Category Archives: Socio-economic Collapse

The Russian air force deployed Su-57 stealth fighters to Syria a second time since first deploying them to the war-torn country in February 2018.

But that doesnt mean the twin-engine Su-57 is any closer to being ready for mass production, to say nothing of its readiness for full-scale warfare against a high-tech foe.

The Russian militarys chief of the general staff Valery Gerasimov announced the deployment in mid-December 2019, according to TASS.

"The fifth-generation Su-57 aircraft is being tested, Gerasimov said. They were re-tested in Syria, during which all the planned tasks were successfully completed."

But its unclear what those tasks might have been. The Su-57s first deployment to Syria apparently did not involve any actual combat. Its possible the 2019 deployment didnt, either.

The two T-50s that took part in the 2018 deployment appeared in Syria along with a Russian air force A-50 radar plane, four Su-25 attack planes and four Su-35s fighters. The warplanes arrived in Syria following weeks of intensive airstrikes by Russian planes targeting areas controlled by anti-regime rebels in Idlib and East Ghouta.

U.S. and coalition forces monitoring the air space over Syria reacted with caution. The Su-57s presence certainly raises the level of complexity the crews have to deal with out there, Air Combat Command Commander Holmes said, according to a tweet from Aviation Week reporter Lara Seligman.

But the coalition also seemed to acknowledge the limited combat potential that just two warplanes represented, regardless of their stealth qualities. The presence of any new Russian aircraft in the region does not affect coalition operations, nor do we see this as a danger to coalition aircraft, a coalition spokesperson stated.

In deploying Su-57s, the Kremlin was outright gambling with precious prototypes and their pilots lives, according to Tom Cooper, an aviation expert and author. The Su-57 was then, and remains, a prototype fighter.

The Russian air force possesses just a dozen or so of the type, which flew for the first time in 2010 but has suffered from a dearth of funding and the collapse of a co-development deal with India.

As of early 2018, the Su-57 possessed inadequate and incomplete sensors, incomplete fire-control systems and self-protection suites, no operational integrated avionics and ... unreliable engines, Cooper noted.

The plane had conducted hardly any weapons-separation testing and lacked any other operational weapons beside its 30-millimeter internal cannon. Worse, the aircraft were flown by pilots who lack any kind of doctrine or tactics for the type and who cannot really depend upon the planes avionics and other systems, according to Cooper.

Shortly following the 2018 deployment, the Kremlin suspended production of the Su-57 after the 28th copy, effectively canceling the program. Russian president Vladimir Putin dramatically revived the program in mid-2019, announcing a plan to buy an additional 48 copies.

The Kremlin ordered its first dozen production-standard Su-57s in August 2018, hoping to form the first regular squadron some time in 2019.

Turkey later expressed interest in buying the type after its insistence on acquiring Russian-made air-defense systems got it kicked out of the American-led F-35 program. Moscow has touted the United Arab Emirates as another potential buyer. These possible sales obviously incentivize Russia to portray the Su-57 as an operational warplane.

But for all the drama of its de facto cancelation then restart and for all the talk of exports, the Su-57 program remains under-funded and under-developed. Its one thing for Russia to announce an order for 48 more of the fighters. Its another for the government actually to pay for the planes, and for Sukhoi actually to build them.

It's unclear how much the Su-57's development has cost so far, how much the program would need to complete development and how much each production-standard plane would set back Russian taxpayers. The U.S. military spent more than $60 billion acquiring around 180 F-22s and expects to spend $400 billion buying some 2,300 F-35s.

But the Su-57 undoubtedly is expensive. And time is running out for the Russian air force to integrate the type into its force structure. The "fifth-generation" stealth fighter began development in the early 2000s, but its fortunes are tied to the Kremlin's 2009 defense strategy, which aimed to reverse years of budget cuts and declining military readiness.

In May 2009, Dmitriy Medvedev, then Russia's president, announced a new national security strategy through the year 2020. The strategy praised former, and future, president Putin for leading Russia out of its "political and socio-economic systemic crisis" and anticipated that Russia would "consolidate its influence in the world arena" as a leading political and economic power.

"Unprecedented" new spending backed up the new strategy, according to the 2017 edition of the International Institute for Strategic Studies' "The Military Balance" report. "The proportion of military spending increased when measured against GDP, placing Russia in a small group of nations spending over five percent of GDP on defense."

"After almost two decades of deterioration and neglect of the Russian military, Moscow began developing a more modern military force capable of power projection outside Russias borders," the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency reported in 2017.

The spending supported five fighter production lines -- one producing the Su-57, three making variants of the Su-27 including the Su-30, the Su-34 and the Su-35 and a fifth manufacturing versions of the MiG-29. Russian air arms received around 200 new and upgraded aircraft in 2017, another 100 in 2018 and around 130 in 2019. By comparison, the U.S. armed forces ordered more than 400 new aircraft in 2018 alone.

An economic downturn, which shaved nearly four percent off of GDP in 2015, forced Moscow to reconsider its priorities. "In preparing the 2016 budget, there was clear awareness that this level of spending could not be sustained," IISS reported.

A few years of higher spending had a dramatic effect on the Russian air force. "Substantial deliveries of new frontline aircraft, and their intensive use in Syria, have given the Russian air force an entirely new public face in a short period of time," analyst Keir Giles wrote in a 2017 report for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

"Optimistic Russian commentators, comparing their airpower specifically with that of the United States, note approximate quantitative parity with the U.S. Air Force," Giles continued.

In fact, the DIA estimated in 2017 that Russian air arms maintained just 1,000 tactical aircraft. At the same time, the U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps between them possessed more than 3,000 fighters, including hundreds of F-22 and F-35 stealth fighters.

To support the 2009 strategy, the Kremlin needed to acquire 1,000 new airplanes and helicopters by 2020, the DIA estimated. Deepening budget cuts could force the Russian armed forces to make do with far fewer new aircraft. The same cash-crunch could weigh on plans to buy scores of Su-57s, and bodes poorly for the types development into a fully combat-capable warplane.

In light of the difficulties the Su-57 program faces, the purported second Syria deployment likely achieved as much as the 2018 deployment did. Nothing much.

David Axe serves as Defense Editor of the National Interest. He is theauthor of the graphic novelsWar Fix,War Is BoringandMachete Squad.

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Russia's New Su-57 Stealth Fighter Is Back in Action in Syria - The National Interest Online

A prosperous India is crucial for a prosperous World. After an unprecedented mandate to the Modi government in 2019 elections (consecutively for the second time), the expectations and hopes from India, both at the domestic and global levels have risen to a new scale. Some discussions around the Indian economy and fluctuations in its GDP growth rate are going on. But according to the IMFs latest estimates, amid the global environment of uncertainty, India retains its rank as the worlds fastest-growing major economy, with a projected growth rate of 6.1 percent for the current fiscal year. The World Economic Outlook report released by IMF in October projected the Indian economy to again pick up a 7 percent growth rate in 2020. India is the worlds third-largest economy in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP) next after China and the USA and the fifth largest country in terms of nominal GDP rankings.

It is interesting that some business and media experts in India are criticizing the government for the things like quarterly fluctuations in the GDP growth rate, slowdown in the auto industry (which is the result of a shift in buying patterns of consumers globally), and Job creation (while some 80-85% of Indians are self-employed), on top of that some regular worrisome comments of ex financial authorities/advisors are catching the front headlines. Most interesting of these comments came from a former Union Finance Minister of India, P Chidambaram (who is out on a bail on some high profile corruption charges) in a press conference he said: Government is clueless on economy; it is stubborn, mulish in defending catastrophic mistakes like demonetization, flaw GST. He recently penned an opinion article that concluded with the statement that Indias economy is being run without the aid and advice of competent economists. And Running an economy without reputed economists and through incompetent managers is the same. By making this argument, former Finance Minister of India has made it necessary to have a quick overview of what was the scenario of the Indian economy when these reputed economists were in charge.

Ten years long UPA (United Progressive Alliance- a coalition of left and centre-left political parties in India) rule is often remembered as one of the worst periods in the economic history of India and some people called that era (2004-14) a decade of economic destruction of the country. According to the contemporary articles of S Gurumurthy, an eminent economist and present part-time Director of Reserve Bank of India during the UPA tenure, the current account deficit topped $360 billion, and it knocked off the value of Indian rupee by almost half. In 2004 when the UPA government started the rupee was 45 to a dollar and it fell to almost Rs 68 to a dollar by August 2013. Moreover from 2009 to 2014 when UPA-II was in power, the average rate of inflation in the country was 10.4%. A series of high profile corruption cases and mega scams had put the Indian economy on the verge of internal and external bankruptcy.

During that time, India was one of the members of the Fragile Five club and the global sentiment was that the I in the BRICS would soon collapse. In the article UPA policies weakening India and enriching China published in August 2013, Gurumurthy wrote: Who gained from Indias loss? Not America, nor England, Germany, France, Japan, or Russia countries friendly to India. It is China. He referred that the UPA was the architect of the huge deficit syndrome with China and further the trade deficit with China ($175 billion) weakens the Indian Rupee and Indian economy and strengthens the Chinese economy, which was a big economic and geopolitical blunder of the UPA government.

It is quite evident that the reputed economist under a failed leadership cannot do a miracle for the economy but the so-called incompetent managers under a visionary leadership can certainly turn all the negatives into positives. Today, the overall picture of the Indian economy is positive and its fundamentals are stronger than ever. India has a continuing and fiscally responsible government, and in the last five years all macro-economic parameters i.e. inflation, current account deficit, fiscal deficit, etc. have been brought down to satisfactory levels. The way India has kept the inflation under control while maintaining a high growth rate is an example for many developing countries of the world.

A country which was plagued by reform inertia and policy paralysis for decades has seen some of the most bold moves in a span of just five years such as Demonetization, Goods and Services Tax (GST), Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC), FDI-related reforms, simplification of labor laws, lowering of taxes, EODB reforms, reforms in the power sector, asset monetization and asset recycling in public sector, reforms in banking, insurance, and pension, etc., there is no sector of the Indian economy where the reforms are not introduced.

The socio-economic reforms of the Modi government and the Speed and Scale at which they are planned and executed reflect that the goal of the Bharat is not merely to survive but to thrive on every sphere.

Bharat is going to become the third-largest economic power, in the coming few years and the five trillion dollar economy goal (by 2024-25) would be the first milestone that it has to achieve.

Economic growth and development of any democracy do not depend on the government alone, from industry to society to common man, everyone plays an active role in it. Prime Minister Narendra Modi perfectly summarized the current scenario of India when in a recent investors meet he said: Today, the growth vehicle in India is running on 4 Wheels with new thinking and a new approach. One Wheel is Society, which is aspiring. The second Wheel is Government, which is Encouraging for New India. The third Wheel is that of Industry, which is daring and the fourth Wheel is of Knowledge, which is sharing. Thus, on these 4 wheels, we are moving at a fast pace.

One of the least discussed facts on Indias real GDP growth is the trajectory of its fastest-growing cities. According to the report of the research institute Oxford Economics (published in 2018), all the top 10 fastest-growing cities by GDP between 2018 and 2035 will be in India. These top 10 vibrant cities of India are- Surat, Agra, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Nagpur, Tiruppur, Rajkot, Tiruchirappalli, Chennai, and Vijayawada.

The first paragraph of the Indian Constitution starts with the line India, that is Bharat and today this statement can be seen as an interesting reference point to examine the shift in the approach to the economic growth of the country. From 2014, India is working with the perspective of Bharat, and an aspirational Bharat is emerging, whose foundation is stronger than ever.

Devsena Mishra promotes advanced technologies, startup ecosystems and Indian governments business and technology related initiatives like Digital India, Make in India and Startup India etc. through her portals, articles, videos, and books.

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Indian Economy is Performing Well | Devsena Mishra - The Times of Israel

News/15 December 2019, 2:13pm/Thandeka Mlangeni

In the past three months, more than 20 people have been shot and killed, with six of those deaths occurring this week when gunmen stormed into a home and killed the Msomi family as they watched TV.

While the motive for this latest wave of attacks was yet to be established, residents, community leaders and activists said it is usually drug-related.

Drug dealing is rife all over the place, said KZN violence monitor and analyst Mary de Haas.

I have no inside information, but the patterns of killings sounds like it is some sort of rival gangs and may well be linked to drugs if the locals are complaining, she said.

The problem is that drug dealers make so much money that they can easily buy off police.

A clean anti-corruption team to deal with organised crime is needed, but there doesnt seem to be the political will to do so, said De Haas.

A local resident, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals, said: The greatest challenge we face is drug dealers in all corners of Hammarsdale, but the police are of little help. The dealers dens are well known, but nothing happens, said the resident.

Sibusiso Dlamini, Ward 5 councillor, said it was very discomforting to see people dying like flies.

It is getting out of control because innocent people are also being killed. Even when police make arrests, people are terrified to testify. So it all comes to nothing, said Dlamini.

Community activist Vanessa Burger said: The main problem is accountability and the state has zero interest in serving the people.

Government is failing and this is driving the socio-economic collapse, especially in poor communities, and this is causing heightened levels of violence.

Burger said the country was awash with guns and some could be from the political violence of the 1990s.

I heard rumours that there may be caches in the area, but there were also thousands of police guns in circulation.

Former KZN legislature deputy speaker Meshack Radebe said regular raids to retrieve all the guns used in the apartheid wars were needed.

A policeman based at Hammarsdale, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said they only had 49 officers at the local station and two vans.

We need the minister (of police Bheki Cele) to intervene, said the informant.

Lirandzu Themba, spokesperson for Cele, said: The minister was briefed about Wednesdays murders and at this stage there were no plans to send in reinforcements.

Sunday Tribune

Originally posted here:

Hammarsdale murders could be linked to drug war | Sunday Tribune - IOL

Udaipur :Chief Justice of Allahabad High Court Govind Mathur said the legislature, executive and judiciary are working harmoniously and performing their functions finely as laid down by the Indian Constitution. We all make mistakes and so these wings too may err at times but otherwise, they are doing their duties diligently.

In 1985, former Chief Justice PN Bhagwati had said that our judicial system is on the verge of collapse. We are in 2019 now but I do not feel a little that our judicial system has even shrunk Mathur was answering to the queries of law students at the University auditorium in an extension lecture program held by the Law college on Saturday. One of the student raised a question whether due to the Nirbhaya case or Hyderabad rape case, people are losing their faith in the concept of Nyaya and applauding police encounter, the Chief Justice said Indian judiciary is too strong and cannot be weakened by few instances.

He said in villages even today, people have strong faith in the judicial system. When anyone is beaten up in a village, he challenge his adversary to see in the court and not anywhere else. So long as people continue to have faith, the judiciary would never fail he said. Mathur further said that it is the duty of the activists, civil society at large to see that nobodys right is curbed. Being a sitting judge, i have lost all my suggestive rights, but there are various remedies for all incidents of restoring and establishing socio-economic rights of the people. Educated and vigilant people should report such events and bring them to the knowledge of the courts which have been taking suo-motu actions in many issues of human, ecological interests he said.

Citing various decisions of Supreme Court, Mathur said Directive principles are like a torch which guides the judiciary to decide and help in the enforcement of socio-economic rights of the public . On the occasion the guests including acting Vice Chancellor N.S Rathore, Law college Dean Anand Paliwal and assistant professor Rajshri Potaliya launched a law journal of Mohanlal Sukhadia University.

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Indian Judicial System Will never Collapse- Govind Mathur - Udaipur Kiran

By: Josephus Moses Gray Paris, France/ Mobile (+33) 751060690 | Email: graymoses@yahoo.com |

Since taking office, President Trump has sought deep cuts in foreign aid spending, aiming to slash nearly a third of the budget with policymakers seeing global economic development as a way to promote U.S. national security. Despite of President Trump pronouncement, Aid funding levels are at their highest since the period immediately following World War II, when the United States in rebuilding European economies. Aid levels were cut in the 1990s, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and in 1997 they were less than $20 billion, or 0.8 percent of the overall U.S. budget. Eventhough USA had had its glorious time in some parts of Africa, in most instances calling the shot and equally stamping its influence and authority in the dos and donts in the manner and form things are conducted, however, times have changed, interests have changed and so is priorities changed with the African nations boldly exploring new and additional avenues and partnership of which USA is no longer the only voice of reason and perpetual threat.

This study emphasizes that America and Chinas foreign aid to Africa was once intended for a win-win benefit for all sides involved in the triangular relations, but due to China and Americas competing interests for Africa, foreign aid from the worlds economic powers has changed to a political and economic weapon purely used for the two countries common benefit. Several researches have shown that Chinas foreign aid to African states and governments is to give Beijing due advantage for oil and other natural resources. Assistant Professor of International Relations at the University of Liberia Graduate School, Josephus Moses Gray offers insight into U.S.-Chinas foreign aid on Liberias national development and its impacts in Africa.

This work emphasizes that America and Chinas foreign aid to Africa was once intended for a win-win benefit for all sides involved in the triangular relations, but due to China and Americas competing interests for Africa, foreign aid from the worlds economic powers has changed to a political and economic weapon purely used for the two countries common benefit. Several researches have showed that Chinas foreign aid to African states and governments is to give Beijing due advantage for oil and other natural resources. While for the U.S., the foreign aid assistance helped to place the U.S. in advance position to project its national interest, at the same time to give the countrys leverages to influence political and economic situations in Africa.

There are hundreds of definitions but for the purpose of this study, foreign aid is money, materials, and services given or loaned by governments, organizations, and individuals in developed countries to help people in developing countries, while aid flows through several key conduits. For others, it is referred to as development assistance, international aid, economic aid, or, foreign aid but it is different from military aid (OECD, 2013). According to Source, the most basic definition of foreign aid is resources given from one developed state to another especially under-developed state. In a broad sense its regularly understood to mean money, food, materials, goods and manpower given by governments, organizations, and individuals in rich countries to help people of under-developed or poor countries. There are different types of foreign aid and distinct providers of aid. However, the two populace ones are known to be bilateral aid and multilateral foreign aid. Fortunately, many countries that once received lots of foreign aid, such as South Korea, have weaned themselves off from foreign aid.

According OECD (2013) report, the best-known donors of foreign aid are governments, multilateral organizations, inter-governmental, non-governmental, not-for-profit organizations and charities. There are over twenty thousand of them, ranging from tiny grassroots outfits to venerable organizations, such as International Red Cross, Catholic Relief Services, Open Society Initiative, Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, World Vision and Medicine Sane Frontiers. These charities helped to gathering billions of dollars and thousands of staffers around the world. Some individuals, businesses and institutions also dispense foreign aid.

According to OECD (2017), the U.S. foreign assistance includes loans, contracts, and grants and is categorized in the Green book as either economic assistance or military assistance. U.S., but it does not include debt forgiveness. USAID (2017) accentuated that the Green book is produced to fulfill a congressionally-mandated requirement and legislative authority for the report is the foreign assistance act of 1961. OECD (2013) states that bilateral aid flows from one government to another and that bilateral aid to poor countries reached its all-time high ofUS$134.8 billion in 2013. While for the U.S., the foreign aid helped to place the U.S. in advance position to project its national interest, at the same time to give the countrys leverages to influence political and economic situations in Africa. President Trump in his 2018 address at the United Nations general Assembly in New York pin pointed that going forward, the U.S. was only going to give foreign aid to those who respect America and, U.S. friends.

A surprise to policymakers, political pundits and stats actors, the leading five countries that provide the largest foreign aid across the globe, China is the winner on the aid list rather than the United States (worldatlas, 2018). But according to OECD, by dollar amount, the U.S. is the worlds biggest bilateral aid donor. In 2012 the U.S. handed out $31.2 billion in economic assistance to 182 countries especially poor countries in the world. China Africa Research (2018) argue that China is not Africas largest donor, that honor still belongs to U.S. (OCED, 2018). However, from 2002, USAID has gradually boosted the total foreign aid budget to a steady amount that rests around $32 billion.

Borgenproject (2018) reported that U.S. gave out $97.67 billion over 18 years in ODA to Africa, with infrastructure projects taking 48 percent of total aid and 26 percent towards humanitarian aid being the top priorities. The analysis of the content of the report showed that the health sector received $6 billion, followed by the agriculture sector$4.2 billion and $3.5 billion was committed to education. According to the Borgenproject (2018) report, besides states which are members of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development(OECD), China does not officially disclose its aid information, but the Chinese government White Paper annually published by Beijing has constantly released figures of its foreign aid assistance. Chinas Ministry of Finance has been publishing their annual central government budgets and expenditures since 2003. Relevant budget categories have evolved over the years, though what the budget category of foreign aid encompasses has remained fairly unchanged (China Africa Research, 2018).

According to the white paper issued by the Chinese State Council at the end of 2016, China has given around 400 billion yuan ($58 billion, 47.4 billion) in development aid to 166 countries and international organizations over the past six decades. However, studies show that as Chinas wealth and influence grows, its development policy is becoming increasingly motivated by a desire to gain access to new markets and economic returns. Chinese State Council (2017) explained that the overseas Chinese aid between 2000 and 2014, capturing 4,373 records totaling $354.4 billion (289.6 billion). This included both traditional aid (about $75 billion, 61.3 billion) and low concessional loans (about $275 billion, 224 billion).

According to the white paper issued by the Chinese State Council at the end of 2016, China has given around 400 billion yuan ($58 billion, 47.4 billion) in development aid to 166 countries and international organizations over the past six decades. However, studies show that as Chinas wealth and influence grows, its development policy is becoming increasingly motivated by a desire to gain access to new markets and economic returns.

Chinese State Council (2017) explained that the overseas Chinese aid between 2000 and 2014, capturing 4,373 records totaling $354.4 billion (289.6 billion). This included both traditional aid (about $75 billion, 61.3 billion) and low concessional loans (about $275 billion, 224 billion). The William & Mary research paper (2016) about aid data claims that China has committed $350 billion to foreign aid between 2000 and 2014, parallel to the U.S. total of $394.6 billion. The analysis of the publication indicates in terms of aid priorities, similar to the U.S., China committed aid to infrastructure development. From 2000 to 2013, William & Mary research paper claimed that nearly 60 percent of the total aid went to transportation $29 billion, energy $25 billion and communication $6.9 billion. The Chinese investment in foreign aid to Africa experienced a dramatic increase. By 2009, China gave about RMB 250 billion of foreign aid to the world, with almost half (45.7 percent) of the total Chinese aid going to African countries.

Driven by natural resources and its own international economic development agenda, China drew an obscured line between investment and development assistance. Angola, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Sudan and many other countries rich in natural resources like oil, gas and minerals are on the top recipient list of Chinese foreign aid (William & Mary, 2016). The Chinese development assistance and other transcontinental infrastructure projects to Africa, like $60 billion development assistance has cut the worlds attention, U.S. has reduced its foreign aid budget to Africa. But the emergence of China as a major player in the development of African countries did heat up the competition with the U.S., especially in terms of using foreign aid as a means to strengthen countrys influence among African countries. China Daily (2018) editorial explained that China is seeking to establish an international development cooperation agency to coordinate its foreign aid, which gives China get over the U.S. in the approach to managing foreign aid to Africa.

On the critical issue of triangular relations regarding U.S., China and Liberia, political pundits and academics consider the two big economic powers aid as not all about just resources, but to undercut one another existence on the African continent, and gain influence over the other. Academics see both U.S. and Chinas foreign aid to African governments, nations and states purely based several factors and that factors include domination, security, fight against terrorism, respect for one China policy. Several researches have shown that Chinas foreign aid to African states and governments is to give Beijing due advantage for oil and other natural resources. While for the U.S., the foreign aid assistance helped to place the U.S. in advance position to project its national interest, at the same time to give the countrys leverages to influence political and economic situations in Africa. It is against this backdrop that a comprehensive analysis is put into place to determine which country is the larger donor of foreign aid to Africa? Is it the United States or China?

In other to contextualize U.S. and Chinas foreign aid to African government and states, I considered it appropriate from a broader background to define and discuss foreign aid. There are hundreds of definitions but for the purpose of this dissertation, foreign aid is money, materials, and services given or loaned by governments, organizations, and individuals in developed countries to help people in developing countries, while aid flows through several key conduits. For others, it is referred to as development assistance, international aid, economic aid, or, foreign aid but it is different from military aid.

According to USAID (2017) report, more than two hundred countries receive U.S. foreign aid, but said it unduly goes to a few, however, the top five all receiving over $1 billion per year as of 2016: Iraq ($5.3 billion, Afghanistan $5.1 billion, Israel $3.1 billion, Egypt $1.2 billion, and Jordan $1.2 billion. In fiscal year 2017, the U.S. government allocated the following amounts for aid: Total economic and military assistance: $49.87 billion. USAID (2017) statistical country by country report across the across Africa, the Liberian-state, a traditional ally of the United States of America (USA) has persistently received foreign aid assistance from the American government. However, figures regarding U.S. FAA to Liberia focus on the period 2004-2017 amounts to US$3,701,080 billion. Africa receives about $133.7 billion each year from official aid, grants, loans to the private sector, remittances (Worldatlas, 2018). The activities covered under the U.S. FAA to Liberia include energy sector project, forest incomes for environmental sustainability, strengthening political parties Programs, advancing partners and community-base, health care, basic education, good governance, agriculture cooperative development, environmental protection, rule of law and justice, social empowerment and support towards government programs.

Reuters-com (2017) reported that President Trumps proposed foreign aid cuts have sparked a bipartisan effort in Congress to resist them. Among the proposed budgets, foreign aid to Africa has been affected the most, expecting a 35 percent reduction (David, 2018). On the other side of the world, China is constantly boosting its aid package to African countries. Here is a comparison between the U.S. and Chinas foreign aid to Africa over the years. According to a Borgen project publication, in the past decade, U.S. foreign aid has maintained at a steady level of US$32 billion distributed over 200 countries. The Official Development Assistance (ODA) focuses on three regions: Asia, Europe and Africa. Huffington post publication showed that from 1980-2012, almost US 22 billion went to sub-Saharan countries like Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya and Congo.

Accordingly, while the overall ODA budget underwent a 17-fold increase from 1960 to 2006, aid to Africa has increased by almost 3,000 percent, from US$211 million to US$5.6 billion. The U.S. gave out US$97.67 billion over 18 years in ODA to sub-Saharan Africa, with infrastructure projects (48% of total aid) and humanitarian aid (26 percent) being the top priorities. The health sector was given US$6 billion, the agriculture sector received US$4.2 billion and US$3.5 billion was committed to education. China has generated tremendous impact on the aid landscape in Africa since its rapidly increased activities. Unlike countries in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, China does not officially disclose its aid information. In a research published recently, Aid Data (2014) disclosed that a research lab at William and Mary, claimed China committed US$350 billion to foreign aid between 2000 and 2014, running close to the U.S. total of US$394.6 billion.

According to Brooking Institute, from US$210 million in 2000 to US$3 billion in 2011, Chinese investment in foreign aid to Africa experienced a dramatic increase. By 2009, China gave about RMB 250 billion of foreign aid to the world, with almost half (45.7 percent) of the total Chinese aid going to African countries. Driven by natural resources and its own international economic development agenda, China drew an obscured line between investment and development assistance. Angola, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Sudan and many other countries rich in natural resources like oil, gas and minerals are on the top recipient list of Chinese foreign aid. According to Aid Data (2014), in terms of aid priorities, like the U.S., China committed aid to infrastructure development, but with different focuses. From 2000-2013, about 60% of the total aid went to transportation (US$29 billion), energy (US$25 billion) and communication (US$6.9 billion). Aid Data (2014) asserted that after Chinas arrival in Africa in early 2000, U.S. foreign aid also shifted to prioritize health and education. U.S. spending on the top three sectors for Chinese aid are only at 2.6 percent, 0.8 percent and 0.07 percent of the total ODA amount.

Wan (2018) revealed that China phenomenal economic reform in the post-Mao era, Beijing has built strong relationships with developing economies, continuing to provide aid in a bid to promote South-South cooperation. Chinese foreign aid is often referred to as having no political strings attached, and is therefore a more attractive option for many non-Western countries, he, however, wondered if really free of constraints? Chinese foreign aid expenditures increased steadily from 2003 to 2015, growing from USD 631 million in 2003 to nearly USD 3 billion in 2015. Foreign aid expenditures fell by nearly USD 750 million from 2015 to 2016. Foreign aid levels rose in 2017 to USD 2.45 billion. However, this amount is still less than the annual aid expenditures from 2011 to 2015 (China Africa Research, 2018).

According to White Paper (2011) published on Chinas foreign aid, published by the State Council, Financial resources provided by China for foreign aid mainly fall into three types: grants (aid gratis), interest-free loans and concessional loans. Kitano & Harada (2016) explained that the first two come from Chinas state finances, while concessional loans are provided by the Export-Import Bank of China as designated by the Chinese government foreign aid expenditure is part of the state expenditure, under the unified management of the Ministry of Finance in its budgets and final accounts system.

China Africa Research (2018) disclosed that from 2000 to 2017, the Chinese government, banks and contractors extended US $143 billion in loans to African governments and their state-owned enterprises. Angola is the top recipient of Chinese loans, with $42.8 billion disbursed over 17 years. Chinese loan finance is varied. Some government loans qualify as official development aid. But other Chinese loans are export credits, suppliers credits, or commercial, not concessional in nature. According China Africa Research (2018) report, in 2017, the gross annual revenues of Chinese companies engineering and construction projects in Africa totaled US$51.19 billion, a 0.5% decrease from 2016. The top 5 countries are Algeria, Angola, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Nigeria. These top 5 countries account for 53% of all Chinese companies 2017 construction project gross annual revenues in Africa; Algeria alone accounts for 15% and that the number of Chinese workers in Africa by the end of 2017 was 202,689.

According to OECD, by dollar amount, the U.S. is the worlds biggest bilateral aid donor. In 2012 the U.S. handed out $31.2 billion in economic assistance to 182 countries especially poor countries in the world. The money is distributed by more than 21 U.S. government agencies, mainly within the departments of State, the Treasury, Agriculture, and Health and Human Services. Afghanistan was the top recipient, taking in close to $3 billion while Kenya and South Sudan placed next; Liberia is persistent receptionist of foreign aid (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2013).

According to the OECD (2013), multilateral organizations bring together multiple countries and other entities for collective action under the term international community. For instance, the World Bank is one of the biggest aid donor; the Bank is funded mainly by the governments of most of the worlds countries, the World Bank gives billions in loans and grants every year conformity with its goals to fight and reduce poverty. But what are the impacts of foreign aid, does it actually work? These are unique but keen argued question. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have also come under heavy criticism for the conditions they often impose with their loans, such as insisting recipients eliminate state subsidies for goods, which drives consumer prices way up.

OECD (2013) revealed that during the cold war, countless millions of dollars in aid wound up in the pockets of pro-American dictators from Latin America to Africa instead of going to help their long-suffering people. Source Generators given to power slum neighborhoods break down because no one provides spare parts to maintain them. Laptops gather dust in rural schools because well-intentioned donors didnt realize the locals have no electricity. Sometimes, despite the best of intentions, aid even backfires. Giving away boatloads of food can wipe out the market for local farmers crops, bankrupting them. Worse, aid can fuel conflict. Rival militias battle each other to snatch donated food. Aid to refugees fleeing Rwanda in the mid-1990s ended up subsidizing rebel Hutu fighters (source).

On the other hand, there are plenty of examples of aid making things better. The Green Revolution spearheaded by Norman Borlaug, an agricultural scientist backed by the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, brought new strains of high-yielding wheat and rice, pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, and other modern agricultural techniques to many poor countries in the 1960s and 1970s, enormously boosting their food production. Source The Global Alliance for Vaccinations and Immunizations, launched in 2000 by several governments, international organizations, and foundations, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (which supports Take Part World), has immunized more than 370 million children in 77 countries against a range of diseases. Sadly, the last two decades have seen historically unprecedented gains in almost every significant measure of human well-being. In the early 1990s, for instance, some 12 million kids under age five were dying every year, mostly because of preventable diseases. . Aid cant take all the credit for all these gains, but it can claim some.

Source After his takeover in 1949, Mao Zedongs China went unrecognized for years by the United States. China was also barred from the United Nations by an American veto. Instead, the U.S. supported the Chinese Nationalist government in Taiwan. Unlike his predecessor, Richard Nixon longed to be known for his expertise in foreign policy. Although occupied with the Vietnam War, former President Nixon also initiated several new trends in American diplomatic relations. Nixon contended that the communist world consisted of two rival powers the Soviet Union and China. Given the long history of animosity between those two nations, Nixon and his adviser Henry Kissinger, decided to exploit that rivalry to win advantages for the United States. That policy became known as triangular diplomacy.

The United States had much to offer China. Since Mao Zedongs takeover in 1949, the United States had refused recognition to the communist government. Instead, the Americans pledged support to the Chinese Nationalist government in Taiwan. China was blocked from admission to the United Nations by the American veto, and Taiwan held Chinas seat on the Security Council. Source in June 1971 Kissinger traveled secretly to China to make preparations for a Presidential visit. After Kissingers return, former President Nixon surprised everyone by announcing that he would travel to China and meet with Mao Zedong. In February 1972, Nixon toured the Great Wall and drank toasts with Chinese leaders. Soon after, the United States dropped its opposition to Chinese entry in the United Nations and groundwork was laid for the eventual establishment of diplomatic relations. As President Nixons national security adviser, Henry Kissinger made a secret trip to arrange the first-ever Presidential visit to China in 1972.

Impact of Foreign Aid on Liberias Socioeconomic Development

This work delves into the impact of foreign aid on post-conflict Liberias socio-economic development and looks deep into how Liberia has made used of aid in its post conflict recovery program, to positively impact national development. Besides, it also seeks to determine how funds and knowledge are transmitted to Liberia and interaction between recipients and donors with respect to the processes of foreign aid on the countrys socio-economic recovery and development program. It further analyzes how aid is being delivered and managed at sectorial level with particular focus on mutual accountability and results attainment. The flow of foreign aid to Liberia has been a subject of discussion especially following the notorious war and its aftermath.

However, on the critical issue of triangular relations regarding U.S., China and Liberia, political pundits and academics consider the two big economic powers aid as not all about just resources, but to undercut one anothers existence on the African continent, and gain influence over the other. Academics see both U.S. and Chinas foreign aid to African governments, nations and states purely based on several factors and such factors include domination, security, fight against terrorism and respect for one China policy. Several researches have shown that Chinas foreign aid to African states and governments is to give Beijing due advantage for oil and other natural resources. While for the U.S., the foreign aid assistance helped to place the U.S. in advance position to project its national interest, at the same time to give the countrys leverages to influence political and economic situations in Africa.

The importance of foreign aid on Liberias socio-economic development has always been a topical subject of interest and debate among political pundits, professionals, intellectuals, ordinary citizens and aid workers respectively. The nations reconstruction in the areas of socio-economic growth and development, and eradication of extreme poverty and hunger largely hinges on the foreign support from Liberias development partners. During the period of the case of this thesis Liberia was blessed to have received from various corners of the world international support in the form of loan, grant, projects and technical assistant. It is moreover the conviction of this study to make a strong motion that Liberias socio-economic development entirely depends on the magnitude at which various stakeholders join hands and aim at managing and properly utilizing foreign aid and other international assistance. World Bank (2002) recommends that, one of the ways of fighting poverty across the globe is realizing the goal of provision of aid to less developed countries (LDCs) by more developed countries (MDCs). Such aid is supported by WB & IMF directed economic structural adjustment programs. One may underscore the fact that the various programs have been tailor-made to focus on specific developmental targets hence attainment of socio-economic development in some way.

The pivotal or multi-million dollar question that arises then is: to what extent has foreign aid contributed to the socio-economic development of post-war Liberias development? And to answer this question, one needs to remember what Mushi (1982) says about positive aid: that aid is developmental only if it lays the foundation for its future rejection. Since World War II, foreign aid has been fueled by both political and economic motivations of the ruling classes in the western donor nations. A classic example is the United States of America Foreign Aid, the Marshall Plan (1948) that was aimed at rehabilitating the shattered economies of Western Europe When the balance of Cold War interests shifted from Europe to the World in the mid-1950s, the policy of containment embodied in the U.S. aid program dictated a shift in emphasis toward political economic and military support for friendly less developed nations especially those considered geographically strategic (Todaro, 1983).

Liberia, like other post conflict countries in the world today is no exception to the dependence on foreign aid. While Liberia enjoyed relative peace and stability since the end of the civil war in 2003, the country remains fragile on the environmental, economic, security, political and societal dimensions according to the 2016 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) fragility framework. Most notably are the economic aspect of fragility due the countrys weak economic fundamentals, low-skilled human capital and high vulnerability to exogenous shocks, as well as the political dimension due to issues of capacity, corruption and concentration of power.

The end of 14 year civil war brought with it the assurance of greater international economic assistance. Along with the global presence of non-for-profit organizations, and official donors stepped up their aid commitments. According to the OECD, in 2012, Liberia received $571 million dollars in Official Development Assistance from the World Bank and IMF. In the same year, the United States provided Liberia with $181 million aid dollars. As a result, Liberia received three-times more ODA than the Sub-Saharan average (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development OECD, 2014). Liberia has benefited from many other donors such as the United States of America, Republic of China, European Union, Federal Republic of Germany, Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), African Union (AU), France, Norway, Danish, SWISS, and Sweden Governments, Arab League, United Nations, IMF, WTO, and ILO. Liberia also became entitled to generous debt forgiveness in 2006 under the World Bank/IMF HIPC initiative (World Bank, 2014).

The Ministry of Finance and Development Planning (MFDP) established 2013 by an Act of the National Legislature, replaced the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Planning and Economic Affairs. It is responsible for the formulation, institutionalization and administering of economic development, fiscal and tax policies for the promotion of sound and efficient management of financial resources of the government. As a custodian of the countrys economy, the MFDP combines public finance, development planning and economic management expertise and experience to effectively manage the economy. Its mandate is in line with international financial management best practices. Within the MFDP is situated the Aid Management and Coordination Unit (AMCU) the center for all aid operations. AMCU is responsible to ensure effective coordination of donor funding, it works closely with Ministries Agencies and Commissions (MACs) as-well as Development Partners on every step of the Aid Cycle to secure and implement external assistance and in line with the Public

U.S China foreign aid to Africa: Political and Economic implications

According to USAID, the current U.S. foreign aid system was created 1961 Foreign Assistance Act which attempted to streamline the governments efforts to provide assistance around the world. The statute defines aid as the unilateral transfers of U.S. resources by the U.S. Government to or for the benefit of foreign entities. These resources include not just goods and funding, but also technical assistance, educational programming, health care, and other services. In order to present an accurate analysis of U.S. foreign aid assistance to African governments and states, and compare that to Chinas foreign aid assistance to African government, this study analyzed U.S. Overseas Loans and Grants, informally known as the Green book, is an annual report submitted to Congress required by the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961. The detailed report summarizes U.S. government foreign assistance data from 1945 to the present on a country by country basis. It is the official record of the level and geographic distribution of U.S. foreign assistance (USAID, 2017).

However, on the critical issue of triangular relations regarding U.S., China and Liberia, political pundits and academics consider the two big economic powers aid as not all about just resources, but to undercut one another existence on the African continent, and gain influence over the other. Academics see both U.S. and Chinas foreign aid to African governments, nations and states purely based several factors and that factors include domination, security, fight against terrorism, respect for one China policy. Several researches have showed that Chinas foreign aid to African states and governments is to give Beijing due advantage for oil and other natural resources. While for the U.S., the foreign aid helped to place the U.S. in advance position to project its national interest, at the same time to give the countrys leverages to influence political and economic situations in Africa. It is against this backdrop that a comprehensive analysis is put into place to determine which country is the larger donor of foreign aid to Africa? Is it the United States or China? In other to contextualize U.S. and Chinas foreign aid to African government and states, the researcher considered it appropriate from a broader background to define and discuss foreign aid.

The emergence of China as a major player in the development of African countries did heat up the competition with the U.S., especially in terms of using foreign aid as a venue to strengthen the donors power among developing countries. Chinese development assistance and other transcontinental infrastructure projects to Africa, like US$900 billion to the One Belt One Road Initiative, are growing, but the Trump administration aims to slash the foreign aid budget in 2018, especially the aid to Africa, citing corruption as the main reason. The proposed cut encountered fierce opposition in Congress and was deemed simplistic and arbitrary by Senator Patrick Leahy, the Senate Appropriations Committees top Democrat. According to Reuters (2018) report, China is seeking to establish an international development cooperation agency to coordinate its foreign aid, which gives China an advantage over the U.S. in the approach to managing foreign aid to Africa, said China Daily in an editorial on former Secretary Rex Tillersons visit to China. Congress will continue to challenge Trumps proposed cuts and the fight against poverty in Africa will continue.

Foreign aid as a political and economic weapon?

According OECD (2013) report, the best-known donors of foreign aid are governments, multilateral organizations, inter-governmental, non-governmental, not-for-profit organizations and charities. There are over twenty thousand of them, ranging from tiny grassroots outfits to venerable organizations, such as International Red Cross, Catholic Relief Services, Open Society Initiative, Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, World Vision and Medicine Sane Frontiers. These charities helped to gathering billions of dollars and thousands of staffers around the world. Some individuals, businesses and institutions also dispense foreign aid.

OECD (2013) states that bilateral aid flows from one government to another and that bilateral aid to poor countries reached its all-time high ofUS$134.8 billion in 2013. According to OECD, by dollar amount, the U.S. is the worlds biggest bilateral aid donor. In 2012 the U.S. handed out $31.2 billion in economic assistance to 182 countries especially poor countries in the world. The money is distributed by more than 21 U.S. government agencies, mainly within the departments of State, the Treasury, Agriculture, and Health and Human Services. Afghanistan was the top recipient, taking in close to $3 billion while Kenya and South Sudan placed next; Liberia is persistent receptionist of foreign aid (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2013).

According to the OECD (2013), multilateral organizations bring together multiple countries and other entities for collective action under the term international community. For instance, the World Bank is one of the biggest aid donor; the Bank is funded mainly by the governments of most of the worlds countries, the World Bank gives billions in loans and grants every year conformity with its goals to fight and reduce poverty. Another example is specialized UN agencies like United Nations International Childrens Emergency Fund (UNICEF) raises money from governments, individuals, corporations, and foundations to promote education, health care, and disaster relief around the world. But what are the impacts of foreign aid, does it actually work? These are unique but keen argued question. According to Independent UK(2016), on the macroeconomic level, some economists say that foreign aid fosters dependency and corruption in the recipient countries. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have also come under heavy criticism for the conditions they often impose with their loans, such as insisting recipients eliminate state subsidies for goods, which drives consumer prices way up.

OECD (2013) revealed that during the cold war, countless millions of dollars in aid wound up in the pockets of pro-American dictators from Latin America to Africa instead of going to help their long-suffering people. Source Generators given to power slum neighborhoods break down because no one provides spare parts to maintain them. Laptops gather dust in rural schools because well-intentioned donors didnt realize the locals have no electricity. Sometimes, despite the best of intentions, aid even backfires. Giving away boatloads of food can wipe out the market for local farmers crops, bankrupting them. Worse, aid can fuel conflict. Rival militias battle each other to snatch donated food. Authored by Josephus Moses Gray, Assistant Professor of International Relations and Foreign Policy Studies at the University of Liberia Graduate School of International Studies, Monrovia, Liberia. Contact (Monrovia) (231) 880330299/ Paris, France/ Mobile (+33) 751060690/ Email:graymoses@yahoo.com

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Analysis of US-China's Foreign aid to Africa and Its Impact on Liberia's Socio-economic Development - Global News Network

Irvine Welsh is hungover. Naturally. We've arranged to meet for lunch on day three of the four-day Beat Hotel Festival in Marrakesh, where, later that afternoon, he'll give a reading in the incendiary, performative style that has become his trademark. But like many of the festival-goers at this late stage of the campaign, his current mood is slightly more subdued.

You'd expect nothing less, of course. Welsh is, after all, the bard of big nights out, the unofficial poet laureate of the absolutely leathered; a man who turned tales of drink and drug-fuelled craziness into an art form as well as book sales mounting into the millions, and one of the most influential British films ever made.

Now in his sixties, Welsh is rich enough to never have to work again, but he wears his wealth lightly: baggy jeans, a T-shirt from an Edinburgh skateboard brand, a snapback pulled low over his shaved head. He mutters a greeting from behind reflective, Wayfarer-style sunglasses. Would he be able to take them off for one or two shots, the photographer asks. "I'd rather not, my eyes are like fuckin' piss-holes in the snow."

Sweary, straight-talking, his Leith accent still firmly in place (despite not having lived there for years), this is the Welsh you can read between the lines of Trainspotting; the Irvine you imagine typing out those Tory-bashing Twitter rants; the person projected publicly by his gloriously-unfiltered Instagram feed. He's a man whose reputation precedes him, and not unintentionally. Whether you ask his friends or his critics, they'll tell you the same thing: that Welsh has always been conscious of the way he comes across.

He's also never been shy about sharing his opinions as demonstrated by those regular social media salvoes, which take aim at everything from Trump, to today's Scotland, to the state of the sandwiches on British trains. Thankfully, Irvine's reluctance to remove his shades in no way indicates reticence as an interviewee.

This hangover is a few days old, he explains, and compounded by jet lag. He only flew in from Miami, where he now lives, last night. He's spent the past few days at the Winter Music Conference, the annual dance music industry gathering. He had "a few people from London" staying in his apartment, and apparently didn't hold back.

It wasn't just partying, though. Irvine was also promoting his new musical side-project, which he describes as "mostly German, country & western, techno". Seeing the blank look on my face, he attempts to clarify. "Like sort of acid house ballads, you know?"

I don't, and I'm suddenly unsure of where I stand. Welsh is, after all, famous for winding up journalists. When he wasn't writing them into his novels, he spent much of the 90s telling fictionalised versions of own life experiences to various interviewers. Before I can ask what "German, country & western, techno" might sound like, however, we're ushered over to lunch.

Welsh's late arrival at the festival meant he skipped last night's cutting-edge main stage line-up, but he's more gutted about having missed Andrew Weatherall's set. The DJ is a friend, he explains, having risen to fame in the same early-90s era, when he famously remixed Primal Scream (another act who Irvine counts as pals). Weatherall's still going strong nearly 30 years later. His sets have evolved somewhat, but he's not afraid to trot out the acid house classics.

Music is a constant reference point for Welsh, both in his writing and in his conversation. "When I was trying to write originally, because I was raving all the time, I was trying to get a 4/4 beat on the page," he says, as wine is poured and the first dish of our five-course taster menu arrives. "That's why I wrote in the vernacular, because it's a performative thing it's got a beat to it, you know?" This time, I do. It's easy to see the links between what Welsh was doing in the early-90s and the wave of exciting music emerging from clubs, illegal raves and the studios of producers like Weatherall. But all that was a long time ago.

In many ways, Welsh's life couldn't be more different to the period that inspired Trainspotting. Speaking engagements mean he flies constantly these days, and he's lived all over the world Miami the latest city in a sequence that includes London, Barcelona, Chicago and San Francisco. Yet in his novels, he keeps returning to the same few square miles at the bottom of Leith Walk, and to the same cast of characters Renton, Spud, Sick Boy and Begbie that first made him famous.

Is this Irvine keeping it real, or merely playing the part expected of him? Certainly critics haven't been universally kind to his more recent work. More than one has suggested that, like a late-career musician, he's resorted to repeating the same, increasingly tired, old hits.

Last year, to coincide with the 25th anniversary of Trainspotting, fellow Scottish novelist Duncan McLean was asked to share some memories of his friend: "Irvine Welsh, you say? Could I write a few words about Irvine Welsh? I tell you, I could write a lot of words about a lot of Irvine Welshes. But which is the real Irvine? I don't know."

Duncan McLean and Irvine Welsh.

Like much about Irvine Welsh, the details of his early life, including his exact date of birth, are shrouded in mystery a result, perhaps, of his mastery for misleading journalists. "The best wind-up ever," he recounts gleefully, was of one Guardian journalist, who was shocked to find himself interviewing a man talking not in the Trainspotting vernacular, but in RP English. "By jove, how do you write this stuff?" he asked. To which Irvine apparently replied, in his perfect cut-glass accent: "Well, you've just got to have a good ear for these things."

What is certain is that Irvine was born and raised in northern Edinburgh, spending much of his childhood in a maisonette in Muirhouse the infamous "scheme" that would provide the dismal setting for a lot of his early work. Like Trainspotting's Mark Renton, who's sometimes seen as his fictional alter-ego, he came from a family with one "vaguely Catholic" and one "vaguely Protestant" parent. But neither were really religious, and among his contemporaries the real church was Easter Road, home to Hibernian FC, the Leith-based club he fell for at an early age, with the fervour of a true believer.

Having left school at 16 he worked various jobs, before drifting down to London in the late 1970s, where he played in punk bands. Then, again like Renton, he made a "choice" that would change his life, becoming hooked on the heroin that swept through Scottish schemes in the 1980s, trailing HIV, still a certain death sentence at the time, in its wake.

To hear him tell it, heroin for Irvine was less of a nihilistic rejection of the norms of life (including "mortgage payments, washing machines, spirit-crushing game shows" and all the rest of it), and more a natural next step on the path he was on. "I had a kind of hedonistic adventurous mentality, like, 'I can take any drugs, I'm as hardcore as fuck.'" But having developed a reputation as the last man standing at any given party in his early twenties, he soon found himself trapped by it.

At the time, he says, "I thought there was one year that I was an addict just out of control. But talk to other people and they would say, 'No fuck, you were out of control long before that.'" Unlike many addicts, however, once he'd got out, at the age of 24, Welsh seems to have had no problems staying out.

"When I was 28 and writing a book I thought, 'I'm gonna go back to this and give it a shot, and see what happens.' But I got no buzz from it at all. I only got the sickness injected right back into me. It was like every single comedown had just come back." And that, for Irvine Welsh, was that. Looking back now, he says, "It's probably the best thing I did in a way, because it made me realise: I am kind of done with this drug. It's not going to give me anything else."

In a physical sense, he may be right. But, I point out, heroin did give him lots more arguably an entire career. He laughs. "Yeah, it's the best thing I ever did," and then perhaps realising the way that might look written down clarifies: "I mean, starting it was the best thing I ever did, but stopping it when I did was too it was the right time to start and the right time to stop. Dont overstay your welcome." He chuckles again. "I got enough lived-in despair to make it actually work, but not enough to fuck up the rest of my life."

Irvine Welsh at Beat Hotel Marrakesh.

After Trainspotting was published, one of the main accusations levelled at it by a scandalised literary establishment was that it glamourised drug use. Did he ever worry, especially after the film's particular brand of 90s cool sent it stratospheric, that he'd made using heroin look kind of sexy?

"Well, it is kind of sexy," he replies. "I mean, if it wasn't fun, people wouldn't do it." To be truthful in fiction, he argues, "You have to show that side of it. But you also you have to show the consequences of it all." And while it was the graphic scenes of drug use that generated a lot of the column inches, there was always far more to Welsh's work than just a series of stories about junkies.

Certainly there was nothing glamorous about the first piece Welsh ever had published. The First Day of the Edinburgh Festival was one of the many short stories that later made it into Trainspotting almost unchanged. It's the one that features Renton fishing about in his own diarrhoea for the opium suppositories he's just shat out a scene that Danny Boyle took to new, magical realist heights, in the film version.

"It was in an anthology called New Writing Scotland, [which allowed] open submissions," remembers Duncan McLean, down the phone from Orkney, where he now lives. "I'd never heard of Irvine Welsh. Nobody I asked knew anything about him, and yet this story was by far the best in that anthology. It was something completely new, completely fresh."

It wasn't just that it was simultaneously funny, tragic and revolting it was also, to Duncan, revolutionary. "I could see that he was doing the same thing I was trying to do, except possibly better which is a kind of working class, everyday voice of the East Coast of Scotland."

At the time Duncan was living just outside Edinburgh with his friend James Meek, a fellow writer who went on to be The Guardian's Moscow correspondent in the 90s, as well as publishing award-winning novels of his own.

Inspired in part by fanzine culture, the pair had co-founded their own literary imprint, Clocktower Press, which James describes as "a pre-internet effort to get past the gatekeepers of publishing". He remembers Duncan coming home and telling him excitedly about this new talent he'd discovered. "And I thought, 'Well, that sounds... interesting.'"

They weren't the only people whose interest had been piqued.

Two front covers of 'Rebel Inc.'

Kevin Williamson poet, publisher and Irvine's long-term partner in provocation is describing the foundation of his early-90s literary magazine, Rebel Inc.: "I boiled our manifesto down to two slogans: 'Fuck the mainstream' and, 'Fuck London'."

At Williamson's suggestion, we've met in The Tourmalet, a cycling-themed pub off Leith Walk. Not because Kevin is a particular bike lover (he barely seems to notice that the Tour de France is climbing the Col du Tourmalet in the background), but because it's close to Easter Road. It's raining, but he'll be watching Hibs play later that afternoon regardless.

Softly-spoken with a pronounced widow's peak, Williamson, now in his fifties, has a careful, considered manner that seems better-suited to academia than shouting from the terraces. But when he talks poetry and politics, he does so with the passion of a fired-up young protester on a picket line.

"The cultural wave that had already begun in the 80s under Thatcher I'm talking literature and music I could feel it rising," he says. "I didn't know where it was going, but I just felt something was changing here in Scotland. You could actually feel the tectonic plates shifting at the time."

Like Duncan and James' Clocktower Press, Kevin's inspiration came from the DIY culture that had grown up around punk ("going right back to Sniffin' Glue fanzine in 1976"), as well as the emergence of new Scottish novelists like Janice Galloway and James Kelman. Kelman's 1984 debut The Busconductor Hines had "landed on the literati like a mortar bomb at Heathrow", according to Scotland on Sunday, but it was rejected by the Booker prize judges, who objected to its use of everyday Scots language and prolific swearing.

For the aspiring authors coming up in his wake, the ludicrousness of this London-centric attitude was obvious. "This was our language it wasn't a slang, it wasn't some mutant bastardisation of English," Kevin says. Yet even ten years later, "when Jim Kelman [eventually] won the Booker Prize, they were counting the number of 'fucks' and 'cunts'. He's just written this work of high art, and they're counting the swearwords?"

Rebel Inc., in this context, was launched as a weapon in what Williamson calls "the language wars": an Exocet packed with (as issue #1 put it) "sharp new writing from Embra and other bits of Scotland like Falkirk", laser-targeted to shake the London literary establishment out of its complacency. "I wanted stories written in Scots urban Scots, not historic Scots or Burns Scots or anything like that," says Kevin. "I wanted the voice of the football terraces, the voice of the parties, the clubs, the pubs and the housing estates."

Writing in Scots wasn't just about bypassing prudish publishers, or giving themselves a license to swear at will. It was about "giving a voice to people in literature and in culture who had been ignored". The magazine was a means of expressing "a developing sense of identity" one that was proudly working class, proudly Scottish and profoundly different from what was happening south of the border. Because it wasn't just Scottish language and literature that was being marginalised, they were being ignored politically as well.

In 1992, to the surprise of many pundits, John Major won the general election. But while the UK as a whole narrowly voted Conservative, in Scotland, Labour won by a landslide. "The voice of Scotland was very different in 1992 to the voice of England," Kevin says. Yet in that pre-devolution era, the Scottish people's choice made no difference to who governed them. For people like Kevin, the result was further confirmation that things needed to change.

Like Duncan McLean, when Williamson had first read Welsh he'd recognised the sound of a writer hitting the nail on the head: linguistically, artistically and politically. With the pair of them acting as editors, encouragers and publishers, Irvine produced the succession of brilliant short stories that would form the basis of Trainspotting (and much of his later collection The Acid House) in the space of a few short years.

They were hilarious, scurrilous and often disgusting, but they also dealt with serious themes: addiction, AIDS and endemic violence; the exercise of free will, how choice is circumscribed by socio-economic conditions; and, of course, the collapse of society under a Conservative government that continued to promulgate the Thatcherite mantra that there was "no such thing".

When Welsh took it upon himself to gather various of these vignettes together, penning the linking chapters that would turn them into a novel, his friends immediately knew they had something special on their hands. "It was everything I'd been wanting to read in a novel form," remembers Kevin Williamson. "I loved Kelman, and Alasdair Gray and James Meek and Duncan's writing, but this" He remembers going up to Orkney to visit Duncan, where he read the proofs overnight. "And then I went back down to Edinburgh and I said, 'Irvine, I want the first interview, because this book's going to change everything for all of us.'"

The interview in question, published in Issue 4 of Rebel Inc. in 1993, has now gone down in legend. Williamson and Welsh took a pill each, stuck a dictaphone on the table and recorded nearly three hours of ecstasy-fuelled conversation. The extract that made the magazine, apparently unedited, is impressively coherent. But the cover, a close-up of their outstretched tongues, each holding a fridge magnet of the letter "e", left no one in any doubt as to what they were up to.

For a literary magazine, it was an outrageous move. But it was also entirely in keeping with the new spirit animating the Scottish scene of the time. Duncan remembers Rebel Inc. readings where the audience was invited to play LSD roulette. "Kevin gave out tabs of blotting paper, except one in every hundred actually had acid on it. But nobody knew which one." Kevin talks about giving away drugs as raffle prizes ("I was quite inspired by the idea of Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zones, where the law of all the rest of the world doesn't exist," he explains).

Irvine's book launches, meanwhile, were like nothing the publishing world had ever seen. "They were selling out big 1,000-seater venues for the launch of Acid House and Ecstasy," remembers Kevin, and not to the normal chin-stroking literary crowd either. "They were a real bunch of reprobates basically the people from the books."

Welsh had long since given up heroin (in fact, by the time Trainspotting was published he was married and working a relatively well-paid day job for Edinburgh City Council), but he was more than happy to play up to his growing reputation as the enfant terrible as the 90s rolled on. "He seemed to be good at getting arrested at the right moment," remembers Duncan. "He'd have a book out, and a week later he'd be arrested at a Hibs game, and it would be in the paper." There were other headline-grabbing pranks, too Irvine would write outraged letters to The Scotsman under a variety of pseudonyms, and at one stage he even applied to become manager of Hearts FC, Hibs' bitter rivals.

What really rocketed Irvine and the Edinburgh scene to worldwide fame, however, was the release of the Trainspotting film in February of 1996. Directed by Danny Boyle and soundtracked by a who's who of the coolest bands in the world at the time including Blur, Pulp and Underworld the uncompromising adaptation was an instant sensation. It launched the careers of Ewan McGregor, Robert Carlyle, Johnny Lee Miller and Ewen Bremner, and sent Irvine's star into the stratosphere.

"By the end of the 90s," Duncan remembers, "it became clear that Irvine had transcended being a literary writer," and had arrived at a new level of recognition and fame. "He created characters and situations that have gone around the world, and will linger for generations. There are so few writers who do that. Going back through Scotland's history you're talking about Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, maybe JM Barrie and Peter Pan." Perhaps, he chuckles "there's a direct line from Peter Pan to Begbie".

Ewan McGregor and Ewan Bremner on Arthur's Seat, Edinburgh in 'T2'. Photo: Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

The morning after meeting Kevin Williamson, I find myself standing in an unprepossessing carpark beneath Edinburgh Castle, staring up at an unremarkable set of concrete stairs. This, Sean Fogharty, a tour guide from Perth, Australia, is telling our group, is where Begbie chased Renton after bumping into him in a nightclub in T2.

Trainspotting is now an industry. It was perhaps inevitable that the success of the film would eventually spawn a sequel, and tourists now flock to Leith each summer to see where the book and the movies were set.

Tim Bell, who's been guiding groups since "about 2003 or 2004", believes you can almost pinpoint the moment when Irvine went from being (as the author himself put it) "a pariah in Edinburgh, with the Council and the tourist board", and started to be seen as an asset.

In 2004, Alexander McCall Smith, a hugely successful if extraordinarily twee Scottish author labelled Welsh's work "a travesty" for the country. "Most people in Scotland," he sniffed, "aren't like that." Just two years later, however, the two writers appeared side-by-side in a collection that also included a short story by J.K. Rowling. In the forward, none other than the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, the equivalent to a Mayor, hailed Welsh as "an iconic chronicler of our city".

The risk that his once-shocking narratives might be co-opted and commodified is something Irvine has long been aware of. "It was only about 18 months after the movie came out that every health and education board advert was suddenly like an outtake of Trainspotting," he says. His friend and fellow Edinburgh author Jenni Fagan, meanwhile, reckons that "Irvine's probably the most ripped off Scottish writer there is by the government and by the tourist board. I saw something the other day about the bins, and they'd used 'flyspotting' rather than Trainspotting."

As we continue our tour of Leith, I see posters for an "immersive" version of Trainspotting playing at this year's Fringe. Outside the Central Bar (whose cellar, we're told, features in T2) we meet a regular, enjoying his first pint of the day in a T-shirt that reads "Toryspotting". It was produced by the Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers Union, he says, the legacy of some bygone industrial action. While Welsh would doubtless have supported the cause, it's hard to escape the idea that Trainspotting has now become a meme: overused to the point of meaninglessness.

All of which begs the question of whether there can still be anything truly radical about Irvines work. His latest novel, 2018's Dead Men's Trousers, sees Renton, Spud, Sick Boy and Begbie reuniting for yet another adventure. But while the outrageous antics, drug taking and gross-out graphic violence are all present and correct, the gang, like Irvine himself, is now middle-aged. Sick Boy lives in London, and when he watches Hibs he books a box for the occasion. Begbie has settled in California and Renton is now the manager of a superstar EDM DJ who spends his life on airplanes and, tellingly, complains about it constantly.

There's another detail that suggests Welsh is less plugged-in to what's happening on the ground than he once was. As Begbie passes through Edinburgh airport on the eve of the Brexit vote, the 22nd of June, 2016, he buys a newspaper "that Independent" and reads all about it. But in real life, The Independent produced its final print edition on the 26th of March, three months earlier.

Of course Irvine has aged, and of course hes become wealthier than he could ever have imagined in the early 90s. It would be churlish to refuse him the right to write about his life as it is now. But you can understand why some critics have decided his more recent work is less vital. Duncan McLean might have been joking when he suggested that Welsh's most gratuitously violent character had something in common with Peter Pan, but they're undoubtedly now both part of the literary canon, beloved by similarly-vast swathes of society. Can one really still be considered much more challenging of its norms than the other?

Or as Alan Taylor, founder of The Scottish Review of Books (and, by his own admission, not an Irvine Welsh fan) put it more brutally: "You ask me what's Irvine Welsh's long-term impact on Scottish literature? Its like asking what impact J.K. Rowling has had on Scottish literature. She's sold a lot of books."

It's been raining most of the afternoon, there's a cold breeze wind blowing off the Firth of Forth and enormous puddles have formed on the edges of Ferry Road. Inside Leith Theatre, however, the seats are packed, the tables are full of fast-emptying wine glasses and the welcome is warm, as Ewen Bremner AKA Spud from Trainspotting takes to the stage with his band.

It's no exaggeration to say that without Irvine and the Edinburgh literary scene of the early-90s, none of this would exist. It's not just that Bremner is fronting the headline act. The show itself, Neu Reekie, a regular poetry and performance art night, is the brainchild of Kevin Williamson, and Leith Theatre might not even be standing were it not for Welsh. The opulent art-deco building had been closed since 1988, but reopened in 2017, thanks in no small measure to his patronage of the theatre trust.

As well as keeping these physical doors open for the next generation of Scottish writers, Irvine and his contemporaries have opened metaphorical ones too. Neu Reekie regularly gives a stage to people like Courtney Stodart, a young poet who makes her show-stealing debut tonight. Midway through the evening, Kayus Bankole, one third of the Mercury Prize-winning hip-hop act Young Fathers, walks in. Neu Reekie and Kevin were early supporters of their work too, he says, while "Irvine is the man".

Jenni Fagan, who recently adapted her 2012 debut The Panopticon into a critically-acclaimed play, agrees. "On a personal level, he encourages me a lot," she says, and compares reading Trainspotting as a teenager to watching Nirvana's era-defining performance on The Word. "To be able to see a world that I recognised, and a language that I recognised, written in a way that I recognised that was very powerful. Irvine managed to do something that a lot of writers never do. He did something that bands do. He represented a generation."

The charge levelled by his recent critics is, of course, that the generation Welsh represented has had its time. But if the expectation was that he'd slip quietly into retirement, no one told Irvine.

He's particularly fired up about Brexit, which he describes as "basically a civil war of the very rich two halves of the ruling class having a fight over how best to fuck everybody else". The way he sees it, "there's no way out of it, because any outcome is going to divide now".

He's interested in how a modern world that promises infinite choice rarely lets us exercise it. He's still thinking about addiction, which he believes is intrinsically linked with consumer capitalism. "The idea that if something makes you feel good, keep doing it, keep doing it, keep doing it," lies at the heart of both, he says.

His politics have hardly mellowed with age either. At one stage he proposes that we abolish elections altogether, instead having a parliament selected like a jury. "You have 630 people coming out of a hat, and out of that you pick your Prime Minister." This would, he believes, "take out the whole lobby system, the idea that people can be bought", and put society "in a position where you have to give people an education in politics, civics, economics, science [and] climate change", because anyone could end up governing.

To those who know Welsh well, none of this is surprising. Fagan sees him as "a working class man who's never compromised on anything", and points out that his contributions on the subjects of class, the state and society have always been overlooked. "His political clarity often gets missed amongst the drugs and violence," she says, "but he's a scathing social commentator." Williamson, meanwhile, makes a case for the radical real-world impact of that social commentary over the past 30 years.

"In the 90s, Scotland became flavour of the month because of Irvine," says Kevin Williamson. "Scottish writers were signed up, people wanted to see Scottish stuff, and it created this momentum which led us politically to our own parliament and then led us to a referendum on independence." That might sound like a bold claim, but as far as Kevin's concerned, Irvine and co. werent just providing the background noise to the movement. "I would go even further it was those writers and it was those artists who set that train on its tracks to where we're going now."

For much of the 2000s, it might have felt easy to dismiss the work of Welsh and his contemporaries as something that was of its time, a force that had been adopted, co-opted and neutered at least from a social and political point of view. But in 2019, with Scotland seemingly poised to hold a second independence referendum, a right-wing Tory Prime Minister back in Downing Street (who gets booed when he sets foot north of the border) and drug deaths in Scotland at a record high, Irvine Welsh's concerns suddenly feel more pressing than ever.

In March of 1996, ahead of Trainspotting's release in American cinemas, The New York Times published a story across four pages of its magazine which hailed Welsh, Williamson, Meek, McLean and the others as "The Beats of Edinburgh".

"As far as I know, they were the only people to ever use that phrase," says James Meek, modestly. Kevin Williamson is also keen to downplay its significance. It was "a bit of a pisstake", he says, remembering how he, Welsh and others deliberately talked up their drug-fuelled antics in yet another bid to wind up a journalist.

Re-reading it today, however, it feels like there's a grain of truth in that label. There was undoubtedly something new, vital and important happening in Edinburgh in the early-90s a literary movement whose effects are still being felt to this day. They might scoff at the idea, but perhaps comparing Irvine and his friends to that illustrious generation wasn't as outrageous as they now think.

Irvine Welsh at Beat Hotel Marrakesh.

Almost exactly 23 years on from that New York Times story, Irvine is letting me know what he really thinks of the Beat Generation as he tucks into his Moroccan lamb. The festival we're at is inspired by the American authors and their trips to Morocco: the main stage is called the Interzone, after the setting of Burroughs' Naked Lunch, quotes from Ginsberg appear on posters around the site, and lines from Kerouac litter their Instagram. But while he acknowledges the debt owed to these antecedents, Irvine is far from an uncritical fanboy.

"Yes, they did have a massive cultural influence, but the caveat I have and the festival's not going to like this, and I probably won't get invited back is that they were also just a bunch of trust-fund nonces." We both burst out laughing. But as always, there's a serious point buried beneath the profanities.

"I mean, what is the difference between old homosexual guys shagging underage boys in [Morocco in] the 1950s, and truck drivers from Hull going to Thailand and shagging underage girls now? In this era, why are we celebrating that? Should we be celebrating Gary Glitter or Michael Jackson?"

The talk turns to music again, and whether you can separate artists from their art. "It's very hard," Irvine says. "Two of my favourite albums of all time are Thriller and Off The Wall, but they're not the same to me now."

What of his own music? I'm still struggling to believe that "German, country & western, techno" isn't just a colossal wind-up, and eventually feel emboldened enough to tell him. In response, he pulls out his phone and loads up a video of himself in a broad-brimmed hat, Devo-style yellow suit and outsized sunglasses, apparently talking over a German-style techno beat.

"It's sort of me telling stories from the acid house generation both my own and other people's stories over the music." The country bit, though surely that's not real? And then, right on cue, the camera zooms in for a close-up of a Shania Twain album, as a pedal-steel guitar lick kicks in.

@Tris_Kennedy

Originally posted here:

How Irvine Welsh Went from Enfant Terrible to the Scottish Tourist Board's Favourite Guy - VICE UK

Pesticides continually get a bad rap, much of it undeserved, some of it bizarre. A recently published study from Japan seems to show that neonicotinoid insecticides (neonics), used around the world to protect crops from insect infestations, are so destructive that even before they were on the market or ever used in farmers fields, they were able to cause entire ecosystems to collapse. Sort of like Back to the Future meets Jurassic Park.

At least thats what one must assume after reading the study, which like others purporting to show harmful environmental effects of neonics, got extensive and often sensationalistic coverage in the media. National Geographic, for instance, headlined How the worlds most widely used insecticide led to fishery collapse, adding a sub-headline alerting readers that the same thing is likely happening to aquatic ecosystems worldwide.

Apocalypse-Shift

This is only the latest apocalypse being ascribed to neonics. As Ive detailed in Part 1 & Part 2 of this series, the ongoing campaign by environmentalists and activist scientists against these insecticides highlights what I have dubbed the Pseudo-Scientific Method (PSM). Drawing its inspiration from Saul Alinsky, the author of Rules for Radicals, rather than Newton or Galileo, the PSM first picks an enemy in this case a popular, state-of-the-art insecticide then manufactures the evidence needed to condemn it.

[Editors note: This is part three of a three-part series on pollinator health and pesticides. Read part one and part two.]

During the years Ive been writing about neonics, weve gone through a litany of supposed neonic-caused catastrophes that were widely trumpeted in the press only to be revealed a short time later to be either wholly fictitious or in no demonstrable way connected to neonics.

The first was the famous bee-pocalypse, the supposedly imminent extinction of the worlds honeybee population. This was so serious and urgent because, we were told, three-quarters of everything we eat is dependent on honeybees, and we were faced with worldwide famine that the European Union, acting on the Precautionary Principle, instituted an immediate ban on the insecticides.

Shortly thereafter, I and other analysts actually looked at the data, something none of the media or, apparently, the EU officials who instituted the ban had bothered to do. The claims of plummeting honeybee populations had simply been fabricated by anti-pesticide activists. As we all know now, honeybee populations have been rising on every habitable continent in the world since neonics came on the market in the mid-1990s.

Without missing a beat, the warnings of apocalypse shifted to a purported collapse of wild bees. This too turned out to be a fiction. The biggest problem with this new apocalypse was that, first, extensive study had shown that those wild bees that come into most contact with agricultural crops, and thus neonics, are thriving.

The third supposed apocalypse sprang into the headlines less than a year ago, with the publication of the claim by long-time neonic-antagonist Francisco Sanchez-Bayo that the entire insect world was going extinct. (As young people say, OMG!) Of course, this got massive coverage in the media, but this time the study was so obviously contrived to produce its alarming result that it was widely criticized by other scientists. Even the environmentalist-loving BBC ripped it to pieces. Science writer Matt Ridley and investigative reporter Jon Entine revealed the study authors penchant for simply fabricating evidence when the facts didnt support their case.

The next apocalypse du jour was the birds. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the claimed bird-pocalypse was how closely it replicated the (fictional) honeybee-pocalypse in the United States. For both honeybees and birds, real population declines in the post-World War II era leveled off and began to reverse in the mid-1990s, just as neonics were coming on the market. See the figure below from a 2018 review study:

Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, activist researchers gotta lie

The discussion above brings us to the latest entry in the neonic-apocalypse playbook, the study published in November by Japanese researchers who looked at the collapse of fish populations (actually, only some fish populations) in Lake Shinji near the coast of Western Japan. Using the year 1993 as their reference point, because this was when neonics were first used by Japanese rice farmers, they show that yields of smelt and eel, which were abundant in the 1980s, have declined to near zero in the case of smelt, while eel remain considerably below earlier levels, despite yearly restocking of the lake with eggs.

The researchers, led by Masumi Yamamuro of the Institute of Geology and Geoinformation in Japan, hypothesize that these declines were due to neonics carried into the lake from nearby rice fields and causing catastrophic declines in zooplankton biomass the invertebrate species of insects and crustaceans that make up much of the fishes diet.

At first glance, Figures 1 and 2 reproduced here as they appear in the published article appear to support that thesis. In the top graph we see neonic quantities rising with time, while, in the bottom graph, zooplankton biomass dramatically collapses. Although this is only a correlation, or association, which would not prove causation, it is highly suggestive.

Neonics: the wonder of time travel

Theres a critical problem with this apparent correlation, however. On closer examination, it is evident that the dates in horizontal axes of the two figures are not aligned; and if both graphs are centered on 1993 (below), the first year neonics were used, it becomes clear that zooplankton biomass had been in precipitous decline for at least a decade before neonics were introduced on rice farms.

The fact that biomass more or less bottomed out in 1993 is clearly the culmination of a trend, a steep and persistent decline that had been going on for over a decade and very likely much longer. The fact that the use of neonics (which began in 1993) overlaps for one year with the tail end of this trend hardly can be said to represent a correlation, especially as the records show negligible quantities during the first six years of usage, from 1993-1998.

To state the obvious, neonics cant be blamed for trends that started long before they were ever applied to farmers fields. But if one looks for the authors to provide an explanation of what was causing the rapid decline in all those years preceding the advent of neonics, one looks in vain. (More about this below.)

The supposed correlation becomes even less convincing given that Figure 1 doesnt even represent actual measurements of neonic levels in Lake Shinji. The only actual measurements of neonic levels in the lake water were made by the authors in one year, 2018, a quarter century after the 1993 reference year. The authors, in fact, have no idea what neonic levels in the lake were prior to 2018. They are asking us to accept, instead, a kind of surrogate for actual measurements namely, the total sales volume of neonics in the entire Shimane Prefecture, in which Lake Shinji is located.

Something is obviously very fishy here, which makes one wonder not only about the competence of the investigators but also whether, in overlooking these points and those discussed below, the peer reviewers and editors of Science, the journal in which this study was published, were comatose.

A dose of skepticism

That brings us to the critical issue of dose-response, or in this case, the actual levels of neonics in the water. From April through June 2018, the authors took several measurements in three different sampling sites in the lake. None of these measurements rise above the level of quantification, i.e. the amount that can be accurately determined given the limits of present-day technology, so they are hard to accept at face value. Even so, the one finding reported in the study itself the highest and only significant concentration, which the authors calculated by adding all the different neonics levels together is not high enough to do the widespread damage to insect populations the authors posit.

This is especially true for crustaceans, which form a large part of the zooplankton biomass and are a critical part of the fish diet. As found in a 2018 study, crustaceans are generally much less sensitive to neonics than are the insect species on which the ecological benchmarks, or safety levels, are based.

Things look even worse for the November Yamamuro study if one applies the researchers surrogate measurement (neonic sales) consistently. Compared to 2016, when sales in the prefecture were about 4,000 kg, sales during the first six years neonics were on the market (1993-1998) were below 200 kg/year; in other words, back then, neonics applied were far below amounts likely to do appreciable harm even to the most sensitive insect species.

Perhaps realizing they had a problem, the authors spent considerable time highlighting neonic concentrations found in the Sagami River as it flows through metropolitan Tokyo. For those not familiar with the geography of Japan, thats about 450 miles away from Lake Shinji, on the other side of at least three massive mountain ranges, and so in a completely different watershed not to mention, in the middle of one of the largest, most populated cites on the planet. The possible relevance of this was not explained.

Other possible causes of zooplankton decline

Given the rather obvious chronology problems of attributing fish declines to neonics, it might have made sense for the authors to look for other possible causes. They arent hard to find.

Heavy metal pollution. The lake has been undergoing significant ecological changes since at least 1922, when a canal was dredged between Shinji and nearby Lake Nakaumi, which caused saltwater to flow into the former, turning it brackish. And since 1966, according to the World Lake Database, efforts have been made to establish a new industrial zone along the coasts of the two lakes (Shinji and Nakaumi).

One might expect that a half-century of industrial development could lead to serious problems with chemical pollution affecting aquatic organisms. In fact, a 2011 study of chemical contaminants in Lake Shinji found exactly that, noting the lakes sediments are moderately to strongly polluted with respect to As [arsenic], moderately polluted with Pb [lead] , Zn [zinc], and Cr [chromium] Other researchers (Hook and Fisher 2001; 2002) looking at the effects of zinc and other chemical pollutants on copepods (the small crustaceans that make up a good deal of the zooplankton food supply for fish in Lake Shinji) found that exposure to contaminated food resulted in assimilation of the metals primarily into internal tissues and that with direct exposure, the metals showed up in the exoskeleton leading to sublethal effects (e.g., decreased egg production and hatching, ovarian development, and protein concentration in eggs) at concentrations 2~3 orders of magnitude less than lethal concentrations.

Eutrophication. Just as Yamamuro et al. fail to mention Lake Shinjis chemical pollution, they also neglect to alert readers to the well-known, long-standing problems the lake suffers from eutrophication, the depletion of oxygen due to the proliferation of algae and other organisms. As Japans Ministry of the Environment noted in 1996: Deterioration of water quality by socio-economic activities in catchment area. Eutrophication with water bloom in summer.

Eutrophication is generally caused by excessive nutrients from sewage, fertilizer and other organic and inorganic pollutants that result in explosive algae growth, the buildup of hydrogen sulfide, and oxygen-depleted water. Although the researchers say that oxygen and some other measurements in Lake Shingi were similar before and after 1993, the effects of eutrophication on lake ecology are highly complex, can manifest over long time periods, and even to this day are not fully understood. In fact, the studys lead researcher, Ms. Yamamuro, acknowledged these issues repeatedly in a study of Lake Shinji and Lake Nakaumi, published in 2000:

In recent decades, these waters have been strongly affected by eutrophication which is accompanied by oxygen depletion. Detailed study of the migration patterns and growth rates of particular fish species in the area would contribute to improving the management of local fisheries as well as to understanding the reaction of fishes to eutrophication.

The decrease of the bottom-dwelling fish, however, might result from increased eutrophication. The increase in plantivorous species, K. punctatus and S. zunasi, also might be related to an increase in phytoplankton, although relationships in the lakes food web are not clarified.

Habitat destruction. Other studies have pointed to severe disruptions of aquatic habitat that have caused significant declines in fish populations. For example, the study co-authored by Yamamuro in 2000 pointed to a large decrease in Carassius sp which the study attributed to the loss of spawning and nursery areas, because 75% of the natural coast of the lake has changed with the construction of an artificial wall (Environmental Agency, 1993) during the course of urbanization of the area.

Perhaps its not a coincidence that this wall appears to have been built around 1993, the authors pivotal date in this new study when, they claim, the lakes environmental collapse began.

Another Fake News Fake Catastrophe

Yamamuro et al. end their 2019 article by quoting a particularly overwrought passage from Rachel Carsons Silent Spring. In it, chemicals threaten to kill every insect, the good and the bad, to still the song of birds, and the leaping of fish in the streams They conclude: The ecological and economic impact of neonicotinoids on the inland waters of Japan confirms Carsons prophecy.

Thats fitting, because Silent Spring, like the Yamamuro et al. study, is agenda-driven rubbish. However, the media loved the Japanese research because it offered a narrative about yet one more environmental catastrophe, showing how neonics could not only harm specific insects, but disrupt the entire ecological web of life. (As though teenage activist Greta Thunberg and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) werent already having enough bad dreams.)

And just as the media never bothered to google honeybee populations before writing thousands of headlines about bees imminent extinction, apparently none bothered to google Lake Shinji, either. It appears that despite massive eutrophication, chemical pollution from 50 years of industrial development, the destruction of fish spawning and nursery areas by construction projects and even negligible, non-harmful levels of neonics Lake Shinji is doing pretty well, thank you. Japans Ministry of the Environment describes the lake this way:

Rich Biodiversity in Brackish Water Ecosystem: Shinji-ko offers an essential habitat for approximately 80 brackish water species of fish and shellfish, including Japans endemic Shinji-ko Goby, Japanese Seaperch, Eel, Icefish and Corbicula Clam. Shinjiko is blessed with the largest catch of Corbicula Clams in Japan. Shinji-ko is also home to 200 species of migratory birds. Especially, more than 20,000 Tufted Ducks and 5000 Scaups are sighted among over 40,000 wild ducks and geese. The lake regularly supports more than 1% of world population of Whitefronted Goose, Tufted Duck and Greater Scaup and it is the southernmost wintering spot for Tundra Swans along with Nakaumi.

So much for the Yamamuro et al. study, perhaps the worst, most irresponsible article I have encountered during more than 40 years of reading Science. And so much for the worldwide fish-pocalypse.

Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute. He was the founding director of the FDAs Office of Biotechnology. Follow him on Twitter at @henryimiller

More here:

What's missing from claims that neonicotinoids are killing bees, birds and fish? - Genetic Literacy Project

The capitalist bourgeosie needs and defends democracy as a form of social freedom only as long as it is useful to its own class rule. Their understanding of democracy and freedom is structurally limited-only he is a full-fledged human being who is also a citizen of property. Learning from O Canada and imitating the 26 community centers in Vancouver could revive democracy &freedom.

A comment by Jrg Schindler

[This article published on December 13, 2019 is translated from the German on the Internet, http://www.spiegel.de.]

Boris Johnson has won the election house high and almost triumphantly, he can now govern through. Lost have decency, sincerity and integrity.

So one lies to his country and his queen from the first day in office. He meets opposition in his party by throwing the opponents out on edge. He mocks Parliament at every opportunity as a chatterbox, he makes fun of Members who fear for their integrity. He threatens the media with harsh consequences as soon as they become insubordinate. All of a sudden, he promises the people his party has cupped for almost ten years the blue sky. He avoids asking questions - or answers them with new lies.

And what do people do? They elect him back to office with an overwhelming majority.

So now Boris Johnson has finally reached his goal. And he has not only won this election, the third in four and a half years, he has triumphed in a way no Briton has triumphed before him for decades.

Johnson has plunged the Labor Party into a crisis from which it will not recover for years to come. He was the first Conservative in living memory to break through the red Labor wall in the centre and north of England and draw voters to his side, whose aversion to Conservatives seemed innate. He has swept away almost all the political rebels, including within his own ranks, who opposed his Brexit course.

From now on, Boris Johnson can practically do what he wants. He no longer has any natural enemies.

You don't have to be a social or liberal democrat to be shocked by the landslide that took place in England. Because the real losers of this election are not the Labor Party and the many voices of reason on all sides of the political spectrum. The real losers are decency, sincerity and integrity.

With this election result - and this winner - Britain has bid farewell to the growing club of countries that at best still regard democratic competition, the search for compromises and fact-based decision-making as a burdensome duty. They have now been replaced in the self-proclaimed motherland of modern democracy by the right of the strongest, the power of lies and the elimination of contradiction at all costs. Donald Trump sees it with goodwill. He has played his part in driving the British away from the old continent. He will continue to work on it with relish. And with Boris Johnson he has a now tremendously powerful ally who is not only outwardly similar to him.

No one knows what Johnson will do with his power. The man for whom it is so much easier to get to the top than to be to the top probably does not know that himself. He may indeed turn out to be the liberal, moderate conservative whom some still think he is. As one who cements what he has smashed to pieces. He is finally beginning to reach out to the 48 percent of Britons who voted to remain in the European Union in 2016. And who is really cautiously leading his Tory party on a new course so that it no longer ignores the growing poverty and grotesque inequality in the country.

But it may also be that the now finally unleashed Johnson is continuing the destructive course with which he has overrun the UK since taking office. That he continues to offend the Scots and Northern Irish.

And that he leads his country as far away from the EU as possible to continue the society-destroying deregulation and privatization work of his predecessors - with low tax rates and a hire-and-fire labor market like those on the other side of the Atlantic. Trump and the now strengthened Brexit radicals in his own party will push Johnson massively towards it. No matter what the price.

SIX THESES ON THE LONG SHADOW OF STALINISM Christopher Jnke in UTOPIE (November 20. 2008)

[This article published in 2008 is translated from the German on the Internet, http://www.linksnet.de.]

The article takes up themes and theses that he presented in his latest book "The Long Shadow of Stalinism. Socialism and Democracy Yesterday and Today", Cologne 2007.

I. The intensifying transformation of democracy The transformation of the ruling democracy that has been going on for decades - its internal erosion from a democracy in the sense of a government of the people by the people and for the people to the merely abstract-formal rules of a purely parliamentary democracy - has reached a new level under the conditions of neoliberalism and armed globalization, i.e. under the conditions of the so-called "war on terror". The democratic achievements and customs are questioned and dismantled by the rulers and the rulers. Central basic values of bourgeois enlightenment are severely shaken and eroded.

This crisis development of freedom and democracy promotes, on the one hand, a proliferating democratic fatigue and political apathy, a form of "disgust for democracy" that can take on extremely diverse forms.1 On the other hand, however, it also increasingly raises the question of the prospects for change and the alternatives to this process. This inevitably raises the question of a socialist alternative.

At first glance, then, the situation is not bad for socialists. The old doctrine of the classical labor movement is being updated before our eyes: The capitalist bourgeoisie needs and defends democracy as a form of social freedom only as long as it is useful to its own class rule, the rule of the free property rights of the individual, and the everyday functioning of capitalism. Their understanding of democracy and freedom is correspondingly structurally limited - only he is a full-fledged human being who is also a citizen of property. As soon as it has become the ruling class, the bourgeoisie takes the side of a merely negatively conceived freedom in order to be able to cling to its particular property egoism. It is their class interest to combat the insistence on social freedom of the lower classes.2

At second glance, however, we are faced with a powerful problem. For freedom and socialism do not fit together either - this tells us, with reference to the experiences with historical Stalinism and the communist world movement, not only the neo-conservatives and neo-liberals for decades, but recently also again leading representatives of the German left.

II Leo Kofler's three forms of freedom

In my opinion, what political-theoretical consequences do we have to draw from the experience of the 20th century in relation to the debate on democracy? I am concentrating here on a central aspect and refer here exemplarily to Leo Kofler, who already half a century ago poured the decisive democratic theoretical doctrine into his portrait of the three world historical forms of freedom.3

For classical socialism, the political freedom asserted in the bourgeois revolutions, i.e. freedom of citizenship and individual rights (i.e. freedom of coalition, assembly, religion and opinion, universal and equal suffrage, etc.), was the first world-historical form of real human freedom. The advancement of political to social democracy and freedom, which had been sued by the rebellious and fighting proletariat since the middle of the 19th century, is the second world-historical form of freedom for him, economic-social freedom.

But both forms of freedom, according to Kofler, are essentially conceived negatively - as "freedom from", as freedom from the feudal shackles, from personal dependence and political paternalism on the one hand, as freedom from material misery, from social oppression and deprivation of rights on the other. The third form of freedom in world history, the actual socialist idea of freedom, was, however, a positive one. Not the "freedom from" is in the foreground here, but the "freedom to", the freedom to an all-round development of the personality. For Kofler, however, this third form, this third stage of a world-historical freedom can only be achieved if the first two world-historical forms are not played off against each other, but inseparably united at a higher level.

Exactly such a synthesis, however, did not succeed in the 20th century. Civil liberty destroyed personal dependence in order to replace it with material dependence. Real-socialist freedom freed the working class from material insecurity and impoverishment at the cost of taking away its individual, formal level of freedom. While international social democracy in the course of the twentieth century confined itself to enforcing and defending the bourgeois stage of freedom by contenting itself with making the working class a formally equal component of bourgeois-capitalist rule, the communist movement limited itself to the enforcement of a certain form of social freedom that sharply opposed the bourgeois form of freedom.

So what was once conceived as a new synthesis of political and social freedom disintegrated into its two components with the integration of social democracy into late bourgeois democracy on the one hand and the Stalinist bureaucratization of the communist movement on the other. While some remained stuck in the first world-historical form of freedom, others barricaded themselves in the second. The third world-historical form, the actual goal of the socialist workers' movement, was "forgotten". In the course of the 20th century, both main currents of the movement thus abandoned their emancipative vision. The idea of emancipation and progress has turned into its opposite. There is no alternative to the social market economy, however it may be - this is called social democratic. In the case of historical real-socialism, on the other hand, this means that what it gave people economically, it took away politically. Where economically it went beyond bourgeois capitalist society, politically it has fallen behind its achievements.

With his theory of the three world-historical forms of freedom, Leo Kofler not only combined the critique of bourgeois freedom with the critique of real-socialist freedom in the 20th century. He does this also in the form of an actualization of the early bourgeois, radical-humanist goal for the socialist movement. According to Kofler, every new attempt at socialism will be democratic or it will not be at all. Every new attempt at socialism can only be victorious if it combines political freedom with social freedom in a practical and political way. Socialism thus proves to be the simple thing that is difficult to make.

III Luciano Canfora's understanding of democracy

With this Kofler interpretation scheme we have not only drawn one of the central lessons from the history of socialism in the 20th century. We also have the interpretation key to look critically at more recent discussions - for example, the discussion on Luciano Canfora's Short History of Democracy, which had a lasting impact on the left-wing feuilleton in 2006 and 2007.

While democracy in history is both - a centuries-old form of political and social freedom movement as well as a specifically institutional version of bourgeois-capitalist class society - the Italian left-wing professor Luciano Canfora writes his history of democracy as the history of a mere means of the ruling classes and strata to confuse the after-pressing. It lacks any real concept of what democracy is, or should be from the left, and does not write the history of struggles for social, political or cultural freedom, but the history of an increasing disgust for democracy. For him, freedom and democracy are "ultimately empty words".4 As a means of emancipation, democracy, more precisely democratic values, needs and forms, do not occur in him. He does not regard democracy as a conspiracy of the same, but only as a conspiracy of the rulers, as democracy from above. In a bad leftist tradition, Canfora absolutes the idea of a social democracy from the fundamental rejection of democratic forms. From the dialectical unity of freedom, equality and fraternity/solidarity he turns antagonistic, i.e. mutually exclusive, opposites into antagonistic, and accordingly feels compelled to abolish freedom and solidarity in order to propagate an equality in which, of course, on closer inspection, some are more equal than others.

To him, ancient and bourgeois democracy are no more than beautiful appearances, because they come from above as means of domination. Socialist democracy, on the other hand, can and must come from above as a means of domination. Ancient and bourgeois democracy is not one for him, because they are both inextricably interwoven with slavery. Socialist democracy, on the other hand, is such a democracy for him, even if, as in the case of historical Stalinism, it comes along with modern forms of slavery (the Gulag system). And because he does not understand the dialectics of democracy and socialism, that is, the special role that democratic values, needs and democratic political forms play in the struggle for socialism; because he unilaterally absolutes the idea of a social democracy in an undialectical manner and thinks he has to justify the educational dictatorial rule of a minority for reasons of historical philosophy, he makes himself the unambiguous apologist of Stalinism. In his history of the 20th century he reproduces the entire program of Stalinist logic, its arguments, prejudices and denunciations. He takes part in every historical turn of Stalin's political zigzag course and provides corresponding, historiographically charged justifications for all these turns.5

Canfora's arguments are anything but original. They have accompanied the socialism of the 20th century since it began to justify post-revolutionary conditions in the Soviet Union. After the collapse of the once "real existing socialism" - in which everything was real but socialism (Rudi Dutschke) - these arguments were represented only in small, marginalized circles of (N)Ostalgikern (for example in the discussion about the Weienseer Bltter at the beginning of the 1990s) or in remainders of West German K-groups (for example in parts of the DKP and the MLPD). Today, however, the political and intellectual marginality of such theses on the left has been broken. Today, the same theses that once isolated Kurt Gossweiler or a Sahra Wagenknecht make intellectuals such as Hans Heinz Holz, Domenico Losurdo or Luciano Canfora into celebrated thought leaders who delight the left-wing mind and feuilleton. And for the first time one can hardly differentiate between the East and the West. What is also new here is that left-western traditions are clearly beginning to mix with left-eastern traditions.

Georg Flberth, to quote only Canfora's most ardent advocate of the German left, sees in Canfora's work not only "a competent political textbook", but even "the historical foundation of a theory of democracy and its prevention in all previous societies of inequality". Even Uwe-Jens Heuer, who is much more credible in questions of socialist democracy, explicitly praised Canfora's work as "progress in democracy theory" in a contribution to the debate. And Oskar Lafontaine even upgraded it by an epilogue to the fourth edition.6 Thus someone is theoretically exaggerated who tells us in our struggle against the ongoing erosion of democracy that we cannot count on democracy in any form in this struggle, because it is only a means of domination of the elites.

IV. What is philistine or neo-Stalinism?

Among other things, a noticeably increasing general appreciation for Canfora and the other authors mentioned is reflected in a noticeably spreading philo- and neostalinism. What do I mean by that?

Stalinism was and is first and foremost a historical phenomenon and describes the Soviet Russian period under Stalin. Seen in this light, Stalinism was, in my view, a specific socio-political system of rule that was neither capitalist nor socialist - at least not according to the criteria of the socialist classics -, a frozen transitional society organized and directed by a bureaucratic layer coming from the workers' movement, the working class.7

But the social system founded by Stalin with violence and malice has not only survived its founder by decades, but has also been applied in other historical and geographical contexts. Stalinism in this context is not only a historical phenomenon, but also a political theory and practice, a specific kind of political thought and action, which as such can also be completely detached from the person of Stalin and from the Soviet Russian example.8

Despite this structural possibility of a detachment of Stalinist political forms from the Soviet Russian case study, neostalinism is all too often still recognizable by its relation to history. A contemporary philo- or neostalinist - I deliberately do not say: Stalinist - is thus in my eyes the one who historically or politically and theoretically adheres to this social system and its ideology of domination, who does not get rid of it in his thoughts either and who still today thinks he has to gloss over, defend, justify and reproduce both the theory and the practice of it.

And one recognizes it above all by two seemingly self-evident argumentation patterns. On the one hand, philo- and neostalinism repeatedly propagate a certain historical-philosophical "realism". For Canfora, his German Adlatus Flberth and many others, this is the infamous Stalinist "Realism" - the supposed end of the world revolutionary process in the 1920s behind which the Stalinist myth of "socialism in one country" hides. Against the background of the supposed end of world-revolutionary processes in the early 1920s, the logic of the idea was that a proxy struggle between two world political camps had unfolded, in which above all the social goals count, not the democratic means. Here not only the real history of the 20th century as a century of permanent revolts and revolutions is turned upside down. Here, more than ever, an ideological theorem - and there is hardly any more - is used to play off the goal of social freedom against political freedom.

On the other hand, we are dealing here with a thoroughly bourgeois understanding of politics and, above all, of revolution. The socialist revolution is measured by the philo- and neostalinists (as by their predecessors) against the traditional understanding of bourgeois revolutionary processes. Socialist revolutions always come to these thinkers and leaders from above, in the form of a kind of educational dictatorship, because - just as in bourgeois thinking - the population is simply not mature enough for true socialism. Central to the transition to socialism was therefore above all the economic level of the development of productive power, on which the empire of freedom could then inevitably and mechanically build itself. And if only the economic and social goals of a supposedly well-intentioned bureaucratic ruling class are correct, then the crimes necessary for this must also be defended, because - according to the recurring figure of argumentation - the bourgeois revolutions also made use of such crimes.

V. And what does it feed on? But why, materialistically speaking, does this past not want to pass away? Why does historical Stalinism continue to cast a clear shadow on the German left?

Part of the answer can certainly be found in the usual standard answer that philostalinism is a legacy of the past, an "eternal yesterday". Indeed, historical Stalinism continues to have an effect, both practical and theoretical. One cannot understand essential parts of the socio-political and socio-philosophical thinking of our time if one does not understand that in many ways, rightly or wrongly, it is an intellectual reaction to the history and ideology of Stalinist deformed communism. Even in Eastern Europe, which is now on its way to capitalism, Stalinism is still present more than just intellectually. Without an understanding of the once "socialist" bureaucracy, the mafiotic transitional capitalism of the East is hardly comprehensible. And the enlarged Germany has become a considerable part of the Eastern European heritage - politically, economically and culturally.

But it is precisely the still predominant "Ostalgia" that points to the fact that the long shadow of Stalinism, contrary to popular opinion, is not only fed by the long past history, but even more by the socio-political present. More than a desired return to the SED dictatorship, this (N)Ostalgia has something to do with "the desire to return to a period of social security and public welfare," as the British political scientist Peter Thompson emphasized once again in his decidedly inspiring (but unfortunately only available in English) book on the far-reaching crisis of the German Left a few years ago.9 The transitions to social authoritarianism and continuing Stalinist thought structures are, as Thompson also points out, especially fluent where there has been no real de-stalinization of thought - and this affects the German left more than other European leftists - and where this lack of de-stalinization mixes with the new realities of a socio-economic and socio-political barbarism that is spreading neoliberally. It is precisely in these processes that the recourse to Stalinist discourses finds its contemporary breeding ground.

Although this philo- and neostalinism does not yet embody an identifiable political-organizational current, it is above all a political-intellectual current.10 But precisely because, as a political reaction to the contemporary state of our now all-German social system, it is also the political theory of a latent political practice, it is time for a discussion of Stalinism that - as Peter Thompson has also pointed out conclusively - points far beyond a pure historical discussion. It should also not be repressed any further just because the political opponent likes to lead it - this argument has always been the gateway of all those who have sufficient reason to remain silent.11

This closes the circle at the beginning of my contribution. Contemporary discontent over the accelerating transformation of the ruling democracy has begun to politicize again in recent years. The question arises as to the perspectives for change and alternatives. Against this background, the philo- and neo-Stalinist tendencies are the political reaction to the contemporary state of our now all-German social system, an expression of an oppositional attitude as well as an expression of an at best halved emancipation, a structurally limited "force of negation", an unenlightened and politically counterproductive reflex and thus a political regression.

Against this background, we are confronted with a shadow that blows over to us not only from the past, but also from the future. For as long as social transformation processes beyond the bourgeois-capitalist form of society are considered, discussed and politicized, there will be the temptation of a sociopolitical substitutionism, i.e. of an authoritarian and educational dictatorial short-circuit, which has also and especially in historical Stalinism been as classically as fatefully reflected, but also, as already said, is able to largely detach itself from it.

VI No socialism without (radical) democracy With their ideological offensive, the philistines or neo-stalinists I have called fall back into precisely that authoritarian, educational dictatorial form of politics that the left cannot convey a way out of its historical crisis simply because it was not least this authoritarian, educational dictatorial politics that brought them into this situation.

On the one hand, socialism thus becomes a continuation of bourgeois political methods, and it remains a mystery why people should commit themselves to socialism at all against this background. On the other hand, such an understanding of socialism cannot and will not realize that socialism can only become capable of hegemony and majority as a radical-democratic hegemony, that it can only win as the most comprehensive social and political self-activity of the majority of the population. And this can only happen if not only this spirit of universal democratic self-activity prevails in the minds of the people, but if this is also reflected in democratic forms of organization, in institutional organs of a socialist democracy, which are able to satisfy and perpetuate radical-democratic needs.12 Only when the people can recognize in their everyday practice that socialism means more democracy than capitalism, only then the breakthrough of a new socialism is secured.13

This is the simple socialism that is so difficult to make. And this is meant by the famous words of Rosa Luxemburg - written down on the occasion of the Soviet Russian Revolution - that socialist democracy "does not (begin) only in the promised land, when the foundation of the socialist economy is created, as a finished Christmas present for the good people, who in the meantime faithfully supported the handful of socialist dictators. Socialist democracy begins at the same time with the dismantling of class rule and the building of socialism. 14 When this was written 90 years ago, it was little more than a form of prophecy - albeit one resulting from the realization of proletarian learning and emancipation processes. Today one can regard these words as historically verified. And a left-wing discussion that does not draw this doctrine and falls back into the old templates of Stalinist thought is thoroughly regressive.

So also this womb is still fruitful. But the German left can only credibly begin afresh if it renews the difficult but necessary dialectic of democracy and socialism and does not allow itself to lose the key to political-intellectual renewal. The "disgust" for democracy, which also emerges in the philo- and neo-Stalinist currents, is not only a false, but even more a politically dangerous dead end in the reformation discussions of the left. For the half measures of bourgeois political emancipation are not overcome with the half measures of real-socialist emancipation.

Christoph Jnke - born 1964, lives as historian and journalist in Bochum, is chairman of the Leo Kofler Society e.V. and author of Sozialistisches Strandgut. Leo Kofler - Leben und Werk (1907-1995), Hamburg 2007. The article takes up themes and theses that he presented in his latest book "Der lange Schatten des Stalinismus. Socialism and Democracy Yesterday and Today", Cologne 2007. Most recently in UTOPIE kreativ: Off to the Last Battle? On the Critique of Domenico Losurdo's Neostalinism, Issue 118 (August 2000).

1 Jacques Ranciere: Hatred of Democracy, London 2006 (French original 2005), has dealt with this new form of disgust for democracy in an extremely stimulating way and has shown that under the new conditions of postmodern neoliberalism, classically conservative arguments have mixed with classically liberal and left-wing arguments to form a specifically new form of criticism of democracy.

2 Cf. Leo Kofler: Zur Geschichte der brgerlichen Gesellschaft (1948), 8th edition Berlin 1992; ders.: Staat, Gesellschaft und Elite zwischen Humanismus und Nihilismus, Ulm/Donau 1960 (two-volume new edition under the title Vergeistigung der Herrschaft, Frankfurt/M. 1986 ff.).

3 I consciously speak of forms, and not, like Kofler himself, of stages of freedom, since I want to avoid the historical teleology that resonates with him here. See Leo Kofler: Perspektiven des revolutionren Humanismus (1968), Frankfurt/M. 2007. For the first time he formulated his teaching on the three stages of freedom in the article "ber die Freiheit" (On Freedom) published in 1951 in the left-wing socialist journal "pro und contra", reprinted in Leo Kofler: Zur Kritik brgerlicher Freiheit. Selected political-philosophical texts of a Marxist loner, Hamburg 2000, pp. 30-39.

4 Luciano Canfora: A Brief History of Democracy, Cologne 2006, p. 331.

5 I have dealt extensively with Canfora's democracy book and the associated feuilleton controversy in my contribution "Luciano Canfora's understanding of democracy", in: Der lange Schatten des Stalinismus. Socialism yesterday and today, Cologne 2007, pp. 151-180.

6 Lafontaine's flamboyant plea for more direct democracy, published there, is quite apt and stimulating - but it cannot rely on Canfora's work, since it is a single (vulgar Marxist) polemic against the self-government of the populations.

7 In the first part of "Der lange Schatten des Stalinismus" (The Long Shadow of Stalinism), I presented an attempt at a critical reappropriation of the debate about what Stalinism actually was historically, with an exemplary view of leading thinkers of the socialist left such as Werner Hofmann, Isaac Deutscher, Georg Lukcs, Leo Kofler and others.

8 The hegemonic parts of contemporary Stalinism research understand Stalinism as a purely historical phenomenon and explicitly reject an extension of the term beyond the focus on the Stalinist terror of the 1930s (cf. e.g. Jrg Baberowski: Der rote Terror. The History of Stalinism, Frankfurt/M. 2007). Even if this overlaps with certain traditions of left-wing historiography, I consider this to be historically and politically wrong.

9 Peter Thompson: The Crisis of the German Left: The Collapse of Communism, the Global Economy and the Second Great Transformation, Oxford 2005, p. 96.

10 What the British historian Edward P. Thompson formulated in the late 1970s still applies to them: "Historians should know that spinning, if tolerated - and even courted and cherished - can develop amazing efficacy and longevity. (After all, for any rational mind, most of the history of ideas is a history of spinning.) "The misery of theory. On the Production of Historical Experience, Frankfurt/M., New York 1980, p. 41).

11 The fact that my book on the long shadow of Stalinism sold well in the first three quarters of the year, but provoked hardly any significant discussions, is, in my opinion, part of this typical repression. Most of the journalistic organs of the left simply couldn't bring themselves to a meeting. The editor-in-chief of the Junge Welt even took a benevolent review (Joerg Boewe: "Trost fr die Trostlosen", http://www.iablis.de/iab2/content/view/346/86) out of the paper again, even though it was already set, and instead published a short total summary of Robert Steigerwald, who explained my theses, which he did not present further, for outside discussion. It's hardly any different with Jrgen Meier's contribution in UTOPIE kreativ 212, June 2008, which also does not leave a good hair on my book and gives a far-reaching lecture on the precarious relationship between working class and peasantry in the post-revolutionary Soviet Union. Although my book is also about history, it is not a history book. One of the reasons why such reviews have to be called "slipping past the topic" is because of this, at best curiously, if such "misunderstandings" did not have their own logic. History still weighs like an album on the soul of the German left. That is also, but not only and not even above all - I like to repeat myself - a problem of history.

12 From here, the role of political organizations on the left could also be more strongly discussed.

13 "In reality, the socialist revolution in the West will only be able to triumph if it expands proletarian democracy as far as possible, far from restricting it. For only this experience, whether gathered in parties or councils, can enable the working class to recognize the real barriers of bourgeois democracy, can historically enable it to overcome them." Perry Anderson: Antonio Gramsci. Eine kritische Wrdigung, West-Berlin 1979, p.99 (Emphasis: P.A.).

14 Rosa Luxemburg: Collected Works, Volume 4, p. 363.

in: UTOPIE Kreative, H. 217 (November 2008), p. 988-996

Read more from the original source:

Boris Johnson and the Long Shadow of Stalinism - SF Bay Area Indymedia

BORIS Johnsons predicted Commons majority has been cut from 80 to just 12 MPs, raising fears of a 2017-style collapse in the Tory lead.

New polling shows Labour eating into the Conservatives lead in the same way they did after Theresa May's disastrous manifesto launch at the last election.

3

The new study of 10,000 voters by Electoral Calculus uses socio-economic and past voting data to create a picture of each individual constituency.

The data has Tories on 41.9 per cent, down from 43 per cent this time last week, with Labour up from 29.9 per cent to 32.3 per cent.

That would give the Conservatives a predicted majority of just 12 with 331 seats down 24 compared to Labour on 235 seats - up 33.

That means the Conservatives lead is below 10 per cent for the first time in the election campaign.

Jeremy Corbyn and Labour are closing the gap on the Conservatives in the same way they did to Mrs May after her the manifesto launch 'dementia tax' fiasco as well as refusal to appear TV debates.

The study also shows the Lib Dems, who have been hoping for a bounce from Remainer votes after pledging to scrape Article 50, have fallen from 15.1 per cent to 13.8 per cent.

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Electoral Calculus founder Martin Baxter saidthe shrinking Tory lead could explain why the PM used a speech to appeal to working-class Brexit votes with pledges on immigration and state aid to protect jobs.

He is going out for a working class Brexit demographic with the calculation that there are still some votes in the Brexit Party and Leave votes in the Conservative Party, he told the Telegraph.

Meanwhile, Labour are continuing gradually to squeeze the Lib Dems and the Greens.

The 80 seat lead was predicted in poll produced for anti-Brexit group Best for Britain.

SHOCK POLLS Jeremy Corbyn closes the gap on Tories in 6 separate polls with 2 weeks to go

'HUNT THEM DOWN' Boris & Corbyn agree truce as Election campaigning postponed after attack

POLL POSITION General Election polls tracker and odds - who will win in 2019?

'PATHETIC' Long-Bailey & Sturgeon blasted for scare-mongering NHS Trump deal claims

Live Blog

ELECTION NEWS Latest news as parties suspend campaigning after London Bridge attack

Earlier this week, an YouGov MRP poll forThe Timespredicted the Tories are on for a 68-seat majority.

The pollsters are the only one to predict Theresa May would lose her majority and forecast Mr Johnsonwill win 359 seats in a triumphant return to No 10, up 42 on the 2017 result.

Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party is poised for disaster and will win 211 seats, down 51 from two years ago, when thecountry goes to the polls on December 12.

But the margin of victory is only predicted to be five per cent - meaning just a few percent loss in the polls could spell disaster.

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Continued here:

Boris predicted majority plunges from 80 to just 12 seats amid fears of Theresa May 2017 style election c - The Sun

At the 2019 Beijing Forum, Russian intellectual Andrey Kortunov, Director General of the Russian International Affairs Council since 2011, tackled a major point of controversy in the West: globalization vs. protectionism.

According to Kortunov, globalization did not produce the anticipated positive revolution in the world order. Back in the 1990s, it was widely believed that the benefits of globalization would be available to everyone. However, Kortunov notes, the benefits were hardly distributed equally and consequentially globalization has divided the world into winners and losers, and more specifically by certain social, age and professional groups, and between large urban agglomerations and rural areas.

Kortunov explained that processes occurring in the second decade of the 21st century, such as Donald Trump's assumptions of the US presidency and the steps towards Brexit in the UK, demonstrated that globalization could be hindered, and - in some countries - even reversed.

Kortunov underlined that certain areas of human activity demonstrated a level of "resistance" to globalization. "The growing gap between the economy and politics proved to be especially evident and dangerous for the phenomenon: the economy requires strategic, systemic, global, continental and multilateral decisions, while politics entail tactical, opportunistic, local and one-sided priorities. Moreover, 'identity politics' prevail over the 'politics of interests' increasingly. This further widens the gap between the way the economic and political domains react to globalization and related events," Kortunov analyzed.

During the 1990s, Kortunov said, the prevailing assumption was that globalization would assure the final victory of liberal economic and political models worldwide. However, today's events are raising questions about globalization even in the so-called historical West, and, opined Kortunov, alternative socio-political and economic models are demonstrating b0tu sustainability and high efficiency. "This raises the question about combining the universal character of globalization with the continuing pluralism of national development paths," Kortunov assessed.

The common wisdom of the late 1980s and early 1990s was assumed that the globalization "waves" would spread outwards from the West to its periphery. The large "semi-peripheral" countries, Russia, China, India, and Brazil, were to become transmission mechanisms. Experts also predicted that as the process moved away from the core (i.e. the West) and closer to the periphery, the resistance to globalization would increase, generating conflicts, trade wars, and the growth of isolationism and nationalism.

However, Kortunov observes, today what is happening is the exact opposite: the "waves" of globalization are moving from the periphery to the core. It is the West that is implementing restrictions on migration, sliding back into protectionism, and allowing the rise of nationalism.

Kortunov concluded stating that the United States, perceived as the primary driver of globalization, is lagging behind China in world trade activity. "Although the aggregate West as a whole currently surpasses the aggregate non-West in its involvement in globalization processes, the question of who will become the main driver of these processes in the future remains open," Kortunov said.

Below are Kortunov's speaking notes for his presentation at the Beijing Forum 2019:[1]

Andrey Kortunov (Source: YouTube.com)

"As noted by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, 'Man came silently into the world'. This observation made by the great 19th Century French philosopher and theologian could be referring to globalization. And indeed, globalization came into the world silently, and we dont truly know when exactly that happened. Some attribute its beginning to the end of the 20th century, while others connect it with the creation of global governance institutions after World War II. Some believe that the foundation of globalization was laid during the Industrial Revolution of the 18th19th centuries; others push the origins of the global world back to the Age of Discovery in the 15th16th centuries.

"Current international discourse on globalization began more than 30 years ago. Politically, such discussion is possible mostly thanks to the end of the Cold War and the world recovering from being split into two opposing and mutually isolated systems. The most crucial technological incentive for such discourse was the emergence of the global Internet and the information and communication revolution. Economically, today's discussions about globalization often trace back to the end of the 20th century, particularly the sharp increase in world trade and investment, the global downward trend in tariffs and other trade restrictions, as well as the successful implementation of regional integration projects (EU, ASEAN and others).

"My remarks will focus on how our views on globalization have changed over the past three decades. Have our hopes from thirty years ago come true? Have we advanced in understanding the driving forces of globalization and its internal logic? Have there been significant shifts in our assessments of the positive and negative aspects of globalization, its main achievements and inevitable side effects? Have we, in 2019, revised fundamental ideas driving globalization that seemed to be unshakable axioms back in 1989?

"My answers to these questions, obviously subjective and undoubtedly vulnerable to criticism, can be summarized in six short sections.

1. Resolution or Evolution?

"Three decades ago, most observers, including myself, believed that globalization would result in a fast and radical restructuring of the system of international institutions, legal norms, and foreign policy practices of individual states. However, globalization has not yet led to a revolution of the world order. The security institutions of the previous era (UN, NATO), as well as development institutions (IBRD, IMF, WTO), showed a high degree of sustainability, confining themselves only to cosmetic repairs of their priorities, procedures and operation principles.

"Neither the rapid collapse of the Soviet Union, nor the rapid rise of international terrorism, nor the global financial crisis of 20082009 entailed global changes of a revolutionary nature. After 30 years, the extent to which the world system can be managed has decreased instead of increased. The gap keeps growing between the objective degree of humankind's unity and how aware the world's leaders, political elite and societies are of that unity.

2. Mutual Benefit or Factor for Polarization?

"In the 1990s, it was widely perceived that 'a rising tide lifts all boats', meaning the benefits of globalization will somehow be available to everyone. In some sense, the fact that today the average human being lives better, brighter, and longer than three decades ago reinforced this view. But the benefits were hardly distributed equally; globalization has divided the world into winners and losers. Moreover, the dividing line between the two does not always lie between 'successful' and 'unsuccessful' states. More often it lies within such countries themselves: between certain social, age and professional groups, between large urban agglomerations and countryside areas, between rich and poor regions. That is between those who 'fit in' to the new way of life and those who simply fell behind.

"The inevitable result of socio-economic polarization is political polarization, which is the rise of weak governments, incapable of taking unpopular and perhaps difficult decisions. Note that it would be incorrect to perceive growing socio-economic inequality as an inevitable consequence of globalization alone: it is sufficient to mention how Scandinavian countries confidently fit into the globalization trend while maintaining one of the lowest Gini indexes in the world. Referring to globalization as the root cause of all problems very often hides the reluctance of leaders (as well as experts) to admit their own mistakes and shortcomings.

3. Permanency or Discreteness?

"One of the notions of globalization, popular at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, was its perception as a relatively linear, permanent, and continuous process. It was assumed that over time, the pace of globalization would only increase, and the resistance to globalization would weaken and decline. However, the second decade of the 21st century with Donald Trump taking office as President of the USA and the beginning of Britain's withdrawal from the EU demonstrated that globalization could be hindered, slowed down, and in some areas and for some countries, even reversed.

"This slowdown is linked to the resistance of various parties who lost touch with new technological and economic structures and the features of such structures. For example, one of the outcomes of the Fourth Industrial Revolution could be the large-scale displacement of workers from the production process, a sharp reduction in labor requirements of developed countries and, as a consequence, an equally drastic reduction of international migration flows. That means that the supply of labor from the developing world will increase, but the demand for it from the developed world will decline rapidly. The development of 'new energy' (renewable sources and shale hydrocarbons) will sooner or later bring down international trade of oil and gas, one of the main pillars of world trade in general. Discussions on the 'reversibility' of globalization that seemed unthinkable twenty years ago have begun. Meanwhile, terms like 'globalization crisis', 'de-globalization' and even 'the post-global world' are gaining momentum.

4. Synchronization or Asynchrony?

"Since the beginning of the 1990s, research on globalization was focused on its financial and economic dimensions. By the end of the 20th century, it was perceived as a complex process that affects all aspects of human life. It was assumed that financial and economic globalization would inevitably push social, cultural and political globalization, just as a locomotive pulls rail cars. Perhaps humans would somehow manage to synchronize its dynamics in all the above-mentioned spheres by ensuring they interact with each other and generate a cumulative effect, accelerating the process as a whole.

"It became clear that certain areas of human activity demonstrated a level of 'resistance' to globalization. Therefore, at the moment, it is impossible to synchronize its processes. The growing gap between the economy and politics proved to be especially evident and dangerous for the phenomenon: the economy requires strategic, systemic, global, continental and multilateral decisions, while politics entail tactical, opportunistic, local and one-sided priorities. Moreover, 'identity politics' prevail over the 'politics of interests' increasingly. This further widens the gap between the way the economic and political domains react to globalization and related events.

5. Universalism or Pluralism?

"The global triumph of political and economic liberalism was accompanied by the rise in interest in the phenomenon of globalization. During the 1990s, 'liberal globalization' and 'globalized liberalism' were perceived as inextricably linked concepts, if not as synonyms. That entails that the accelerators of globalization, as well as one of its inevitable results, should have been the final victory of liberal economic and political models on a global scale. Any non-liberal development models were interpreted in this context as manifestations of archaic nature, symptoms of inconsistent and incomplete modernization, impeding their successful integration into the new global world.

"Today, such causal relationships look much less convincing than three decades ago. Political and economic liberalism are undergoing tough times; their fundamental principles are being questioned even in the so-called historical West, while alternative socio-political and economic models are demonstrating sustainability and, in some cases, high efficiency. This raises the question about combining the universal character of globalization with the continuing pluralism of national development paths. This new task was hardly discussed ten or fifteen years ago.

6. Core or Periphery?

"In the late 1980s early 1990s, it was assumed that the 'waves' of globalization would spread mainly from the economic, political and technological core of the modern world (the aggregate West) to its periphery. Large 'semi-peripheral' countries such as Russia, China, India, Brazil and others, should have become transmission mechanisms. Moreover, experts predicted that when moving away from the core closer to the periphery, the resistance to globalization would increase, generating conflicts, trade wars, growth of isolationism and nationalism. These impulses of de-globalization, though, would weaken the closer they get to the global core.

"History shows that, in many cases, the 'waves' of globalization are moving the opposite direction from the periphery to the core. The aggregate West is trying to fence itself off the periphery by implementing restrictions on migration, sliding back into protectionism, repatriating previously abandoned industries and allowing the rise of nationalism. The United States, perceived by the majority as the undisputed leader and primary driver of globalization, remains at the very lowest end in almost all of its dimensions. This applies to world trade activity, with the United States lagging behind China. Although the aggregate West as a whole currently surpasses the aggregate non-West in its involvement in globalization processes, the question of who will become the main driver of these processes in the future remains open.

Interim Results

"What does all this mean for our perception of globalization? Perhaps none of the above sections is sufficient to conclude that the process reached its peak at the beginning of the century and is now in decline. Likewise, Trump's Administration taking office in the United States was not necessarily the turning point in globalization trends. DHLs latest annual Global Connectedness Index concluded that such processes have gained momentum and remained stable, despite some fluctuations. The Index assessed the dynamics of globalization according to four critical criteria: shares of trade, capital, information, and people flows crossing national borders.

"The phenomenon turned out to be much more complex, more controversial and less predictable than it had seemed before. Moreover, the world is only at the very beginning of the age of globalization. Currently, roughly 20% of economic output across the globe is exported, while only 1719% of tourists cross their countries borders. On average, transnational corporations produce only 9% of their products outside their country of origin, while roughly 7% of phone call minutes are international and only 3% of people live outside the countries they were born. Numerous academics and journalists who expressed ideas such as 'the world has become borderless', 'distance is dead' and 'the world is flat', seem to be reflecting what the future might hold, rather than what the world looks like today.

"Nevertheless, it is essential to prepare for the future today. Perhaps the main lesson of the last thirty years is that market mechanisms alone cannot be a universal solution to economic and political issues: neither at the level of individual elements of the global social system (states) nor at the level of the system as a whole. Increasing the manageability of the system in the age of globalization is more relevant than ever before in the history of humankind. Accordingly, there remains a need for comprehensive interdisciplinary research, revealing the features of the phenomenon of globalization at a new stage of its development."

[1] Russiancouncil.ru, November 12, 2019.

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