May 2016 - P2P-Foundation - lists.ourproject.org

Fwd: [CommonGood] Conference Unconditional Basic Income and Degrowth, Hamburg, 19./20. May 2016
by Michel Bauwens 16 May '16

16 May '16

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Kipping Katja Mitarbeiter 02 <katja.kipping.ma02(a)bundestag.de> Date: Sun, May 15, 2016 at 1:27 AM Subject: [CommonGood] Conference Unconditional Basic Income and Degrowth, Hamburg, 19./20. May 2016 To: "commongood(a)listi.jpberlin.de" <commongood(a)listi.jpberlin.de> *English* https://ubi-degrowth.eu/ *Conference: Unconditional Basic Income and Degrowth, Hamburg, 19./20. May 2016* *Aim of the Conference* The aim of the conference is to create a dialogue between the movements for degrowth and basic income. Each movement should learn about the relevance of the other and ultimately aim to identify points of intersection, common challenges and opportunities for cooperation. Ideally a long term network will be established that supports both topics and increases their relevance on a European level. Find out more here <https://ubi-degrowth.eu/en/conference>. *German* Konferenz Grundeinkommen und Degrowth https://ubi-degrowth.eu/de _______________________________________________ CommonGood Mailingliste JPBerlin - Politischer Provider CommonGood(a)listi.jpberlin.de https://listi.jpberlin.de/mailman/listinfo/commongood -- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/

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Fwd: [CommonGood] The truth about the tragedy of the commons (thanks to veron)
by Michel Bauwens 16 May '16

16 May '16

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: tina ebro <cgebro(a)gmail.com> Date: Fri, Apr 22, 2016 at 7:37 AM Subject: [CommonGood] The truth about the tragedy of the commons (thanks to veron) To: apologies if cross-posting The Only Woman to Win the Nobel Prize in Economics Also Debunked Mainstream Economics The truth about the tragedy of the commons <http://evonomics.com/the-only-woman-to-win-the-nobel-prize-economics-debunk…> <http://evonomics.com/the-only-woman-to-win-the-nobel-prize-economics-debunk…> <http://evonomics.com/the-only-woman-to-win-the-nobel-prize-economics-debunk…> <http://evonomics.com/the-only-woman-to-win-the-nobel-prize-economics-debunk…> <http://evonomics.com/the-only-woman-to-win-the-nobel-prize-economics-debunk…> *By David Bollier* “Picture a pasture open to all.” For at least a generation, the very idea of the commons has been marginalized and dismissed as a misguided way to manage resources: the so-called tragedy of the commons. In a short but influential essay published in Science in 1968, ecologist Garrett Hardin gave the story a fresh formulation and a memorable tagline. “The tragedy of the commons develops in this way,” wrote Hardin, proposing to his readers that they envision an open pasture: It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible in the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy. As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, “What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?” The rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another…. But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd with- out limit—in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all. The tragedy of the commons is one of those basic concepts that is drilled into the minds of every undergraduate, at least in economics courses. The idea is considered a basic principle of economics—a cautionary lesson about the impossibility of collective action. Once the class has been escorted through a ritual shudder, the professor whisks them along to the main attraction, the virtues of private property and free markets. Here, finally, economists reveal, we may surmount the dismal tragedy of a commons. The catechism is hammered home: individual freedom to own and trade private property in open markets is the only way to produce enduring personal satisfaction and social prosperity. Hardin explains the logic this way: we can overcome the tragedy of the commons through a system of “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected.” For him, the best approach is “the institution of private property coupled with legal inheritance.” He concedes that this is not a perfectly just alternative, but he asserts that Darwinian natural selection is ultimately the best available option, saying, “those who are biologically more fit to be the custodians of property and power should legally inherit more.” We put up with this imperfect legal order, he adds, “because we are not convinced, at the moment, that anyone has invented a better system. The alternative of the commons is too horrifying to contemplate. Injustice is preferable to total ruin.” Such musings by a libertarian-minded scientist have been catnip to conservative ideologues and economists (who are so often one and the same). They see Hardin’s essay as a gospel parable that affirms some core principles of neoliberal economic ideology. It affirms the importance of “free markets” and justifies the property rights of the wealthy. It bolsters a commitment to individual rights and private property as the cornerstone of economic thought and policy. People will supposedly have the motivation to take responsibility for resources if they are guaranteed private ownership and access to free markets. Tragic outcomes—“total ruin”—can thereby be avoided. The failure of the commons, in this telling, is conflated with government itself, if only to suggest that one of the few recognized vehicles for advancing collective interests, government, will also succumb to the “tragedy” paradigm. (That is the gist of Public Choice theory, which applies standard economic logic to problems in political science.) Over the past several decades, the tragedy of the commons has taken root as an economic truism. The Hardin essay has become a staple of undergraduate education in the US, taught not just in economics courses but in political science, sociology and other fields. It is no wonder that so many people consider the commons with such glib condescension. The commons = chaos, ruin and failure. There is just one significant flaw in the tragedy parable. It does not accurately describe a commons. Hardin’s fictional scenario sets forth a system that has no boundaries around the pasture, no rules for managing it, no punishments for over-use and no distinct community of users. But that is not a commons. It is an open-access regime, or a free-for-all. A commons has boundaries, rules, social norms and sanctions against free riders. A commons requires that there be a community willing to act as a conscientious steward of a resource. Hardin was confusing a commons with “no-man’s-land”—and in the process, he smeared the commons as a failed paradigm for managing resources. To be fair, Hardin was following a long line of polemicists who projected their unexamined commitments to market individualism onto the world. As we will see later, the theories of philosopher John Locke have been widely used to justify treating the New World as terra nullius—open, unowned land—even though it was populated by millions of Native Americans who managed their natural resources as beloved commons with unwritten but highly sophisticated rules. Hardin’s essay was inspired by his reading of an 1832 talk by William Forster Lloyd, an English lecturer who, like Hardin, was worried about overpopulation in a period of intense enclosures of land. Lloyd’s talk is notable because it rehearses the same line of argument and makes the same fanciful error—that people are incapable of negotiating a solution to the “tragedy.” Instead of a shared pasture, Lloyd’s metaphor was a joint pool of money that could be accessed by every contributor. Lloyd asserted that each individual would quickly deplete more than his share of the pool while a private purse of money would be frugally managed. I mention Lloyd’s essay to illustrate how ridiculous yet persistent the misconceptions about the “tragedy” dynamic truly are. Commons scholar Lewis Hyde dryly notes, “Just as Hardin proposes a herdsman whose reason is unable to encompass the common good, so Lloyd supposes persons who have no way to speak with each other or make joint decisions. Both writers inject laissez-faire individualism into an old agrarian village and then gravely announce that the commons is dead. From the point of view of such a village, Lloyd’s assumptions are as crazy as asking us to ‘suppose a man to have a purse to which his left and right hand may freely resort, each unaware of the other’.” This absurdity, unfortunately, is the basis for a large literature of “prisoner’s dilemma” experiments that purport to show how “rational individuals” behave when confronted with “social dilemmas,” such as how to allocate a limited resource. Should the “prisoner” cooperate with other potential claimants and share the limited rewards? Or should he or she defect by grabbing as much for himself as possible? Needless to say, the complications are endless. But the basic premise of such social science experiments is rigged at the outset. Certain assumptions about the selfishness, rational calculation of individuals and lack of context (test subjects have no shared social history or culture) are embedded into the very design of the “game.” Test subjects are not allowed to communicate with each other, or develop bonds of trust and shared knowledge. They are given only limited time and opportunity to learn to cooperate. They are isolated in a lab setting for a single experiment, and have no shared history or future together. Aghast at the pretzel logic of economic researchers, Lewis Hyde suggested that the “tragedy” thesis be called, instead, “The Tragedy of Unmanaged, Laissez-Faire, Common-Pool Resources with Easy Access for Noncommunicating, Self-Interested Individuals.” The dirty little secret of many prisoner’s dilemma experiments is that they subtly presuppose a market culture of “rational” individuals. Most give little consideration to the real-life ways in which people come to cooperate and share in managing resources. That is changing now that more game theory experiments are incorporating the ideas of behavioral economics, complexity theory and evolutionary sciences into their design. Yet the fact remains that a great deal of economic theory and policy presume a rather crude, archaic model of human being. Despite its obvious unreality, Homo economicus, the fictional abstract individual who actively maximizes his personal “utility function” through rational calculation, continues to hold sway as the idealized model of human agency in the cultural entity we call the “economy.” Two introductory economics textbooks widely used in the US, by Samuelson and Nordhaus (2004) and Stiglitz and Walsh (2006), consider cooperative behaviors to be so inconsequential that they do not even mention the commons. If economists show any inclination to discuss the commons, you can be sure that the word “tragedy” will be lurking very nearby. Paradoxically enough, the heedless quest for selfish gain— “rationally” pursued, of course, yet indifferent toward the collective good—is a better description of the conventional market economy than a commons. In the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, such a mindset propelled the wizards of Wall Street to maximize private gains without regard for the systemic risks or local impacts. The real tragedy precipitated by “rational” individualism is not the tragedy of the commons, but the tragedy of the market. Happily, contemporary scholarship has done much to rescue the commons from the memory hole to which it has been consigned by mainstream economics. The late American political scientist Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University deserves special credit for her role in expanding the frame of analysis of economic activity. In the 1970s, the economics profession plunged into a kind of religious fundamentalism. It celebrated highly abstract, quantitative models of the economy based on rational individualism, private property rights and free markets. A child of the Depression, Ostrom had always been interested in cooperative institutions working outside of markets. As a young political scientist in the 1960s, she began to question some of the core assumptions of economics, especially the idea that people are unable to cooperate in stable, sustainable ways. Sometimes working with political scientist Vincent Ostrom, her husband, she initiated a new kind of cross-disciplinary study of institutional systems that manage “common-pool resources,” or CPRs. CPRs are collective resources over which no one has private property rights or exclusive control, such as fisheries, grazing lands and groundwater. All of these resources are highly vulnerable to over-exploitation because it is difficult to stop people from using them. We might call it the “tragedy of open access.” What distinguished Ostrom’s scholarship from that of so many academic economists was her painstaking empirical fieldwork. She visited communal landholders in Ethiopia, rubber tappers in the Amazon and fishers in the Philippines. She investigated how they negotiated cooperative schemes, and how they blended their social systems with local ecosystems. As economist Nancy Folbre of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, explained, “She would go and actually talk to Indonesian fishermen or Maine lobstermen, and ask, ‘How did you come to establish this limit on the fish catch? How did you deal with the fact that people might try to get around it?’” >From such empirical findings, Ostrom tried to figure out what makes for a successful commons. How does a community overcome its collective-action problem? The recurring challenge facing a group of principals in an interdependent situation, she wrote, is figuring out how to “organize and govern themselves to obtain continuing joint benefits when all face temptations to free-ride, shirk, or otherwise act opportunistically. Parallel questions have to do with the combinations of variables that will (1) increase the initial likelihood of self-organization; (2) enhance the capabilities of individuals to continue self-organized efforts over time; or (3) exceed the capacity of self-organization to solve CPR [common-pool resource] problems without eternal assistance of some form.” Ostrom’s answer was Governing the Commons, a landmark 1990 book that set forth some of the basic “design principles” of effective, durable commons. These principles have been adapted and elaborated by later scholars, but her analysis remains the default framework for evaluating natural resource commons. The focus of Ostrom’s work, and of the legions of academics who now study commons, has been how communities of resource users develop social norms—and sometimes formal legal rules—that enable them to use finite resources sustainably over the long term. Standard economics, after all, declares that we are selfish individuals whose wants are unlimited. The idea that we can depend on people’s altruism and cooperation, economists object, is naive and unrealistic. The idea that commons can set and enforce limits on usage also seems improbable because it rejects the idea of humans having unbounded appetites. Ostrom nonetheless showed how, in hundreds of instances, commoners do in fact meet their needs and interests in collective, cooperative ways. The villagers of Törbel, Switzerland, have managed their high alpine forests, meadows and irrigation waters since 1224. Spaniards have shared irrigation waters through huerta social institutions for centuries while, more recently, diverse water authorities in Los Angeles learned how to coordinate their management of scarce groundwater supplies. Many commons have flourished for hundreds of years, even in periods of drought or crisis. Their success can be traced to a community’s ability to develop its own flexible, evolving rules for stewardship, oversight of access and usage, and effective punishments for rule-breakers. Ostrom found that commons must have clearly defined boundaries so that commoners can know who has authorized rights to use a resource. Outsiders who do not contribute to the commons obviously have no rights to access or use the common-pool resource. She discovered that the rules for appropriating a resource must take account of local conditions and must include limits on what can be taken and how. For example, wild berries can only be harvested during a given period of time, or wood from the forest can only be taken from the ground and must be used for household use only, not sold at markets. Commoners must be able to create or influence the rules that govern a commons, Ostrom noted. “If external governmental officials presume that only they have the authority to set the rules,” she discovered, “then it will be very difficult for local appropriators to sustain a rule-governed CPR over the long run.” Commoners must be willing to monitor how their resources are used (or abused) and must devise a system of sanctions to punish anyone who violates the rules, preferably through a gradation of increasingly serious sanctions. When disputes arise, commoners must have easy access to conflict-resolution mechanisms. Finally, Ostrom declared that commons that are part of a larger system of governance must be “organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises.” She called this “polycentric governance,” meaning that the authority to appropriate a resource, monitor and enforce its use, resolve conflicts and perform other governance activities must be shared across different levels— from local to regional to national to international. Excerpted from *Think Like A Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons <http://www.newsociety.com/Books/T/Think-Like-a-Commoner>*. 28 July 2015 _______________________________________________ CommonGood Mailingliste JPBerlin - Politischer Provider CommonGood(a)listi.jpberlin.de https://listi.jpberlin.de/mailman/listinfo/commongood -- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/

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Fwd: Ownership and funding in a peer-to-peer world
by Michel Bauwens 10 May '16

10 May '16

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Marketplace Academy by Sharetribe <hello(a)sharetribe.com> Date: Tue, May 10, 2016 at 7:04 AM Subject: Ownership and funding in a peer-to-peer world To: michael.linton+sharetribe(a)gmail.com An interview with Michel Bauwens, co-founder of the P2P Foundation. <http://sharetribe.us9.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=216d0e80594e1726eb9992…> What does a peer-to-peer future look like? <http://sharetribe.us9.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=216d0e80594e1726eb9992…> Co-creating commons. Looking beyond traditional ownership models. These are the major themes of this week's Marketplace Academy interview with Michel Bauwens, the co-founder and director of the P2P Foundation <http://sharetribe.us9.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=216d0e80594e1726eb9992…> . Read more <http://sharetribe.us9.list-manage.com/track/click?u=216d0e80594e1726eb9992b…> This will be the last interview in our current series of interviews <http://sharetribe.us9.list-manage.com/track/click?u=216d0e80594e1726eb9992b…> with collaborative economy experts. Want more? Know someone we should interview? Do tell us <hello(a)sharetribe.com>! Next week, it's back to the Academy guide <http://sharetribe.us9.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=216d0e80594e1726eb9992…> for building an online marketplace business. See you then! *If you have any questions, please let us know by replying to this email.* On behalf of the Sharetribe team, *Juho Makkonen* CEO, Sharetribe [image: Facebook] <http://sharetribe.us9.list-manage.com/track/click?u=216d0e80594e1726eb9992b…> [image: Twitter] <http://sharetribe.us9.list-manage.com/track/click?u=216d0e80594e1726eb9992b…> Copyright © 2016 Sharetribe, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you created a marketplace at Sharetribe or requested information about Sharetribe and marketplaces. Our mailing address is: Sharetribe Bulevardi 14 A Helsinki 00120 Finland Add us to your address book <http://sharetribe.us9.list-manage.com/vcard?u=216d0e80594e1726eb9992b9b&id=…> Unsubscribe <http://sharetribe.us9.list-manage2.com/unsubscribe?u=216d0e80594e1726eb9992…> Subscription Preferences <http://sharetribe.us9.list-manage.com/profile?u=216d0e80594e1726eb9992b9b&i…> View in Browser <http://us9.campaign-archive2.com/?u=216d0e80594e1726eb9992b9b&id=df6aace22b…> *Create a marketplace with Sharetribe. It only takes a minute.* <http://sharetribe.us9.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=216d0e80594e1726eb9992…> -- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/

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Fwd: Noam Chomsky: Masters of Mankind (from his new book::Who Rules the World--2016)
by Michel Bauwens 10 May '16

10 May '16

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Tikkun & The (interfaith & secular-humanist-and-atheist welcoming) Network of Spiritual Progressives <magazine(a)tikkun.org> Date: Tue, May 10, 2016 at 10:02 PM Subject: Noam Chomsky: Masters of Mankind (from his new book::Who Rules the World--2016) To: Michelsub2004(a)gmail.com <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=yyk6BK9jLcsWmUcfTuHqSDm2UvLy1S…> You can read this online at: http:// www.tikkun.org/nextgen/noam-chomsky-who-rules-the-world <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=Huglb7rnD%2B0kdQQbnmSs0jm2UvLy…> Editor’s Note: Noam Chomsky is one of the great contemporary analysts of the global impact of American power. I first met Chomsky when we both were involved in challenging America’s disastrous war in Vietnam–never yet adequately mourned by the U.S. government and its architects like Henry Kissinger never punished for the war crimes for which we were responsible. Chomsky has been a voice of sanity and a scholar whose broad vision of the role of America in the world puts to shame the shallow interpretations of American politics that still mesmerize the media and mislead the American people. Instead, the media and much of academia dismisses Chomsky as a leftist extremist rather than addressing the reasoned and documented analyses he has developed in his many books. Please read this article and his new book *Who Rules the World* –Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor, Tikkun magazine www.tikkun.org RabbiLerner.Tikkun(a)gmail.com *American Power Under Challenge* *Masters of Mankind (Part 1)* By *Noam Chomsky * <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=taNMhbXKMm1%2F2t3Y%2BaJSqJJKPU…> [*This piece, the first of two parts, is excerpted **from Noam Chomsky’s new book, *Who Rules the World? <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=qwbet94Fa8xhctnXH1cgqDm2UvLy1S…> *(Metro**politan Books). It is reprinted by Tikkun with permission from our ally TomDispatch.com.* When we ask “Who rules the world?” we commonly adopt the standard convention that the actors in world affairs are states, primarily the great powers, and we consider their decisions and the relations among them. That is not wrong. But we would do well to keep in mind that this level of abstraction can also be highly misleading. States of course have complex internal structures, and the choices and decisions of the political leadership are heavily influenced by internal concentrations of power, while the general population is often marginalized. That is true even for the more democratic societies, and obviously for others. We cannot gain a realistic understanding of who rules the world while ignoring the “masters of mankind,” as Adam Smith called them: in his day, the merchants and manufacturers of England; in ours, multinational conglomerates, huge financial institutions, retail empires, and the like. Still following Smith, it is also wise to attend to the “vile maxim” to which the “masters of mankind” are dedicated: “All for ourselves and nothing for other people” -- a doctrine known otherwise as bitter and incessant class war, often one-sided, much to the detriment of the people of the home country and the world. In the contemporary global order, the institutions of the masters hold enormous power, not only in the international arena but also within their home states, on which they rely to protect their power and to provide economic support by a wide variety of means. When we consider the role of the masters of mankind, we turn to such state policy priorities of the moment as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, one of the investor-rights agreements mislabeled “free-trade agreements” in propaganda and commentary. They are negotiated in secret, apart from the hundreds of corporate lawyers and lobbyists writing the crucial details. The intention is to have them adopted in good Stalinist style with “fast track” procedures designed to block discussion and allow only the choice of yes or no (hence yes). The designers regularly do quite well, not surprisingly. People are incidental, with the consequences one might anticipate. *The Second Superpower* The neoliberal programs of the past generation have concentrated wealth and power in far fewer hands while undermining functioning democracy, but they have aroused opposition as well, most prominently in Latin America but also in the centers of global power. The European Union (EU), one of the more promising developments of the post-World War II period, has been tottering because of the harsh effect of the policies of austerity during recession, condemned even by the economists of the International Monetary Fund (if not the IMF’s political actors). Democracy has been undermined as decision making shifted to the Brussels bureaucracy, with the northern banks casting their shadow over their proceedings. Mainstream parties have been rapidly losing members to left and to right. The executive director of the Paris-based research group EuropaNova attributes the general disenchantment to “a mood of angry impotence as the real power to shape events largely shifted from national political leaders [who, in principle at least, are subject to democratic politics] to the market, the institutions of the European Union and corporations,” quite in accord with neoliberal doctrine. Very similar processes are under way in the United States, for somewhat similar reasons, a matter of significance and concern not just for the country but, because of U.S. power, for the world. The rising opposition to the neoliberal assault highlights another crucial aspect of the standard convention: it sets aside the public, which often fails to accept the approved role of “spectators” (rather than “participants”) assigned to it in liberal democratic theory. Such disobedience has always been of concern to the dominant classes. Just keeping to American history, George Washington regarded the common people who formed the militias that he was to command as “an exceedingly dirty and nasty people [evincing] an unaccountable kind of stupidity in the lower class of these people.” In *Violent Politics*, his masterful review of insurgencies from “the American insurgency” to contemporary Afghanistan and Iraq, William Polk concludes that General Washington “was so anxious to sideline [the fighters he despised] that he came close to losing the Revolution.” Indeed, he “might have actually done so” had France not massively intervened and “saved the Revolution,” which until then had been won by guerrillas -- whom we would now call “terrorists” -- while Washington’s British-style army “was defeated time after time and almost lost the war.” A common feature of successful insurgencies, Polk records, is that once popular support dissolves after victory, the leadership suppresses the “dirty and nasty people” who actually won the war with guerrilla tactics and terror, for fear that they might challenge class privilege. The elites’ contempt for “the lower class of these people” has taken various forms throughout the years. In recent times one expression of this contempt is the call for passivity and obedience (“moderation in democracy”) by liberal internationalists reacting to the dangerous democratizing effects of the popular movements of the 1960s. Sometimes states do choose to follow public opinion, eliciting much fury in centers of power. One dramatic case was in 2003, when the Bush administration called on Turkey to join its invasion of Iraq. Ninety-five percent of Turks opposed that course of action and, to the amazement and horror of Washington, the Turkish government adhered to their views. Turkey was bitterly condemned for this departure from responsible behavior. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, designated by the press as the “idealist-in-chief” of the administration, berated the Turkish military for permitting the malfeasance of the government and demanded an apology. Unperturbed by these and innumerable other illustrations of our fabled “yearning for democracy,” respectable commentary continued to laud President George W. Bush for his dedication to “democracy promotion,” or sometimes criticized him for his naïveté in thinking that an outside power could impose its democratic yearnings on others. The Turkish public was not alone. Global opposition to U.S.-UK aggression was overwhelming. Support for Washington’s war plans scarcely reached 10% almost anywhere, according to international polls. Opposition sparked huge worldwide protests, in the United States as well, probably the first time in history that imperial aggression was strongly protested even before it was officially launched. On the front page of the *New York Times*, journalist Patrick Tyler reported that “there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.” Unprecedented protest in the United States was a manifestation of the opposition to aggression that began decades earlier in the condemnation of the U.S. wars in Indochina, reaching a scale that was substantial and influential, even if far too late. By 1967, when the antiwar movement was becoming a significant force, military historian and Vietnam specialist Bernard Fall warned that “Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity... is threatened with extinction... [as] the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size.” But the antiwar movement did become a force that could not be ignored. Nor could it be ignored when Ronald Reagan came into office determined to launch an assault on Central America. His administration mimicked closely the steps John F. Kennedy had taken 20 years earlier in launching the war against South Vietnam, but had to back off because of the kind of vigorous public protest that had been lacking in the early 1960s. The assault was awful enough. The victims have yet to recover. But what happened to South Vietnam and later all of Indochina, where “the second superpower” imposed its impediments only much later in the conflict, was incomparably worse. It is often argued that the enormous public opposition to the invasion of Iraq had no effect. That seems incorrect to me. Again, the invasion was horrifying enough, and its aftermath is utterly grotesque. Nevertheless, it could have been far worse. Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and the rest of Bush’s top officials could never even contemplate the sort of measures that President Kennedy and President Lyndon Johnson adopted 40 years earlier largely without protest. *Western Power Under Pressure* There is far more to say, of course, about the factors in determining state policy that are put to the side when we adopt the standard convention that states are the actors in international affairs. But with such nontrivial caveats as these, let us nevertheless adopt the convention, at least as a first approximation to reality. Then the question of who rules the world leads at once to such concerns as China’s rise to power and its challenge to the United States and “world order,” the new cold war simmering in eastern Europe, the Global War on Terror, American hegemony and American decline, and a range of similar considerations. The challenges faced by Western power at the outset of 2016 are usefully summarized within the conventional framework by Gideon Rachman, chief foreign-affairs columnist for the London *Financial Times*. He begins by reviewing the Western picture of world order: “Ever since the end of the Cold War, the overwhelming power of the U.S. military has been the central fact of international politics.” This is particularly crucial in three regions: East Asia, where “the U.S. Navy has become used to treating the Pacific as an ‘American lake’”; Europe, where NATO -- meaning the United States, which “accounts for a staggering three-quarters of NATO’s military spending” -- “guarantees the territorial integrity of its member states”; and the Middle East, where giant U.S. naval and air bases “exist to reassure friends and to intimidate rivals.” The problem of world order today, Rachman continues, is that “these security orders are now under challenge in all three regions” because of Russian intervention in Ukraine and Syria, and because of China turning its nearby seas from an American lake to “clearly contested water.” The fundamental question of international relations, then, is whether the United States should “accept that other major powers should have some kind of zone of influence in their neighborhoods.” Rachman thinks it should, for reasons of “diffusion of economic power around the world -- combined with simple common sense.” There are, to be sure, ways of looking at the world from different standpoints. But let us keep to these three regions, surely critically important ones. *The Challenges Today: East Asia* Beginning with the “American lake,” some eyebrows might be raised over the report in mid-December 2015 that “an American B-52 bomber on a routine mission over the South China Sea unintentionally flew within two nautical miles of an artificial island built by China, senior defense officials said, exacerbating a hotly divisive issue for Washington and Beijing.” Those familiar with the grim record of the 70 years of the nuclear weapons era will be all too aware that this is the kind of incident that has often come perilously close to igniting terminal nuclear war. One need not be a supporter of China’s provocative and aggressive actions in the South China Sea to notice that the incident did not involve a Chinese nuclear-capable bomber in the Caribbean, or off the coast of California, where China has no pretensions of establishing a “Chinese lake.” Luckily for the world. <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=FJUQ4%2F6O%2Fqm3e%2BGADDLKEzm2…>Chinese leaders understand very well that their country’s maritime trade routes are ringed with hostile powers from Japan through the Malacca Straits and beyond, backed by overwhelming U.S. military force. Accordingly, China is proceeding to expand westward with extensive investments and careful moves toward integration. In part, these developments are within the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which includes the Central Asian states and Russia, and soon India and Pakistan with Iran as one of the observers -- a status that was denied to the United States, which was also called on to close all military bases in the region*.* China is constructing a modernized version of the old silk roads, with the intent not only of integrating the region under Chinese influence, but also of reaching Europe and the Middle Eastern oil-producing regions. It is pouring huge sums into creating an integrated Asian energy and commercial system, with extensive high-speed rail lines and pipelines. One element of the program is a highway through some of the world’s tallest mountains to the new Chinese-developed port of Gwadar in Pakistan, which will protect oil shipments from potential U.S. interference. The program may also, China and Pakistan hope, spur industrial development in Pakistan, which the United States has not undertaken despite massive military aid, and might also provide an incentive for Pakistan to clamp down on domestic terrorism, a serious issue for China in western Xinjiang Province. Gwadar will be part of China’s “string of pearls,” bases being constructed in the Indian Ocean for commercial purposes but potentially also for military use, with the expectation that China might someday be able to project power as far as the Persian Gulf for the first time in the modern era. All of these moves remain immune to Washington’s overwhelming military power, short of annihilation by nuclear war, which would destroy the United States as well. In 2015, China also established the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), with itself as the main shareholder. Fifty-six nations participated in the opening in Beijing in June, including U.S. allies Australia, Britain, and others which joined in defiance of Washington’s wishes. The United States and Japan were absent. Some analysts believe that the new bank might turn out to be a competitor to the Bretton Woods institutions (the IMF and the World Bank), in which the United States holds veto power. There are also some expectations that the SCO might eventually become a counterpart to NATO. *The Challenges Today: Eastern Europe* Turning to the second region, Eastern Europe, there is a crisis brewing at the NATO-Russian border. It is no small matter. In his illuminating and judicious scholarly study of the region, *Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands*, Richard Sakwa writes -- all too plausibly -- that the “Russo-Georgian war of August 2008 was in effect the first of the ‘wars to stop NATO enlargement’; the Ukraine crisis of 2014 is the second. It is not clear whether humanity would survive a third.” The West sees NATO enlargement as benign. Not surprisingly, Russia, along with much of the Global South, has a different opinion, as do some prominent Western voices. George Kennan warned early on that NATO enlargement is a “tragic mistake,” and he was joined by senior American statesmen in an open letter to the White House describing it as a “policy error of historic proportions.” The present crisis has its origins in 1991, with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. There were then two contrasting visions of a new security system and political economy in Eurasia. In Sakwa’s words, one vision was of a “‘Wider Europe,’ with the EU at its heart but increasingly coterminous with the Euro-Atlantic security and political community; and on the other side there [was] the idea of ‘Greater Europe,’ a vision of a continental Europe, stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok, that has multiple centers, including Brussels, Moscow and Ankara, but with a common purpose in overcoming the divisions that have traditionally plagued the continent.” Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was the major proponent of Greater Europe, a concept that also had European roots in Gaullism and other initiatives. However, as Russia collapsed under the devastating market reforms of the 1990s, the vision faded, only to be renewed as Russia began to recover and seek a place on the world stage under Vladimir Putin who, along with his associate Dmitry Medvedev, has repeatedly “called for the geopolitical unification of all of ‘Greater Europe’ from Lisbon to Vladivostok, to create a genuine ‘strategic partnership.’” These initiatives were “greeted with polite contempt,” Sakwa writes, regarded as “little more than a cover for the establishment of a ‘Greater Russia’ by stealth” and an effort to “drive a wedge” between North America and Western Europe. Such concerns trace back to earlier Cold War fears that Europe might become a “third force” independent of both the great and minor superpowers and moving toward closer links to the latter (as can be seen in Willy Brandt’s *Ostpolitik* and other initiatives). The Western response to Russia’s collapse was triumphalist. It was hailed as signaling “the end of history,” the final victory of Western capitalist democracy, almost as if Russia were being instructed to revert to its pre-World War I status as a virtual economic colony of the West. NATO enlargement began at once, in violation of verbal assurances to Gorbachev that NATO forces would not move “one inch to the east” after he agreed that a unified Germany could become a NATO member -- a remarkable concession, in the light of history. That discussion kept to East Germany. The possibility that NATO might expand *beyond *Germany was not discussed with Gorbachev, even if privately considered. Soon, NATO did begin to move beyond, right to the borders of Russia. The general mission of NATO was officially changed to a mandate to protect “crucial infrastructure” of the global energy system, sea lanes and pipelines, giving it a global area of operations. Furthermore, under a crucial Western revision of the now widely heralded doctrine of “responsibility to protect,” sharply different from the official U.N. version, NATO may now also serve as an intervention force under U.S. command. Of particular concern to Russia are plans to expand NATO to Ukraine. These plans were articulated explicitly at the Bucharest NATO summit of April 2008, when Georgia and Ukraine were promised eventual membership in NATO. The wording was unambiguous: “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.” With the “Orange Revolution” victory of pro-Western candidates in Ukraine in 2004, State Department representative Daniel Fried rushed there and “emphasized U.S. support for Ukraine’s NATO and Euro-Atlantic aspirations,” as a WikiLeaks report revealed. Russia’s concerns are easily understandable. They are outlined by international relations scholar John Mearsheimer in the leading U.S. establishment journal, *Foreign Affairs.* He writes that “the taproot of the current crisis [over Ukraine] is NATO expansion and Washington’s commitment to move Ukraine out of Moscow’s orbit and integrate it into the West,” which Putin viewed as “a direct threat to Russia’s core interests.” “Who can blame him?” Mearsheimer asks, pointing out that “Washington may not like Moscow’s position, but it should understand the logic behind it.” That should not be too difficult. After all, as everyone knows, “The United States does not tolerate distant great powers deploying military forces anywhere in the Western hemisphere, much less on its borders.” In fact, the U.S. stand is far stronger. It does not tolerate what is officially called “successful defiance” of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which declared (but could not yet implement) U.S. control of the hemisphere. And a small country that carries out such successful defiance may be subjected to “the terrors of the earth” and a crushing embargo -- as happened to Cuba. We need not ask how the United States would have reacted had the countries of Latin America joined the Warsaw Pact, with plans for Mexico and Canada to join as well. The merest hint of the first tentative steps in that direction would have been “terminated with extreme prejudice,” to adopt CIA lingo. As in the case of China, one does not have to regard Putin’s moves and motives favorably to understand the logic behind them, nor to grasp the importance of understanding that logic instead of issuing imprecations against it. As in the case of China, a great deal is at stake, reaching as far -- literally -- as questions of survival. *The Challenges Today: The Islamic World* Let us turn to the third region of major concern, the (largely) Islamic world, also the scene of the Global War on Terror (GWOT) that George W. Bush declared in 2001 after the 9/11 terrorist attack. To be more accurate, *re-*declared. The GWOT was declared by the Reagan administration when it took office, with fevered rhetoric about a “plague spread by depraved opponents of civilization itself” (as Reagan put it) and a “return to barbarism in the modern age” (the words of George Shultz, his secretary of state). The original GWOT has been quietly removed from history. It very quickly turned into a murderous and destructive terrorist war afflicting Central America, southern Africa, and the Middle East, with grim repercussions to the present, even leading to condemnation of the United States by the World Court (which Washington dismissed). In any event, it is not the right story for history, so it is gone. The success of the Bush-Obama version of GWOT can readily be evaluated on direct inspection. When the war was declared, the terrorist targets were confined to a small corner of tribal Afghanistan. They were protected by Afghans, who mostly disliked or despised them, under the tribal code of hospitality -- which baffled Americans when poor peasants refused “to turn over Osama bin Laden for the, to them, astronomical sum of $25 million.” There are good reasons to believe that a well-constructed police action, or even serious diplomatic negotiations with the Taliban, might have placed those suspected of the 9/11 crimes in American hands for trial and sentencing. But such options were off the table. Instead, the reflexive choice was large-scale violence -- not with the goal of overthrowing the Taliban (that came later) but to make clear U.S. contempt for tentative Taliban offers of the possible extradition of bin Laden. How serious these offers were we do not know, since the possibility of exploring them was never entertained. Or perhaps the United States was just intent on “trying to show its muscle, score a victory and scare everyone in the world. They don’t care about the suffering of the Afghans or how many people we will lose.” That was the judgment of the highly respected anti-Taliban leader Abdul Haq, one of the many oppositionists who condemned the American bombing campaign launched in October 2001 as "a big setback" for their efforts to overthrow the Taliban from within, a goal they considered within their reach. His judgment is confirmed by Richard A. Clarke, who was chairman of the Counterterrorism Security Group at the White House under President George W. Bush when the plans to attack Afghanistan were made. As Clarke describes the meeting, when informed that the attack would violate international law, "the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.'" The attack was also bitterly opposed by the major aid organizations working in Afghanistan, who warned that millions were on the verge of starvation and that the consequences might be horrendous. The consequences for poor Afghanistan years later need hardly be reviewed. The next target of the sledgehammer was Iraq. The U.S.-UK invasion, utterly without credible pretext, is the major crime of the twenty-first century. The invasion led to the death of hundreds of thousands of people in a country where the civilian society had already been devastated by American and British sanctions that were regarded as “genocidal” by the two distinguished international diplomats who administered them, and resigned in protest for this reason. The invasion also generated millions of refugees, largely destroyed the country, and instigated a sectarian conflict that is now tearing apart Iraq and the entire region. It is an astonishing fact about our intellectual and moral culture that in informed and enlightened circles it can be called, blandly, “the liberation of Iraq.” Pentagon and British Ministry of Defense polls found that only 3% of Iraqis regarded the U.S. security role in their neighborhood as legitimate, less than 1% believed that “coalition” (U.S.-UK) forces were good for their security, 80% opposed the presence of coalition forces in the country, and a majority supported attacks on coalition troops. Afghanistan has been destroyed beyond the possibility of reliable polling, but there are indications that something similar may be true there as well. Particularly in Iraq the United States suffered a severe defeat, abandoning its official war aims, and leaving the country under the influence of the sole victor, Iran. The sledgehammer was also wielded elsewhere, notably in Libya, where the three traditional imperial powers (Britain, France, and the United States) procured Security Council resolution 1973 and instantly violated it, becoming the air force of the rebels. The effect was to undercut the possibility of a peaceful, negotiated settlement; sharply increase casualties (by at least a factor of 10, according to political scientist Alan Kuperman); leave Libya in ruins, in the hands of warring militias; and, more recently, to provide the Islamic State with a base that it can use to spread terror beyond. Quite sensible diplomatic proposals by the African Union, accepted in principle by Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, were ignored by the imperial triumvirate, as Africa specialist Alex de Waal reviews. A huge flow of weapons and jihadis has spread terror and violence from West Africa (now the champion for terrorist murders) to the Levant, while the NATO attack also sent a flood of refugees from Africa to Europe. Yet another triumph of “humanitarian intervention,” and, as the long and often ghastly record reveals, not an unusual one, going back to its modern origins four centuries ago. *The Costs of Violence* *Masters of Mankind (Part 2)* By Noam Chomsky <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=pIBvw6FdqePe7e0A7A1Kwjm2UvLy1S…> In brief, the Global War on Terror sledgehammer strategy has spread jihadi terror from a tiny corner of Afghanistan to much of the world, from Africa through the Levant and South Asia to Southeast Asia. It has also incited attacks in Europe and the United States. The invasion of Iraq made a substantial contribution to this process, much as intelligence agencies had predicted. Terrorism specialists Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank estimate that the Iraq War “generated a stunning sevenfold increase in the yearly rate of fatal jihadist attacks, amounting to literally hundreds of additional terrorist attacks and thousands of civilian lives lost; even when terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan is excluded, fatal attacks in the rest of the world have increased by more than one-third.” Other exercises have been similarly productive. A group of major human rights organizations -- Physicians for Social Responsibility (U.S.), Physicians for Global Survival (Canada), and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (Germany) -- conducted a study that sought "to provide as realistic an estimate as possible of the total body count in the three main war zones [Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan] during 12 years of ‘war on terrorism,'" including an extensive review “of the major studies and data published on the numbers of victims in these countries,” along with additional information on military actions. Their "conservative estimate" is that these wars killed about 1.3 million people, a toll that "could also be in excess of 2 million." A database search by independent researcher David Peterson in the days following the publication of the report found virtually no mention of it. Who cares? More generally, studies carried out by the Oslo Peace Research Institute show that two-thirds of the region’s conflict fatalities were produced in originally internal disputes where outsiders imposed their solutions. In such conflicts, 98% of fatalities were produced only after outsiders had entered the domestic dispute with their military might. In Syria, the number of direct conflict fatalities more than tripled after the West initiated air strikes against the self-declared Islamic State and the CIA started its indirect military interference in the war -- interference which appears to have drawn the Russians in as advanced US antitank missiles were decimating the forces of their ally Bashar al-Assad. Early indications are that Russian bombing is having the usual consequences. The evidence reviewed by political scientist Timo Kivimäki indicates that the “protection wars [fought by ‘coalitions of the willing’] have become the main source of violence in the world, occasionally contributing over 50% of total conflict fatalities.” Furthermore, in many of these cases, including Syria, as he reviews, there were opportunities for diplomatic settlement that were ignored. That has also been true in other horrific situations, including the Balkans in the early 1990s, the first Gulf War, and of course the Indochina wars, the worst crime since World War II. In the case of Iraq the question does not even arise. There surely are some lessons here. The general consequences of resorting to the sledgehammer against vulnerable societies comes as little surprise. William Polk’s careful study of insurgencies, *Violent Politics*, should be essential reading for those who want to understand today’s conflicts, and surely for planners, assuming that they care about human consequences and not merely power and domination. Polk reveals a pattern that has been replicated over and over. The invaders -- perhaps professing the most benign motives -- are naturally disliked by the population, who disobey them, at first in small ways, eliciting a forceful response, which increases opposition and support for resistance. The cycle of violence escalates until the invaders withdraw -- or gain their ends by something that may approach genocide. *Playing by the Al-Qaeda Game Plan* Obama’s global drone assassination campaign, a remarkable innovation in global terrorism, exhibits the same patterns. By most accounts, it is generating terrorists more rapidly than it is murdering those suspected of someday intending to harm us -- an impressive contribution by a constitutional lawyer on the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, which established the basis for the principle of presumption of innocence that is the foundation of civilized law. Another characteristic feature of such interventions is the belief that the insurgency will be overcome by eliminating its leaders. But when such an effort succeeds, the reviled leader is regularly replaced by someone younger, more determined, more brutal, and more effective. Polk gives many examples. Military historian Andrew Cockburn has reviewed American campaigns to kill drug and then terror “kingpins” over a long period in his important study *Kill Chain* and found the same results. And one can expect with fair confidence that the pattern will continue. No doubt right now U.S. strategists are seeking ways to murder the “Caliph of the Islamic State” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who is a bitter rival of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. The likely result of this achievement is forecast by the prominent terrorism scholar Bruce Hoffman, senior fellow at the U.S. Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center. He predicts that “al-Baghdadi’s death would likely pave the way for a rapprochement [with al-Qaeda] producing a combined terrorist force unprecedented in scope, size, ambition and resources.” <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=0PawbxXWRH7vc2lqcCclNjm2UvLy1S…>Polk cites a treatise on warfare by Henry Jomini, influenced by Napoleon’s defeat at the hands of Spanish guerrillas, that became a textbook for generations of cadets at the West Point military academy. Jomini observed that such interventions by major powers typically result in “wars of opinion,” and nearly always “national wars,” if not at first then becoming so in the course of the struggle, by the dynamics that Polk describes. Jomini concludes that “commanders of regular armies are ill-advised to engage in such wars because they will lose them,” and even apparent successes will prove short-lived. Careful studies of al-Qaeda and ISIS have shown that the United States and its allies are following their game plan with some precision. Their goal is to “draw the West as deeply and actively as possible into the quagmire” and “to perpetually engage and enervate the United States and the West in a series of prolonged overseas ventures” in which they will undermine their own societies, expend their resources, and increase the level of violence, setting off the dynamic that Polk reviews. Scott Atran, one of the most insightful researchers on jihadi movements, calculates that “the 9/11 attacks cost between $400,000 and $500,000 to execute, whereas the military and security response by the U.S. and its allies is in the order of 10 million times that figure. On a strictly cost-benefit basis, this violent movement has been wildly successful, beyond even Bin Laden’s original imagination, and is increasingly so. Herein lies the full measure of jujitsu-style asymmetric warfare. After all, who could claim that we are better off than before, or that the overall danger is declining?” And if we continue to wield the sledgehammer, tacitly following the jihadi script, the likely effect is even more violent jihadism with broader appeal. The record, Atran advises, “should inspire a radical change in our counter-strategies.” Al-Qaeda/ISIS are assisted by Americans who follow their directives: for example, Ted “carpet-bomb ’em” Cruz, a top Republican presidential candidate. Or, at the other end of the mainstream spectrum, the leading Middle East and international affairs columnist of the *New York* *Times*, Thomas Friedman, who in 2003 offered Washington advice on how to fight in Iraq on the *Charlie Rose* show: “There was what I would call the terrorism bubble... And what we needed to do was to go over to that part of the world and burst that bubble. We needed to go over there basically, and, uh, take out a very big stick, right in the heart of that world, and burst that bubble. And there was only one way to do it... What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying, which part of this sentence don’t you understand? You don’t think we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy we’re going to just let it go? Well, suck on this. Ok. That, Charlie, was what this war was about.” That’ll show the ragheads. *Looking Forward* Atran and other close observers generally agree on the prescriptions. We should begin by recognizing what careful research has convincingly shown: those drawn to jihad “are longing for something in their history, in their traditions, with their heroes and their morals; and the Islamic State, however brutal and repugnant to us and even to most in the Arab-Muslim world, is speaking directly to that... What inspires the most lethal assailants today is not so much the Quran but a thrilling cause and a call to action that promises glory and esteem in the eyes of friends.” In fact, few of the jihadis have much of a background in Islamic texts or theology, if any. The best strategy, Polk advises, would be “a multinational, welfare-oriented and psychologically satisfying program... that would make the hatred ISIS relies upon less virulent. The elements have been identified for us: communal needs, compensation for previous transgressions, and calls for a new beginning.” He adds, “A carefully phrased apology for past transgressions would cost little and do much.” Such a project could be carried out in refugee camps or in the “hovels and grim housing projects of the Paris *banlieues*,” where, Atran writes, his research team “found fairly wide tolerance or support for ISIS’s values.” And even more could be done by true dedication to diplomacy and negotiations instead of reflexive resort to violence. Not least in significance would be an honorable response to the “refugee crisis” that was a long time in coming but surged to prominence in Europe in 2015. That would mean, at the very least, sharply increasing humanitarian relief to the camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey where miserable refugees from Syria barely survive. But the issues go well beyond, and provide a picture of the self-described “enlightened states” that is far from attractive and should be an incentive to action. There are countries that generate refugees through massive violence, like the United States, secondarily Britain and France. Then there are countries that admit huge numbers of refugees, including those fleeing from Western violence, like Lebanon (easily the champion, per capita), Jordan, and Syria before it imploded, among others in the region. And partially overlapping, there are countries that both generate refugees and refuse to take them in, not only from the Middle East but also from the U.S. “backyard” south of the border. A strange picture, painful to contemplate. An honest picture would trace the generation of refugees much further back into history. Veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk reports that one of the first videos produced by ISIS “showed a bulldozer pushing down a rampart of sand that had marked the border between Iraq and Syria. As the machine destroyed the dirt revetment, the camera panned down to a handwritten poster lying in the sand. ‘End of Sykes-Picot,’ it said.” For the people of the region, the Sykes-Picot agreement is the very symbol of the cynicism and brutality of Western imperialism. Conspiring in secret during World War I, Britain’s Mark Sykes and France’s François Georges-Picot carved up the region into artificial states to satisfy their own imperial goals, with utter disdain for the interests of the people living there and in violation of the wartime promises issued to induce Arabs to join the Allied war effort. The agreement mirrored the practices of the European states that devastated Africa in a similar manner. It “transformed what had been relatively quiet provinces of the Ottoman Empire into some of the least stable and most internationally explosive states in the world.” Repeated Western interventions since then in the Middle East and Africa have exacerbated the tensions, conflicts, and disruptions that have shattered the societies. The end result is a “refugee crisis” that the innocent West can scarcely endure. Germany has emerged as the conscience of Europe, at first (but no longer) admitting almost one million refugees -- in one of the richest countries in the world with a population of 80 million. In contrast, the poor country of Lebanon has absorbed an estimated 1.5 million Syrian refugees, now a quarter of its population, on top of half a million Palestinian refugees registered with the U.N. refugee agency UNRWA, mostly victims of Israeli policies. Europe is also groaning under the burden of refugees from the countries it has devastated in Africa -- not without U.S. aid, as Congolese and Angolans, among others, can testify. Europe is now seeking to bribe Turkey (with over two million Syrian refugees) to distance those fleeing the horrors of Syria from Europe’s borders, just as Obama is pressuring Mexico to keep U.S. borders free from miserable people seeking to escape the aftermath of Reagan’s GWOT along with those seeking to escape more recent disasters, including a military coup in Honduras that Obama almost alone legitimized, which created one of the worst horror chambers in the region. Words can hardly capture the U.S. response to the Syrian refugee crisis, at least any words I can think of. Returning to the opening question “Who rules the world?” we might also want to pose another question: “What principles and values rule the world?” That question should be foremost in the minds of the citizens of the rich and powerful states, who enjoy an unusual legacy of freedom, privilege, and opportunity thanks to the struggles of those who came before them, and who now face fateful choices as to how to respond to challenges of great human import. *Noam Chomsky is institute professor emeritus in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A* TomDispatch* regular* <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=xO5Uq%2FA6FfQcZEc2kWLDnDm2UvLy…>*, among his recent books are *Hegemony or Survival*and *Failed States*. This essay, the second of two parts, is excerpted from his new book, *Who Rules the World? <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=u%2BtvWA%2Fz1%2FbbPPrCgly%2Bwj…>* (Metropolitan Books, the American Empire Project <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=WbIvp9vkHXntcVn%2BeNsCGzm2UvLy…>, 2016). To read part 1, click here <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=KTkdi6vHEANoLI10TrGcTjm2UvLy1S…>. His website is **www.chomsky.info <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=JWUFhGAnW35KYeEqBU4JkTm2UvLy1S…>* *.* *We gratefully acknowledge our ally *TomDispatch.com which published this piece from Noam Chomsky.*Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse’s *Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=MLbndlnAzIi7BByPDq6iejm2UvLy1S…>*, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, *Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=gY4DI%2BeNIVxO6lJSTE%2B5Djm2Uv…> *.* Copyright 2016 Valeria Galvao Wasserman-Chomsky If you wish to be involved in supporting a movement to change the way the U.S. relates to the world both domestically and internationally, please read Tikkun's proposed Global Marshall Plan (downlaod the full 32 page brochure at www.tikkun.org/gmp <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=uoOKKJsxQ2WhywTabu%2Fimjm2UvLy…>), then read the world view behind it at www.spiritualprogressives.org/covenant <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=jzedxFvxiCLhoTS9k7XJLTm2UvLy1S…> and JOIN the Network of Spiritual Progressives www.spiritualprogressives.org/join ------------------------------ Click here to unsubscribe <http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=ZIlsxdf5IsFeF6jDq8s91Dm2UvLy1S…> if you are having trouble unsubscribing Click here <kay(a)tikkun.org> Copyright 2015 Tikkun Magazine. Tikkun is a registered trademark. 2342 Shattuck Avenue, #1200 Berkeley, CA 94704 510-644-1200 Fax 510-644-1255 [image: empowered by Salsa] <http://www.salsalabs.com/?email> -- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/

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Fwd: Weekend Roundup: From Beijing to Moscow, a Digital Curtain Descends
by Michel Bauwens 09 May '16

09 May '16

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: The WorldPost <highlights(a)theworldpost.com> Date: Sat, May 7, 2016 at 9:02 PM Subject: Weekend Roundup: From Beijing to Moscow, a Digital Curtain Descends To: michel(a)p2pfoundation.net Weekend Roundup: From Beijing to Moscow, a Digital Curtain Descends By: Nathan Gardels, Editor-in-chief Visit the WorldPost at http://www.theworldpost.com <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001eMNVk3e4Ma4Jkp32RYbXhCewxpjJ2C8WMeezbor5B6lt…> / Dear Michel, In March 1946, Winston Churchill famously declared <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001eMNVk3e4Ma4Jkp32RYbXhCewxpjJ2C8WMeezbor5B6lt…> that an "iron curtain" had descended across the European continent, casting a decades-long chill between East and West known as the Cold War. A new chill is in the air once again as China and Russia seek to draw a new "digital curtain" across the world in a joint effort to thwart the Western web from penetrating their cultural space. If the arrival in Moscow last week <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001eMNVk3e4Ma4Jkp32RYbXhCewxpjJ2C8WMeezbor5B6lt…>of China's Internet czar, Lu Wei, to advise his Russian counterpart on how to erect a "firewall" against the West is any indication, a new "Cominternet" for the 21st century seems to be in the works - analogous to the so-called "Communist International <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001eMNVk3e4Ma4Jkp32RYbXhCewxpjJ2C8WMeezbor5B6lt…>," or "Comintern," which linked communist parties around the world from Moscow to Beijing during the Stalin era. Writing from Moscow, Andrei Soldatov <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001eMNVk3e4Ma4Jkp32RYbXhCewxpjJ2C8WMeezbor5B6lt…>sees the Russia-China cybersecurity forum that convened last week as marking a shift in Vladimir Putin's censorship strategy from "intimidation" to "technology" that fortifies net sovereignty against Western-dominated Internet companies and content. "Splinternet" author Scott Malcomson <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001eMNVk3e4Ma4Jkp32RYbXhCewxpjJ2C8WMeezbor5B6lt…> explains how Russia and China are cooperating to dismantle America's dominance of the Internet. As these infographics <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001eMNVk3e4Ma4Jkp32RYbXhCewxpjJ2C8WMeezbor5B6lt…> surprisingly show, the U.S. is actually spending less on security aid to its Asian allies than before President Obama announced his "pivot to Asia" in 2010. See here how the Chinese military is using a slick, rap-style music video <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001eMNVk3e4Ma4Jkp32RYbXhCewxpjJ2C8WMeezbor5B6lt…> to attract new recruits. Looking at the lives of the growing community of immigrants in China, Eric Olander and Cobus van Staden <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001eMNVk3e4Ma4Jkp32RYbXhCewxpjJ2C8WMeezbor5B6lt…> explore what it is like to be black in China. History is also being revisited in Turkey where the secular foundations of the republic established by Kemal Mustafa Ataturk in 1923 are once again open to question. Some leading legislators of the ruling Islamist party of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan want to enshrine Turkey as a religious instead of secular state in the new constitution <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001eMNVk3e4Ma4Jkp32RYbXhCewxpjJ2C8WMeezbor5B6lt…> under consideration. Writing from Istanbul, novelist Kaya Genc <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001eMNVk3e4Ma4Jkp32RYbXhCewxpjJ2C8WMeezbor5B6lt…> describes how "secularism" means so many things to so many people in Turkey precisely because it allowed a robust civil society to flourish. Fréderike Geerdink <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001eMNVk3e4Ma4Jkp32RYbXhCewxpjJ2C8WMeezbor5B6lt…> scores what she says has all along been "non-secular secularism" in Turkey that favors conservative Islamic values. WorldPost Middle East Correspondent Sophia Jones <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001eMNVk3e4Ma4Jkp32RYbXhCewxpjJ2C8WMeezbor5B6lt…> reports from Istanbul on how the resignation this week of Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu figures in the battle over a new constitution that would most likely invest ultimate authority in the presidential office under Erdogan. Next door in Iran, Negar Mortazavi <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001eMNVk3e4Ma4Jkp32RYbXhCewxpjJ2C8WMeezbor5B6lt…> explains how the moderate allies of President Hassan Rouhani have taken the upper hand from hard-liners in the most recent parliamentary elections. As World Reporter Nick Robins-Early <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001eMNVk3e4Ma4Jkp32RYbXhCewxpjJ2C8WMeezbor5B6lt…> writes, global public opinion is reeling at the realization that an unabashed demagogue like Donald Trump could become not only the nominee of one of America's two main political parties, but also perhaps even win the presidency. To mark its fifth anniversary in the midst of America's craziest electoral season in memory, the Berggruen Institute this week honored Gov. Jerry Brown for his intelligent governance of California. "By imposing restraint on water use, greenhouse gas emissions and the budget," I said at the event in Los Angeles in my capacity as a co-founder of the institute, "Governor Brown has done the hardest - but most essential - thing in democratic political life: He has looked beyond the short-term horizon of immediate constituency pressures and the next election cycle to make tough decisions for the long-term good of the state." The governor was presented with a model of the no-frills blue Plymouth that was the official car of his first term and came to symbolize his trademark frugality. Former Gov. Gray Davis and Gov. Jerry Brown attend the Berggruen Institute 5 Year Anniversary Celebration on May 3, 2016 in Los Angeles. (Vivien Killilea/Getty Images for Berggruen Institute) Contrasting populist American politics with competent meritocratic governance in Singapore, Mark Chou <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001eMNVk3e4Ma4Jkp32RYbXhCewxpjJ2C8WMeezbor5B6lt…> argues that, "The best political leaders and the most stable political systems aren't necessarily produced through 'one person, one vote.'" Writing from Manila, Richard Javad Heydarian <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001eMNVk3e4Ma4Jkp32RYbXhCewxpjJ2C8WMeezbor5B6lt…> says the Philippines has reached a crossroads in next week's elections: a return to the cycle of "strongman" rule over a feudal economy, or the true advance and maturation of democratic institutions. It is the angry and impatient electorate that will decide. Diego Iraheta <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001eMNVk3e4Ma4Jkp32RYbXhCewxpjJ2C8WMeezbor5B6lt…>, editor-in-chief of *HuffPost Brazil*, details from Sao Paulo the latest twist - the removal of a powerful legislator from office - in the corruption and impeachment scandal that has engulfed the South American nation. Writing from Mexico City, poet and ecologist Homero Aridjis <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001eMNVk3e4Ma4Jkp32RYbXhCewxpjJ2C8WMeezbor5B6lt…> exposes the newest threat to the monarch butterfly refuge in Central Mexico - a planned mining operation looking for copper, zinc, lead, silver and gold. Also on Mexico, the International Crisis Group's Mary Speck <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001eMNVk3e4Ma4Jkp32RYbXhCewxpjJ2C8WMeezbor5B6lt…> evaluates President Enrique Peña Nieto's pledge to address the "incredulity and distrust <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001eMNVk3e4Ma4Jkp32RYbXhCewxpjJ2C8WMeezbor5B6lt…>" that has arisen over the investigation into the 43 missing students. After a series of tragic attacks from all sides in the Syrian civil war, Joanne Liu <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001eMNVk3e4Ma4Jkp32RYbXhCewxpjJ2C8WMeezbor5B6lt…> of Médecins Sans Frontières appeals to the United Nations to protect hospitals in the war zone. European parliamentarian and former Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001eMNVk3e4Ma4Jkp32RYbXhCewxpjJ2C8WMeezbor5B6lt…> is appalled at the inaction over Syria and the resulting refugee crisis. "Never before has a continent with so much invested in the stability of its surrounding regions, been so reluctant to project its power and defend its interests," he writes. In this photoblog, we look at the deepening crisis of the Rohingya Muslim minority <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001eMNVk3e4Ma4Jkp32RYbXhCewxpjJ2C8WMeezbor5B6lt…> as Myanmar advances toward democracy. We also profile a photographer who is making it his mission to document faces around the world <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001eMNVk3e4Ma4Jkp32RYbXhCewxpjJ2C8WMeezbor5B6lt…>. Finally, our Singularity <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001eMNVk3e4Ma4Jkp32RYbXhCewxpjJ2C8WMeezbor5B6lt…> series this week envisions a time when satellites will be manufactured in space instead of boosted from the Earth. Introducing the WorldPost - Where the World Meets <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001eMNVk3e4Ma4Jkp32RYbXhCewxpjJ2C8WMeezbor5B6lt…> *WHO WE ARE* EDITORS: *Nathan Gardels*, Co-Founder and Executive Advisor to the Berggruen Institute, is the Editor-in-Chief of The WorldPost. *Kathleen Miles* is the Executive Editor of The WorldPost. *Farah Mohamed* is the Managing Editor of The WorldPost. *Alex Gardels* and *Peter Mellgard* are the Associate Editors of The WorldPost. *Katie Nelson* is the National Editor at the Huffington Post, overseeing The WorldPost and HuffPost's editorial coverage. *Eline Gordts* is HuffPost's Senior World Editor. *Charlotte Alfred* and *Nick Robins-Early* are World Reporters. *Rowaida Abdelaziz* is Social Media Editor. CORRESPONDENTS: *Sophia Jones* in Istanbul. EDITORIAL BOARD: *Nicolas Berggruen*, *Nathan Gardels*, *Arianna Huffington* , *Eric Schmidt* (*Google Inc.*), *Pierre Omidyar *(*First Look Media*) *Juan Luis Cebrian *(*El Pais/PRISA*), *Walter Isaacson* (*Aspen Institute/TIME-CNN*), *John Elkann* (*Corriere della Sera, La Stampa*), *Wadah Khanfar* (*Al Jazeera)*, *Dileep Padgaonkar *(*Times of India*) and *Yoichi Funabashi *(*Asahi Shimbun*). VICE PRESIDENT OF OPERATIONS: *Dawn Nakagawa*. CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: *Moises Naim* (former editor of *Foreign Policy*), *Nayan Chanda* (*Yale/Global; Far Eastern Economic Review*) and *Katherine Keating* (*One-On-One)*. *Sergio Munoz Bata* and *Parag Khanna* are Contributing Editors-At-Large. *The Asia Society* and its *ChinaFile*, edited by *Orville Schell*, is our primary partner on Asia coverage. *Eric X. Li *and the Chunqiu Institute/Fudan University in Shanghai and Guancha.cn also provide first person voices from China. We also draw on the content of *China Digital Times*. *Seung-yoon Lee *is The WorldPost link in South Korea. *Jared Cohen* of Google Ideas provides regular commentary from young thinkers, leaders and activists around the globe. *Bruce Mau* provides regular columns from MassiveChangeNetwork.com <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001eMNVk3e4Ma4Jkp32RYbXhCewxpjJ2C8WMeezbor5B6lt…> on the "whole mind" way of thinking. *Patrick Soon-Shiong* is Contributing Editor for Health and Medicine. ADVISORY COUNCIL: Members of the Berggruen Institute's 21st Century Council and Council for the Future of Europe serve as the *Advisory Council* -- as well as regular contributors -- to the site. These include, *Jacques Attali, Shaukat Aziz*, *Gordon Brown*, *Fernando Henrique Cardoso*, *Juan Luis Cebrian*, *Jack Dorsey*, *Mohamed El-Erian*, *Francis Fukuyama*, *Felipe Gonzalez*, *John Gray*, *Reid Hoffman*, *Fred Hu*, *Mo Ibrahim*, *Alexei Kudrin*, *Pascal Lamy*, *Kishore Mahbubani*, *Alain Minc*, *Dambisa Moyo*, *Laura Tyson*, *Elon Musk*, *Pierre Omidyar*, *Raghuram Rajan*,*Nouriel Roubini*, *Nicolas Sarkozy*, *Eric Schmidt*, *Gerhard Schroeder*,*Peter Schwartz*, *Amartya Sen*, *Jeff Skoll*, *Michael Spence*, *Joe Stiglitz*,*Larry Summers*,* Wu Jianmin*, *George Yeo*, *Fareed Zakaria*, *Ernesto Zedillo*, *Ahmed Zewail*, and *Zheng Bijian*. >From the Europe group, these include: *Marek Belka*, *Tony Blair*, *Jacques Delors*, *Niall Ferguson*, *Anthony Giddens*, *Otmar Issing*, *Mario Monti*,*Robert Mundell*, *Peter Sutherland* and *Guy Verhofstadt*. *MISSION STATEMENT* *The WorldPost is a global media bridge that seeks to connect the world and connect the dots. Gathering together top editors and first person contributors from all corners of the planet, we aspire to be the one publication where the whole world meets.* *We not only deliver breaking news from the best sources with original reportage on the ground and user-generated content; we bring the best minds and most authoritative as well as fresh and new voices together to make sense of events from a global perspective looking around, not a national perspective looking out.* Forward this email <http://ui.constantcontact.com/sa/fwtf.jsp?m=1110940033069&ea=michel%40p2pfo…> STAY CONNECTED [image: Like us on Facebook] <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001eMNVk3e4Ma4Jkp32RYbXhCewxpjJ2C8WMeezbor5B6lt…> [image: Follow us on Twitter] <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001eMNVk3e4Ma4Jkp32RYbXhCewxpjJ2C8WMeezbor5B6lt…> Berggruen Institute, 100 Wilshire Boulevard, Santa Monica, CA 90401 SafeUnsubscribe™ michel(a)p2pfoundation.net <http://visitor.constantcontact.com/do?p=un&m=001Fir_ZmuFJraz33jPTYaklA%3D%3…> Forward this email <http://ui.constantcontact.com/sa/fwtf.jsp?llr=nbi4sukab&m=1110940033069&ea=…> | About our service provider <http://www.constantcontact.com/legal/service-provider?cc=about-service-prov…> Sent by highlights(a)theworldpost.com in collaboration with [image: Constant Contact] <http://www.constantcontact.com/index.jsp?cc=PT_MN> Try it free today <http://www.constantcontact.com/index.jsp?cc=PT_MN> -- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/

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Re: [P2P-F] [NetworkedLabour] The End - of the list
by willi uebelherr 08 May '16

08 May '16

Dear Orsan, alone you explain the Nw Labour List for terminated. Formally you can do it. Actually not, because the members have to make this decision. Lists are like our children. They will be independent, autonomous. In my diary I wrote: "Actually, I should reply Orsan. He remade his way alone. Quite understandable, but without perspectives." The conflicts and disorientation in the Nw Labour List have little to do with the persons. There are fundamental contradictions which crystallize at the persons. The questions stay always in the room: What future do we want? For what future do we work? And these questions directly accesses our personal perspectives. Do we want a simple, parasitic form of existence, where others take the concrete work for us (or have to do)? Or do we even make our contribution for that, what we use? We can also describe these poles as representative and parasitic elite instances, based on the slavery as a substructure or the self-organized, independent local economy based on democratic self-organization. We could now explain many details and describe the opportunities that exist today. But this is about the Nw Labour List. From the name, it may be a central instance of the discourse. But if they are as many lists flooded with any text from outside, without describing their own position and perspective, then this list is for the junkyard. And I suspect that this is done by design. We need the discourse of the active people who are searching on the go. They wish to formulate their questions freely, substantiate their answers freely and they want to pass this to the critical reflection. It is a space of theoretical reflection and interaction. Our practical work is done in our local reality. There arise the questions for which we need answers. But that also means, that without these practical fields, there are no questions. This is perhaps the reason why the Nw Labour List so much slipped into the arbitrariness, and its full potential has been stored in the refrigerator. A similar situation we find in the lists of the IGF (Internet Governance Forum), IUF (Internet Ungovernance Forum), ISOC (Internet Society) and the like. There is now generally recognized that telecommunications in the form of an Internet, a transport system for digital data in packet form, technologically is very simple. Difficult it is only because a giant parasitic apparatus was constructed about and this now is fighting for its preservation. And this we find also in the representative political systems, all of which are superfluous and fight for its preservation. And to our conflicts in the "Commons" environment to make it clear: even this comes from the conservation struggles of superfluous parasitic structures. That on this basis the gentle form of exclusion of other opinions is replaced with fascist exclusion practice, it is clear. Or? I do not intend to participate in farewell ceremonies to the Nw Labour List. If it is needed, it is created. If not, it does not arise or is dissolved. It is not long ago that you wanted to leave the list for personal reasons, or at least pass the Administration. In your critical reflection to the financing of "commons" oriented organizations by parasitic robbers realized that your view is not yet completely tarnished. In this sensor and these feelings you should always leave you. Also the churches talk of service to others and think about the robbery that they organize. And your friend Peter Waterman, active for years in the trade unions? Be careful with such "friends". In this list, the class struggle is raging. The list members do not engage in class struggle. The list itself is the subject of the class struggle. many greetings, willi Boa Vista, Brasil Am 07/05/2016 um 17:37 schrieb Orsan Senalp: > Dear Peter, Willi, Bob and all, > > Today is exactly the 3rd anniversary of this lists creation in 2013. > > I would like to thank all who has joined the list, contributed or not, and made it sort of thoughtful and, at least for me, very useful exchange space. > > Intention has never been to create what the list has become; yet the sources, individuals and how the world evolved around in time let things happen this way. Although idea was something more comprehensive, collectively managed, and somewhat focused discussion I can take responsibility on my part for moving away from that perspective and negative aspects emerged in the communication that took place on this space; as well as rather unproductive aspects of it. Like spamming and making people spend time and energy to read or erase emails; such could have been used in better ways; no matter how large or small they were. > > I accept that we could not manage any labour networking, nor networking our labour towards some concrete end results. Yet I hope times and energies put here by all would have contributed and would be contributing in positive change somewhere or sometime else. > > So, instead of being have to get rid of this or other person, I believe time has arrived to get rid of the space itself which completed part of its mission -yet failed in others. > > Anyone who wish to do so can download the email content from archives page. if you like to do that you ca do it in coming months. We have had already used lots of server space voluntarily provided by a friend (Albi) for free, so can be good to release that space for other uses. So by first of July I suppose the list can be deleted from where it is hosted now. > > Although I do not agree with the positions they took in passing 3 years of politics we owe thanks to organizations -about which I have been harshly critical- like Tni and transform which also made this experience possible. I hope Walter, Marco, Hilary and others of course would excuse me and accept my appreciation. > > Thanks all again, and stay in touch with solidarity! > > Best, > > Orsan > > > >> On 06 May 2016, at 18:40, peter waterman <peterwaterman1936(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> >> In so far as this amounts to a further ad hominem attack, which makes no single reference to the content of posted item, I offer the following choice to Orsan and to other contributors to this list: >> >> 1. Get rid of Willi >> >> or >> >> 2. Get rid of me. >> >> The principle of tolerance is qualified. It implies place/space for people who believe in dialogue and with a dialogical mode of expression. Ad hominem attacks are the first refuge of Stalinists or other Vanguardists who think they have they have the keys to the kingdom of rectitude and both the right and duty to shit on others without reading what they say. >> >> I don't mind moving my efforts elsewhere. >> >> PeterW >> >> >> >>> On Fri, May 6, 2016 at 5:50 PM, willi uebelherr <willi.uebelherr(a)riseup.net> wrote: >>>> Am 06/05/2016 um 02:29 schrieb Peter Waterman: >>>> http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/1254.php >>> >>> Dear Peter, >>> >>> mostly all this "Labour Leader" are corrupt. This people never want to go in direction to our future. They have only her private interests. And this everywhere on our planet. >>> >>> many greetings, willi >>> Boa Vista, Brasil >>> >>> >>>> _______________________________________________ >>>> NetworkedLabour mailing list >>>> NetworkedLabour(a)lists.contrast.org >>>> http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour >>> _______________________________________________ >>> NetworkedLabour mailing list >>> NetworkedLabour(a)lists.contrast.org >>> http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour >> >> >> >> -- >> Click for recent writings: >> >> https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwAVbfM6AWJpUmloOEhtUlppSnM/view?usp=shari… >> _______________________________________________ >> NetworkedLabour mailing list >> NetworkedLabour(a)lists.contrast.org >> http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour > > > > _______________________________________________ > NetworkedLabour mailing list > NetworkedLabour(a)lists.contrast.org > http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour >

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Conference Call: Rethinking Power in Communicative Capitalism. Critical Perspectives on Media, Culture and Society (ESA RN18)
by Christian Fuchs 05 May '16

05 May '16

Rethinking Power in Communicative Capitalism. Critical Perspectives on Media, Culture and Society European Sociological Association Research Network 18: Sociology of Communications and Media Research RN18 Mid-Term Conference Venue: ISCTE – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal September 8-10, 2016 http://esarn18.tumblr.com Keynote Speakers: Jodi Dean (Hobart and William Smith Colleges, NY, USA): Communicative capitalism and class struggle Christian Fuchs (University of Westminster, UK): Karl Marx and communicative capitalism Abstract submission deadline: May, 15, 2016 Notification of selected abstracts: June, 10, 2016 Conference dates: September 8-10, 2016 Please send your 250-400 words abstract to Romina Surugiu (University of Bucharest) romina.surugiu(a)fjsc.ro, Roy Panagiotopoulou (University of Athens) rpanag(a)media.uoa.gr, and Marisol Sandoval (City University London) marisol.sandoval.1(a)city.ac.uk The proliferation of digital media in the 21st century has once again shown the deeply ambivalent and contradictory potentials of technological development. Digital technologies have been celebrated for enabling new levels of democratic communication, participatory media production, community building and media activism. From Wikipedia, to open source programming, open access publishing, and peer-to-peer file sharing, we have witnessed the rise of a range of alternative forms of communication and media production that seemed to challenge established media business models and momentarily contested corporate power. However, far from decreasing the dominance of corporate media, the expansion of digital culture, the Internet and social media further strengthened the power of multinational corporations over media culture and human communication. Despite the rhetoric of ‘social’ media, sharing, community and collaboration, the majority of the digital media sphere remains privately owned and controlled. In this corporate media system, multinational corporations maintain almost exclusive control over large parts of the media and communication technology, infrastructure and content. Power in communicative capitalism is uneven and corporate control confronts us with a range of problems such as the systematic surveillance of Internet users, an increasingly commercialised online environment, devastating environmental impacts of the production and usage of media technologies and the global exploitation of digital labour. (Digital) media technologies are deeply entangled with the on-going economic, social, environmental and political crises. Mobilising the empowering qualities of digital technologies and their potential to contribute to progressive social change requires an effective critique of corporate dominance, challenging power inequalities and strengthening radical alternatives. This conference invites contributions that offer a critical analysis of corporate media culture and alternatives to it and thus contribute to rethinking power in communicative capitalism. Conference fees 80 Euro for ESA RN18 members / 100 Euros for non ESA RN18 members (conference dinner included) 60 Euro for ESA RN18 members / 80 Euros for non ESA RN18 members (without conference dinner) 25 Euro for students (Bachelor and Master) (without conference dinner) / 45 Euros (conference dinner included) The registration details, including the registration form, will be available on the DINÂMIA’CET-IUL website (http://dinamiacet.iscte-iul.pt/) on June 1, 2016. You can become a member of ESA RN18 by joining the ESA and subscribing to the network. The network needs material support, so we encourage you to join or renew your membership. The network subscription fee is only 10 Euros: http://www.europeansociology.org/member/ Participation support for 4 PhD students and/or independent researchers will be available. This will not cover all costs, but part of them (accommodation and full conference fee). Preference will be given to presentations that suit the overall conference topic. If you want to apply for participation support, please indicate this in your abstract submission by adding the sentence “I want to apply for participation support for PhD students / independent researchers”. The notifications about participation support will be sent out together with the notifications of acceptance or rejection of presentations. Additional information to prove your condition as PhD student or independent researcher will be requested.

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Socialisation and Commons in Europe
by Kevin Flanagan 02 May '16

02 May '16

Socialisation and Commons in Europe ( Source : http://www.transform-network.net/publications/publications-2016/news/detail… ) We present our first transform! eBook, which deals with the promising topic of the Commons. It is a reiteration of the essential discussions held during a European seminar in Paris in November 2014. You can download the eBook in EPUB (for eBook readers) and PDF format (for printing and everything else) on the right. The seminar was organised by transform!, the Association pour l’Autogestion, the Workers’ Control Network, Espaces Marx, Fondation Copernic, and Omos under the theme Socialisation and Commons in Europe: How to Construct an Alternative Project. It brought together around 50 actors and researchers from the social and political movement from nine different countries. Among other things, its aim was to bring into the dialogue different experiences of the commons, cooperatives and public services and start creating a coherent narrative in order to decipher what these different experiences can contribute to constructing an alternative project. A number of issues were debated: What relations need to exist between the struggles and the institutions to make these new experiences permanent? What can we change here and now by using what already exists? What is the public-private link and how does it relate to the commons? Do state-owned entities currently act in the interests of the people or of money? How does the state relate to constructing commons based on its politics? Commons institutions do not exist; the right of ownership alone is legally valid in our society. How can we change this situation that is paralysing the dynamism, actions and creations of the peoples involved in struggles? Through this eBook, we will try to answer some of these questions by sharing and analysing concrete experiences and will then look at the initial reflections of the researchers on these issues. This eBook is the first in a series on this issue, in which transform! europe will look in greater depth at the challenges for an alternative project – through European seminars and world social forums, as it is closely involved with the networks addressing these issues. http://www.transform-network.net/uploads/tx_news/Socialisation_and_Commons_… http://www.transform-network.net/uploads/tx_news/Socialisation_and_Commons_… Table of Contents Chantal Delmas: Introduction – Socialisation and Commons in Europe: Constructing an Alternative Project Roberto Musacchio: Cooperativism and Self-management in Italy Theodoros Karyotis: Self-management as an antagonistic force: Commons-based responses to the Greek structural adjustment Peter North: Contemporary commoning: A diverse economies perspective Gigi Malabarba: The Story of RiMaflow: A factory reclaimed by its workers in Milan Alan Tuckman: The NHS in the UK: The Struggle over Health in Common Marina Sitrin: The Self-Organizational Seeds Planted by the Occupy Movement Catherine Samary: Stuck in the past? Elisabetta Cangelosi: To Begin With, an Initial Attempt at Defining the Commons Christian Laval: What is the Principle of the Common? Dario Azzellini: Privatisation, public and commons Alfonso Gianni: Mutualism Between Tradition and Modernity Pablo Sanchez: Public services in the age of austerity Ugo Mattei: First Thoughts for a Phenomenology of the Commons Marie-Christine Vergiat: Towards new ways of collective appropriation Benoît Borrits: Co-operative ownership and Common Pierre Dardot: Self-management, Social Reappropriation and the Commons Francine Mestrum: Social Protection: It’s up to Us! Redefining Social Protection through ‘Social Commons’ Benoît Borrits & Chantal Delmas: A Political Vision for the Commons -- https://twitter.com/flgnk Skype: kev.flanagan Phone: +353 87 743 5660

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Re: [P2P-F] [NetworkedLabour] Theses on a Unionism Beyond Capitalism
by Örsan Şenalp 01 May '16

01 May '16

Bob hi, below is from the Resalience blog, the post reproduced from David Boiller's. I remember getting an email about the below report from Pat Conaty recently. Discussion comes close to on what type of new unionism. I was wonder what would your thoughts about the below, in relation to Peter's and Eric Forman's theses? Also Peter your thoughts on the below? by David Bollier, originally published by David Bollier blog | Apr 28, 2016 http://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-04-28/mutualized-solutions-for-the-p… Large companies have long sought to boost profits by converting their employees into “independent contractors,” allowing them to avoid paying benefits. The rise of the “gig economy” – exemplified by digital platforms such as Uber and Airbnb – has only accelerated this trend. Business leaders like to celebrate the free agent, free market economy as liberating -- the apex of American individualism and entrepreneurialism. But the self-employed are more likely to experience a big loss of income, security and collegiality. There is a reason that this cohort is called “the precariat.” A new report by Co-operatives UK called “Not Alone: Trade Union and Co-operative Solutions for Self-Employed Workers” offers a thoughtful, rigorous overview of this neglected sector of the economy. Although it focuses on the UK, its findings easily apply internationally, particularly for co-operative and union-based solutions. The author of the report, Pat Conaty, notes that “self-employment is at a record level” in the UK – some 15% of the workforce – and rising. While some self-employed workers choose this status, a huge number are forced into through layoffs and job restructuring, with all the downward mobility and loss of security implied by them. Few politicians or economists are honestly addressing the implications. They assume that technological innovation will simply create a new wave of jobs to replace the ones being eliminated, same as it ever was. The sad truth is that investors and companies benefit greatly from degrading full-time jobs into piecemeal, task-based projects tackled by a growing pool of precarious workers. This situation is only going to become more desperate as artificial intelligence, automation, driverless vehicles and platform economics offshore and de-skill conventional jobs if they don't permanently destroy them. The “Not Alone” report does not tackle this larger mega-challenge, but it does fill an enormous void by addressing how the precariat might begin to fight back. In many respects, the challenge is about basic survival for the Uber drivers and temp workers, agency staff and solo creatives, who are now forced to fend for themselves. Conaty describes the basic problem: The self-employed precariat do not enjoy employment rights and protections at work, or any of the implicit services associated with being an employee, such as payroll or workplace insurance – let alone pension or sick pay. In addition, their potential income is indirectly eroded by other costs such as agency fees. They face additional challenges related to being paid on time and the right to a contract. To compound all of this, many self-employed are among the lowest paid workers in the UK. Not only are many self-employed workers among the lowest paid, they often have careers based on “zero hours contracts” (no guaranteed work or income), part-time work and “portfolios” (multiple temporary or part-time jobs drawing on the same set of skills). All of these developments may serve the interests of capital and companies, but do they really represent “progress” for most solo practitioners? The report calls for the “cousins of the labor movement” – co-operatives, trade unions and mutual organizations – to come together, as they did in another era of history, to help form new institutions to help the precariat. In the US, one such advocate for the self-employed is the Freelancers Union, which seeks to “connect freelancers to group-rate benefits, resources, community, and political action to improve their lives – and their bottom lines.” The Freelancers Union is not a trade union or co-operative, but it does provide health, dental and other benefits to its 280,000 members. In Belgium, a co-operative known as SMart provides invoicing and debt collection services for its 60,000 members who work in commercial art and design. SMart functions as a kind of modern-day guild, helping members avoid the burden of setting up a company and providing small loans, training services, legal advice and shared workspaces. General trade unions in the Netherlands and Spain represent self-employed workers and provide services. In India, there is a Self-Employed Women’s Association that acts as a service co-operative for its 1.7 million members, providing “micro-insurance” and advocating for workers’ rights. One of the more innovative mutual aid models is the “bread fund.” It’s a new type of organization first developed in the Netherlands that provides sick pay to the self-employed. Each bread fund has between 20 and 50 self-employed members who put aside money every month into their individual bread fund account. The money remains theirs, but is used to support them and other members if they become sick. No bread fund may have more than 50 members. In the Netherlands, there are currently 170 bread funds in 88 towns and cities, with more than 7,000 participating members. The report describes a large array of other self-help, co-operative solutions. They include mutual guarantee societies (co-operative societies of small businesses that guarantee each other’s loans), credit unions for the self-employed, and co-operative money and credit. The report also discusses ways in which the government can help legally protect marginal survival activities – often known as the “informal economy” – and integrate them into the mainstream economy. An entire section of the report deals with co-operatives in digital sectors, “social care” and the “solidarity economy.” As far as general strategies for helping the self-employed, Conaty recommends four priority goals (my paraphrasing here): 1) Recognize this growing workforce by developing organizing strategies for them; 2) Focus on providing mutualized services to workers in creative industries, care services and the green economy; 3) Represent the interests of self-employed workers in national policymaking; and 4) Help develop regulatory solutions to enable collaboration among self-employed workers with respect to mutual guarantee societies and worker benefits. There is much to digest in “Not Alone,” and many creative challenges to be met. This report illuminates this poorly understood landscape with insightful analyses, useful detail and lessons from the history of co-operatives and mutual aid. Bob Haugen schreef op 1-5-2016 om 11:03: > Re-read(ed) again. This is not really a response to GLC (or the > article that started this thread), but we were discussing yesterday > how (or if) working-class organizing can intersect with the kinds of > proposals from the P2PF and also the kinds of projects we have been > involved in lately, which are mostly alternative-economy things. Not > what does the vast majority of the work in the world. Tiny in > comparison. > > I do see Nick Dyer-Witheford's Commonism article among your citations: > http://turbulence.org.uk/turbulence-1/commonism/ > > We actually want to take over Walmart and Google and Cargill and John > Deere, but don't quite know how to go about it. > > > On Sat, Apr 30, 2016 at 8:14 AM, Bob Haugen <bob.haugen(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> I don't remember if you posted it before or somebody else. It was awhile ago. >> >> Is the best URL for GLC? >> http://www.social-globalization.uni-kassel.de/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Wa… >> >> (I read that before, too, but will re-read in the light of this >> current conversation.) >> >> On Sat, Apr 30, 2016 at 8:08 AM, peter waterman >> <peterwaterman1936(a)gmail.com> wrote: >>> Bob >>> >>> Sorry for double posting. Put it down to jetlag (or age?). >>> >>> Yup, I thought it was a strong political-economic analysis but still >>> 'labourist' in the sense of 1) assuming the proletariat, or one part >>> thereof, is the privileged agent of a socialist future, 2) 'Unionist' in the >>> sense of seeing their shortcomings in terms of bureaucracy and corporate >>> self-interest, 3) defining workers in terms of their existence for capital >>> rather than as human-beings for whom 'being a worker is something relative' >>> (a Peruvian worker and book title), therefore not address (them as) >>> citizens, species beings, gendered, ethnic, [fill this space). >>> >>> But rather than criticising him online I would rather offer him my Global >>> Labour Charter project and get him to respond by either telling me what's >>> wrong with it, or amending it as he sees fit. >>> >>> My GLC has probably also been posted on NL, but can probably found under >>> that name and my name. Interesting to me is that despite it's having been >>> around since 2005, in two languages, there has so far been no response to >>> it. I wonder whether that isn't because it's utopian, to which most on the >>> Left are either averse or nervous about. >>> >>> P >>> >>> rather seeking for a 'relational form' appropriate for the kind of >>> capitalism he describes and decries. By 'relational form', rather than >>> 'organisation' I open the matter up to 'networking'. >>> >>> On Sat, Apr 30, 2016 at 1:57 PM, Bob Haugen <bob.haugen(a)gmail.com> wrote: >>>> >>>> Peter, I read this when it floated through here before, and re-read it >>>> again, and it's a good analysis. But do you understand from it what >>>> the author proposes to concretely *do*? As in what is to be done? >>>> >>>> And since you are apparently covering the waterfront of this general >>>> topic, which of the various proposals would you at least somewhat >>>> recommend at this stage? >>>> >>>> On Sat, Apr 30, 2016 at 1:48 AM, Peter Waterman >>>> <peterwaterman1936(a)gmail.com> wrote: >>>>> Check this out: >>>>> https://roarmag.org/magazine/rethinking-union-labor-organizing/ >>>>> _______________________________________________ >>>>> NetworkedLabour mailing list >>>>> NetworkedLabour(a)lists.contrast.org >>>>> http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> -- >>> Click for recent writings: >>> >>> https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwAVbfM6AWJpUmloOEhtUlppSnM/view?usp=shari… > _______________________________________________ > NetworkedLabour mailing list > NetworkedLabour(a)lists.contrast.org > http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour >

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