this planet.

IPS: What is the role of youth, and especially of young women in creating peace?

JW: Often people will say to me that young people don’t care. But look at Greta Thunberg and the climate strikes. Not all young women, but many, know they have a place. Young people aren’t waiting, they are using their voices to hold adults who messed up everything, to account. Young people are playing a role. I’m proud of them and especially to walk with them and learn more from them.

Congressman Juan Guaidó of the Popular Will party, president of the National Assembly since Jan. 5, was sworn in on Jan. 23 before a crowd as Venezuela's interim president. Credit: NationalAssembly

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Jan 25 2019 (IPS)

Venezuela entered a new and astonishing arena of political confrontation, with two presidents, Nicolás Maduro and Juan Guaidó, leading the forces vying for power, while Venezuelans once again are taking to the streets to demonstrate their weariness at the crisis, which has left them exhausted.

Both sides “have sharply raised the stakes, they’re not giving in and the internal and international factors that traditionally operate as mediators show signs of having taken sides,” Carlos Romero, former director of postgraduate studies in political science at Venezuela’s Simón Bolívar and Central Universities, told IPS.

Guaidó, 35, who was appointed president of the single-chamber National Legislative Assembly on Jan. 5, was sworn in on Jan. 23 before a crowd of supporters in Caracas – while hundreds of thousands marched in 50 other cities – as “interim president of the Republic”, to put an end to Maduro’s alleged “usurping” of power, create a transitional government and organise new elections.

“I don’t want a ‘bono’ (stipend) anymore, I don’t want Clap (bags of food at subsidised prices), what I want is for Nicolás to leave”, along with shouts of “Freedom!” and insults against the president were the most frequently chants by people from practically all social strata, who have been hit hard by the crisis, including annual hyperinflation of 1.7 million percent, according to the National Assembly in the absence of official statistics.

The United States, Brazil, Canada and a dozen other countries in the Americas immediately recognisedGuaidó, to which Maduro responded by denouncing that “the imperialist government of the United States is directing an operation to, through a coup d’état, impose a puppet government” in Venezuela.

In response, Maduro cut off diplomatic ties with Washington and gave all U.S. diplomats 72 hours to leave the country.

The United States, through Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, ignored Maduro’s measure and announced that it would keep its diplomats in Caracas as requested by Guaidó, the president they recognise.

U.S. President Donald Trump also called for stronger measures.

For a century, Venezuela has been a supplier of oil to the United States, currently the destination of 47 percent of its exports, while it imports not only U.S. manufactured products, but also inputs such as components to make gasoline. But the flow of trade has not appeared in the breakup equation.

The “Guaidó phenomenon” achieved what seemed unthinkable just a few weeks ago: reviving the mass “open councils” in the streets, which led to the huge opposition marches on Jan. 23.

That is a key date in Venezuela because on that day in 1958 a civil-military uprising put an end to the almost 10-year dictatorship of General Marcos Pérez Jiménez (1914-2001).

Maduro, 56, in power since 2013, was re-elected on May 20, 2018 in controversial elections in which the majority of the opposition – much of which was disqualified – did not participate, and whose results were not recognised by many governments in the Americas and Europe.

General Vladimir Padrino, minister of defense and head of the high command of the Bolivarian National Armed Force of Venezuela, ratified his support for President Nicolás Maduro on Jan. 24. Credit: Miraflores Palace

The president took office on Jan. 10 for a new six-year term. That same day, a majority of governments in the Americas and the European Union (EU) said they did not recognise his government.

The heir to Hugo Chávez, who governed the country between 1999 and 2013, the year of his death, also received the backing of hundreds of supporters on Jan. 23, who crowded around the Miraflores Presidential Palace.

He was also backed by the commanders of the Bolivarian National Armed Force, who on Jan. 24 reiterated their loyalty to Maduro in a series of statements.

Guaidó’s proclamation “is shameful and aberrant,” and part of “a criminal plan that reached the limits of extreme danger,” because “a coup d’état is being carried out against democracy and the constitution,” declared General Vladimir Padrino, defense minister and head of the military high command.

Today in Venezuela “three scenarios have opened up. The first is that President Maduro withstands the pressure from the opposition, from the population in the streets and from the international community, and that the mass movement against him peters out,” Romero said.

The second is that the street protests and international pressure sustain the duality of power, which translates into the elimination of Maduro’s government, either by him stepping down or by an act of force, and new elections are called,” the analyst added.

“And the third is that a third actor enters the scene, which could be international, from the armed forces, or some other factor that intervenes to stop the confrontation if it gets out of hand in the country,” Romero said.

Luis Salamanca, also a professor of political science at the Central University of Venezuela, told IPS: “There can’t be two presidents at the same time in the same territory. That puts the ball in Maduro’s court, and he will have to pull his strings to stop and perhaps arrest Guaidó, but to do that he would have to assess the political costs.”

The crowds returned to the streets of Caracas and dozens of other Venezuelan cities to express discontent over the economic crisis and call for change in the country’s leadership. Credit: National Assembly

Guaidó, for his part, “must have calculated the risks of taking the bull by the horns in the middle of the square. There may be arrests that reach not only him but other members of the Assembly,” Salamanca said.

Parliament was declared “in contempt” two years ago by the government-appointed Supreme Court of Justice. Since then, the other branches of power, all in the hands of government allies, have ignored its decisions, while in 2017 a National Constituent Assembly was elected, also without an opposition presence, which has assumed part of the legislature’s functions.

International factors

United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres called on Jan. 24 for “a transparent and independent investigation” into “the incidents in Venezuela,” because in the context of the protests of Jan. 21-23, at least 26 people were shot dead, according to local media, and dozens were injured and arrested.

On Jan. 18,Guterres had already said his organisation”is willing to use its good offices” to promote a political solution”, since only the U.N. “can solve and provide answers to Venezuela’s problems.”

Washington, Ottawa and the Lima Group (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay and Peru) recognisedGuaidó. Ecuador did as well.

Meanwhile, Uruguay and Mexico distanced themselves to insist on the need for a new “urgent and transparent” dialogue between the parties. Bolivia, Cuba, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Suriname were the countries in the region that supported Maduro.

Although the EU did not recognise Maduro’s election and second term, it has not given Guaidó recognition either, although some of its members have done so or have ratified their support for him as president of the legislature.

However, the bloc insists on the need for new elections, with guarantees, in order to return to a state of law in Venezuela.

Two other major global players, China and Russia, have expressed their support for Maduro.

What will happen if, for example, the United States refuses to withdraw its diplomats from Caracas and Maduro’s government imprisons Guaidó?

The new scenario could take one of many directions, while underneath the surface of a situation where the country has two presidents are years of weariness and crisis that has undermined the quality of life of Venezuelans, with growing numbers of people going to sleep hungry every night, and millions forced to emigrate.

In the central park of the southern Mexican city of Tapachula, a camp was improvised, where thousands of migrants stopped to rest and wash before proceeding to the border with the United States, 2,000 kilometres away. People of all ages, entire families and many children are part of the caravan that began its desperate trek on Oct. 13 in Honduras. Credit: Javier García/IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
TAPACHULA, Mexico, Oct 22 2018 (IPS)

A long chain of people is winding its way along the highways of Chiapas, the southernmost Mexican state. It is moving fast, despite the fact that one-third of its ranks are made up of children, and it has managed to avoid the multiple obstacles that the governments of Honduras, Guatemala and now Mexico, under pressure from the United States, have thrown up in a vain effort to stop it.

Every attempt to make it shrink seems to have the opposite effect. And on Monday Oct. 22, some 7,000 Central Americans, most of them Hondurans, kept walking northward, in defiance of U.S. President Donald Trump’s warning to do everything possible to “stop the onslaught of illegal aliens from crossing” the U.S.-Mexico border."This is giving rise to something like a trail of ants, and we don't know where it's going to end…We're going to be seeing mass exoduses much more similar to those we see from Africa to Europe." -- Quique Vidal Olascoaga

The caravan that set out from San Pedro Sula, in northern Honduras, in the early hours of Oct. 13, has put the migration policy of the entire region in check. Trump took it up as the campaign theme for the Nov. 6 mid-term elections, and via Twitter, threatened Honduras with immediate withdrawal of any financial aid.

“People have to apply for asylum in Mexico first and if they fail to do that, the U.S. will turn them away,” Trump tweeted.

The caravan isn’t stopping. In nine days it has travelled a little more than 700 kilometres to reach Tapachula, a city of 300,000 inhabitants, close to the border, which has welcomed the migrants’ arrival with food, beverages and encouraging messages.

Groups of activists and human rights defenders are preparing to meet them in different parts of the country. “This is not a caravan, it’s an exodus,” say migrant advocates.

There is still a long road ahead, however. The migrants still have 2,000 kilometres to go before reaching the nearest Mexican-U.S. border crossing, in an area governed by criminal groups, which have made migrant smuggling one of the country’s most lucrative businesses.

In addition, the Mexican government has threatened to detain them if they leave Chiapas, where local legislation allows them to be in transit with few requirements because it is a border zone.

But none of this has prevented new groups of migrants from arriving every day to join the caravan.

The number of children in the arms of their parents is striking, as they walk kilometre after kilometer, cross rivers and border barriers, or wait for hours in crowded, unsanitary conditions, in suffocating temperatures.

The stories they tell are heartbreaking.

A line of more than five kilometres of migrants walked on Sunday, Oct 21, from Ciudad Hidalgo to Tapachula, 40 kilometers inside the state of Chiapas, in southern Mexico. There are 2,000 kilometres left to the U.S.-Mexico border, along a route that is partly controlled by organised crime groups. Credit: Javier García/IPS

“We don’t have a job, we don’t have medicine, we have nothing in our country, we can’t even afford to eat properly. I want to get to the United States to raise my children,” Ramón Rodríguez, a man from San Pedro Sula who arrived with his whole family to the Guatemalan-Mexican border on Oct. 17, told IPS in tears.

In the last decade, human rights organisations and journalists have documented the massive displacement of Central Americans toward the southern border of Mexico, and have repeatedly warned of a humanitarian crisis that is being ignored.

In 2016, the Global Report on Internal Displacement, published by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, devoted a special section to an emerging phenomenon of displacement in Mexico and the countries of the so-called Northern Triangle of Central America (Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador).

In May 2017, Médecins Sans Frontières presented the report “Forced to Flee Central America’s Northern Triangle: A Neglected Humanitarian Crisis”, in which it warned of an exodus, caused above all by criminal violence in the region.

The Mesoamerican Migrant Movement, which has organised 14 caravans of mothers of migrants who have disappeared in Mexican territory, has also described the situation in the Northern Triangle as a “humanitarian tragedy”.

The violence, along with precarious labour and economic conditions, skyrocketed a few days ago when the government of Juan Orlando Hernandez announced hikes in the electricity rates.

According to versions given by Hondurans who arrived in Mexico, it was Bartolo Fuentes, a pastor and former legislator who has participated in several caravans in Mexico, who launched the call for a collective march to the United States.

They were to gather in the Great Metropolitan Central bus station in San Pedro Sula. Around one thousand people showed up.

Hundreds of Mexicans mobilised to help Central American migrants, many giving rides in their cars and trucks to members of the caravan, to ease their journey to Tapachula, where other supportive residents provided them with food and beverages. Credit: Javier García/IPS

“Many of us thought that in a group it was easier and safer, because we know that going through Mexico is dangerous,” a member of the caravan who asked for anonymity told IPS. “Later, messages began to arrive through Whatsapp (the instant messaging network), and people began to organise to flee the country,” he said.

By Oct. 15, another group had organised in Choluteca, in southern Honduras, and yet another in Tegucigalpa.

The Honduran government tried to close the border crossings, but was unable to stop some 3,000 people from leaving the country and crossing Guatemala. The detention and deportation of Pastor Fuentes did not stop them either. On Oct. 17, the caravan arrived in the city of Tecún Umán, on the border with Mexico.

The Mexican government had stepped up security at the border and the caravan was stranded on the bridge that joins the two countries. Desperation set in: on Oct. 19, the migrants crossed the police cordon and were dispersed with tear gas.

Faced with media pressure, the Mexican authorities offered “orderly passage” for groups of 30 to 40 people who were to take the steps to apply for refuge.

But it was actually a ruse, because the migrants were taken to an immigration station where they must stay 45 days, and have no guarantees of the regularisation of their immigration status.

The border bridge became a refugee camp, without humanitarian assistance from either government. The only thing the Guatemalan government provided were buses for those who wanted to “voluntarily” return to their country.

Exhausted, many decided to turn around, the disappointment plain to see on their faces.

However, the bulk of the caravan made the decision to swim or raft across the Suchiate River.

For more than 24 hours, images of thousands of people crossing the river circled the world, while other groups of migrants continued to arrive at the border to join the caravan that today numbers more than 7,000 people, according to human rights groups.

Some activists believe that, because of its size and the form it has taken, this caravan could fundamentally change migratory movements in Central America, with people increasingly turning to a new strategy of migrating in huge groups.

“This is giving rise to something like a trail of ants, and we don’t know where it’s going to end,” Quique Vidal Olascoaga, an activist with the organisation Voces Mesoamericanas, told IPS. “We’re going to be seeing mass exoduses much more similar to those we see from Africa to Europe.”

With reporting by Rodrigo Soberanes and Angeles Mariscal, from various places in the state of Chiapas.

Katy Rodríguez and her son (in his father’s arms) when they were reunited after leaving the Migrant Assistance Centre in San Salvador following their deportation. Like thousands of other Central American families since April, mother and son were separated for four months after entering the United States without the proper documents. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Jul 2 2018 (IPS)

After three hours of paperwork, Katy Rodriguez from El Salvador, who was deported from the United States, finally exited the government’s immigration facilities together with her young son and embraced family members who were waiting outside.

Rodríguez and her three-year-old son were reunited again on Jun. 28, just before she was sent back to her home country El Salvador. She is originally from Chalatenanango, in the central department of the same name.

The 29-year-old mother and her little boy spent more than four months apart after being detained on Feb. 19 for being intercepted without the proper documents in the U.S. state of Texas, where they entered the country from the Mexican border city of Reynosa.

“It’s been bad, very bad, everything we’ve been through, my son in one place and me in another,” Rodríguez told IPS in a brief statement before getting into a family car outside the Migrant Assistance Centre, where Salvadorans deported from both the United States and Mexico arrive.

She was informed she could apply for asylum, but that meant spending more time away from her son, and for that reason she chose to be deported. “I felt immense joy when they finally gave me my child,” she said with a faint smile..

Rodriguez was held in a detention centre on the outskirts of San Antonio, Texas, while her son was sent to a children’s shelter in far-flung New York City as a result of the “Zero Tolerance” policy on illegal immigration imposed in April by the Donald Trump administration.

The traumatic events experienced by Rodríguez and her son are similar to what has happened to thousands of families, most of them from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, detained and separated on the southern U.S. border after Trump implemented the measure to, in theory, stem the flow of immigrants to the United States.

According to the Salvadoran General Migration Officete, between Jan. 1 and Jun. 27, 39 minors were deported from the US, either alone or accompanied, 1,020 from Mexico and five others from other locations. That figure of 1,064 is well below the 1,472 returned in the first half of 2017.

Of the 2,500 children separated from their parents or guardians on the southern border of the U.S. since April, just over 2,000 are still being held in detention centres and shelters in that country, according to the media and human rights organisations.

This is despite the fact that President Trump signed a decree on Jun. 20 putting an end to the separation of families.

Images of children locked up in cages created by metal fencing, crying and asking to see their parents, triggered an international outcry.

“The detention of children and the separation of families is comparable to the practice of torture under international law and U.S. law itself. There is an intention to inflict harm by the authorities for the purpose of coercion,” Erika Guevara, Amnesty International’s director for the Americas, told IPS from Mexico City.

The plane in which Rodríguez was deported carried another 132 migrants, including some 20 women, who told IPS about the abuses and human rights violations suffered in the detention centres.

The presidents of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras and the vice president of the United States gave a press conference after a Jun. 28 meeting in Guatemala City on the issue of migration by undocumented Central Americans to the U.S.. Credit: Presidency of El Salvador

Carolina Díaz, 21, who worked in a maquiladora – export assembly plant – before migrating to the United States, told IPS that she was held for a day and a half in what migrants refer to as the “icebox” in McAllen,Texas.

The icebox is kept extremely cold on purpose, because the guards turn up the air conditioning as a form of punishment “for crossing the border without papers,” said Díaz, a native of Ciudad Arce, in the central department of La Libertad, El Salvador.

“You practically freeze to death there, with nothing to keep yourself warm with,” she added, saying she had decided to migrate “because of the economic situation, looking for a better future.”

To sleep, all they gave her was a thermal blanket that looked like a giant sheet of aluminum foil, she said. Another woman, who did not want to be identified, told IPS that she was held in the icebox for nine days without knowing exactly why.

Díaz also spent another day and a half in the “kennel,” as they refer to the metal cages where dozens of undocumented immigrants are held.

“When I was in the kennel, the guards made fun of us, they threw the food at us as if we were dogs, almost always stale bologna sandwiches,” she said.

Díaz said that in McAllen, as well as in a similar detention centre in Laredo, Texas, she saw many mothers who had been separated from their children, crying inconsolably.

“The mothers were traumatised by the pain of the separation,” she said.

Guevara of Amnesty International said Trump’s decree does not stop the separations, but only postpones them, and families will continue to be detained, including those seeking asylum.

“The president’s Jun. 20 decree does not say what they are going to do with the more than 2,000 children already separated, in a situation of disorder that is generating other human rights violations,” she said.

These violations include the failure to notify parents or guardians when children are transferred to other detention facilities.

She added that the United States has created the world’s largest immigrant detention system, and currently operates 115 centres with at least 300,000 people detained each year.

Meanwhile, Marleny Montenegro, a psychologist with the Migrations programme in Guatemala’s non-governmental Psychosocial Action and StudiesTeam, explained that children detained and separated from their parents suffer from depression, fear, anxiety and anguish, among other psychological issues.

“They are affected in their ability to trust, their insecurity and they have trouble reintegrating into the community and in communicating their feelings and thoughts,” Montenegro told IPS from the Guatemalan capital.

The plane with undocumented deportees arrived in El Salvador on the same day as U.S. Vice President Michael Pence, who was meeting in Guatemala with Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales, Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, and El Salvador’s President Sánchez Cerén.

Pence’s aim at the Jun. 28 meeting was to obtain a commitment from the three governments to adopt policies to curb migration to the U.S. According the figures he cited, 150,000 Central Americans have arrived to the US. so far this year – an irregular migration flow that he said “must stop.”

In a joint statement, at the end of what they called “a frank dialogue” with Pence, the three Central American leaders expressed their willingness to work together with the United States on actions that prioritise the well-being of children and adolescents, family unity and the due process of law.

They also stressed the importance of working in a coordinated manner to inform nationals of their countries of the risks involved in irregular migration and to combat human trafficking and smuggling networks.

Activists and academics from Canada, the United States and Mexico called in March in Mexico for an end to the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), because of its secrecy and because it fails to represent the interests of the people of the three nations. Credit: Emilio Godoy / IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Apr 4 2018 (IPS)

Statements by U.S. President Donald Trump against Mexico have begun to permeate the presidential election campaign in this Latin American country, forcing the candidates to pronounce themselves on the matter.

In his most recent angry tweet, Trump said Apr. 1 that he would withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) if Mexico doesn’t work harder to stop illegal immigration and drug trafficking into the U.S.

The next few days will be crucial for the renegotiation of the trade deal between Mexico, the U.S. and Canada."After Trump's remarks, everything is up in the air. We will hear statements back and forth from the negotiating parties and the candidates. Any sign of having anything in common with Trump is political suicide for the candidates." -- Manuel Pérez Rocha

“After Trump’s remarks, everything is up in the air. We will hear statements back and forth from the negotiating parties and the candidates. Any sign of having anything in common with Trump is political suicide for the candidates,” said Manuel Pérez Rocha, Associate Fellow at the U.S. Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies.

The expert told IPS that “the important thing is to continue analysing the proposals of the candidates and see what positions they take with respect to NAFTA.”

The eighth, and presumably last, round of negotiations is scheduled to begin on Apr. 8 in Washington and end on Apr. 16.

After the seven previous rounds, the advances disclosed by the three partners have been scarce, in negotiations marked by rigid positions, tension and secrecy.

Of the 30 chapters that have been discussed, the negotiating teams have concluded the chapters on good regulatory practices, transparency, sanitary and phytosanitary measures, small and medium-sized businesses, competition and anti-corruption.

The priorities of the United States include new phytosanitary measures, greater protection of intellectual property, labour and environmental matters and the possible elimination of the dispute resolution chapter, which establishes special panels to address abusive trade practices.

Meanwhile, Mexico is focusing mainly on energy, electronic commerce and small and medium enterprises.

Canada, for its part, prioritises the inclusion of labour, environmental and gender standards, an increased migratory flow, indigenous rights, a revision of the dispute resolution mechanism, a more open government procurement market and higher wages.

The renegotiation of the treaty in force since 1994 also covers issues not included in the original text, such as energy, e-commerce and on-line activities.

The renegotiation of NAFTA was imposed by Trump, who included it in the campaign that took him to the White House in January 2017.

NAFTA and, above all, Trump’s outbursts about Mexico and Mexicans have begun to appear in the campaign for Mexico’s Jul. 1 presidential elections, although only the front-runner has addressed it explicitly.

Leftist candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, heading the “Together We Make History” coalition, said on Apr. 1 that “we are not going to rule out the possibility of convincing Donald Trump of his mistaken foreign policy and in particular of his contemptuous attitude towards Mexicans, we will be very respectful of the government of the United States, but we will also demand respect for Mexicans.”

The three-time candidate for the Mexican presidency expressed his support for NAFTA, but clarified that “it would be best to sign agreements after Jul. 1,” when he hopes to finally win the presidency with the support of an alliance between the leftist National Regeneration Movement and Workers’ Party, together with the conservative Social Encounter Party.

A protest against U.S. President Donald Trump outside the U.S. embassy in Mexico City. Trump’s verbal attacks against Mexico and Mexicans have increased since March and are beginning to reverberate in the campaign for the Jul. 1 presidential elections. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

The second in the polls, Ricardo Anaya, candidate for the “Mexico al Frente” coalition, formed by the right-wing National Action Party, the centrist Party of the Democratic Revolution, and the centre-right Citizen’s Movement, has not referred to the renegotiation.

Nor has the ruling party candidate José Meade, representing the conservative Institutional Revolutionary Party, the Ecologist Green Party and the New Alliance, mentioned NAFTA or Trump so far in the campaign.

None of the candidates have discussed Trump’s promise to build a border wall between the two countries.

“Mexico has to withdraw from negotiations to reform the treaty and wait for a new government to take over the process. We can’t tolerate all of these insults and threats from Trump,” academic Alberto Arroyo, a member of the non-governmental coalition Mexico Better without FTAs, told IPS.

The car industry, “maquilas” or for-export assembly plants, agro-exports and financial services are among the sectors that have benefited from the 24 years of free trade between the three countries.

According to academics and activists from the affected sectors, the big losers under NAFTA have been small-scale farmers, including producers of the staple products corn and beans, and the food sector in general.

NAFTA strengthened Mexico’s trade dependency on the U.S., which purchases more than 80 percent of Mexico’s exports.

Imports from the United States, meanwhile, climbed from 151 billion dollars in 1993 to 614 billion dollars in 2017 – a 307 percent increase. Meanwhile, its exports grew from 142 billion to 525 billion, a 270 percent rise.

“Any disruption to the economic relationship could have adverse effects on investment, employment, productivity, and North American competitiveness,” says the study “NAFTA Renegotiation and Modernization,” prepared by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), a non-partisan legislative branch agency housed in the Library of Congress.

The report published in February adds that “Mexico and Canada could consider imposing retaliatory tariffs on U.S. exports if the United States were to withdraw” from NAFTA.

In 2017, the United States a trade deficit of 89.6 billion dollars with its two partners, compared with 9.1 billion in 1993.

“It is not clear how the (Trump) administration would expect to reduce the trade deficit through the renegotiation,” says the paper.

In another of his attacks, Trump threatened to impose extraordinary tariffs on steel and aluminum imports unless NAFTA were renegotiated to terms more favorable to the U.S

According to Pérez Rocha, Mexicans would celebrate the end of NAFTA as “a net job destroyer, and for allowing transnational corporations to devastate the environment.”

He added that, in his opinion, the majority of Mexico’s 123 million people would support an end to the treaty “for destroying the livelihoods of millions in rural areas, for being an instrument of corporations for reversing sanitary and environmental policies, and for making Mexico the Latin American country with the most obesity.”

He called for postponing the renegotiation until the new administration takes office, because “this government has been unable to ensure the interests of Mexicans. We need a change to society, a new way of interacting with all social sectors.”

For his part, Arroyo, who is writing a study on NAFTA’s impact on the Mexican economy, called for a treaty that respects “human, economic, social, cultural and environmental rights, the national sovereignty of each country and real economic development.”

The CRS report concludes that the outlook for the renegotiation is “uncertain”.

Today, the United States and Mexico are more and more similar to what English journalist Alan Riding once described as “distant neighbours.”

Cubans wait in line outside the Colombian embassy in Havana, to obtain a visa for Colombia in order to apply for a U.S. visa at the U.S. embassy in Bogotá, due to the reductions in staff in the U.S. embassy in the Cuban capital. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños / IPS

By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Apr 2 2018 (IPS)

Cuba’s tense relations with the United States under the administration of Donald Trump reflect a scenario of conflict that is not alien to the generation that will take over the country on Apr. 19, when President Raúl Castro is set to step down.

Since the 1960s, Cuba’s nationalist stance has drawn on the animosity with the U.S., and the likely successors of the country’s current leaders, most of whom were born around the time of the 1959 revolution or afterwards, were educated in a culture of “anti-imperialist resistance”.

According to the official figures on the outcome of the Mar. 11 general elections, the average age of the new members of parliament fell to 49 years, compared to 57 years for the outgoing lawmakers.

The single-chamber National Assembly of People’s Power elects from among its members the 31 members of the Council of State, which according to the constitution is the highest representative of the Cuban state, whose president is the head of state and government."Reconciliation and rapprochement occur on a human level. States can facilitate it, but they can neither impose it nor stop it…Even during the most tense moments of relations between Cuba and the United States, we Cubans have remained in touch with our families, friends and collaborators." -- Lillian Manzor

The most likely candidate to succeed Castro is the current first vice president, Miguel Diaz-Canel, 57, although there is no official confirmation.

The return to the tension that existed before the détente agreed by Raúl Castro, 86, and Barack Obama (2009-2017) on Dec. 17, 2014, which led to the restoration of diplomatic relations between Washington and Havana, brings additional difficulties to the weakened Cuban economy and puts a brake on the changes required by its socialist model of development.

“Unfortunately, reform in Cuba becomes more difficult when the United States is more aggressive and negative,” said John McAuliff, executive director of the Fund for Reconciliation and Development, a U.S.-based non-governmental organisation that supports efforts for reconciliation with Cuba.

In his opinion, a new generation of leaders “opens a door, but it does not guarantee” how quickly change will come. “If the new leaders expand opportunities for the self-employed and small businesses, especially in tourism and other professional sectors, the economy will improve,” he told IPS from the U.S. by e-mail.

In the same vein, he said that “if the public dialogue incorporates all the sectors that are not explicitly counterrevolutionary inside and outside the country, politics will expand, evolve and be strengthened along with Cuba’s history and culture.”

Trump’s adverse policy towards Cuba since his arrival at the White House in January 2017 has kept bilateral ties at their lowest level, with a skeleton staff at the two embassies, which are unable to carry out their consular and business duties, while it has restricted travel by U.S. citizens to the Caribbean island nation, among other limitations.

Senator Patrick Leahy (centre), and four other U.S. Democrat lawmakers give a press conference in Havana on Feb. 21, at the end of their visit to Cuba, in violation of the U.S. travel advisory against Cuba issued by Republican President Donald Trump. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños / IPS

Washington justifies the reduction of personnel and the recommendation to U.S. citizens to refrain from traveling to Cuba by citing mysterious attacks – apparently linked to high-pitched sounds – that affected the health of U.S. and Canadian diplomats in Cuba between November 2016 and August 2017.

Havana has denied any involvement in the incidents.

In a Dec. 22 speech in the Cuban parliament, Castro accused the United States of fabricating “pretexts” to justify the return to “failed and universally rejected policies.”

U.S. lawmakers who visited Cuba between Feb. 19-21, led by the Democratic Senator for the state of Vermont, Patrick Leahy, said the measures ordered by Trump were a serious mistake, harmful to the governments and people of both nations.

In defiance of the travel advisory against Cuba, the legislators flew here with their wives, and in the case of Leahy, with his 13-year-old granddaughter. The group met with Castro and other local authorities.

“Cuba is changing. Soon you will elect a new president and likely experience a generation shift in leadership, and regrettably at this historic moment in Cuban history, the U.S. engagement is limited,” Jim Mcgovern, a Democrat member of the U.S. House of Representatives, representing Massachusetts, lamented in a press conference.

In turn, Senator Ron Wyden, of Oregon, reported that there is a legislative proposal against the embargo brought forward by him and other senators, which has strong bipartisan support. “After the November elections, we will have more support to end the embargo,” he said.

Meanwhile, migrants are among the biggest losers in the embassy conflict, although the Cuban embassy in Washington, with 17 fewer staff members, says it has maintained its usual services, including consular services for Cubans and Americans.

A classic 1957 convertible Chevrolet Bel-Air, used by private drivers for sightseeing tours, drives through the historic centre of Old Havana in search of customers, now that the boom of visits by U.S. citizens has ceased. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños / IPS

But the reduction of personnel in the U.S. embassy in Havana forces Cuban immigrants to travel to Colombia to process their visas, which will prevent Washington in 2018 from meeting its commitment to issue 20,000 visas a year, as established in the migration agreements of 1994 and 1995.

The main recipient of Cuban emigration is the United States, where over two million people of Cuban origin reside, of whom almost 1.2 million were born in Cuba, according to official data from the U.S. A good part of that population has not cut its umbilical cord with Cuba.

Lillian Manzor, interim chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Miami, told IPS by e-mail that currently, most Cubans in the U.S. support rapprochement between the two countries, while U.S. foreign policy is going in the opposite direction.

“Reconciliation and rapprochement occur on a human level. States can facilitate it, but they can neither impose it nor stop it,” she said, recalling that “even during the most tense moments of relations between Cuba and the United States, we Cubans have remained in touch with our families, friends and collaborators.”

In that sense, Manzor, a Cuban resident in the United States, does not underestimate the strength that this majority sector of Cuban migrants can represent in order to stop the setback imposed by the Trump administration on the normalisation of bilateral ties between Washington and Havana, restored in July 2015.

“That’s the big challenge. How can this need to stay connected with our family and friends be turned into an electoral force. In the meantime, we must continue with what we have always done: cope with adverse policies and fight for our rights as American citizens,” she said.

The academic also said that among immigrants favourable to “closer political and human relations” there are many who hope that “the new president of Cuba will continue with the necessary migratory changes to facilitate travel for Cubans residing abroad.”

Whoever it will be, Castro’s successor has the stage set to move in that direction. On Jan. 1, four Cuban government measures came into force, aimed at relaxing the country’s migration policy and improving its relation with the Cuban exile community. The provisions followed the new Migration Law in force since 2013.

“The Cuban passport is still one of the most expensive in the world especially considering the payment that must be made every two years to maintain the validity of the passport,” said Manzor. The document, valid for six years, costs 400 dollars plus 200 dollars for the biannual extension.

Chhean was four years old when he moved to the U.S. His impoverished and traumatised parents ended up in the margins of society. "Life was hard. We were a minority in a minority.”

By Pascal Laureyn
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia, Jan 18 2018 (IPS)

Three friends are relaxing in a quiet courtyard. They speak English with a strong American accent and talk about their disadvantaged neighborhoods. Their tattoos depict a rough life on the street. One of them calls Massachusetts home, while the others grew up in Georgia.

But home is far away, on the other side of the world. They have been living in Cambodia for a number of years, against their will. They were deported by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to their country of origin, one completely unknown to them. Most have no or little knowledge of the Cambodian language, Khmer."Officially I'm Cambodian, but I don't feel that way. My home country is the U.S. but they don't want me there anymore." --Jock, 49

These American Cambodians belong to a group of more than 500 ‘deportees’ who have been sent back since 2002. They have lived the biggest part of their lives in the U.S. Their parents fled in the eighties, when Cambodia was torn apart by the genocidal Khmer Rouge and the following civil war. Between 1975 (start of the Khmer Rouge) and 1994 (end of the civil war) 158,000 Cambodians were allowed into the U.S.

“I was born in Thailand, in a refugee camp. Before I was deported, I had never visited Cambodia,” explains Chhean* (35). “I didn’t know nothing of this country. I didn’t speak Khmer. I grew in America, I am an American.”

Chhean was four years old when he moved to the U.S. His impoverished and traumatised parents ended up on the margins of society. “Life was hard. We were a minority in a minority. It was a tough time trying to survive, there was a lot of violence. I had to protect myself. That’s how I ended up in a gang.”

“I made bad choices. I was a threat to society. I can’t make no excuses, I can only blame myself.” After Chhean finished his time in prison, he was deported by ICE.

Five Years for a Fistfight

Legal residents in the U.S. who have no citizenship and get convicted for a crime can be sent back to their country of origin. No appeal is possible. The nature of the crime is not taken into account. “Immigration came to my home to detain me,” remembers Jock* (49). “I once got a conviction for a fistfight at school. I was 18. Twenty years later I get deported for a fistfight.”

Jock recounts what happened to him with disbelief. “I have spent five years in a cell, they thought I was an escape risk. Five years! For a fistfight 20 years ago! For years I have been begging them: ‘Please deport me’.” His friend Chhean was also incarcerated before his flight to Cambodia, but ‘only’ for two years.

Jock has been living in Cambodia for six years. He didn’t know the country at all. “I cried a long time when I arrived here. I thought my life was over. Someone who robs a bank is released after 15 years in prison and can start over again. I can’t.”

The deported Cambodians have trouble finding work. This country has a high rate of unemployment. They speak the local language badly and lack the necessary skills. Cambodia has an agrarian economy, but they are city boys. They are also met with distrust. They dress and behave differently. In Cambodian culture, their tattoos are considered signs of serious crimes.

“I worked the first six years in the rice fields. That is simple but hard work. I couldn’t find anything else,” says a deported Cambodian who wishes to stay anonymous. Last year, he acquired a certificate to teach English. He works in a classroom now.

“In the U.S. I worked in construction, but here it makes very little money. So I became a farmer,” explains Jock. “When I’m picking mangos, I can stop thinking.”

Chhean has familiar problems. “When I arrived here, I suffered from panic attacks. And even now I’m not adapted yet. Officially I’m Cambodian, but I don’t feel that way. My home country is the U.S. but they don’t want me there anymore. Now, Cambodia is my ‘land of opportunity’. I have to make the best of it. But I don’t plan big things for my life anymore.”

Lasting Trauma

The U.S. government wants Cambodia to take back more of its ‘lost’ children. That is required by international law when Cambodians are deported. But the government in Phnom Penh is hesitant. These citizens have no sense of the culture and can never really integrate into society. Some have serious mental illnesses, says Jock.

“I know a mental ‘deportee’ in my neighborhood. He walks all day in the middle of the street. He doesn’t realize where he is, he thinks he is still in the U.S. They shouldn’t bring those people here.”

The families that found a new home in the U.S. in the eighties brought few belongings but many war traumas. “My parents survived famine and mass murder,” says the teacher. “They don’t talk about it much. They try to forget.”

Research by the Leitner Center in New York showed that 62 percent of Cambodian refugees in California suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Fifty-two percent had severe depression. Many were in a state of shock and not able to take care of themselves or their children. They ended up in poor neighborhoods where crime was the norm.

For these specific circumstances, psychiatrists and lawyers say that refugees from Cambodia deserve special treatment. But President Donald Trump wants to increase the deportations. Some 1,900 are eligible for deportation, says ICE. In the “Kingdom of Wonder” – as Cambodians call their country – many refugees who return are confronted with alcohol and drug abuse. Many suffer from depression, and at least six deported Cambodians have committed suicide.

“I miss my three children (24, 18 and 13),” says Jock. “I call them once a week. I don’t tell them how I’m doing here. I don’t want them to worry.”

The teacher has a child in the U.S. as well. “I talk to her with Messenger. I can’t do much more. I can miss her as much as I like, it will not change a thing.”

Once deported, there is no way back. They can never visit the country where they grew up ever again. “Hell yeah! I would go back immediately if I could. Not tomorrow but today,” shouts Chhean jokingly.

His friend Jock has another view. “Once you have a criminal record in the U.S. they will never leave you in peace. I don’t want to go back. Period.”

*Last names omitted to protect the sources’ privacy.

U.S. President Donald Trump with Chinese President Xi Jinping during Trump’s visit to Asia. As the US pulls out of the Paris Climate Agreement, China has shown huge growth in clean energy and its emissions appear to have peaked more than a decade ahead of its Paris Agreement NDC commitment. Credit: Public Domain

By Friday Phiri
SAN FRANCISCO, California, Nov 12 2017 (IPS)

As negotiators meet in Bonn to put together a deal to implement the Paris Agreement, John Holdren, a professor of environmental policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, stressed that economic development and climate change mitigation and adaptation are not ‘either-or’ but must be pursued together.

Addressing science journalists a week before the Bonn climate talks, Professor Holdren said among climate change skeptics, “wafflers’ are the most dangerous, because their arguments to postpone aggressive climate action now in favor of economic progress has the potential to increasingly influence debate and government policy.”

According to Professor Holdren, the wafflers claim to favor research and development on better technologies so emissions reductions can be made more cheaply in the future, and further argue for accelerating economic progress in developing countries as the best way to reduce their vulnerability as well as counting on adaptation as needed.“The idea that society cannot afford to address climate change is wildly wrong.” --Prof. John Holdren

However, it is ironic, he says, that the current US administration “with climate deniers and wafflers occupying top positions” are cutting support for the same approaches they propose.

“Of course, the deniers and the wafflers in the top positions in the Trump administration are, with surpassing cynicism, busy cutting support for all of these approaches,” he said, referencing the numerous reversals that the Trump administration has made even to the ‘win-win’ adaptation-preparedness resilience measures adopted under Obama.

Apart from drastic domestic spending cuts to climate related programmes, President Trump earlier this year decided to pull the US out of the Paris Agreement—a move that has left the global community wondering what’s next.

Africa’s Dismay

Despite its negligent contribution to global emissions, Africa is one of the most vulnerable regions to climate change—already suffering droughts, floods, affecting the predominantly rain-fed agricultural productivity and production. And Professor Holdren’s address titled: Why the Wafflers are Wrong—Addressing Climate Change is Urgent—and a Bargain delivered to the 10^th World Conference of Science Journalists (WCSJ2017) in San Francisco, California, held 26-30^th October 2017, is music to the ears of the African Group of Negotiators (AGN) who have been pushing urgent climate action at the UNFCCC negotiating table.

According to Professor Seth Osafo of AGN, “The slow progress by developed country parties towards reaching the US$100 billion goal of joint annual mobilization by 2020 is not in Africa’s interest.”

And in the words of Emphraim Mwepya Shitima, Chief Environmental and Natural Resources Officer at Zambia’s Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources, the developing country community needs financial resources now more than ever. “We are at a critical stage where we need all the financial resources we can get to effectively implement our NDC which is off course now in sync with the recently launched Seventh National Development Plan running up to 2021,” he told delegates at a COP23 preparatory meeting.

With the US pullout meaning the loss of a major financial contributor, there are fears that the resource mobilization process might even get slower. Mithika Mwenda, Secretary General of the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA), a consortium of African civil society organisations, is also concerned and is pushing for industrialised countries to set more ambitious goals in terms of their emission cuts.

“Coming from the region that suffers the most due to climate change, we have watched with utter dismay President Trump’s continued efforts at dismantling the former President’s Barrack Obama’s climate legacy, and wish to reiterate that this is the time to classify the global community into two: those for the people and planet, and those for Trump and profit,” says Mwenda.

He questioned the presence of the official US delegation, saying it may be a bad influence on other states that are already reluctant to take serious action on climate change. “The US withdraws from the Paris Agreement, yet they still want to show that they can negotiate the implementation framework,” complained Mwenda, “That’s why we are calling in delegates here to sign our petition to kick Trump and his government out of these negotiations…” 

Scientifically, climate change is a serious complex issue—it requires well-developed research systems especially on how it impacts different sectors of development, or at least in the spirit of the WCSJ2017 theme, to bridge science and societies. Unfortunately, as compared to the developed world, Africa’s scientific research and development still lags behind such that most often than not, it relies on the developed world for data, a concern that South Africa’s Minister of Science and Technology, Naledi Pandor raised during a session on Who will do Science at the WCSJ2017.

Pandor believes private companies which drive scientific innovations in the developed world must stop seeing the developing world just as a mass clientele—where research and development is done just for corporate interests and not for the benefit of the people.

“A number of private companies only have commercial relationships but do not have innovation relationships with the developing world; so the nature of partnerships between my continent Africa and other parts of the developing world must change,” she said. “If we are to do science in the 21^st century…the way we perceive Africa and scientists in Africa has to fundamentally alter.”

She further lamented the sidelining of women in science whom she said are doing a lot of tremendous work, and her plea is for Africa to embrace and give space to women scientists amidst the challenge of climate change in a continent that contributes less than 4 percent to global emissions. “The next generation of scientists must be women—and black people have to be a part of that.”

The High Cost of Inaction

Agreing that research and development are important steps in tackling climate change, Professor Holdren, who is former Assistant to President Obama for Science & Technology, argues that even if implemented, the wafflers’ favoured economic approaches would be grossly inadequate because while clean energy is essential to provide options for the next stage of deep emissions reductions, the global community needs to be reducing now with the available technologies.

He says climate change is already causing serious harm around the world with increases in floods, drought, wildfires, heat waves, coral bleaching, among others, all of which are “plausibly linked to climate change by theory, models, and observed ‘fingerprints’; most growing faster than projected”.

The global community has three options: mitigation, adaptation – or suffering. Therefore, minimizing the amount of suffering in the mix can only be achieved by doing a lot of mitigation and a lot of adaptation.

“Mitigation alone won’t work because climate change is already occurring and can’t be stopped quickly. And adaptation alone won’t work because adaptation gets costlier and less effective as climate change grows. We need enough mitigation to avoid the unmanageable, enough adaptation to manage the unavoidable,” he adds.

In arguing for adaptation specifically, Professor Holdren believes that many adaptation measures would make economic sense even if the climate were not changing because there have always been heat waves, floods, droughts, wildfires, powerful storms, crop pests, and outbreaks of vector-born disease, and society has always suffered from being underprepared.

Additionally, he says, virtually all reputable studies suggest that the economic damages from not adequately addressing climate change would far exceed the costs of adequately addressing it.

“The idea that society cannot afford to address climate change is wildly wrong,” he said, calling for urgent climate action now and not later

COP22 produced the Marrakech Partnership for Global Climate Action which called for all to go further and faster in delivering climate action before 2020. The global community now eagerly awaits COP23 Bonn declaration.

Pearland, Texas after Hurricane Harvey made landfall. Credit: Brant Kelly/cc by 2.0

By Kenton X. Chance
KINGSTOWN, St. Vincent, Aug 31 2017 (IPS)

The government of St. Vincent and the Grenadines says it hopes that the devastating loss and damage that Hurricane Harvey has wrought in Texas might inspire the government of President Donald Trump to rethink its position on climate change.

Hurricane Harvey, the strongest storm to hit the United States since 2005 and the costliest in U.S. history in terms of damage, made landfall in Texas on Aug. 25 and left much of Houston and other parts of the state under feet of floodwater."We must be touched with the feeling of their distress and their loss and their grief and their anguish, because we are subject to the same." --Minister of Foreign Affairs Louis Straker

Harvey made its way to the United States about a week after it passed near St. Vincent and the Grenadines and other countries in the Caribbean.

Residents of this eastern Caribbean nation breathed a sign of relief after the only lasting sign of the passage of the storm was some flooding in Bequia, the largest and northern-most of the Grenadine islands.

Harvey made landfall in Texas for a second time in less than a week on Tuesday and the damage it left in the “Lone Star State” was a reminder to Vincentians of the power of tropical cyclones and the damage that they have caused over the last decade in this multi-island nation.

“I wonder what we would be doing if we had that sort of persistent rain. I trust that what is happening in Houston will open the eyes of a lot of people worldwide with regards to climate change,” Minister of Transportation and Works, Sen. Julian Francis told a press conference in Kingstown on Monday.

Francis was updating the media on a road repair programme and the annual road-cleaning that came ahead of September, which is traditionally the heart of the Atlantic Hurricane Season.

The minister noted that the programme, which normally runs for 10 days, was reduced to eight because of the passage of Tropical Storm Harvey.

But the two days of work that the temporary workers employed under the programme lost as a result of the storm was nothing compared to the damage and loss left by less powerful weather systems over the past few years.

AMO and Special Operations agents conduct rescue with CBP UH-1N helicopter as part of Hurricane Harvey response. Credit: Public domain

The senator, who also has ministerial responsibilities for local government, expressed sympathy for the victims of Harvey but also criticized President Trump, who shortly after taking office pulled the United States out of the global Paris Accord to reduce the greenhouse emissions driving climate change and severe weather, has attempted to cut government funding for the agencies that monitor climate, and has long downplayed the problem while promoting the fossil fuel industry over renewables.

“It is pouring down on the fourth largest city in the United States of America but we know what the position of the sitting president and his administration is with regards to climate change.

“So I trust this comes as an eye-opener to the administrators and policymakers in the United States of America. I do feel sad and sympathise with the people of Texas… I have been following it closely and I say I wonder what would happen to us if we had that sort of downpour,” Francis said.

Speaking at a separate event later on Monday, Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves said that St. Vincent and the Grenadines is among the top 10 countries in the world most vulnerable to extreme weather events as a result of climate change.

“We don’t have to have high winds. Because we are mountainous, we have a lot of landslides, the rivers overflow their banks, a lot of disasters are caused in this country by heavy rainfall, without the wind.”

Gonsalves said that the nation’s seacoast is being eroded by wave action resulting from the frequent and more intense storms associated climate change.

“The entire eastern coast is being eroded and also on the western side of the island,” he said.

He noted that between 2014 and 2016, his government has had to rebuild five major bridges in a five-mile area in eastern St. Vincent.

The bridges were built to replace older ones damaged or destroyed by extreme weather events, which also necessitated redesign to accommodate larger water flows during storms ranging from tropical depressions to hurricane.

At a total cost of 7.4 million dollars, the bridges represent a significant budgetary expense in a multi-island nation whose capital expenditure allocation in 2016 was 74 million dollars.

“I say these things so that we can keep this matter in focus,” said Gonsalves, whose government in May introduced a one per cent levy to help fund the cost of disaster response and mitigation.

In 2016, flooding as a result of tropical waves left damage to public infrastructure totalling EC$37 million, almost 10 per cent of the 342-million-dollar national budget.

Meanwhile, at Tuesday’s meeting of the national assembly, Minister of Foreign Affairs Louis Straker expressed solidarity with the people of the United States, and used the experience of St. Vincent and the Grenadines to remind nationals of what Texans might be experiencing.

“We are not immune to natural disasters and we have had our own flooding here, the major one being 2013 Christmas Eve, in which 13 lives were lost,” Straker said.

“Some people say that this is because of global warming, climate change, something that is denied and rejected by the president of the United States,” he told parliament.

“But what we have seen in Texas what is referred to in language as ‘of epic proportion’, ‘unprecedented’, ‘one in a 100 years’, the president said one in 500 years, and it is catastrophic. We must be touched with the feeling of their distress and their loss and their grief and their anguish, because we are subject to the same,” Straker said.

The foreign minister, whose oldest son lives in Texas, told lawmakers that all residents of the state have been affected in one way or the other.

“And we have to commiserate and sympathise and show solidarity with the Vincentians in the diaspora and with the hundreds of thousands of other people in Houston who have been affected by this storm, Harvey,” he said, noting that the storm passed St. Vincent and the Grenadines without much devastation.

Speaking about the impact on the lives of the people of Texas, he added, “Could you imagine that people work all their lives to build a home — that is very previous to a lot of people — and you furnish your home and you live comfortably with your family and within the space of a day or two, you could lose everything and you are left homeless? That’s a chilling prospect that all of us should contemplate,” Straker said.

Regionally, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), a block of 15 Caribbean nations, also extended its sympathies to the government and people of the United States and especially the State of Texas on the loss of lives and extensive damage to property and infrastructure following the passage of Hurricane Harvey.

CARICOM Secretary-General, Ambassador Irwin LaRocque, in a message to U.S. President Donald Trump, said CARICOM is confident that the people of Texas and the wider United States have the resilience to recover from the disaster.

LaRocque assured Trump that CARICOM stands with the Unites States at this time of disaster.

“The widespread destruction wrought by this hurricane has brought suffering to many and will necessitate a significant and lengthy rebuilding process,” LaRocque said. “The unprecedented nature of this climatic event highlights the unusual nature of weather patterns that continue to affect nations across the globe.”

People wait for assistance after the devastation left by Hurricane Matthew in Low Sound, North Andros, The Bahamas in October 2016. A leading climate change mitigation and adaptation activist in the Caribbean says more climate-related disasters can result in climate refugees looking towards the United States for assistance. Credit: Kenton X. Chance/IPS

By Kenton X. Chance
KINGSTOWN, St. Vincent, Jul 4 2017 (IPS)

A leading climate change mitigation and adaptation activist and former climate negotiator in the Caribbean says that the United States could protect its economic and political interest by helping the region to go green.

Further, James Fletcher, a former Minister of Sustainable Development, Energy, Science and Technology in St. Lucia, says that US President Donald Trump’s emphasis on the coal industry is an attempt to increase jobs that no longer exist, while ignoring numerous opportunities in renewable energy.“President Trump does not understand, his administration does not understand, that the more that you invest in building resilience in countries like ours, the more it allows us to make that transition away from fossil fuels. It is less of a burden that it places on them.” --James Fletcher

On June 1, Trump announced that he would withdraw the United States from the global climate change deal reached in Paris in 2015, saying that the non-binding accord imposes draconian financial and economic burdens on the United States.

The US President was referring to the Green Climate Fund, for which advanced economies have formally agreed to jointly mobilise 100 billion dollars per year by 2020, from a variety of sources, to address the pressing mitigation and adaptation needs of developing countries.

Fletcher, who was the 15-member Caribbean Community’s lead negotiator for the Paris accord, told St. Vincent and the Grenadines’ Minister of Sustainable Development, Camillo Gonsalves’ “Firm Mediation” podcast, that Trump is wrong.

“Those are voluntary contributions, so it isn’t something that any country is mandated to do,” he said of the voluntary contribution to the GCF, known as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs).

Former US President Barack Obama had pledged 3 billion dollars to the GCF and delivered 1 billion before leaving office.

“Now, it’s up to President Trump to decide whether he wants to honour that obligation, adjust it — we know he won’t increase it,” Fletcher said, noting that there is nothing compelling the United States to contribute any amount to the GCF.

“It’s just 100 billion that we hope to raise,” Fletcher emphasised.

“The Nationally Determined Contributions are precisely what they say they are: contributions. They are not commitments. No country is being held legally liable… You are not even allowed to name and shame. It is a kind of gentleman’s agreement that we all say yes we agree to do this, we all agree that there will be no backsliding so that we will increase ambition over time and I believe that’s one of the reasons that so many countries found it safe enough to join the Paris Agreement, because they knew there were no legal sanctions if they backed off on the agreement.

“So, to speak of the NDC as basically something that is putting an economic noose around the neck of the United States of America is anything but,” Fletcher said.

He said that the growth of the energy sector in the United States is in renewable energy.

“And if President Trump understood that sector a little bit better, he would understand that that is where he needs to be focusing his attention and not on a coal industry that really does not have any future, from an employment-generation perspective, for the United States.”

Fletcher said that contributing to the GCF “makes sense for the United States of America”.

“President Trump does not understand, his administration does not understand, that the more that you invest in building resilience in countries like ours, the more it allows us to make that transition away from fossil fuels. It is less of a burden that it places on them.”

He said that when there are natural disasters in the Caribbean, “our focus almost immediately turns to our closest wealthy neighbour, which is the United States of America for support.

“And the more you can reduce that burden by making us resilient and reducing the severity and frequency of those natural disasters, then the less of a burden there is on the United States of America.”

Fletcher said climate refugees will be a regular feature of the Caribbean landscape in years to come.

“Because people will lose their livelihoods, people’s home will be displaced, people’s habitats will be destroyed and these people have limited opportunities, particularly in small islands like ours.”

He noted that his country, St. Lucia is 238 square miles and is mountainous, with most of the settlements on the coast.

“When you have lost most of your coastland, where do you go? You don’t go inland. … There are limited opportunities to move inland, so people now start to migrate.”

He said that former US Vice President Joe Biden recognised these reality, and spoke to it in the two US-Caribbean summits that he organised.

“When he saw that the Caribbean was moving away from fossil fuels to renewable energy, he saw two things immediately. He saw an opportunity to lessen the influence of Venezuela in the region, and he saw it from a political vantage point, but he also saw an opportunity for US companies that are involved in renewable energy, in solar and in wind to basically sell their services to the Caribbean because he was concerned that our focus was on Europe any many of us for looking to Europe for technical assistance and support.

“So, there are opportunities there and it is very short-sighted on the part of President Trump to view this almost as a way of causing a resurgence of jobs that no longer exists.”

Fletcher said that while Trump speaks about coal mining jobs, all of the data suggest that there are fewer than 75,000 jobs in the coal industry in the United States and that it is a shrinking sector.

“There are over 650,000 jobs in the renewable energy sector in the United States, and that is growing. So it will make more sense to focus on a growing sector than a dying sector.”

Trump was also concerned that China and India, as large emitters, are allowed to continue to emit, while the US is restricted.

Fletcher said that on this point, what Trump says about China and India “is partially correct”, because they are significant emitters.

“But that’s where the issue of common but differentiated responsibility (CBDR) comes in,” Fletcher said, noting that countries like India and China say they have large sections of their population living in abject poverty and they need to be given some space to develop those sectors.

“And while they have committed — and India is making significant strides in renewable energy — they are saying, you can’t hold us to the same yardstick that you hold countries like Russia, like the United States, that are the cause of the problem that we have right now. Yes, we are working to address our problem but there is still a development trajectory that we are on that you can’t cause us to stop immediately and put us in an even bigger problem than we are right now.”

Fletcher said that if he were asked in an ideal world whether he would like to see India and China reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases more quickly, he would say absolutely and that he would love to see every country do the same thing.

Peter Thiel speaking at Hy! Summit in Berlin, Germany, March 19, 2014. Photograph by Dan Taylor, www.heisenbergmedia.com

By Christopher Pala
WELLINGTON, Jun 8 2017 (IPS)

In January, the revelation that Peter Thiel, the libertarian Silicon Valley venture capitalist and Trump adviser, secretly got a New Zealand citizenship six years ago caused an uproar, mostly because he was the first to get one without pledging to live there.

It didn’t help that he wasn’t even required to fly to New Zealand to get his papers: the government allowed him to pick up his passport at its consulate in Santa Monica. The outrage was compounded by the government’s release in February of his 145-page naturalization file, which revealed a cascade of broken promises.Purchases by absentee foreign billionaires have been blamed for helping push up real estate prices and boosting homelessness, which at 1 percent is twice the US rate and three times the British one.

In his application dated June 2011, he described New Zealand as a utopia that “aligns more with my view of the future” than any other country. Thiel has said the maximum tax rates in the U.S. (now 39.6 percent) should be lowered to 20 percent or less and the shortfall in national income should be recovered by “disentangling some of those middle-class entitlements that people have gotten used to.”

In New Zealand, the top tax rate is 33 percent. It is the only OECD country without a capital gains or inheritance tax; it is run by the world’s most business-friendly bureaucracy and has a vibrant and under-capitalized tech sector.

Though it was the first country to give women the vote, in 1893, and has offered free dental care to schoolchildren since 1921, it swung from one of the most managed economies to one of the least regulated in the 1980s. As a result, 60 percent of its rivers are too polluted to swim in and its fisheries have been found to rest on a foundation of waste and official lies.

In 2015, Thiel bought a 193-hectare estate on Lake Wanaka, in the South Island. He also owns a mansion on Lake Wakatipu, an hour away. These and other purchases by absentee foreign billionaires have been blamed for helping push up real estate prices and boosting homelessness, which at 1 percent is twice the US rate and three times the British one. The cost of housing is the hottest issue in elections due this year.

In his citizenship application, Thiel wrote, “It would give me great pride to let it be known that I am citizen and an enthusiastic supporter of the country and its emerging high-tech industry.” He said he intended “to devote a significant amount of my time and resources to the people and businesses of NZ” and become “an active player in NZ’s venture capital industry.”

He explained that the year before, he had created an investment fund called Valar Ventures “dedicated exclusively to funding and aiding New Zealand technology companies.” Through it, he could “act in an advisory role in a way that (others) cannot because I have encountered and solved many of the problems that will confront entrepreneurs as they build their companies.”

At the government’s suggestion, according to the file, Thiel even donated NZ$1 million (830,000 U.S. dollars at the time) to an earthquake relief fund.

On July 8, 2011, three days after his application was accepted, he was the headline speaker at a conference at the Icehouse, a business development center in Auckland, the economic capital. But Thiel made no mention of his new citizenship, nor did he speak of becoming an active player on the local tech scene. Likewise, he made no mention of New Zealand to a New Yorker writer who interviewed him for a long profile headlined “No Death, no Taxes,” published that November.

“The last thing we want to do is give people the impression that our citizenship is up for sale, and this affair has certainly created that,” said Iain Lees-Galloway, the spokesman on immigration issues of the opposition Labour Party, in an interview. As for Thiel’s promises in his application, Lees-Galloway added, “He couldn’t have been all that proud (of becoming a Kiwi) because he didn’t tell anybody for six years.”

The government of the right-wing National Party glossed over the broken promises. Prime Minister Bill English, who was deputy PM in 2011, told local reporters, “If people come here and invest and get into philanthropy and are supportive of New Zealand, for us as a small country at the end of the world, that’s not a bad thing.” Thiel had been to New Zealand four times, his file showed, starting in 1993.

On February 4 came another disclosure: The Herald reported that nine months after Thiel was granted the citizenship, his Valar Ventures fund had accepted what the paper called a “sweetheart deal” from the New Zealand Venture Investment Fund, created in 2002 to encourage investments in local tech start-ups.

Valar and the fund would jointly invest in four local companies: Xero, with the largest share, as well as Vend, Booktrack and Pacific Fibre. Two years earlier, Thiel had separately invested three million dollars in Xero, a cloud-based accounting software that was already listed.

At the time, NZVIF’s standard contract had a clause that allowed the outside investor to buy, after five years, the government’s share at its initial cost, plus the yield of a five-year government bond. If the company shares went up, the investor pocketed the profits from the government’s share, too. If the shares fell, both lost equally.

In October 2016, after the shares of Xero soared, Valar Ventures exercised the clause. The exact size of its investment is not known, but the profits have been estimated at 23.5 million dollars for an investment of 6.8 million. Valar still owns 4.8 percent of Xero, down from a peak of 7 percent. Today, of the 13 companies in its portfolio, only two are from New Zealand: Xero and Vend.

Opposition politicians suggested that naïve government officials had made yet another transaction with Thiel that failed to benefit New Zealanders. “Thiel had already invested in Xero, it was hardly a risky venture,” pointed out Lees-Galloway, the Labour MP.

But while politicians denounced the deal as having essentially privatized the profits from a taxpayer-funded investment, the tech world saw things very differently.

Andrew Hamilton, the CEO of the Icehouse business center where Thiel gave his speech, declined to specify what else Thiel had done for startups, saying only: “Peter was and is awesome, and we are always grateful to people who contribute and help!”

Lance Wiggs, the founding director of the Punakaiki Fund, which invests in companies in the development and fast-growth phases, said Valar was “exactly the kind of fund New Zealand wanted to attract.” He said Thiel’s investment in Xero “was absolutely crucial at the time, he really helped them lift their game from being a local player to an international one.” Xero is now worth two billion dollars and has 1,400 employees around the world.

As for the government, Wiggs added, “I can see why they blinked and gave him a passport, though I can’t see why he needed it,” given that Thiel has a residency permit since 2006.

But unlike the permit, citizenship is “irrevocable,” as his lawyer pointed out in the application.

Adam Hunt, a tax administration specialist, offered one possible explanation: “It’s an attractive place for a rich person,” he said. Thiel could renounce his American citizenship and move to New Zealand. “If you’re rich and you move here, you can live off your capital gains,” which are not taxed. “You may have virtually no income here, and pay almost no taxes.”

Forbes estimates Thiel’s net worth at 2.7 billion dollars. He is 49 years old.

As for Thiel himself, who was born German and naturalized American, he declined to publicly defend the officials who did him the favor, or to make any new investments in New Zealand start-ups. His spokesman, Jeremiah Hall of Torch Communications in San Francisco, did not respond to three e-mails seeking comment.

Trump indicated the US is open to re-negotiating the Paris agreement. But European leaders quickly responded there is no such possibility. Credit: Diego Arguedas Ortiz/IPS

By Martin Khor
PENANG, Malaysia, Jun 5 2017 (IPS)

By withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement, President Donald Trump abdicated not only leadership but membership of the community of nations cooperating to tackle climate change, the most serious crisis facing humanity.

Trump’s announcement was shocking, even though it was not unexpected.

It was shocking for showing the extreme lengths to which the President would go to deny scientific opinion on climate change and defy the position of almost all other countries, on an issue that may well determine the fate of the Earth and human civilisation.

The decision was against the advice of most members of his inner-most circle of advisors, many corporate leaders, and the other G7 leaders who spent an entire frustrating day in Sicily trying to explain to him the critical importance of the Paris deal.

Just as disturbing as the withdrawal was Trump’s speech justifying it.  He never acknowledged the seriousness or even the existence of the climate change crisis, which poses the gravest threat to human survival.   He lamented that Paris would hinder US jobs, mentioning coal in particular while ignoring the jobs in renewable energy that would increase manifold if the US adopted an energy policy to counter global warming.

Martin Khor

His main grouse was that the Paris agreement was “unfair” to the US vis-à-vis all other countries, as if it had been designed specifically to cheat the US.  And he grumbled that the US would have to pay billions of dollars to developing countries through the Green Climate Fund.

The speech was riddled with many misconceptions and factual errors, which many scientists, politicians and NGOs are now busy refuting.

Condemnation came fast and furious from within the US and around the world.  A notable comment came from John Kerry, former Secretary of State under Obama:  “He’s made us an environmental pariah in the world….It may be the most self-defeating action in American history.”

Trump indicated the US is open to re-negotiating the Paris agreement.   But European leaders quickly responded there is no such possibility.  The UNFCCC secretariat correctly pointed out that a single country cannot decide on a re-negotiation.

Indeed, it would require a consensus of its 195 members to make amendments to the Paris Agreement or even agree to a re-negotiation.

That will not happen, as the agreement is a delicately balanced outcome which took many years of long and complicated negotiations to achieve.  To re-negotiate it would in effect be kill it.

The best response to the Trump decision is for others to resolve to do even more to combat climate change.  In the US itself, many states and cities have announced they will form an alliance and continue with their climate actions.

Condemnation came fast and furious from within the US and around the world. A notable comment came from John Kerry, former Secretary of State under Obama: “He’s made us an environmental pariah in the world….It may be the most self-defeating action in American history.”
An increasing number of countries including China, India, Germany, France, Italy and Canada as well as the European Union leadership have announced they will honour their Paris commitments despite the US pull-out.   There are no signs, so far at least, that any other country intends to follow the US out of Paris.

Indeed the Trump decision to leave Paris will be a milestone marking a huge loss of international prestige, influence and power to the US.   In a world so divided by ideology, inequality and economic competition, the Paris agreement was one rare area of global consensus and cooperation, on climate change.

For the US to pull out of that hard-won consensus is a shocking abdication not only of leadership but of its membership of the community of nations in its joint effort to face up to perhaps its gravest challenge of survival.

The lack of appreciation of this great crisis facing humanity and the narrow-mindedness of his concerns was embarrassingly evident when Trump made his withdrawal speech.  He was more interested to revive the sunset coal sector than in the promise of the fast developing renewable energy industries.

He was convinced reducing emissions would cost millions of jobs, ignoring the record of many countries like Germany that have de-coupled emissions growth from economic growth.  He was miserly towards poor countries which are receiving only a fraction of what they were promised and what they need for climate mitigation and adaptation, while celebrating hundreds of billions of dollars worth of new deals for his armaments industry.

He complained that the US is asked to do more than others in the Paris agreement when in fact the US has the highest emissions per capita of any major country and its pledged rates of emissions reduction are significantly lower than Europe’s.   He saw the speck in everyone else’s eyes while totally oblivious to the beam in his own.

Just as alarming as withdrawing from Paris is Trump’s comprehensive dismantling of Obama’s climate change policies and measures.   This will make the US unable to meet the target it chose under the Paris agreement:  a cut in emissions by 26-28 per cent by 2025 compared to the 2005  level.   The gap between the US target (which is already unambitious compared to what the science requires and compared to the European Union) and the expected higher emissions levels influenced by Trump’s policies, will worsen the global shortfall in emission reduction.

What will now happen in the UN climate convention, home to the Paris agreement?   The negotiations to establish the guidelines for countries to implement of the agreement will continue in the years ahead.

A complication is that the US has to wait three years from November 2016 (when the agreement came into effect) before withdrawing from Paris and then wait another year for this to come into effect.

The US will thus still be a member of the Paris agreement for the rest of Trump’s present term, although he announced he will not implement the Paris target that Obama had committed to. This defiance will likely have a depressing impact on other countries.

By also being still a member, the US could play a non-cooperative or disruptive role during the negotiations on many topics.  We can anticipate that the US will challenge principles or actions that have already been accepted or that are to be transformed into actions,  such as common but differentiated responsibilities to be operationalized in all areas;  equal and balanced treatment for mitigation and adaptation;  providing adequate financial resources for developing countries;  transparency of actions and of finance; and technology transfer.

Since the Trump has already made clear the US wants to leave Paris, and no longer subscribes to its emissions pledges (nationally determined contributions) nor will it meet its US$3 billion pledge on the Green Climate Fund, it would be strange to enable the country to still behave in the negotiations with the same status as other members that remain committed to their pledges.   How to deal with this issue is important so that the UNFCCC negotiations are not disrupted in the four years ahead.

Finally, the Trump portrayal of developing countries like India and China as profiting from the US membership of the Paris Agreement is truly unfair.

China is the number one emitter of carbon dioxide in absolute terms, with the US second and India third.   But this is only because the two developing countries have huge populations of over a billion each.

In per capita terms, carbon dioxide emissions in 2015 were 16.1 tonnes for the US, 7.7 tonnes for China and 1.9 tonnes for India, according to one authoritative estimate.  It would be unfair to ask China and India to have the same mitigation target as the US, especially since the US has had the benefit of using or over-using more than their fair share of cheap fossil-fuel energy for over a century more than the other two countries.

A recent New York Times editorial (22 May 2017) compared the recent performance of India and China with the recent actions of the US under President Trump.  It states:  “Until recently, China and India have been cast as obstacles…in the battle against climate change.   That reputation looks very much out of date now that both countries have greatly accelerated their investments in cost-effective renewable energy sources — and reduced their reliance on fossil fuels.  It’s America – Donald Trump’s America – that now looks like the laggard.”

It cites recent research that China and India should easily exceed their Paris agreement targets, with China’s emissions appearing to have peaked more than 10 years sooner (than pledged) and India expected to obtain 40% of its electricity from non-fossil fuel sources by 2022, eight years ahead of schedule.   It criticises the Trump administration for destroying Obama’s initiatives based on his Paris pledge to reduce America’s greenhouse gases.

“China and India are finding that doing right by the planet need not carry a big economic cost and can actually be beneficial,” said the editorial.   “By investing heavily in solar and wind, they and other countries like Germany have helped drive down the cost of those technologies where in many places renewable energy can generate electricity more cheaply than dirtier sources like coal.

“China has reduced coal use for three years in a row and recently scrapped plans to build more than 100 coal power plants.  Indian officials have estimated that country might no longer need to build new coal plants beyond those already under construction….There are of course formidable challenges….Still, Beijing and New Delhi – not embarrassingly enough, Washington – are showing the way forward.”

By withdrawing from the Paris agreement and through his reversal of Obama’s climate change policies, President Trump has taken the US and the world many big steps backwards in the global fight against global warming.  It will take some time for the rest of the world to figure out how to carry on the race without or despite the US.  Hopefully the absence of the US will only be for a few years.

Excerpt:

Officials say future climate action will require farsightedness, political courage, intelligent regulations and getting corporations on board. Credit: Bigstock

By Zofeen Ebrahim
BERLIN, May 22 2017 (IPS)

In a last-ditch effort, Germany and China are trying to influence the United States not to walk away from the Paris climate change accord it signed along with 194 nations.

In December 2015, nearly every country committed to take action to reduce planet-warming emissions."The US may try to renegotiate the terms of the agreement. Other countries have to be very clear that they are defending the integrity of the accord and would not accept reduced US commitments." --Lutz Weischer

“We are trying to influence the US through different channels and people, at the foreign ministry level to the EPA and even the Chancellor [Angela Merkel] has repeatedly called up President [Donald] Trump to remain in this landmark agreement,” said German Environment Minister Barbara Hendricks at the two-day 8th Petersberg Climate Dialogue being held in Berlin.

Terming the Paris Agreement a “hard-won milestone”, the Chinese special envoy Xie Zhenhua said his country was “true to word and resolute in deed”. Like his German counterpart, he too reiterated that all signatories should “stick to it” and “not retreat”. China is resolute in its commitment, he said and added the need for transparency to “build mutual trust and confidence” was also paramount.

At the same time, both countries gave a positive signal of what they were doing to reduce carbon emissions, with Hendricks emphasizing on the need to work on the “ecological technologies of the future” in the sectors of transport, infrastructure development and grids. They talked about the advances made in the renewable energy sector, the dire need for phasing out coal and the baby steps made towards electric cars.

Hendricks said future climate action would require farsightedness, political courage, intelligent regulations and getting corporations on board. “We do not have a blueprint as yet” but countries are ready to ride the wave of enthusiasm although with some reservations but all for “prosperity in the long term”.

She also said it was prudent to mainstream climate action in all economic, fiscal even health policies. “The ball is in the court of national governments,” she said adding: “Actions should speak louder than words.”

But despite so much commitment, the air of uncertainty continues to loom heavy over all climate talks as President Trump mulls over his “big decision”.

Dr Ralph Bodle, a senior fellow and coordinator of Ecologic, a Berlin based think tank on environment, was recently in Bonn helping ministers and diplomats from nearly 200 countries to hammer out a “rule book” to say who should do what, by when, how and with what financial support, thereby putting the Paris Climate Agreement into practice.

He, too, conceded that there was concern over Trump’s decision during the 11-day intersessional climate talks. Bodle believed the Paris Accord “will live or fail with political will”.

It is expected the US president will announce a final decision after his return from Taormina, in Sicily, where he will attend the 43rd G7 Summit and where he will be pressured by other countries to give in.

In March, Trump had threatened to pull out of the accord and roll back the widely- supported climate policies of former president Barack Obama, whose administration set a target of a 26-28 percent reduction in emissions by 2025, based in 2005 levels. He had declared an end to the “war on coal”, signed an executive order that removed several restrictions on fossil fuel production and removed barriers to the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines.

Before leaving office, Obama had transferred one billion dollars to the U.N.’s Green Climate Fund and pledged billions more to the fund through the Paris deal, which has not been taken well by Trump.

He has said the US was “paying disproportionately” and that they “got taken to the cleaners financially”. It is unclear whether Trump will honour those financial commitments.

In addition, he has gathered around him climate deniers. Take Scott Pruitt, the environment chief, for instance, who has gone on record saying global warming is not caused by emissions from fossil fuels.

Not everyone is sure whether it’s better to have Trump in or out.

“If Trump poses conditions for the US staying in the Paris Agreement, depending on the conditions, they could cause damage to the accord,” said Lutz Weischer from Germanwatch. He suspects the “US may try to renegotiate the terms of the agreement. Other countries have to be very clear that they are defending the integrity of the accord and would not accept reduced US commitments.”

There are others who also say that the withdrawal may have implications for the US-China relationship. President Xi Jinping has publicly hinted at his desire for the US to remain in it despite a tweet by Trump saying climate change was a Chinese conspiracy.

During the campaign, he claimed on Twitter that the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.

According to Weischer, there are three important gaps that China is looking at — climate diplomacy, emissions and financing.”It knows it cannot fill the void all by itself and without the US on its side.” But if things take a turn for the worse, China will forge alliances with the EU and Canada. As for the financing gap, Weischer said “even that loss can be assuaged if all other countries stick to their commitments, at least for the next four years.”

But even if the US decides to pull out there are other countries who have reaffirmed their commitment which could, in fact be, a “reaction to the US”, said Weischer, who heads international climate policy at Germanwatch. He said it was more important to keep that momentum with actions being taken on the ground.

Even within the US, there are several states and even big corporations who want the US to have the seat at the table. “And even within the White House there are various camps on the issue,” he noted.

The next Conference of Parties to the climate framework (COP23), to be held this November, will be organized by Fiji, but hosted by Bonn.

What would happen if the US leaves the Paris agreement? It would be a big blow to global cooperation, especially since the US is the top emitter after China, and is also by far a bigger emitter per capita than China and most other countries. Credit: Bigstock.

By Martin Khor
PENANG, Malaysia, May 8 2017 (IPS)

Global climate change policy is in a state of flux, with all other countries waiting for the United States to decide whether to leave or remain in the Paris Agreement.

That treaty, adopted by 195 countries with great fanfare in December 2015 and  came into force in November 2016, symbolizes the efforts of governments to cooperate to avert disastrous global warming that threatens human survival.

On 29 April, the 100^th day of Donald Trump’s presidency, thousands marched in Washington and other cities in the US and around the world to protest against the administration’s about-turn in climate policy.

Trump signed an executive order at the end of March unraveling former President Barrack Obama’s clean power plan, the centerpiece of his policy to reduce emissions causing global warming.  The plan would have closed hundreds of coal-fired power plants and replaced them with new wind and solar farms.

Further reflecting the policy changes, the Environmental Protection Agency last week removed climate change information from its website, saying it would be undergoing changes to better reflect the administration’s priorities.

Martin Khor

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change is now meeting for two weeks in Bonn to discuss rules to follow up on the Paris Agreement. Uppermost in the minds of the thousands of delegates and NGOs will be the uncertainty caused by the new US position.

Trump is expected to soon announce if the US will exit the Paris Agreement.  The administration is split, with one camp (that includes EPA chief Scott Pruitt and Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon) wanting the US to quit while others (including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and Trump’s son-in-law and advisor Jared Kushner) advocate that the US remains.

The big change in US climate policy comes at a very bad time. Last month, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for the first time reached 410 ppm (parts per million) in the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii.

The level was 280 ppm in 1958 and passed 400ppm in 2013.  We are inching closer to the 450 ppm danger level at which there is only a 50% chance of keeping global temperature rise to 2 degrees celsius.

The year 2016 is the hottest on record.  Many recent signs of climate change effects include sea level rise; changes in rainfall; more flooding, storms, and drought in different parts of the world; and the melting of glaciers.

The hard-fought Paris Agreement has many flaws, but it is an important achievement. One drawback is that the mitigation pledges made by countries fall far short of limiting warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees.  Instead they would bring about 2.7 to near 4 degree temperature rise, according to various estimates, and the effects would be catastrophic.

The agreement also does not contain concrete commitments or plans by developed countries to assist developing countries to tackle climate change.  There remains the old promise to jack up climate finance to $100 billion a year by 2020, but no road map on how to get there, nor even an agreed definition of what constitutes North-to-South climate financing.

There is also little left of the old commitment to transfer climate technology to developing countries.  And while there is interest to help developing countries to curb their emissions (which is known as mitigation), there is less appetite to help them cope with the effects of climate change (which is termed adaptation and loss and damage).

Despite these deficiencies, the Paris Agreement has positive aspects which make it an important treaty. Almost all countries made pledges to take concrete actions. While participation is thus widespread, differences in obligations as between developed and developing countries remain in the Paris agreement, in line with the Climate Convention.

The agreement mandates that developed countries make greater efforts than developing countries on mitigation, and they are also obliged to provide climate funds to developing countries.

Most important, the Paris agreement is a symbol and manifestation of international cooperation to tackle the climate crisis. Although the overall level of ambition is too low, the agreement has mechanisms to urge members to increase the ambition in both mitigation and in assistance to developing countries in future.

There might however be a situation of the worst of both worlds: The US announces it is quitting, thus already damaging global cooperation, then plays a spoiler’s game inside, since it will still be a member for four more years.
Without a Paris agreement, there would be no global framework or action plan for the coming decades. The world would be adrift even as the crisis worsens.

What would happen if the US leaves the Paris agreement?  It would be a big blow to global cooperation, especially since the US is the top emitter after China, and is also by far a bigger emitter per capita than China and most other countries.

There is also a fear of a contagion effect. Some other countries may follow the US and quit the agreement too.

In an opinion article, former UN Secretary General Ban Ki moon and Harvard University professor Robert Stavins have strongly argued that the US must stay inside the Paris agreement, for the sake of the world and for its own interests.

They also point out that even if Trump decides the pull the US out, this withdrawal will only take effect after four years, due to the rules of the agreement.

They add that if the US wants a quicker exit, it can quit the Climate Convention, under which the Paris agreement is established. This exit will take effect after a year. But if it leaves the Convention, the US would really become a “pariah” and thus it is unlikely to do so.

In any case, the US will still be a member of the Paris agreement during the rest of Trump’s present term.

It is unlikely to be a passive member, whether or not it gives notice to exit from Paris.  There is a growing consensus among Trump’s advisers that the US can’t stay in the Paris agreement unless it negotiates new terms, according to a report in Politico.

While it it is impossible to renegotiate the Paris deal, Trump’s officials are ‘discussing leveraging the uncertainty over the U.S. position to boost the White House’s policy priorities in future discussions,’ said the article.

If this happens, the effect may be really adverse.  Since the US will be in the Paris agreement for the next four years at least, it may use this period to weaken further the already low level of ambition of its own actions as well as those of other countries.

The US will also try to weaken or eliminate the commitments of developed countries to support the developing countries. Trump has already made clear there will be no more US contributions to the Green Climate Fund.

It will also dampen any discussions on how climate financing can be jacked up in the years ahead towards the promised $100 billion by 2020.

Some people have argued it may better if the US leaves the Paris agreement and that prevents it from discouraging all the others that remain from taking action.

There might however be a situation of the worst of both worlds: The US announces it is quitting, thus already damaging global cooperation, then plays a spoiler’s game inside, since it will still be a member for four more years.

It was thus heartening that US citizens are protesting against their government’s climate change policies.

It is also important for people and governments in the rest of the world to strengthen their resolve to fight climate change, rather than to relax now that the US leadership is refusing to do its part.

The best solution would be for the US to remain in the Paris agreement, and go along with other countries to meet and improve on their pledges and enable international cooperation to thrive.

That is not going to happen. So we may have to wait at least four years before another US administration rejoins the rest of the world to tackle climate change.  Let’s hope it will not be really too late by then to save the world.

Excerpt:

With one of the world’s largest emitters of greenhouse gases becoming a disbeliever that climate change is man-made and could devastate the Earth, and no longer committing to take action domestically and helping others to do so, other countries may be tempted or encouraged to do likewise. Credit: Cam McGrath/IPS

By Martin Khor
PENANG, Apr 24 2017 (IPS)

This week, Donald Trump will mark his first hundred days as US President.  It’s time to assess his impact on the world, especially the developing countries.

It’s too early to form firm conclusions.  But much of what we have seen so far is of serious concern.

Recently there have been many U-turns from Trump. Trump had indicated the US should not be dragged into foreign wars but on 6 April he attacked Syria with missiles, even though there was no clear evidence to back the charge that the Assad regime was responsible for using chemical weapons.

Then his military dropped what is described as the biggest ever non-nuclear bomb in a quite highly-populated district in Afghanistan.

Critics explain that this flexing of military might be aimed at the domestic constituency, as nothing is more guaranteed to boost a President’s popularity and prove his muscular credentials than bombing an enemy.

Perhaps the actions were also meant to create fear in the leaders of North Korea.  But North Korea threatens to counterattack by conventional or nuclear bombs if it is attacked by the US, and it could mean what it says.

Martin Khor

Trump himself threatens to bomb North Korea’s nuclear facilities.  With two leaders being so unpredictable, we might unbelievably be on a verge of a nuclear war.

As the Financial Times’ commentator Gideon Rachman remarked, there is the danger that Trump has concluded that military action is the key to the “winning” image he promised his voters.

“There are members of the president’s inner circle who do indeed believe that the Trump administration is seriously contemplating a ‘first strike’ on North Korea.  But if Kim Jong Un has drawn the same conclusion, he may reach for the nuclear trigger first.”

The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof says the most frightening nightmare is of Trump blundering into a new Korean war.  It could happen when Trump destroys a test missile that North Korea is about to launch, and the country might respond by firing artillery at Seoul (population: 25 million).

He cites Gen. Gary Luck, a former commander of American forces in South Korea, as estimating that a new Korean war could cause one million casualties and $1 trillion in damage.

Let us all hope and pray that this nightmare scenario does not become reality.

This may be the most unfortunate trend of the Trump presidency.  Far from the expectation that he would retreat from being the world policeman and turn inward to work for “America First”, the new President may find that fighting wars or at least unleashing missiles and bombs in third world countries may “make America great again”.

This may be easier than winning domestic battles like replacing former President Obama’s health care policy or banning visitors or refugees from seven Muslim-majority countries, an order that has been countered by the courts.

But the message that people from certain groups or countries are not welcome in the US is having effect: recent reports indicate a decline in tourism and foreign student applications to the US.

Another flip-flop was on NATO.  Trump condemned it for being obsolete, but recently hailed it for being “no longer obsolete”, to his Western allies’ great relief.

Another note-worthy but welcome about-turn was when the US President conceded that China is after all not a currency manipulator.  On the campaign trail, he had vowed to name China such a manipulator on day 1 of his presidency, to be followed up with imposing a 45% tariff on Chinese products.

Trump continues to be obsessed by the US trade deficit, and to him China is the main culprit, with a $347 billion trade surplus versus the US.

The US-China summit in Florida on 7-8 April cooled relations between the two big powers. “I believe lots of very potentially bad problems will be going away,” Trump said at the summit’s end.

The two countries agreed to a proposal by Chinese President Xi Jinping to have a 100-day plan to increase US exports to China and reduce the US trade deficit.

For the time being the much anticipated US-China trade war is off the radar.  But it is by no means off altogether.

Trump has moved to shred Obama’s climate change policy. He proposed to cut the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by 31% and eliminate climate change research and prevention programmes throughout the federal government. The EPA, now led by a climate change skeptic, was ordered to revise its standards on tailpipe pollution from vehicles and review the Clean Power Plan, which was the centrepiece of Obama’s policy to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
Trump has asked his Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to prepare a report within 90 days on the US’ bilateral trade deficits with its trading partners, and whether any of them is caused by dumping, cheating, subsidies, free trade agreements, currency misalignment and even unfair WTO rules.

Once Trump has the analysis, he will be able to take action to correct any anomalies, said Ross.

We can thus expect the Trump administration to have a blueprint on how to deal with each country with a significant trade surplus with the US.

If carried out, this would be an unprecedented exercise by an economic super-power to pressurise and intimidate its trade partners to curb their exports to and expand their imports from the US, or else face action.

During the 100-day period, Trump did not carry out his threats to impose extra tariffs on Mexico and China.  He did fulfil his promise to pull the US out of the TPPA but he has yet to show seriousness about revamping NAFTA.

A threat to the trade system could come from a tax reform bill being prepared by Republican Congress leaders.  The original paper contains a “trade adjustment” system with the effect of taxing US imports by 20% while exempting US exports from corporate tax.

If such a bill is passed, we can expect a torrent of criticism from the rest of the world, many cases against the US at the WTO and retaliatory action by several countries.   Due to opposition from several business sectors in the US, it is possible that this trade-adjustment aspect could eventually be dropped or at least modified considerably.

In any case, as the new US trade policy finds its shape, the first 100 days of Trump has spread a cold protectionist wind around the world.

On another issue, the icy winds have quickly turned into action, and caused international consternation.

Trump has moved to shred Obama’s climate change policy.  He proposed to cut the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by 31% and eliminate climate change research and prevention programmes throughout the federal government.

The EPA, now led by a climate change skeptic, was ordered to revise its standards on tailpipe pollution from vehicles and review the Clean Power Plan, which was the centrepiece of Obama’s policy to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

The plan would have shut down hundreds of coal-fired power plants, stop new coal plants and replace them with wind and solar farms.

“The policy reversals also signal that Mr Trump has no intention of following through on Mr Obama’s formal pledges under the Paris accord,” said Coral Davenport in the New York Times.

Under the Paris agreement, the US pledged to reduce its greenhouse gases by about 26% from 2005 levels by 2025.  “That can be achieved only if the US not only implements the Clean Power Plan and tailpipe pollution rules but also tightens them or adds more policies in future years,” says Davenport.

She quotes Mario Molina, a Nobel prize-winning scientist from Mexico, as saying:  “The message clearly is, we won’t do what the United States has promised to do…They don’t believe climate change is serious.  It is shocking to see such a degree of ignorance from the US.”

Will the US pull out of the Paris Agreement?  An internal debate is reportedly taking place within the administration.  If the country cannot meet and has no intention of meeting its Paris pledge, then it may find a convenient excuse to leave.

Even if it stays on, the new US delegation can be expected to discourage or stop other countries from moving ahead with new measures and actions.

There is widespread dismay about Trump’s intention to stop honouring the US pledge to contribute $3 billion initially to the Green Climate Fund, which assists developing countries take climate actions.

Obama had transferred the first billion, but there will be no more forthcoming from the Trump administration unless Congress over-rules the President (which is very unlikely).

Another adverse development, especially for developing countries, is Trump’s intention to downgrade the importance of international and development cooperation.

In March Trump announced his proposed budget with a big cut of 28% or $10.9 billion for the UN and other international organisations, the State Department and the US agency for international development, while by contrast the proposed military budget was increased by $54 billion.

For the time being the much anticipated US-China trade war is off the radar. But it is by no means off altogether. Credit: Bigstock

At about the same time, the UN humanitarian chief Stephen O’Brien urgently requested a big injection of donor funds to address the worst global humanitarian crisis since the end of the second world war, with drought affecting 38 million people in 17 African countries.

The US has for long been a leading contributor to humanitarian programmes such as the World Food program.  In future, other countries will have to provide a greater share of disaster assistance, said Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

“The US is turning inward at a time when we are facing these unprecedented crises that require increasing US assistance,” according to Bernice Romero of Save the Children, as quoted in the Los Angeles Times.  “In 2016 the US contributed $6.4 billion in humanitarian assistance, the largest in the world.  Cutting its funding at a time of looming famine and the world’s largest displacement crisis since World War II is really unconscionable and could really have devastating consequences.”

Trump also proposed to cut the US contribution to the UN budget by an as yet unknown amount and pay at most 25% of UN peacekeeping costs.  The US has been paying 22% of the UN’s core budget of $5.4 billion and 28.5% of the UN peacekeeping budget of $7.9 billion.  Trump also proposed a cut of $650 million over three years to the World Bank and other multilateral development banks.

The foreign affairs community in the US itself is shocked by the short-sightedness of the Trump measures and 121 retired US generals and admirals urged Congress to fully fund diplomacy and foreign aid as these were critical to preventing conflict.

The proposed Trump budget will likely be challenged at the Congress which has many supporters for both diplomacy and humanitarian concerns.  We will have to wait to see the final outcome.

Nevertheless the intention of the President and his administration is clear and depressing.   And instead of other countries stepping in to make up for the United States’ decrease in aid, some may be tempted to likewise reduce their contributions.

For example, the United Kingdom Prime Minister Teresa May in answer to journalists’ questions refused to confirm that the UK would continue its tradition of providing 0.7% of GNP as foreign aid.

This has led the billionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates to warn that a cut in UK aid, which currently is at 12 billion pounds, would mean more lives lost in Africa.

Besides the reduction in funding, the Trump foreign policy approach is also dampening the spirit and substance of international cooperation.

For example, the President’s sceptical attitude towards global cooperation on climate change will adversely affect the overall global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and build resilience to global warming.

With one of the world’s largest emitters of greenhouse gases becoming a disbeliever that climate change is man-made and could devastate the Earth, and no longer committing to take action domestically and helping others to do so, other countries may be tempted or encouraged to do likewise.

The world would be deprived of the cooperation it urgently requires to save itself from catastrophic global warming.

Excerpt:

Jared Kushner, senior advisor to President Donald J. Trump, speaks with Marine Corps Gen. Joe Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (by Dominique A. Pineiro via Department of Defense)

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Apr 20 2017 (IPS)

The apparent and surprisingly abrupt demise in Steve Bannon’s influence offers a major potential opening for neoconservatives, many of whom opposed Trump’s election precisely because of his association with Bannon and the “America Firsters,” to return to power after so many years of being relegated to the sidelines. Bannon’s decline suggest that he no longer wields the kind of veto power that prevented the nomination of Elliott Abrams as deputy secretary of state. Moreover, the administration’s ongoing failure to fill key posts at the undersecretary, assistant secretary, and deputy assistant secretary levels across the government’s foreign-policy apparatus provides a veritable cornucopia of opportunities for aspiring neocons who didn’t express their opposition to the Trump campaign too loudly.

Ninety days into the administration, the military brass—whose interests and general worldview are well represented by National Security Advisor Gen. H.R. McMaster and Pentagon chief Gen. James Mattis (ret.), not to mention the various military veterans led by National Security Council (NSC) chief of staff Gen. Kenneth Kellogg (ret.) who are taking positions on the NSC—appears to be very much in the driver’s seat on key foreign policy issues, especially regarding the Greater Middle East. Their influence is evident not only in the attention they’ve paid to mending ties with NATO and northeast Asian allies, but also in the more forceful actions in the Greater Middle East of the past two weeks. These latter demonstrations of force seem designed above all to reassure Washington’s traditional allies in the region, who had worried most loudly about both Obama’s non-interventionism and Trump’s “America First” rhetoric, that the U.S. is not shy about exerting its military muscle.

Nor could it be lost on many observers that Bannon’s expulsion from the NSC took place immediately after Jared Kushner returned from his surprise visit to Iraq hosted by Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford—reportedly the culmination of a calculated strategy of seduction by the Pentagon. Kushner has emerged as the chief conduit to Trump (aside, perhaps, from Ivanka). The timing of Bannon’s fall from grace—and Kushner’s reported role in it—was particularly remarkable given that Kushner and Bannon were allied in opposing McMaster’s effort to fire Ezra Cohen-Watnick from the NSC just a week before Kushner flew to Baghdad.)

The Ascendance of the Military

The military’s emergence—at least, for now—has a number of implications, some favorable to neocons, others not so much.

On the favorable side of the ledger, there are clear areas of convergence between both the brass and the neocons (although it’s important to emphasize that neither is monolithic and that there are variations in opinion within both groups). Although both the military and the neocons give lip service to the importance of “soft power” in promoting U.S. interests abroad, they share the belief that, ultimately, hard power is the only coin of the realm that really counts.

The military tends to appreciate the importance of mobilizing multilateral and especially allied support for U.S. policies, especially the use of force. Many neocons, however, don’t accord such support so much importance. Indeed, some are openly contemptuous of multilateralism and international law in general, believing that they unduly constrain Washington’s freedom of action (to do good for the world).
With substantial experience in counter-insurgency (COIN) doctrine in Iraq and Afghanistan, both McMaster and Mattis appreciate the importance of politics in military strategy in principle. But they are ultimately military men and hence naturally inclined to look in the first instance to military tools to pound in any loose nails, whether in the form of failing states or failing regional security structures. (That hammer will likely look even more compelling as the Trump administration follows through on its budgetary proposals to deplete U.S. diplomatic and development capabilities.) Like neoconservatives, they also appreciate large military budgets, and although they certainly oppose, in principle, the idea that the U.S. should play globocop for fear of overextension, they have no problem with the notion of U.S. global military primacy and the necessity of maintaining hundreds of military bases around the world to uphold it.

Moreover, the military and neoconservatives share to some extent an enduring hostility toward certain states. The Pentagon is quite comfortable with an adversarial relationship with Russia, if only because it is familiar and ensures European adherence to NATO, which the United States will dominate for the foreseeable future. This applies in particular to McMaster, who spent the last couple of years planning for conflict with Russia. For similar reasons, the military is generally comfortable with a mostly hostile relationship toward Iran. Such a stance ensures close ties with Washington’s traditional allies/autocrats in the Gulf (whose insatiable demand for U.S. weaponry helps sustain the industrial base of the U.S. military as well as the compensation for retired flag officers who serve on the boards of the arms sellers). And, as Mattis has made clear on any number of occasions, he sees Iran as the greatest long-term threat to U.S. interests in the region and welcomes an opportunity to “push back” against what he has claimed are Tehran’s hegemonic ambitions there. All of this is clearly encouraging to neocons whose antipathy toward both the Islamic Republic and Russia is deeply ingrained and of long standing.

On the more negative side, however, the military as an institution naturally harbors a distrust of neoconservatives, a distrust established by the Iraq debacle in which the military still finds itself bogged down with no clear exit. “Regime change” and “nation-building”—much touted by neocons in the post-Cold War era—are dirty words among most of the brass, for whom such phrases have become synonymous with quagmire, over-extension, and, as much as they resist coming to terms with it, failure. Of course, many active-duty and retired senior military officers, of whom McMaster may well be one, consider the 2007-08 “Surge”—a plan heavily promoted by neoconservatives—to have been a great success (despite its manifest failure to achieve the strategic goal of political and sectarian reconciliation) that was undone by Obama’s “premature” withdrawal. But even the most ardent COINistas are aware that, absent a catastrophic attack on the U.S. mainland, the American public will have very limited patience for major new investments of blood and treasure in the Middle East, especially given the general perception that Russia and China pose increasing threats to more important U.S. interests and allies in Europe and East Asia, respectively, compared to five or six years ago.

The prevailing wisdom among the brass remains pretty much as former Defense Secretary Bob Gates enunciated it before his retirement in 2011: “In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.” The military may indeed escalate its presence and loosen its rules of engagement in Mesopotamia, Afghanistan, and even Yemen in the coming months, but not so much as to attract sustained public attention and concern, despite the wishes of neocons like Bloomberg columnist Eli Lake, Gen. Jack Keane (ret.), or the Kagans. The desirability of a “light footprint” has become conventional wisdom at the Pentagon, while some neocons still believe that the U.S. occupation of post-World War II Germany and Japan should be the model for Iraq.

Besides Iraq’s legacy, the military has other reasons to resist neocon efforts to gain influence in the Trump administration. As successive flag officers, including one of their heroes, Gen. David Petraeus (ret.), have testified, the virtually unconditional U.S. embrace of Israel has long made their efforts to enlist Arab support for U.S. military initiatives in the region more difficult. Of course, like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, neocons argue that circumstances have changed over the last decade, that the reigning regional chaos and the fear of a rising Iran shared by both Israel and the Sunni-led Arab states have created a new strategic convergence that has made the Israeli-Palestinian conflict virtually irrelevant. According to this view, Washington’s perceived acquiescence in, if not support for, expanding Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank and its quarantine of Gaza are no longer a big deal for Arab leaders.

But this perception runs up against the reality that the Pentagon and CENTCOM have always faced in the region. Even the most autocratic Arab leaders, including those who have intensified their covert intelligence and military cooperation with Israel in recent years, are worried about their own public opinion, and, that until Israel takes concrete steps toward the creation of a viable and contiguous Palestinian state pursuant to the solution outlined in the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative (API), their cooperation will remain limited, as well as covert. In the meantime, the ever-present possibility of a new Palestinian uprising or another armed conflict in Gaza threatens both continuing cooperation as well as the U.S. position in the region to the extent that Washington is seen as backing Israel.

There are other differences. Despite the experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, neocons have long believed that states necessarily constitute the greatest threat to U.S. national security, while the military tends to take relatively more seriously threats posed by non-state actors, such as the Islamic State and al-Qaeda or, for that matter, al-Shabaab or Boko Haram to which neocons pay almost no attention. Although some neocons are clearly Islamophobic and/or Arabophobic (in major part due to their Likudist worldview), the military, as shown most recently by McMaster’s opposition to the use of the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism,” sees that attitude as counter-productive. And although neocons and the military share a strong antipathy toward Iran, the latter, unlike the former, appears to recognize that both countries share some common interests. Mattis, in particular, sees the nuclear deal as imperfect but very much worth preserving. Most neocons want to kill it, if not by simply tearing it up, then indirectly, either through new congressional sanctions or other means designed to provoke Iran into renouncing it.

The military tends to appreciate the importance of mobilizing multilateral and especially allied support for U.S. policies, especially the use of force. Many neocons, however, don’t accord such support so much importance. Indeed, some are openly contemptuous of multilateralism and international law in general, believing that they unduly constrain Washington’s freedom of action (to do good for the world). Neocons see themselves above all as moral actors in a world of good and evil; the brass is more grounded in realism, albeit of a pretty hardline nature.

Thus, to the extent that the military’s worldview emerges as dominant under Donald Trump, neoconservatives may have a hard time gaining influence. However, on some issues, such as lobbying for a larger Pentagon budget, taking a more aggressive stance against Moscow, aligning the U.S. more closely with the Sunni-led Gulf states, and promoting a more confrontational stance vis-à-vis Iran in the Middle East, neocons may gain an entrée.

Other Avenues of Influence

Just as the Pentagon deliberately courted Kushner—who appears, like his father-in-law, to be something of an empty vessel on foreign policy issues despite the rapid expansion of his international responsibilities in the first 90 days—so others will. Indeed, Abrams himself appears to have gotten the message. In his interview last week with Politico, he unsurprisingly praises Trump’s cruise-missile strikes against Syria and Kushner’s modesty. (“I don’t view him at all as an empire builder.”) At the end of the article, the author notes,

As for his own future with Trump, Abrams teased that it may still be in front of him, depending on how things shape up with Bannon and Kushner, the latter of whom he kept going out of his way to praise. [ Emphasis added.]

Although the deputy secretary of state position now appears to be taken, Abrams was also careful to laud his erstwhile promoter, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Now reportedly coordinating increasingly with Mattis and McMaster, Tillerson seems to have gained significant ground with Trump himself in recent weeks. Neocons may yet find a home at State, although I think Tillerson’s initial promotion of Abrams as his deputy was due primarily to the latter’s experience and skills as a bureaucratic infighter rather than for his ideological predispositions. Meanwhile, UN Amb. Nikki Haley, who was promoted to the NSC’s Principals Committee on the same day that Bannon was expelled, appears to have become a neocon favorite for her Kirkpatrickesque denunciations of Russia, Syria, and the UN itself. That she initially supported neocon heartthrob Sen. Marco Rubio for president and has been aligned politically with Sen. Lindsey Graham, who stressed Haley’s commitment to Israel when she was nominated as ambassador, also offers hope to neocons looking for avenues of influence and infiltration.

Yet another avenue into the administration—indeed, perhaps the most effective—lies with none other than casino king Sheldon Adelson, the single biggest donor to the Trump campaign and inaugural festivities (as well as to Haley’s political action committee). As we noted in January, Kushner himself, along with Israeli Amb. Ron Dermer, had become a critical, pro-Likud conduit between Trump and Adelson beginning shortly after Trump’s rather controversial appearance before the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) at the beginning of the presidential campaign. Although Adelson has maintained a low profile since the inauguration, he clearly enjoys unusual access to both Kushner and Trump. Indeed, the fact that Sean Spicer reportedly apologized personally to Adelson, of all people, almost immediately after his “Holocaust center” fiasco last week serves as a helpful reminder that, as much as the various factions, institutions, and individuals jockey for power in the new administration, money—especially campaign cash—still talks in Washington. This is a reality that neoconservatives absorbed long ago.

This piece was originally published in Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy Lobelog.com

A wind farm in Curacao. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
BRIDGETOWN, Barbados, Apr 14 2017 (IPS)

Barbados and its Caribbean neighbours are continuing to press ahead with their climate change agenda and push the concept of renewable energy despite the new position taken by the United States.

This was made clear by the Minister of the Environment and Drainage in Barbados, Dr. Denis Lowe, against the background of the position taken by U.S. President Donald Trump that climate change is a “hoax”, and his subsequent push for the revitalisation of the coal industry, and the issuance of an Executive Order to restart the Dakota Access Pipeline.“We stand ready to do what needs to be done." --Dr. Denis Lowe

“The moment has come. The President of the United States of America has determined that climate change is really a hoax, and that any notion about climate change science is based on false belief, and that there is no clear justification that this phenomenon called climate change exists,” Lowe said.

However, the Environment Minister pointed out that while Trump was “decrying” the legitimacy of climate change, 2016 was already being labelled as the warmest ocean temperature year.

“The impact of that accelerated warmth of the earth, according to American environmentalists, is the Michigan coastline, Lake Michigan. Evidence has been produced to show that the impact of climate change has affected that whole seaboard area, including the erosion of beaches along the Illinois Coast. This is a fact as reported,” he said.

Dr. Lowe cautioned that the new US position spelled “bad news” for the Caribbean.

He warned that the new position could see a significant reduction in funding from the United States to the United Nations system, which was the primary driver of the climate change fight.

“Institutions like the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Green Climate Fund will be impacted. The Adaptation Fund will be affected, and all of the other activities driven by US-donated funding will be impacted,” he pointed out.

But Lowe stressed that the region could not allow itself to be “hemmed in” by what might or might not occur relating to international funding.

He gave the assurance that his Ministry and Government would continue “to plough” ahead and look for unique ways to fund the island’s coastal rehabilitation and green energy programmes.

“We stand ready to do what needs to be done. Our Ministry continues to work with our stakeholders to look for ways to continue to press ahead with our climate change agenda,” Lowe said.

“We ask Barbadians from all walks of life to assist us in adopting and practising habits that would reduce the impacts of climate change on us as it relates to our water supply, our conservation effort, and our preservation efforts in terms of our spaces around the island that would be of importance,” he added.

Meanwhile, New York-based syndicated columnist Rebecca Theodore, who has written extensively on climate change and renewable energy in the Caribbean, said while President Trump seeks for a revitalisation of the coal industry in the United States, this will need more than government policy in Washington to be implemented.

“First, renewable energy sources like wind and solar are much more price-viable than coal. The demand for jobs in renewable energy is going up while for coal it’s rapidly going down,” Theodore told IPS.

“Secondly, the moral arguments and market forces in which the production of coal as an energy source are interlaced cannot be ignored. Carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants are the leading cause of death in many places and continue to be a hazard to public health.

“Thirdly, if the Clean Power Plan is to achieve its aims of cutting carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, then there must be a reduction in coal consumption,” Theodore added.

She also noted that carbon pollution from power plants is one of the major causes of climate change.

“It follows that if the United States must continue the fight in the global efforts to address climate change then the goal must be centered on cheap natural gas and the installation of renewable energy plants, Theodore told IPS.

“There must be options for investment in renewable energy, natural gas and shifting away from   coal-fired power.”

Earlier this year, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) said a significant portion of the 13 billion dollars it will be lending this year has been earmarked for agriculture, climate change and renewable energy projects.

IDB Executive Director Jerry Butler noted that the issue of renewable energy has been a constant focus for the institution.

“We are going to lend 13 billion dollars and of that amount we’ve carved out 30 percent of it for climate change, agriculture and renewable energy. In fact, 20 percent of that 13 billion in the Americas will be devoted to climate change and renewable energy,” Butler said.

“I think we are putting our money where our mouth is when it comes to us as a partner with the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and us as a partner with the other entities that work with us.”

Highlighting the IDB’s commitment to the region, Butler noted that even though the Eastern Caribbean States are not members of the bank, through its lending to the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB), countries in the sub-region have not been left out.

“For example, the more than 80 million dollars that’s devoted to geothermal exploration, Grenada will be the first beneficiary in the Eastern Caribbean,” he said.

“And our focus on the Caribbean is not stopping – whether it be smart financing programmes in Barbados, whether it be programmes associated with renewable energy and energy efficiency in Jamaica, or whether it be programmes in Guyana off-grid or on-grid – we try to do everything that we can to bring resources, technology, intelligence and at the same time best practices to everything that we do when it comes to the topic of renewable energy.”

Butler said the IDB believes that the sustainability, the competitiveness and the job-creation potential of the Caribbean can be unlocked “if there is a considered focus on weaning ourselves off the dependence on foreign fuels for generation” and focusing on “producing its own indigenous type of energy”.

Nikki Haley, U.S. Permanent Representative to the UN holding up pictures of victims of the alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria which prompted the Trump administration to launch an airstrike against the Assad government. Credit: UN Photo/Rick Bajornas

By Lyndal Rowlands
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 7 2017 (IPS)

U.S. President Donald Trump Thursday night described the deepening Syrian refugee crisis as partial justification for the first direct U.S. airstrike against the Syrian government, even though the United States still bans all refugees from Syria.

Several rights groups responded Friday, calling on Trump to repeal the ban, which applies to migrants from Syria and 5 other countries in Africa and the Middle East.

“Trump was using very strong words last night to describe the cruelty and the horrors that children and civilians in general are enduring (in Syria),” Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno, co-director of the US Program at Human Rights Watch told IPS.

“To try to keep refugees out of the United States is cruel,”McFarland Sánchez-Moreno added. “It’s contrary to the values that the U.S. has traditionally claimed to hold dear and inconsistent with some of the words that President Trump himself used last night.”

Speaking from Palm Beach, Florida on Thursday night Trump described how “even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered” in the alleged chemical weapons attack which took place earlier this week.

“Years of previous attempts at changing Assad’s behavior have all failed, and failed very dramatically.  As a result, the refugee crisis continues to deepen and the region continues to destabilize…” Trump continued.

However despite the airstrike marking a change in direction in Syria for the Trump Republican administration, there is no indication the administration is considering a similar shift in its policy towards Syrian refugees.

Reactions from the 15 member states of the UN Security Council to the airstrike on Friday were mixed, with some supporting the strikes even though the United States carried out the unilateral attack without the backing of the council. Others, including Bolivia, which called the meeting, strongly opposed the attack.

Lord Steward Wood of Anfield, Chair of the UN Association of the UK, a civil society organisation questioned the United States decision to take “unilateral action without broad international backing through the UN,”

He said that such action “without a clear strategy for safeguarding civilians, and through further military escalation risks further deepening and exacerbating an already protracted and horrific conflict, leaving civilians at greater, not lesser, risk of further atrocities.”

“In the meantime, if President Trump wishes to help the victims of Assad’s atrocities, he could pledge to play a leading role in resettling the survivors,” Wood added.

Meanwhile Noah Gottschalk, Oxfam America’s Senior Humanitarian Policy Advisor called for the United States to “change course” on Syrian refugees following the airstrikes.

Gottschalk said that the “innocent families” that Trump referred to “who were killed in Idlib are no different than the people who are attempting to seek refuge in the U.S.”

“Oxfam is urging the President to change course on his discriminatory ban that blocks Syrian civilians from finding refuge in the United States,” he said. “If we truly want to help protect the people of Syria, we must also be willing to offer the Syrians assistance as they flee attacks in search of safety.”

Although this is the first time that the United States has directly targeted Bashar Al-Assad’s government, airstrike monitoring project Airwars reports that there have been 7912 US-led coalition strikes targeting the so-called Islamic State since 2014. Airwars has also reported a spike in civilian casualties related to coalition air strikes in March 2017, rating 477 civilian casualties reports as ‘fair’.

However Airwars also reported that the U.S. strike on Shayrat Airfield in Homs in the early hours of Friday 7 April destroyed “up to 12 aircraft” describing this result as “significant” considering that “the primary cause of civilian deaths by (the) Syrian regime remains airstrikes.”

Earlier this week spokesmen for the UN Secretary-General Stéphane Dujarric said that the Secretary-General was “deeply disturbed by the reports of alleged use of chemical weapons in an airstrike in the Khan Shaykhun area of southern Idlib, Syria.”

“The Secretary-General expresses his heartfelt condolences to victims of the incident and their families.”

Guterres had not yet commented on the U.S. airstrike against the Syrian government as of Friday evening.

Almost five million people have fled Syria since the conflict began over six years ago. Many areas of Syria are besieged and inaccessible to humanitarian assistance as well as UN monitors. This makes it difficult for the UN to monitor attacks such as the alleged chemical weapons attack which took place this week. This is also why the UN no longer provides an official death toll for the conflict, however in April 2016, UN Special Envoy to Syria Staffan de Mistura said that it is likely more than 400,000 people had been killed.

Mothers and babies wait for health screening at a US funded health clinic in Uganda. Credit: Lyndal Rowlands / IPS.

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 5 2017 (IPS)

The U.S. has withdrawn all of its funding to the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), an agency that works on family planning and reproductive health in over 150 countries.

The decision is based on what the UNFPA says is an erroneous claim that it “supports, or participates in the management of, a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilisation (in China).”

The claim was made by the U.S. State Department in a letter on Monday announcing the cuts, but has been described repeatedly as baseless, by those who know the UNFPA’s work.

According to the UNFPA, it does not promote abortions and instead “accords the highest priority to voluntary family planning to prevent unintended pregnancies to eliminate recourse to abortion.”

In a statement released in response to the funding cuts, the UNFPA said that “we have always valued the United States as a trusted partner and leader in helping to ensure that every pregnancy is wanted, every childbirth is safe, and every young person’s potential is fulfilled.”

The U.S. is one of the largest contributors to UNFPA having provided over $75 million in 2015 alone, the third highest contribution from a government after the United Kingdom and Sweden. The U.S. is also the second largest funder of UNFPA’s humanitarian operations. Like other UN agencies, UNFPA is funded by governments voluntarily.

Though UNFPA does work in China, both Kowalski and Jalan told IPS that the accusation is baseless and is simply an “excuse” to stop funding an organization working on sexual and reproductive rights.

International Women’s Health Coalition’s Director of Advocacy and Policy Shannon Kowalski told IPS that the cuts will have “devastating consequences” for girls and women around the world.

President of the Caribbean Development Bank Dr. Warren Smith says the bank is giving high priority to addressing the fallout from climate change in the region. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
BRIDGETOWN, Barbados, Apr 4 2017 (IPS)

From tourism-dependent nations like Barbados to those rich with natural resources like Guyana, climate change poses one of the biggest challenges for the countries of the Caribbean.

Nearly all of these countries are vulnerable to natural events like hurricanes.“Why is this such a big deal? The Caribbean is facing a climate crisis, which we need to tackle now - with urgency.” --Dr. Warren Smith

Not surprisingly, the climate change threat facing the countries of the Caribbean has not gone unnoticed by the region’s premier financial institution, the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB).

“We are giving high priority to redressing the fallout from climate change,” the bank’s president Dr. Warren Smith told journalists at a press conference here recently.

“This is an inescapable reality, and we have made it our business to put in place the financial resources necessary to redress the effects of sea-level rise and more dangerous hurricanes.”

CDB has also tapped new funding for renewable energy and for energy efficiency.

For the first time, the bank has accessed a 33-million-dollar credit facility from Agence Française de Développement (AFD) to support sustainable infrastructure projects in select Caribbean countries and a 3 million euro grant to finance feasibility studies for projects eligible for financing under the credit facility.

“At least 50 percent of those funds will be used for climate adaptation and mitigation projects,” Smith explained.

“We persuaded the Government of Canada to provide financing for a CAD 5 million Canadian Support to the Energy Sector in the Caribbean Fund, which will be administered by the CDB. This money will help to build capacity in the energy sector over the period 2016 to 2019.”

In February, CBD also became an accredited partner institution of the Adaptation Fund, and in October 2016, the bank achieved the distinction of accreditation to the Green Climate Fund (GCF).

“Why is this such a big deal? The Caribbean is facing a climate crisis, which we need to tackle now – with urgency,” Smith said.

“The Adaptation Fund and the Green Climate Fund have opened new gateways to much-needed grant and or low-cost financing to address climate change vulnerabilities in all of our borrowing member countries (BMCs).”

The financing options outlined by the CDB president would no doubt be welcome news to Caribbean countries in the wake of United States President Donald Trump’s recently proposed budget cuts for climate change funding.

The proposed 2018 federal budget would end programmes to lower domestic greenhouse gas emissions, slash diplomatic efforts to slow climate change and cut scientific missions to study the climate.

The budget would cut the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) funding by 31 percent including ending Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan – the Obama administration’s plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.

At the U.S. State Department, the budget proposal eliminates the Global Climate Change Initiative and fulfills the president’s pledge to cease payments to the United Nations’ climate change programmes by eliminating U.S. funding related to the Green Climate Fund and its two precursor Climate Investment Funds.

The Green Climate Fund is the U.N. effort to help countries adapt to climate change or develop low-emission energy technologies, and the Global Climate Change Initiative is a kind of umbrella programme that paid for dozens of assistance programmess to other countries working on things such as clean energy.

The proposal would also cut big chunks out of climate-related programmes of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The USAID is the American agency through which the countries of the Caribbean get a lot of their funding for climate change adaptation and mitigation.

“We would be foolish to have taken a lead role in getting the world to move on climate, to put innovation at its core and then walk away from that agenda,” Dr Ernest Moniz said on CNN. “Some of the statements being made about the science, I might say by non-scientists, are really disturbing because the evidence is clearly there for taking prudent steps.

“I would not argue with the issue that different people in office may decide to take different pathways, different rates of change etc., but not the fundamental science,” added Moniz, who was instrumental in negotiating the Paris Climate Agreement.

Throughout his election campaign, Trump consistently threatened to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate deal.

Moniz, a nuclear physicist and former Secretary of Energy serving under President Obama, from May 2013 to January 2017, said he would wait and see how this develops, but said of the threat to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement, “obviously, that would be a very bad idea” noting that every country in the world is now committed to a low-carbon future.

“There’s no going back. One of my friends in the industry would say ‘you can’t keep the waves off the beach’. We are going to a low carbon future.”

Since being sworn in as president in January, Trump’s administration has been sending somewhat mixed signals about climate change. While Trump himself has described climate change as a hoax, he also said he had an open mind toward efforts to control it.

Caribbean countries, meanwhile, are watching with keen interest the developments in the United States.

Executive Director of the Caribbean Regional Fisheries Mechanism (CRFM) Milton Haughton said fisheries is one of the industries being impacted by climate change.

“Climate change, sea level rise, ocean acidification and disaster risk management are major challenges facing the fisheries sector and the wider economies of our countries,” Haughton said ahead of a two-day meeting in Kingston to discuss measures for adaptation to climate change and disaster risk management in fisheries as well as the status of and recent trends in fisheries and aquaculture in the region.

“These issues continue to be high priorities for policy-makers and stakeholders because we need to improve capacity, information base and policy, and institutional arrangements to respond to these threats and protect our future.

“At this meeting, we will be discussing the USA-sponsored initiative to provide risk insurance for fishers, among other initiatives to improve and protect the fisheries sector and ensure food security,” Haughton added.

The US/Mexico Border is becoming more dangerous. Credit: Hans Maximo Musielik/Amnesty International

By Madeleine Penman
MEXICO CITY, Mar 29 2017 (IPS)

The sight of one of the most infamous borders on earth – roughly 1,000 kilometers of porous metal fence dividing lives, hopes and dreams between the USA and Mexico, is undoubtedly overwhelming, but not in the way we expected it to be.

While it has been one of the most talked about issues since last year’s USA election campaign, the stretch of land that separates the USA and Mexico now lies eerily quiet.

The stream of men, women and children US President Trump predicted would be flooding the area are nowhere to be seen. There is no one working on the “big, powerful wall” Trump promised to build along the entire length of more than 3,000 kilometers of the border. The 5,000 additional border patrol agents that are meant to be “increasing security” in the area have yet to be deployed.

What we recently witnessed along the border, however, is increasing confusion and utter fear. As many advocates described it “the quiet before the storm”. This is not a new situation, things have been building up in the area but they are likely to get devastatingly worse.

Because although President Trump’s promises have not yet been fully acted upon, the machine has been set in motion, building up on years of bad policies and practices along the border. The potential impact the most recently enacted border control measures will have on the lives of thousands of people living in terror of being sent back to extreme violence is becoming notable.

This is how the Trump administration is stirring up what could dangerously become a full blown refugee crisis:

1. Sow a discourse of hate and fear

Since the start of his campaign for the Presidency, Donald Trump has repeatedly described migrants and asylum seekers, particularly people from Mexico and Central America, as “criminals and rapists”.

He has failed to acknowledge the plight of the thousands of women, children and men who live in “war-like” situations in some of the most dangerous countries on earth, particularly El Salvador and Honduras, and who are effectively forced to flee their homes if they want to live.

Credit: Hans Maximo Musielik/Amnesty International

2. Pass confusing orders with no advice on how to implement them

In the initial raft of Executive Orders passed by President Trump during his first days in office, the administration effectively sought to close the borders to immigrants, including asylum seekers looking for a safe haven in the USA.

The Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements Executive Order of 25 January aims at ensuring that the process of detaining and expelling migrants and asylum seekers is as swift as possible – fully ignoring the fact that some of these people face mortal danger if sent back to their countries.

Furthermore, since the order was issued, it appears border agencies have been left in the dark about how to implement it. We arrived in Arizona just two days after the Department of Homeland Security had released its 20 February Memo detailing how to roll out Trump’s border security executive order. We were told that at least one high-level member of border control had received the memo the same time as the press had, and was none the wiser as to how to implement it.

3. Turn people back, no questions asked

Each year, hundreds of thousands of people from Central America and other countries around the world cross Mexico’s land border with the USA to seek safety and a better life. As well as Mexicans, many of these people are seeking protection as they are fleeing extreme violence in their home countries (including El Salvador and Honduras).

But we received multiple reports and evidence that rather than allowing people to enter the USA and seek asylum in order to save their lives, US Customs and Border patrol are repeatedly refusing entry to asylum seekers all along the border.

From San Diego, California to McAllen, Texas, we were told that even before Trump arrived on the scene, from as early as 2015, border agents have been known to take the law into their own hands by turning back asylum seekers, telling them they cannot enter. This is not only immoral but also against international legal principles the USA has committed to uphold and USA law itself, which stipulates the right and process to ask for asylum.

One human rights worker on the Mexican side of the border with Arizona, told us how a border patrol agent scorned her for accompanying Central Americans to the border to ensure that their rights were not violated. “How do you feel, aren’t you ashamed to be helping ‘terrorists’?” she was asked.

4. Turn a blind eye to criminal groups terrorizing asylum seekers

Crossing into the USA without papers means risking your life, as it makes people more vulnerable to gangs and drug cartels who control the border area and are primed to profit from people in desperate situations.

We have received many reports that people smugglers have hiked their rates dramatically since Trump was elected. US Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly recently announced that since November 2016 the rate charged by people smugglers in some areas along the US southwest border has risen from US$3,500 to US$8,000. Yet what Kelly fails to recognize is how this will put people’s lives at further risk. People will not stop fleeing their countries and moving north in search of safety, despite Trump’s border control measures. Criminal groups will only gain more power once the border wall is built, charging vulnerable people fortunes to leave their country and make their way to the USA.

5. Outsource the responsibility

Multiple questions remain regarding the USA’s plans to further militarize its southern border and deny entry to asylum seekers. One of the biggest questions involves Mexico’s role in this equation.

In recent weeks, Mexico’s Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray announced that Mexico would not receive foreigners turned back from the USA under Trump’s 25 January Border Control Executive Order. Yet no one we spoke to on the border understood what this would look like in practice. Would Mexico start raids along its border? Would it carry out more deportations? Or, would Mexico’s refusal to host migrants lead to even more people locked up in immigration detention centres on the US side? Or, would we see ad hoc refugee camps along the Mexican side of the border as asylum seekers wait for their claims to be heard in US immigration courts? Already acutely vulnerable people would be exposed to further harm and human rights abuses by both criminal groups.

Amnesty International spoke to four Mexican government officials stationed at border cities, and it was evident that confusion reigns. “We are going along with our work in a normal way,” one official in Tamaulipas told us. “I don’t think we have any plans regarding how to receive those being turned back,” another official in Chihuahua said.

In this climate of uncertainty and fear, migrants and asylum seekers are more vulnerable to coercion and violations of their rights to due process. Fearful of a USA government that appears quick to detain and deport them, and uncertain of their situation while on Mexican soil, the desperation of migrants and asylum seekers and the abuses they are forced to endure, are bound to rise.

Excerpt:

Snow falls outside of the UN headquarters Secretariat building in New York. Credit: UN Photo/Rick Bajornas

By Lyndal Rowlands
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 17 2017 (IPS)

In the midst of responding to the worst humanitarian crisis since records began, the UN is now faced with potential funding cuts from its biggest donor, the United States.

On Thursday, U.S. President Donald Trump released “America First: A Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again,” the first such budget proposal of his presidency. The blueprint’s biggest proposed cuts target the Department of State, which would lose 29 percent of its budget, and the Environment Protection Agency, which would lose 31 percent.

Although details of exactly how the proposed cuts – which still require approval of U.S. Congress – would be made, are yet to emerge, funding for the UN and the USAID which both fall under the State Department is at risk.

“If approved – and that’s a big “if” – the Whitehouse’s plans could slash several billions in UN funding,” Natalie Samarasinghe Executive Director of the United Nations Association of the UK, told IPS.

These billions of dollars of potential cuts come at a time when the United Nations is occupied responding to both acute and chronic crises around the world.

“Some 20 million people are facing famine in Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen,” said Samarasinghe.

“The number of people forced to flee their homes is now the biggest since records began,” she said. “These are people for whom the UN is literally the difference between life and death,” she said.

Michel Gabaudan, President of Refugees International, told IPS that it is important to keep the United States contribution in perspective when assessing the potential cuts.

“The U.S. contribution is critical, it is generous, it is vital, but it is not unduly high compared to other countries of the western bloc – who are the main funders of humanitarian aid – and we must keep this contribution in perspective.”

“The total foreign aid of the U.S. is about one percent of the budget – not 10 or 15 percent as some people seem to think – it’s one percent.”

“The magnitude of the U.S. economy means that that one percent of money is critical to humanitarian relief and to development programs but if you compare this with what some European countries are doing, like Switzerland, like the Nordics, like the Dutch … they are certainly giving more in terms of dollar per capita of their citizens,” he said.

Samarasinghe also noted that the proposed cuts are “still a relatively small amount compared to, say, fossil fuel subsidies.”

She said that it would be “politically challenging for European countries to pick up the slack, especially with elections looming in a number of countries.”

As an example, said Samarasinghe, a recent appeal from the Netherlands to fund reproductive health and safe abortions has not yet reached its $600 million target. That appeal was set up after Trump re-instated the Global Gag Rule, which removes U.S. funding from non-governmental organisations that carry out any activities related to safe abortion, regardless of the funding source.

Meanwhile, Deborah Brautigam an expert on China in Africa told IPS that it is unlikely that China will increase its funding to the United Nations as the United States steps back, because China already feels “very comfortable” in its current position at the UN. This position includes a permanent seat on the UN Security Council and UN development policies, which align with China’s priorities, such as industrialisation, said Brautigam who is Professor of International Political Economy and Director of the China Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins University.

Two UN agencies that receive the most funding from the United States are the World Food Program, which provides emergency food assistance, and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

However Gabaudan said that both the more immediate humanitarian aid as well as long-term development assistance are needed to address the world’s crises:

“The state department funds UNHCR and USAID funds development programs which tie the humanitarian aid with longer term issues,” said Gabaudan.

“Most displacement crises are protracted, people don’t leave and get back home after a year or two,” he said, as is the case with the Syrian conflict, which just surpassed six year on March 15th.

The budget proposal also reinforces other aspects of the emerging Trump Republican administration policies, including sweeping cuts to environment programs and cuts to programs, which assist the poor in the United States.

Nikki Haley, U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations said in a statement that the cuts reflected a desire to make the United Nations more effective and efficient.

“I look forward to working with Members of Congress to craft a budget that advances U.S. interests at the UN, and I look forward to working with my UN colleagues to make the organisation more effective and efficient.”

“In many areas, the UN spends more money than it should, and in many ways it places a much larger financial burden on the United States than on other countries.”

However that financial relationship between the UN and the host of UN Headquarters is not unidirectional. According to the latest New York City UN Impact Report, the UN community contributed 3.69 billion dollars to the New York City economy in 2014.

In response to the budget blueprint Stéphane Dujarric, Spokesman for UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said that “the Secretary-General is grateful for the support the United States has given to the United Nations over the years as the organisation’s largest financial contributor.”

“The Secretary-General is totally committed to reforming the United Nations and ensuring that it is fit for purpose and delivers results in the most efficient and cost-effective manner.”

“However, abrupt funding cuts can force the adoption of ad hoc measures that will undermine the impact of longer-term reform efforts,” said Dujarric.

Dujarric’s statement also addressed aspects of the proposed budget, which claim to address terrorism. The proposal, which significantly increases spending on the U.S. military appears to favour a “hard power” militaristic approach over a “soft power” diplomatic and humanitarian approach.

“The Secretary-General fully subscribes to the necessity to effectively combat terrorism but believes that it requires more than military spending,” said Dujarric. “There is also a need to address the underlying drivers of terrorism through continuing investments in conflict prevention, conflict resolution, countering violent extremism, peacekeeping, peacebuilding, sustainable and inclusive development, the enhancement and respect of human rights, and timely responses to humanitarian crises.”

Torrential rains from trough systems in St. Vincent and the Grenadines in November 2016 resulted in landslides like this one, which swept one structure away and threatened nearby houses. Credit: Kenton X. Chance/IPS

By Kenton X. Chance
KINGSTOWN, St. Vincent, Mar 5 2017 (IPS)

Caribbean leaders worry that with climate change sceptic Donald Trump in the White House, it will be more difficult for small island developing states facing the brunt of climate change to secure the financing necessary to adapt to and mitigate against it.

Mere days after Trump’s inauguration, the White House ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to delete a page about climate change from its website. It has also also signalled its intention to slash the budget of the NOAA, the U.S.’s leading climate science agency, by 17 percent.“I have listened to President Trump after the election and he had said that he is keeping an open mind on the question of man-made climate change.” --PM of St. Vincent and the Grenadines Ralph Gonsalves

If Trump follows through on his campaign promise to roll back his predecessor, Barack Obama’s, green legacy, it seems inevitable that Caribbean and other small island developing states will feel the effects. Trump had also explicitly vowed to stop all US payments to UN climate change programmes.

In this archipelagic nation, the Ralph Gonsalves administration spent some 3.7 million dollars in November 2016 – about 1 per cent of that year’s budget – cleaning up after a series of trough systems.

The sum did not take into account the monies needed to respond to the damage to public infrastructure and private homes, as well as losses in agriculture resulting from the severe weather, which the government has blamed on climate change.

“The United States is one of the major emitters of greenhouse gases and, for us, the science is clear and we accept the conclusion of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change,” Prime Minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines Ralph Gonsalves told IPS.

He said his nation’s commitment is reflected not only in the fact that St. Vincent and the Grenadines was one of the early signatories to the Paris Agreement at the end of COP 21, but was also one of the early ratifiers of the agreement.

The Paris Agreement sets out a global action plan to put the world on track to avoid dangerous climate change by limiting global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius. During the election campaign, Trump vowed that he would pull the U.S. out of the deal if elected, although there appears to be some dissent within the administration on the issue.

It was reported this week that Patricia Espinosa, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which oversaw the Paris deal, is visiting the US and had requested a meeting with Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state, and other officials over the commitment of the new administration to global climate goals.

So far, Espinosa says she has been snubbed, and a state department official told the Guardian there were no scheduled meetings to announce.

The official added: “As with many policies, this administration is conducting a broad review of international climate issues.”

Small island developing states have adopted the mantra “1.5 to stay alive”, saying that ideally global climate change should be contained to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrialisation levels if their islands are to survive.

Gonsalves is hopeful that Trump would modify the policies outlined during the election campaign.

“I have listened to President Trump after the election and he had said that he is keeping an open mind on the question of man-made climate change,” he told IPS.

Gonsalves noted, however, the developments regarding the removal of climate change references from the White House website, adding, “But I would actually wait to see what would actually happen beyond what takes place on the website.”

The prime minister noted to IPS that the United States is an extremely powerful country, but suggested that even if Washington follows through on Trump’s campaign pledges, all is not lost.

“The United States of American has a population of 330 million people. Currently, in the world, there are seven and a half billion people … There is a lot of the world out there other than 330 million [people] and the world is not just one country — though a hugely important country.”

But Kingstown is not just waiting to see where Trump goes with his policy on climate change.

Come May 1, consumers in St. Vincent and the Grenadines will begin paying a 1 per cent “Disaster Levy” on consumption within the country. The monies generated will be used to capitalise the Contingences Fund, which will be set up to help offset the cost of responding to natural disasters.

In presenting his case to lawmakers, Gonsalves, who is also Minister of Finance, said that there have been frequent severe natural disasters in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, particularly since 2010, resulting in extensive loss and damage to houses, physical infrastructure and economic enterprises.

“The central government has incurred significant costs in providing relief and assistance to affected households and businesses and for rehabilitation and replacement of damaged infrastructure. Indeed, we have calculated that no less than 10 per cent of the public debt has been incurred for disaster-related projects and initiatives, narrowly-defined,” he told Parliament during his Budget Address in February.

As part of the Paris Agreement, developed countries said they intend to continue their existing collective goal to mobilise 100 billion dollars per year by 2020 and extend this until 2025. A new and higher goal will be set for after this period.

Gonsalves said it was not anticipated that the Paris Agreement would have been signed and ratified by November 2016. “But it was done. The anticipation was that it was going to take several years longer, so they put the commitments from 2020.

“Now, what are we going to do between 2017 and 2020?” he told IPS, adding that one practical response is to push for the pledges to come forward.

As Caribbean nations do what they can, locally, to respond to the impact of climate change, they are hoping that global funding initiatives for adaptation and mitigation do not take on the usual sluggish disbursement practices of other global initiatives.

Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit told leaders of the 15-member Caribbean Community at their 28th Inter-Sessional Meeting in Guyana in mid-February that it was critical the Green Climate Fund be more readily accessible for countries trying to recover from the aftermaths of climate-driven natural disasters.

Confusion over the implementation of the US travel ban has left journalists unable to travel. Credit: Rebecca Murray/IPS.

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
NEW YORK, Feb 20 2017 (IPS)

New restrictions on immigrants and refugees coming to the United States are also posing challenges for foreign correspondents covering news in the United States. Some have had to indefinitely postpone plans to report on conflicts in the Middle East while others have found an unfriendly reminder of their past treatment as journalists in less free countries.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s immigration executive order sent shockwaves throughout the world as citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries and all refugees were barred from entering the country for 90 days and 120 days respectively.

Though the travel ban is temporarily on hold following a court decision to reject its reinstatement, President Trump stood by his policy, calling it “common sense” and promising to keep “the wrong people” out of the U.S. Trump announced Thursday that he would sign a new Executive Order next week which will address some of the legal issues raised by the U.S. courts.

Within the millions affected by the travel ban are journalists, many of whom were caught amidst the chaos and confusion as the initial Executive Order was implemented.

In the wake of the order, BBC journalist Ali Hamedani, an Iranian-born British citizen, was detained and questioned upon his arrival at Chicago’s O’Hare airport for over two hours.

He said his phone and computer were searched, including his social media accounts.

”It wasn’t pleasant at all. To be honest with you, I was arrested back home in Iran in 2009 because I was working for the BBC and I felt the same this time,“ he said.

Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, a dual American and Iranian citizen, also expressed his fear about the “major” impact of the new policy on his family, stating: “This isn’t the America I promised [my wife] when we were finally set free.”

Rezaian spent nearly two years in an Iranian prison after being arrested on charges including espionage and propaganda against the government.

CNN editor and award-winning journalist Mohammed Tawfeeq, who is an Iraqi national and legal permanent resident of the U.S., was detained in Atlanta where he was subjected to additional screening. He promptly filed a federal lawsuit challenging the executive order.

“We are concerned when policies adopted by countries restrict the access and movement of journalists…We believe that journalists should be allowed to enter countries, to report on them regardless of where those countries are,” Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)’s Advocacy Director Courtney Radsch told IPS.

The ban also affects foreign correspondents covering the United Nations. Although there is a specific exception for journalists traveling as part of diplomatic delegations to the United Nations, the original executive order does not directly address any other media visas given to foreign media representatives traveling to or who are already in the country.

The restrictions have also concerned journalist Sama Dizayee, an Iraqi journalist who is a green card holding legal permanent resident in the U.S.

Dizayee told IPS that she had a trip planned to London but was forced to cancel it once the travel ban was implemented.

“I wake up and [saw] all of these people that were detained, deported back to their home countries…I was like oh my god I’m a legal resident here in America and I came all the way from Iraq here to pursue journalism, a dream that I always wanted and now my freedom is threatened,” she told IPS.

The Department of Homeland Security later clarified the policy in relation to green card holders, stating that U.S. permanent residents from one of the seven countries are not automatically barred from entry and will be assessed on a case-by-case basis.

Despite this, Dizayee, who initially had refugee status before becoming a permanent resident, said she still did not want to take the risk.

“Do I really want to become subject to extra screening and hours of being held at the airport? Do I really want to be profiled as a Muslim Iraqi here in the U.S.? This is not an experience I want to remember,” she said.

Dizayee told IPS that she has always been subjected to extra screening due to her background, waiting for hours to be released.

“That really stays with you…and it has now become a law with this travel ban,” she said.

Dizayee highlighted that the stakes are particularly high for journalists whose work is now limited due to the inability to travel.

“[Journalists] go places to cover stories—they go to Iraq, to Lebanon, we travel all the time,” she said, adding that she had planned to travel to Iraq to cover the Mosul battle.

“I can’t be there now, I can’t write that story,” Dizayee continued.

CPJ issued a safety advisory for journalists, recommending that those who are from one of the seven countries with media visas in the U.S. should not leave within the time period covered by the executive order.

Radsch also advised journalists not to travel with mobile or other devices or to make sure confidential or important information is backed up rather than on their devices.

“This order is helping to highlight the importance of [digital security] for journalists,” she told IPS.

The U.S. order has already emboldened other governments to implement similar policies, including the Iraqi government which approved a “reciprocity” measure banning Americans from entering the Middle Eastern country, further restricting information flow across borders and journalists’ ability to report.

Radsch highlighted the need to get clarity on how the order is impacting journalists and what the regulations are.

She also told IPS that journalists have been subject to secondary screening and questioning at the border before this new policy, including Canadian photojournalist Ed Ou who was pulled aside and interrogated for six hours on his way to cover the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. After refusing to surrender the password to his devices, Ed Ou was denied entry into the U.S.

Dizayee expressed uncertainty and apprehension regarding the future of the new travel restrictions.

“I was always dreaming to live here, to write stories here, to be able to travel to places and write whatever I wanted to write about without being persecuted,” she told IPS.

“I am not going anywhere for the next 90 days for sure,” Dizayee continued.

The immigration executive order, initially implemented at the end of January, was denounced by several human rights groups and politicians, including the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights who said: “Discrimination on nationality alone is forbidden under human rights law. The US ban is also mean spirited, and wastes resources needed for proper counter-terrorism.”

Similarly, Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Sarif, said the Trump Administration’s decision would be recorded in history as “a great gift to extremists and their supporters” while Swedish foreign affairs minister Margot Wallström said she was “deeply concerned” by a decision that “creates mistrust between people.”

Others expressed support for the move including Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull who stated that “”it is vital that every nation is able to control who comes across its borders.”

The tax on US imports, without the same being applied to US-made products, discriminates against foreign products, and US exports being exempted from taxes is tantamount to being an export subsidy. How will this be taken at the WTO, the guardian of the multilateral trading system? Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Martin Khor
PENANG, Feb 17 2017 (IPS)

As American lawmakers and the Trump administration prepare the ground for introducing a border adjustment tax, many controversial issues have emerged, including whether they go against the rules of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

The border tax is part of the overhaul of the US corporate tax system proposed by Republican Congress leaders and appears to have the support of President Donald Trump.

If adopted, the tax measure is sure to attract the opposition of the United States’ trading partners, as their exports to the US will have the equivalent of a 20% tax imposed on them, whereas the exports from the US will be exempted from a 20% corporate tax.

The tax on US imports, without the same being applied to US-made products, discriminates against foreign products, and US exports being exempted from taxes is tantamount to being an export subsidy.

How will this be taken at the WTO, the guardian of the multilateral trading system?

US Congressman Kevin Brady, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, and the plan’s main advocate, is convinced the plan is WTO-consistent, but has yet to explain why.

On the other hand, many trade and legal experts think the plan violates the principles and rules of the WTO, although they caution that a final opinion is possible only when the language of the law is known.

Their general view is as follows: Firstly, the inability to deduct import expenses from a company’s tax (while allowing deductions for locally sourced products and services and wages) discriminates against imports vis-à-vis domestic products, and violates the national treatment principle of the WTO and the rules of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) which specify that imports must be treated no less favourably than similar locally produced goods.

Secondly, the exemption of export revenues from the taxable income would be most likely assessed as a prohibited export subsidy under the WTO’s subsidies agreement.

The renowned international trade expert, Bhagirath Lal Das, says that there are two separate issues to be considered:  the differential treatment of domestic and imported materials, and the differential tax treatment of income based on whether the product is domestically consumed or exported.

Martin Khor

Says Das:   “It appears that the proposal is to deduct the cost of domestic input (product) from a company’s income while computing the tax, whereas there is no such deduction if a like imported input is used in the production.

“If this be the case, such a provision will clearly violate the principle of national treatment contained in Article III of the GATT 1994.”     Under that article, imported products must be accorded treatment no less favourable than that given to similar domestic products in respect of laws and regulations.

Added Das:  “If the use of the domestic product results in tax reduction whereas the use of the like imported product does not get similar treatment, clearly the imported product will get “less favourable” treatment. And that will violate the principle of national treatment, and it can be successfully challenged in the WTO on this ground.”

On the second issue, the proposal is to differentiate between the earning from domestic sale and that from export in the matter of taxation in respect of a product.

Commented Das:  “Here it would appear that the exemption of the tax is conditional on export. This practice will clearly qualify for being categorised as export subsidy which is prohibited under Article 3 of the WTO’s Subsidy Agreement.”

Das cites a case of an American company, the Domestic International Sales Corporation (DISC).  A portion of its profit which was engaged in export was tax free.  The EEC, the predecessor of EC, raised a dispute in the GATT in 1973. The matter was delayed for a long time until in 1999 a panel at the WTO ruled that the US practice was in fact an export subsidy and was prohibited.

“This case may not be exactly the same as the currently anticipated proposal, but it does point to the fallibility of providing government benefit contingent on export,” says Das.

Das was formerly Chairman of the General Council of GATT,  Indian Ambassador to GATT, and subsequently Director of Trade in the UN Conference on Trade and Development, and has written many books on the WTO and its agreements.

According to another eminent expert on the WTO, Chakravarthi Raghavan, whether the US law is considered “legal” depends on the language of the law and its actual effects.

“There is little doubt that the “pith and substance” of the Republican border tax proposal or ideas will be in violation of Articles II and III of GATT and Article 3.1 of the Subsidies Agreement.”

Raghavan, Chief Editor Emeritus of the South-North Development Monitor, followed and analysed the negotiations of the Uruguay Round and of the WTO on a daily basis ever since.

There are many shortcomings with the WTO dispute system. Few countries have the courage or financial resources to take up cases against the US.
Countries can challenge the US at the WTO and if they succeed the US has to change its law or face retaliatory action.  The winning party can block US exports to it equivalent in value to the loss of its exports to the US.

However, there are many shortcomings with the WTO dispute system.  Few countries have the courage or financial resources to take up cases against the US.

If some countries do take up cases, it takes as long as three to four years for a case in the WTO to wind its way through panel hearings and to a final verdict at the Appellate Body, and for the winning Party to get the go-ahead to take retaliatory action.  During that period, the US can continue with its laws and practices.

If the US loses, it need not pay any compensation to the successful Party for having suffered losses.   Moreover, in the past, when it loses cases at the WTO, the US has typically not complied with the orders made on it.  Even if it does comply, it needs to do so only in respect of the Parties that brought the action against it; it need not do so for other Parties.

If it does not comply, the complainant countries are allowed to take retaliatory action by blocking US goods and services from entering their markets up to an amount equivalent to the losses they have suffered.  This retaliatory action can only be taken by those countries that successfully took up the cases.

Thus, the US may decide to implement the border adjustment taxes and wait two to four years before a final judgment is made at the WTO, and for retaliatory action to be allowed by the WTO.   It can meanwhile reap the benefits of its border tax measures.

Another possibility is that Trump may make good his threat to leave the WTO, if important cases go against it.  That would cause a major crisis for the WTO and for international trade.

With regard to the WTO process, Raghavan said:   “Apart from the difficulties of taking up cases in the WTO, including costs, the lengthy process and no retrospective damages when any WTO member, raises a dispute, the onus of proving the violation is on them.

“To the best of my knowledge, in none of the rulings against US, requiring changes in law or regulations, has the US implemented them, and even major trading partners have been chary of taking retaliation action.

“Countries that are affected, could act to unilaterally deny the US some rights; but they cannot justify that this is retaliation, until there is a ruling in their favour.”

American advocates of the border adjustment tax plan have claimed that it is similar to a value added tax (VAT) which is considered by the WTO to be a legitimate measure;  and thus that the border adjustment tax would also be compatible with the WTO.

Almost all major developed countries have instituted the VAT system, with the notable exception of the US.  The Republican Congress leaders and Trump have argued  that this places the US at a disadvantage in its trade relations because the VAT system imposes a tax on imports, whilst allowing companies to obtain a refund for taxes paid on their exports.

They claim the border tax would correct this disadvantage that the WTO should similarly recognise the border tax as legitimate.

However, several well-known economists and lawyers are of the opinion that there are important differences between the VAT and the border tax.

There are two parts of their arguments.  Firstly, the VAT imposes taxes on both imports and locally produced goods and services and therefore does not discriminate against imports;  whereas the border tax system imposes a tax on imports whilst excluding domestic inputs and wages from tax, which therefore discriminates against imports.  Secondly, the VAT system does not subsidise exports, whereas the border tax system does.

In a 1990 paper, Martin Feldstein and Paul Krugman found that the VAT does not improved the trade competitiveness of countries using it.  They said:  “The point that VATs do not inherently affect international trade flows has been well recognised in the international tax literature…A VAT Is not a protectionist measure.”

Krugman, in a recent blog, reiterated that “a VAT does not give a nation any kind of competitive advantage, period.”  But a destination-based cash flow tax like the border adjustment tax has a subsidy element that “would lead to expanded domestic production.”

In another paper, Reeven Avi-Yonah and Kimberly Clausing  from Michigan Law School and Reed College respectively analyse the difference between the VAT and the proposed border adjustment tax and why the former is WTO-consistent whereas the latter would violate WTO rules.

They said:   “U.S. trading partners are likely to be hurt in several ways. The effects of the wage deduction render the corporate cashflow tax different from a VAT, and these differences have the net effect of increasing the incentive to operate in the United States

“In addition, such a tax system would exacerbate the profit shifting problems of our trading partners, since the United States will appear like a tax haven from their perspective.”

Economists also agree that the border tax will raise the value of the US dollar but there is a debate as to how long this will take and by how much it will rise. If the dollar appreciation is significant, this may have an adverse effect on countries that hold debt in US dollars, as they would have to pay out more in their domestic currency to service their loans. This would include many developing countries with substantial dollar-denominated debts of the public or private sectors, and some of them may tip into new debt and financial crises.    According to former US Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers:  “Proponents of the plan anticipate a rise in the dollar by an amount equal to the 15 to 20 per cent tax rate.  This would do huge damage to dollar debtors all over the world and provoke financial crises in some emerging markets.”           

This article is the second in a two-part series on the border adjustment tax, which would have the effect of taxing imports of goods and services that enter the United States, while also providing a subsidy for US exports which would be exempted from the tax. You can find Part 1 here

Excerpt:

For the time being the much anticipated US-China trade war is off the radar. But it is by no means off altogether. Credit: Bigstock

By Martin Khor
PENANG, Feb 17 2017 (IPS)

A new and deadly form of protectionism is being considered by Congress leaders and the President of the United States that could have devastating effect on the exports and investments of American trading partners, especially the developing countries.

The plan, known as a border adjustment tax, would have the effect of taxing imports of goods and services that enter the United States, while also providing a subsidy for US exports which would be exempted from the tax.

The aim is to improve the competitiveness of US products, drastically reduce the country’s imports while promoting its exports, and thus reduce the huge US trade deficit.

On the other hand, if adopted, it would significantly reduce the competitiveness or viability of goods and services of countries presently exporting to the US.  The prices of these exports will have to rise due to the tax effect, depressing their demand and in some cases make them unsalable.

And companies from the US or other countries that have invested in developing countries because of cheaper costs and then export their products to the US will be adversely affected because of the new US import tax.

Some firms will relocate to the US.   Potential investors will be discouraged from opening new factories in the developing countries.  In fact this is one of the main aims of the plan – to get companies return to the US.

The plan is a key part of the America First strategy of US President Donald Trump, with his subsidiary policies of “Buy American” and “Hire Americans.”

The border adjustment tax is part of a tax reform blueprint “A Better Way” whose chief advocates are Republican leaders Paul Ryan, speaker of the House of Representatives and Kevin Brady, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

President Trump originally called the plan “too complicated” but is now considering it seriously.  In a recent address to congressional Republicans, Trump said:  “We’re working on a tax reform bill that will reduce our trade deficits, increase American exports and will generate revenue from Mexico that will pay for the (border) wall.”

Martin Khor

The proposal has however generated a tremendous controversy in the US, with opposition coming from some Congress members (including Republicans), many economists and American companies whose business is import-intensive.

It however has the strong support of Republican Congress leaders and some version of it could be tabled as a bill.

Trump had earlier threatened to impose high tariffs on imports from countries having a trade surplus with the US, especially China and Mexico.

This might be a more simple measure, but is so blatantly protectionist that it would be sure to trigger swift retaliation, and would also almost certainly be found to violate the rules of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

The tax adjustment plan may have a similar effect in discouraging imports and moreover would promote exports, but it is more complex and thus difficult to understand.

The advocates hope that because of the complexity and confusion, the measure may not attract such a strong response from US trading partners.  Moreover they claim it is permitted by the WTO are presumably willing to put it to the test.

In the tax reform plan, the corporate tax rate would be reduced from the present 35% to 20%.   The border adjustment aspect of the plan has two main components. Firstly, the expenses of a company on imported goods and services can no longer be deducted from a company’s taxable income.  Wages and domestically produced inputs purchased by the company can be deducted.

The effect is that a 20% tax would be applied to the companies’ imports.

This would especially hit companies that rely on imports such as automobiles, electronic products, clothing, toys and the retail and oil refining sectors.

The Wall Street Journal gives the example of a firm with a revenue of $10,000 and with $5,000 imports, $2 000 wage costs and $3,000 profit.  Under the present system, where the $5,000 imports plus the $2,000 wages can be deducted, and with a 35% tax rate, the company’s taxable total would be $3,000, tax would be $1,050 and after-tax profit would be $1,950.

Under the new plan, the $5,000 imports cannot be deducted and would form part of the new taxable total of $8,000.  With a 20% tax rate, the tax would be $1,600 and the after-tax profit $1,400.

Given this scenario, if the company wants to retain his profit margin, it would have to raise its price and revenue significantly, but this in turn would reduce the volume of demand for the imported goods.

For firms that are more import-dependent, or with lower profit margin, the situation may be even more dire, as some may not be financially viable anymore.

Take the example of a company with $10,000 revenue, $7,000 imports, $2,000 wages and $1,000 profit.   With the new plan, the taxable total is $8,000 and the tax is $1,600, so after tax it has a loss of $600 instead of a profit of $1,000.

The company, to stay alive, would have to raise its prices very significantly, but that might make its imported product much less competitive.  In the worst case, it would close, and the imports would cease.

The economist Larry Summers, a former Treasury Secretary, gives a similar example of a retailer who imports goods for 60 cents, incurs 30 cents in labour and interest costs and then earns a 5 cent margin.  With 20% tax, and no ability to deduct import or interest costs, the taxes will substantially exceed 100% of profits even if there is some offset from a stronger dollar.

On the other hand, the new plan allows a firm to deduct revenue from its exports from its taxable income.  This would allow the firm to increase its after-tax profit.

The Wall Street Journal article gives the example of a firm which presently has export sales of $10,000, cost of inputs $5,000, wages $2,000 and profit $3,000.  With the 35% corporate tax rate, the tax is $1,050 and after-tax profit is $1,950.

Perhaps the most vulnerable country is Mexico, where many factories were established to take advantage of tariff-free entry to the US market under the North American Free Trade Agreement. President Trump has warned American as well as German and Japanese auto companies that if they make new investments in Mexico, their products would face high taxes or tariffs on entry, and called on them to invest in the US instead.
Under the new plan, the export sales of $10,000 is exempt from tax, so the company has zero tax.  Its profit after tax is thus $3,000.   The company can cut its export prices, demand for its product increases and the company can expand its sales and export revenues.

At the macro level, with imports reduced and exports increased, the US can cut its trade deficit, which is a major aim of the plan.

On the other hand, the US is a major export market for many developing countries, so the tax plan if implemented will have serious adverse effects on them.

The countries range from China and Mexico, which sell hundreds of billions of dollars of manufactured products to the US; to Brazil and Argentina which are major agricultural exporters; to Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam which sell commodities like palm oil and timber and also manufactured goods such as electronic products and components and textiles, Arab countries that export oil, and African countries that export oil, minerals and other commodities, and countries like India which provide services such as call services and accountancy services to US companies.

American industrial companies are also investors in many developing countries. The tax plan if implemented would reduce the incentives for some of these companies to be located abroad as the low-cost advantage of the foreign countries would be offset by the inability of the parent company to claim tax deductions for the goods imported from their subsidiary companies abroad.

Perhaps the most vulnerable country is Mexico, where many factories were established to take advantage of tariff-free entry to the US market under the North American Free Trade Agreement.  President Trump has warned American as well as German and Japanese auto companies that if they make new investments in Mexico, their products would face high taxes or tariffs on entry, and called on them to invest in the US instead.

After the implications of the border adjustment plan are understood, it is bound to generate concern and outrage from the United States’ trading partners, in both South and North, if implemented.  They can be expected to consider immediate retaliatory measures.

A former undersecretary for international business negotiations of Mexico (2000-2006), Luis de la Calle, said  in a media interview:  “If the US wants to move to this new border tax approach, Mexico and Canada would have to do the same….We have to prepare for that scenario.”

In any case, it can be expected that countries will take up complaints against the US at the WTO.   The proponents claim the tax plan will be designed in a way that is compatible with the WTO rules.

But many international trade law experts believe the tax plan’s measures will violate several of the WTO’s principles and agreements, and that the US will lose if other countries take up cases against it in the WTO dispute settlement system.

This prospect may however not decisively deter Trump from championing the Republicans’ tax blueprint and signing it into law, should Congress decide to adopt it.

The President and some of his trade advisors have criticised the WTO’s rules and have mentioned the option of leaving the organisation if it prevents or impedes the new America First strategy from being implemented.  If the US leaves the WTO, it would of course cause a major crisis for international trade and trade relations.

There are many critics of the plan.  Lawrence Summers, a former US Treasury Secretary, warns that the tax change will worsen inequality, place punitive burdens on import-intensive sectors and companies, and harm the global economy.

The tax plan is expected to cause a 15-20% rise in the US dollar.  “This would do huge damage to dollar debtors all over the world and provoke financial crises in some emerging markets,” according to Summers.

While export-oriented US companies are supporters, other US companies including giants Walmart and Apple are strongly against the border tax plan, and an influential Republican, Steven Forbes, owner of Forbes magazine, has called the plan “insane.”

It is not yet clear what Trump’s final position will be. If he finds it too difficult to use the proposed border tax, because of the effect on some American companies and sectors, he might opt for the simpler use of tariffs.

In any case, whether tariffs or border taxes, policy makers and companies and employees especially in developing countries should pay attention to the trade policies being cooked up in Washington, and to voice their opinions.

Otherwise they may wake up to a world where their products are blocked from the US, the world’s largest market, and where the companies that were once so happy to make money in their countries suddenly pack up and return home.

This article is the first in a two-part series on the border adjustment tax, which would have the effect of taxing imports of goods and services that enter the United States, while also providing a subsidy for US exports which would be exempted from the tax. You can find Part 2 here

Excerpt: