By Hazel Henderson
ST. AUGUSTINE, Florida, Aug 27 2015 (IPS)

Millions in the New York City area are excited about Pope Francis’ visit on Sep. 25 to address the U.N. General Assembly as worldwide consensus grows on the need to shift global investments from fossil fuels to clean, efficient, renewable energy in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) scheduled to replace the expiring Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). 

Private investments worldwide in the clean energy transition now total 6.22 trillion dollars while successful U.S. students’ divestment networks have forced over 30 college endowments to divest.  Over 200 institutions have divested worldwide, including the U.S. cities of Minneapolis and Seattle, Oxford in the United Kingdom and Dunedin in New Zealand.

Hazel Henderson

The Episcopal Church and the Church of England, in a faith-based consortium, are calling on Pope Francis to urge divestment for all religious and civic groups.  Islamic Climate Change Symposium leaders cited the Quran earlier this month in calling 1.6 billion Muslims to act in phasing out fossil fuels by 2050.

Backlash from traditional Wall Streeters has joined some U.S. Catholic organisations with millions still invested in fossil energy, fracking and oil sands.  The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has guidelines against investing in abortion, contraception, pornography, tobacco and war but is silent on energy stocks.

Reuters reports that Catholic dioceses in Boston, Baltimore, Toledo and much of Minnesota in the United States have millions of dollars in oil and gas stocks, making up between 5-10 percent of their holdings.  It has been reported that Chicago’s Archbishop Blasé Cupich, appointed by Pope Francis, will re-examine over 100 million dollars in fossil fuel investments.

Wall Street is also re-examining its positions on fossil fuels.  A survey of asset managers in Institutional Investor, July 2015, found that 77 percent expected the carbon-divestiture movement to continue and gain momentum.  Yet, Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson has claimed that the models on climate change “aren’t that good” and has no plans to invest in renewable energy.

Recently, many large companies have been calling for and budgeting for carbon pricing – favoured by most economists.  Britain’s BG Group, BP, Italy’s ENI, Shell, Norway’s Statoil and France’s Total sent an open letter to world governments and the United Nations in June asking them to accelerate carbon pricing schemes.The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has guidelines against investing in abortion, contraception, pornography, tobacco and war but is silent on energy stocks

The ethical investing movement now accounts for one-sixth of all holdings on Wall Street and the U.N. Principles of Responsible Investing counts signatory institutions with 59 trillion dollars in assets under management.

Hybrid approaches include venture philanthropy and “impact” investing, while a recent CFA Institute survey found almost three quarters of investment professionals use environmental, social and governance information in their investment decisions.

Against this backdrop, Timothy Smith, pioneer founder of the Interfaith Council on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) and now Senior Vice-President of Walden Asset Management, says that the “visit of the Pope in the wake of his prophetic Encyclical on climate is a clarion call – to ramp up our efforts to combat climate change with concrete actions,” adding that “it’s not the Pope’s job to present a specific game plan for Americans.  That is our job.”

Through ICCR, religious investors have worked for two decades on these issues.  Firms like Walden, Ceres and others have joined up to combat climate change, promoting efficiency and renewable resources.  All this new activity within the climate debate provides the greatest challenge yet to business-as-usual capitalism.

Many financiers in the global casino still see themselves as “masters of the universe” because they control capital flows, most investments, pension funds, influence monetary policies, capture politicians and regulators, while funding friendly academics and think tanks.

The recent jitters of stock markets have again revealed their fragility and the increasing turbulence and volatility caused by computerized algorithms accounting for over half of all activity.  High-frequency trading (HFT), “flash crashes”, are continuing with little regulation.  Foundations are crumbling from these many new challenges as small investors flee. 

Crowdfunding, peer-to-peer lending, local and cryptocurrencies, credit unions and cooperative enterprises are flowering along with hybrid start-ups in the “shareconomy” – AirBnB, Uber, Lyft, Task Rabbit and the growth of farmers markets, swap sites for tools, clothes and second-hand exchanges.

Many reformers of capitalism try to change its culture, of short term gain and speculative trading.  The U.N. Inquiry into the Design of a Sustainable Financial System will release its report to the General Assembly on Sep. 25, with global research on current practices and potential reforms.

A promising new effort to mobilise U.S. public opinion is JUSTCapital, founded by luminaries Deepak Chopra, Arianna Huffington and hedge fund philanthropist Paul Tudor Jones.  CEO Martin Whittaker says: “We are addressing some of the core questions affecting capitalism and corporations in the 21^st century.  We are applying policy, research and surveys to define ‘just business behaviour’ in the eye of the public, using this definition to evaluate and rank the performance of the largest publicly traded American companies.”

While such caring financiers are quietly exploring reforms, the biggest threat is the fragility of global market structures from automation, algorithms, HFT and artificial intelligence which financiers still believe they can control.

Yet these same computers can now run markets more efficiently than humans.  Matching and trading buy and sell orders in transparent computerised black boxes makes human traders redundant, as well as reducing insider trading, speculating, front-running, naked short-selling, fixing interest rates and today’s widespread greed and corruption.

Capitalism’s greatest challenge is its reliance on rollercoaster national money systems and currencies.  Central bankers and governments’ tools fail along with economic theories as social movements are now aware of money-printing and the politics of money creation and credit-allocation, revealed in all its favouritism and inequalities.

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

Jazz musician Marcus Miller (left), spokesman for the Slave Route Project, is using music to help educate people about slavery. Credit: A.D. McKenzie/IPS

By A. D. McKenzie
PARIS, Sep 14 2014 (IPS)

The Oscar-winning film 12 Years a Slave recently generated international discussion about the barbarity of slavery, but it is not alone in the attempt to break the silence around the 400 years of the transatlantic slave trade and to “shed light” on the lasting historical consequences.

At the United Nations level, The Slave Route Project observed its 20th anniversary this month in Paris and is pushing for greater education about slavery and the slave trade in schools around the world.

“People of all kinds suffered from slavery and people of all kinds profited from slavery just like so many people are now profiting from modern-day slavery. Racism is a direct result of this monstrous heritage and we need to increase the dialogue about this” – Ali Moussa Iye, head of UNESCO’s Slave Route Project
Ali Moussa Iye, chief of the History and Memory for Dialogue Section of UNESCO, the UN’s cultural agency, and director of the Project, says: “The least the international community can do is to put this history into the textbooks. You can’t deny this history to those who suffered and continue to experience the consequences of slavery.”

The Project is one of the forces behind a permanent memorial to slavery that is being constructed at UN headquarters in New York, scheduled to be completed in March 2015 and meant to honour the millions of victims of the traffic in humans.

UNESCO is also involved in the UN’s International Decade for People of African Descent (2015-2024), which is aimed at recognising people of African descent as a distinct group and at “addressing the historical and continuing violations of their rights”. The Decade will officially be launched in January next year.

“The approach is not to build guilt but to achieve reconciliation,” Moussa Iye said in an interview. “We need to know history in a different, more pluralistic way so that we can draw lessons and better understand our societies.”

He is aware that some people will question the point of the various initiatives, preferring to believe that slavery’s legacy has ended, but he said that international organisations can take the lead in urging countries to examine their past acts and the results.

“People of all kinds suffered from slavery and people of all kinds profited from slavery just like so many people are now profiting from modern-day slavery,” he said. “Racism is a direct result of this monstrous heritage and we need to increase the dialogue about this.”

According to UNESCO, the Slave Route Project has put these issues on the international agenda by contributing to the recognition of slavery and the slave trade as crimes against humanity, a declaration made at the World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa, in 2001.

Ali Moussa Iye, head of UNESCO’s Slave Route Project. Credit: A.D. McKenzie/IPS

It has also been collecting and preserving archives and oral traditions, supporting the publication of books, and identifying “places of remembrances so that itineraries for memory” can be developed.

For many people of African descent, however, much more needs to be done to raise awareness. Ricki Stevenson, a Paris-based African-American businesswoman who heads a company called Black Paris Tours, focusing on the African Diaspora’s contributions in the French capital, told IPS that there ought to be “national and international conversation about the continued effects of enslavement.”

“We need to break the silence on how racism continues to hurt, not just Black people, but all people in any country that would kill, imprison, deny education and rights to individuals,” she said. “The United States, France, and all of Europe made unimaginable money from the cruel, inhumane kidnapping and enslavement of millions of Africans.

“These nations grew rich, built their cities and economies on the enslavement of Africans, on the forced labour of Black people who were stripped of every basic human right, treated less than animals,” she added. “Today we are learning that the wealth of Wall Street and so many major corporations, insurance companies, shipping companies, banks, private families, even churches, is still tied to slavery.”

Stevenson said she knows that some find it hard to comprehend the legacy of slavery. “I doubt if anyone who has never lived in the United States can understand the overwhelming challenge of ‘breathing while Black’,” she told IPS. “It is a horrible, daily fact of life every Black man, woman, child has faced or will face at some point in their lives.”

In France, meanwhile, the rise of nationalism is leading to a culture of exclusion as well as racism, according to political observers. Justice Minister Christiane Taubira, for example, author of a 2001 law bearing her name that also recognises slavery as a crime against humanity, has been the target of racist depictions on social media and in certain publications.

Speaking at the 20th anniversary ceremony of the Slave Route Project, Taubira described her battle against “hatred” and said that the world’s challenge today is to understand the global forces that divide people for exploitation.

“We cannot accept this kind of inhumanity,” she said, adding that the “anonymous victims” were not just victims but “survivors, creators, artists, cultural, guides … and resistors”, despite the immense violence they suffered.

Some individuals and municipalities in France have worked to highlight the country’s active role in the transatlantic slave trade, through cultural and memorial projects. The northwestern city of Nantes, which achieved vast wealth through slavery in the 18th century, built a memorial to victims in 2012.

Historians say that more than 40 percent of France’s slave trade was conducted through the city’s port, which acted as a transhipment point for some 450,000 Africans forcibly taken to the Americas. But this part of Nantes’ history was kept hidden for years until the move to “break the silence” cumulated in the Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery.

In England, the city of Liverpool has an International Museum of Slavery, and Qatar and Cuba have also set up museums devoted to this history, carrying out partnership projects with UNESCO.

Acclaimed American jazz musician Marcus Miller, spokesman for the Slave Route Project, is also using music to educate people about slavery. Prior to an uplifting performance in Paris with African musicians, Miller said he wanted to focus on the resistance and resilience of the people forced into slavery and those who fought alongside to end the centuries-long atrocity.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Between 2000 and 2012, rents in the U.S. rose by 12 percent while the average renters’ income fell 13 percent. Credit: Bill Lapp/CC-BY-2.0

By Samuel Oakford
NEW YORK, Jun 9 2014 (IPS)

Six years after the financial crisis, Wall Street’s housing alchemy engine is revving up again – only this time it’s coming for your rental.

Right as housing prices bottomed out around January 2012, large institutional investors began buying distressed properties in regions hit hard by the foreclosure crisis; they’ve purchased at least 200,000 to date.

In only a year, private equity giant Blackstone Group went from owning no single-family rental properties (SFRs) to being the U.S.’ single largest landlord.

Now, several companies, including Blackstone, are packaging their SFRs into bonds similar to the mortgage backed securities that fueled the financial crisis.

Like those securities, SFR bonds are backed by homes; but this time rental payments, rather than mortgage payments, pay the interest. Securitisation frees up money, allowing big buyers to purchase more properties with less capital by increasing their leverage – and risk.

“Previously you had individual ‘mom and pop’ landlords, but now you have companies that have large portfolios that span multiple states – [will] the systems that they are putting in place [...] be able to keep up?” -- Sarah Edelman, policy analyst at the Center for American Progress

Issuances thus far are small – less than three billion dollars. But wary housing advocates are pushing regulators to increase supervision. Wall Street’s role as a proprietor is unprecedented, and no one knows what to expect, least of all the families renting the homes.

Last year, two senior Federal Reserve economists warned institutions could “have difficulties managing such large stocks of rental properties or fail to adequately maintain their homes.”

Indeed, this May, a couple in Sun Valley, California filed suit against Blackstone subsidiary Invitation Homes for allowing their home to descend into a slum, where they allege toxic mould caused “nose bleeds, headaches, fatigue, memory loss, inability to concentrate, chronic runny nose, respiratory issues and other chronic flu-like symptoms.”

In January, California Congressman Mark Takano called for hearings on the issue, but they have yet to take place.

“Securitisation allows for bad practices to flourish exponentially,” Kevin Stein, associate director of California Reinvestment Coalition, told IPS. “We don’t know what kind of property manager is available, and we don’t know if there will be pressure to raise rents.”

Last October, Deutsche Bank marketed the first ever bond backed by SFRs – 479.1 million dollars in expected rental payments on 3,207 units owned by Invitation Homes.

The deal was only a drop in the bucket of 44,000 homes Blackstone owns nationwide. This summer, they aim to package a billion dollars’ worth of units.

Collectively over the past three years, large investors have spent an estimated 20 billion dollars on homes. The thought of capturing more of the three-trillion-dollar single-family market has Wall Street frothing at the mouth.

Their entrance into the housing market comes amid historic inequality in the U.S., where extracting wealth from the poorest has become normalised.

The financialisation of everyday life means that something as commonplace as the landlord banging on your door for rent now involves thousands of investors, thousands of miles away, all urging that landlord to extract greater profits.

“Single family rental is not new,” Sarah Edelman, policy analyst at the Center for American Progress, told IPS. “Previously you had individual ‘mom and pop’ landlords, but now you have companies that have large portfolios that span multiple states – [will] the systems that they are putting in place work – will they be able to keep up?”

Because institutional investors can pay more than the asking price – in cash – for multiple properties, they’ve edged out local would-be homeowners and driven up prices in several hot markets. The percent of all-cash buyers has doubled in only a year, to over 40 percent of all home sales.

Tight credit for personal mortgages – from the same lenders that liberally dished out dangerous subprime loans before 2008 – has only worsened the picture for renters looking to move into a home of their own.

That has resulted in homeownership rates at two-decade lows and rising rents in practically every region.  Income, however, is moving in the opposite direction. Between 2000 and 2012, rents rose 12 percent in real dollars; over that same period, the median income of renters fell 13 percent.

SFR-backed securities do theoretically open up funding for an expansion of the rental market. Though there is an immediate need for affordable housing, seeing Wall Street renting out homes that its own malfeasance forced owners to abandon makes for a bitter image.

“Millions of families lost their homes during the foreclosure crisis and now as a result we have millions of families that are looking for homes to rent,” said Edelman. “We do need an increased supply of rental housing, but we also need to make sure those are stable.”

But as SFRs, like seemingly every financial instrument, become increasingly inevitable, housing advocates don’t want regulators to be playing catch up.

“The industry doesn’t have much of a track record – it’s important that the industry establishes best practices and that state and local policy makers revisit their landlord-tenant policies,” said Edelman.

Issuances are picking up. In April, Colony American homes sold bonds totaling 513 billion dollars. The next month, American Homes 4 Rent, the largest publicly traded single-family landlord, sold 481 million dollars’ worth.

More than half of the properties in the American Homes 4 Rent deal were located in Atlanta, Dallas, Las Vegas, Tampa and Phoenix – some of the cities hit hardest when the housing bubble collapsed.

“Securitisation just provides a mechanism to increase the volume of this activity,” Stein told IPS. “It’s not surprising people have found out a way to make money out of this.”

(END)

Five years after the 2008 world financial crisis and two years after the Occupy movement it triggered, U.S. critics of the financial sector are coalescing around the idea of a Robin Hood Tax on financial transactions.

Bankers look down onto Robin Hood tax protestors gathered in New York City on Sept 17, 2013. Credit: Samuel Oakford/IPS

“The questions that Occupy raised are the right ones and it’s up to everyone else to come up with some answers,” said Robert Pollin, an economist at UMASS Amherst who works on financial transaction taxes (FTTs).

The idea, first floated by Nobel Prize-winning economist James Tobin in the early 1970s as a way to discourage overzealous currency trading, would, in its current iterations, levy a small duty on stocks, bonds and derivatives.

Though the debate over FTTs has long focused on curbing risky and unnecessary trading and “righting the market”, the Robin Hood movement attempts to shift it to one over human rights, fulfilling basic needs and not least a bit of payback for taxpayer bailouts of the financial sector.

For activists in the United States, the tax is part of what they hope will be a societal reorientation away from the privileging of an industry that has doubled its share of U.S. GDP since 1980 and drains other fields of the best and brightest.

FTTs exist in over 30 countries, many of them, like South Korea and Brazil, with some of fastest growth rates in the world.

“People don’t realise how tiny a tax we are talking about,” said Nicole Woo, director of domestic policy at the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR).

“There’s plenty of evidence out there that if revenues were to go to infrastructure spending, education and other public goods, it could increase GDP in the end and help increase employment,” Woo told IPS.

The Robin Hood Tax coalition, an umbrella group of sympathetic organisations, has put its weight behind a bill, “The Inclusive Prosperity Act,” introduced in the House of Representatives by Rep. Keith Ellison. The bill’s text is a strong critique of the financial sector and calls for the tax to pay for housing, healthcare and protecting the public sector and the environment.

The legislation would tax stock trades at 0.5 percent, bonds at .1 percent and derivatives at .005 percent.

The mix aims to “tax different markets equally”, Pollin told IPS, making it difficult for traders to flee one asset class for another. A tax in the U.S. would enjoy auto-enforcement on the part of market players because of the judicial security it provides.

“If you want to use the American legal system, you will have to trade here,” says Pollin.

Larry Summers’ decision to remove himself from consideration as chairman of the Federal Reserve in the face of a promised uproar among liberal members of Congress has Robin Hood supporters optimistic.

Summers is seen by many on the left as a leading architect of the financial crisis after he pushed for financial deregulation and opposed transparency in the derivatives market while serving as treasury secretary during the Bill Clinton administration.

A European proposal, agreed to by 11 countries, however, suffered a legal setback this month when E.U. lawyers delivered a non-binding opinion that found a continent-wide FTT used jurisdictional powers within states illegally. The decision is one of many roadblocks that supporters can expect to encounter.

For nurses at a Sept. 17 Robin Hood event in New York City, the events in Europe were noise.

“We looked around the globe and found nurses have the same issues everywhere. Austerity measures are killing us,” said Jean Ross, co-president of National Nurses United (NNU), a union of over 180,000 registered nurses and co-founder of the Robin Hood Tax coalition.

The union sees a Robin Hood Tax paying for many of the medical services which have been cut since the economic crisis.

An enemy weakened

For years, High Frequency Trading (HFT) was the oft-cited boogeyman when it came to pushing for a Robin Hood Tax. Critics claim the billions of daily trades distorted markets and added to volatility.

Fears were realised on May 6, 2010 when the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than nine percent only to regain those losses in a matter of minutes. Resounding blame was laid on trading algorithms that exacerbated an initial drop in the futures market. By 2012, HFT were estimated to be executing 84 percent of all trades on U.S. exchanges.

But as more HFT players enter the fray, returns in the zero sum game of shaving fractions of pennies off trades have decreased.

Large firms like KCG – itself formed when GETCO merged with near bankrupt Knight Capital after a haywire algorithm cost the latter over 400 million dollars in one day – have seen their profits cut by over three quarters from the height of the HFT boom, a period that coincided with the first volatile spurts of the crisis in 2008. Many have gone out of business.

KCG declined to comment for this story, as did industry leader Citadel Group.

That high-frequency trading may eat itself up underscores its social uselessness, says Woo. HFT proponents cite the volume and liquidity it creates – if bid and ask prices are nearly even, retail investors and pensions should pay lower prices. This is misleading, Woo told IPS.

“The liquidity provided by these traders is a sort of phantom liquidity because as soon as things start going south the computer algorithms pull all their money out, the liquidity just dries up completely,” she said.

HFT profits, even at their height, were small compared to those of the entire financial sector. Pollin’s models, using parametres similar to those set forth in Ellison’s bill, predict a drop in trade volume of at least 50 percent, putting U.S. market volume and capitalisation proportionally on par with Great Britain, where a tax of .5 percent already exists on stocks.

“Financial trading is an undertaxed sector of our economy,” says Woo.

Many even on Wall Street, especially those whose profits are reliant on long-term trends, agree.

A lack of tax on commodity trading can in fact be a burden on the average consumer. Legislation will help consumers by discouraging speculation in commodity markets, says Kenneth Zinn, political director at NNU. “There’s a surcharge on gasoline that’s simply Wall Street speculation.”

After watching a bruising battle over healthcare that ended in the Affordable Care Act, the nurses union is gearing for a fight with the financial industry, another special interest group which will fight tooth and nail to protect its privileged place in the economic pecking order.

On Nov. 29, 138 member states of the United Nations General Assembly voted in favour of giving Palestine “non-member observer state” status. Only nine voted no, 41 abstained. Beyond Middle East politics, the vote also mirrors the limits of the U.S. global, and the Israeli regional, empires: 138 defy their grip and favour change, 41+9=50 do not for various reasons. Who wants what?

Johan Galtung

First: the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) did not yield to U.S.-Israel in spite of the efforts against the Arab awakening. Israel is alone in the region: Greece-Turkey-Cyprus all voted yes.

Second: more than half of the states not in favour of the move were Eastern Europe (16) and the Pacific (10 – nine mini-states, and Australia). Add seven from Latin America, five from Africa, three from Asia (not Japan) and we get 41.

Third: Western Europe-NATO was divided. The Nordic European Free Trade Association (EFTA) countries (Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland) were in favour, as well as Austria, France and GIPSI (Greece-Italy-Portugal-Spain-Ireland), the indebted EU periphery. Not in favour: UK, Germany, Netherlands; three mini-states; and the hard core, U.S.-Israel-Canada, making 50, only a quarter of the U.N. members.

The General Assembly is the closest we have to world democracy: no Security Council ‘big power’ veto. Israel has no regional support and the U.S. only little, shaky, insignificant, world support. U.S. clout does not even reach Afghanistan-Iraq-Libya, recently bombed-invaded-occupied. The UK remains at heel, like poodle to master.

Read the vote in terms of a world regionalisation process: Green light for OIC; some political leadership is needed in the Latin America-Caribbean, Africa and Asia regions. The Nordic-EFTA moral light is intact, and the new Third World, GIPSI, is joining the old.

The U.S. is out of touch. Stop droning, killing; make a beautiful North America with Mexico and Canada.

But empires also crumble from within through demoralisation. With political demoralisation, world clout is disappearing. Also watch the “fiscal cliff” for doubts about the U.S. political process: two parties, at loggerheads. No cancelling of mortgage debts, no lifting of the bottom 16 percent – many not knowing where the next meal comes from – into the economy, increasing domestic demand.

With economic demoralisation: the West is outcompeted. And the financial crisis and Great Recession scared the wits out of most Americans –cautious, risk-averse and defensive- spending less and saving more. Not a single person was imprisoned for exorbitant commissions and bonuses, secret deals and obscure derivatives; but Wall Street continues to lobby against new legislation.

With military demoralisation: the U.S.-NATO is losing. And consider the lifestyle and affair of a top U.S. Army official in Afghanistan and director of the CIA, killing machines: general David Petraeus. Imagine the effect on soldiers risking their lives for an unwinnable and dubious war while the top fools around.

With cultural demoralisation: faith in U.S. exceptionalism is decreasing. Public figures ignore what happens in the real world. Truth will soon dawn upon them.

With social demoralisation: the U.S. birthrate plummets to the lowest level since the 1920s. This may imply a decline in the U.S. population and in tax revenue, as in much of the West.

Add it all up: the fall of the U.S. empire is on track.

How about Israel? Heading for a cliff of its own making.

The United Nations vote was on the 65th anniversary of the U.N. two-state resolution 181. Shortly after the adoption of the resolution, Swedish diplomat Folke Bernadotte was murdered by the Zionist group Lehi. Then the Nakba, the expulsion of Palestinians from their land in 1948. The problem is not Zionism but hard, revisionist Expansion-Occupation-Siege (E-O-S) Zionism driving to the cliff.

The U.N. vote legitimised Palestine and delegitimised that kind of Israel.

Direct negotiations lead nowhere: the Oslo process left security, Jerusalem, refugees, Israeli settlements, boundaries, for “later”.

But Israel had to react to the rockets! Yes, by dropping E-O-S for ‘2-6-20+’: two States in a six-state community with Arab neighbors in a 20+ states Organisation for Security and Cooperation with a nuclear free zone. But Israel delegitimised itself by choosing violence. Israel also reacts to nonviolence-boycott, non-cooperation, civil disobedience, with violence, as it did against boats trying to break the siege. And delegitimises itself even further.

Together with mainstream U.S., Israel tries to control the discourse by branding all critics as anti-Semites and self-hating Jews. A non-starter in democracies. Jimmy Carter, Desmond Tutu, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Richard Falk, to mention some recently branded that way, are neither anti-Jewish nor anti-Israel, but use transparency and dialogue – the hallmarks of democracy – constructively. Stifle that, and we get two elites listening only to themselves.

Travel these roads: delegitimise yourself, meet violence with violence, meet nonviolence with violence, control discourse, and down the road, very close to the cliff, the South African scenario is waiting. The U.S. decides one day that Israel is more of a liability than an asset.

Israel is out of touch. A regime change from within is needed. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Johan Galtung, rector of the TRANSCEND Peace University, is author of ‘The Fall of the US Empire – And Then What?’, published by the TRANSCEND University Press.

The media did their best to make the U.S. presidential election look important, the altar on which democracy is built. But there has been a problem ever since the Supreme Court legalised unlimited campaign spending (six billion dollars this year), thereby authorising one more freedom of expression, called “commercial speech” even though much of this speech is libellous, often neither true nor relevant.

Johan Galtung

There were real disagreements, some kind of rhetorical left-right. However, the real problem lies somewhere else, not in what was said but in what was not. The list is long. The Washington Post on election day (Manuel Roig-Fanza): “A tough day for causes without a candidate”. The article mentions climate change, gun control and immigration as issues that werent picked up by either one of the party conventions, nor in the debates. But there are many more pressing problems confronting the country.

Two major lobbies advocating the use of force were left untouched: the National Rifle Association, NRA, for violence in the U.S., and the American-Israeli Political Action Committee, AIPAC, for violence abroad, mainly anti-Muslim wars.

They both exercise power through their impact on the media, denying critical politicians access to political power, thereby removing obstacles to violence. Dennis Kucinich, a voice for peace in Congress, and other critics, had the boundaries of their districts changed so that they were not reelected, fatally reducing the political spectrum in Congress and elsewhere. Both presidential candidates knew that to take them on would be suicidal.

Foreign policy was twisted in the debates to economic relations with China, trying to sound tough. But the U.S. majority cannot live without affordable Chinese goods with adequate quality/price ratios. Unless a big unless the U.S. restructures its economy from below, with cooperatives and self-employment, activating the countryside and local communities with numerous small enterprises focused on basic needs, food above all, housing and clothing, health and education, direct from producers to consumers.

No country in the world has a population so creative and cooperative. But the blossoming Occupy Movement has so far limited itself to occupation and critique, not to constructive action. They left untouched the basic change in the world: the U.S. grip on elites in other countries is loosening, in Latin America, even Africa, in the Arab awakening.

Instead they recited the “largest economy in the world” (the European Union is bigger, and China will overtake the U.S. soon) and the “strongest military power in the world” (losing Vietnam, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan is a strange concept of “strongest”).

Climate change: the U.S. is dragging its feet, delaying action in any international fora. Not the candidates, but Nature, in the shape of Sandy, talked, a brutal reminder of climate reality. How much is man-made is uncertain but the change is certain enough. And the self-proclaimed world leader does not lead.

Then, incredible: the fact that 16 percent are in misery and hunger, while one percent live in opulence, feeding on speculation, was drowned in glib talk about the “middle class”. Yes, it is large, and stagnant. But far from 100 percent.

Neither candidate had answers, possibly agreeing to be silent. The U.S. desperately needs more parties that are less afraid of truth (as they will not win anyhow), for democratic transparency, and open dialogue.

Does the election make a difference? What change will the second Barack Obama term bring? Obama said in his victory speech that he will focus on deficit, the taxation system, and immigration. None of the above mentioned issues. In foreign policy Mitt Romney, like George W. Bush, might have been more reckless, accelerating the fall of the empire. Obama, like Bill Clinton, is better informed, more sophisticated, holding up the fall a little longer. And democrats are more inclined to do what Israel wants.

Obamacare will continue, whatever that is worth given the rise in costs for any medical care possibly because the “state will pay”.

On Jan. 1, 2013, the debt ceiling strikes, according to the Congress consensus, with major “austerity” for those who can least afford it, touching the military gently. Misery will accelerate and so could military deployment and wars waged the Obama way, with drones and SEALs, extrajudicial executions.

Imagine a Politburo committee in China studying photos to decide whom to kill abroad for anti-Chinese activity or threats to China’s security. Or China arming Cuba and Haiti countries as close to the U.S. as Taiwan is to China to the teeth; with a fleet cruising in the Caribbean. The U.S. would find this unacceptable.

But Obama will play, “I am above the parties uniting the nation. In his first term he was leaning over backward to the Republicans and was badly punished mid-term; this time that makes Romney a de facto co-president. The Dodd-Frank finance economy reforms will be very bland, Wall Street will by and large continue its lethal games. The rich may be taxed and may find more loopholes including settling abroad. Like the French super-rich in London?

Is U.S. democracy a two-party system becoming a one-party state? If so, other countries beware. Do not imitate. Democracy is more than elections. It is also transparency and dialogue, for real change. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

* Johan Galtung, rector of the TRANSCEND Peace University, is author of “The Fall of the US Empire–And Then What?” ( www.transcend.org/tup)