Western Freedom of Speech

Danish Bill Proposes 12 Years          

in Prison for 'Pro-Russia' 

Opinion

11:19 13.10.2018(updated 11:38 13.10.2018) Get short URL

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Danish lawmakers have gone on the offensive against interference in public debate, sparking criticism that a new proposal, which could entail criminal liability for expressing opinions similar to those of Moscow, may become a step toward silencing public debate.

According to a bill brought forward in local parliament, Danes could face a jail term if they voice dissent over the government's position on Russia.

The proposal, which is said to be meant to "strengthen efforts against illegal influence from foreign intelligence services," would introduce criminal penalties for perceived "meddling" in public debates and attempts to influence decision-making. Crimes committed during an election campaign would entail a maximum prison term of 12 years.

Berlingske, the country's oldest newspaper, has bashed the bill, claiming that it would narrow the scale of political conversation in Denmark.

Berlingske's Flemming Rose argues that the law could be stretched to the point where a Danish director is targeted for changing a burnt-out light bulb following the advice of a foreign intelligence agent.

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Analyst on Hacking Accusations Against Russia: 'West Is in a Kind of Paranoia'

He also warns that a Danish subject could face punishment for sharing an opinion in the local media that anti-Russia sanctions damage the country or attempting to publicly downplay concerns over the Russia-led Nord Stream 2 pipeline project (Denmark has so far failed to give its approval of the pipeline passing through its territorial waters).

The bill is understood to mean an attempt to influence public opinion in Denmark and concrete decisions in both the private and public sectors as it targets legitimate opinions that can be taken to be propaganda.

This comes at a time when Russia is facing a flurry of accusations from Western countries that it had hacked doping agencies and other international organizations in a bid to influence public opinion. Russia has vehemently dismissed the allegations as "spy mania."

https://sputniknews.com/europe/201810131068853099-denmark-bill-pro-russia-jail-term/

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Samstag, 13. Oktober 2018, 15:59 Uhr
~11 Minuten Lesezeit

Die Krise des Systems

Ist Migration grundsätzlich zu begrüßen? Oder nicht vielmehr wichtiger Bestandteil globaler Ausbeutungsstrukturen? Exklusivabdruck aus „Kritik der Migration“.

von Hannes Hofbauer

Foto: Matus Duda/Shutterstock.com

Es war das sprichwörtliche Tüpfelchen auf dem „I“, als die Chefin der deutschen Regierung, Angela Merkel, unter aufmunternden Zurufen aus Unternehmer- und Kirchenkreisen im Hochsommer 2015 die Migrationsschleuse für Muslime aus dem Nahen Osten öffnete. Das Kapital hoffte auf billige Arbeitskräfte und die Kirchen lieferten das ideologische Beiwerk der Menschlichkeit. Einem kritischen Beobachter fiel sofort auf, dass an dieser Inszenierung etwas nicht stimmen konnte.

Die Not von Kriegsflüchtlingen wurde im europäischen Zentralraum der Wirtschaft zum Nutzen und dem Gewissen zur Beruhigung angeboten. Mit diesem genialen Schachzug gelang es, die Diskussion über die auslösenden Faktoren für Migration sowie ihren zerstörerischen Charakter für die Herkunftsländer, aber auch die Zielländer der Auswandernden zu verdecken.

Die medial und politisch dominierende Darstellung von Migration als Zeichen von Weltoffenheit und Diversität prallt allerdings zunehmend auf die Wirklichkeit der gesellschaftlichen und politischen Kosten. Weil eine strukturelle sozio-ökonomische Kritik an Mobilität insgesamt – mit Ausnahme ökologischer Ansätze, die allerdings in der Migrationsfrage nicht gefragt werden – fehlt oder hintertrieben wird, konnte die politische Rechte an ihrer Stelle das Opfer der weltweit zunehmenden ungleichen Entwicklung, den Migranten und die Migrantin, zum Sündenbock stempeln. Sie befeuert damit einen rassistischen Diskurs.

Die politische Linke wiederum schwankt zwischen Schockstarre und der Übernahme liberaler Postulate. In diesen wird Migration, getreu ihrer Verwertbarkeit und in multikultureller Blauäugigkeit, zu einem nicht hinterfragbaren positiven Bekenntnis. Die ihr zugrunde liegende weltweite Ungleichheit bleibt ausgeblendet beziehungsweise wird einem Hilfsgedanken untergeordnet. Damit verstellt der einzelne, von Krieg, Krise oder Umweltzerstörung gezeichnete Migrant den Blick auf die Funktion von Migration.

Tatsächlich bildet diese den Schlussstein im Mosaik globalistischer Interventionen, deren wirtschaftliche und/oder militärische Ausgriffe Millionen von Menschen ihre Lebensgrundlage entziehen. An die Abfolge Schießen-Flüchten-Helfen und ihre ständige Wiederkehr haben sich nicht nur die Zyniker dieser Welt bereits gewöhnt. Sie zu durchbrechen, hat sich der vorliegende Text zur Aufgabe gemacht.

Das liberale Paradigma des Globalismus

„Während noch in den 1990er-Jahren Einwanderung fast ausschließlich als Gefahr und Problem beschrieben wurde, erinnert sei an die geschmacklose Metapher vom ‚vollen Boot‘, wird Migration heute zunehmend als notwendiges, gar erfreuliches Phänomen angesehen.“

Im Jahr 2018 scheint obiges Zitat wie aus der Zeit gefallen. Erschienen ist es nur vier Jahre zuvor, 2014, in einem von zwei deutschen Gewerkschaftern herausgegebenen Band.

Dass sich die Einschätzung von Autor und Herausgeber Patrick Schreiner nur wenige Monate nach Drucklegung dermaßen wirklichkeitsfremd liest, hat nur vordergründig mit der großen Wanderung der Muslime in den Jahren 2015/2016 zu tun, die Migration zum entscheidenden gesellschaftlichen Reibebaum in Deutschland und darüber hinaus in vielen Teilen EU-Europas hat werden lassen. Ein „erfreuliches Phänomen“ war sie zu diesem Zeitpunkt nur für eine kleine Minderheit, die Mehrheit betrachtete sie als „Gefahr und Problem“.

Die Fehleinschätzung des Gewerkschafters wurzelt tiefer. Sie ist einem Wahrnehmungsverlust sozialdemokratischer Politik geschuldet, die sich seit der britischen New Labour des Tony Blair und der Agenda 2010 des Gerhard Schröder dem globalistischen Weltbild angedient und mit ihm die Opfer der Globalisierung aus dem Blick verloren hat.

Massenhafte zwischenstaatliche Migration ist Ausdruck sozialer Missstände, und zwar sowohl in den Herkunfts- als auch in den Zielländern. Dieser Befund widerspricht freilich der Grundthese der vier kapitalistischen Grundfreiheiten, nach denen der Verkehr von Kapital, Waren, Dienstleistungen und Arbeitskraft möglichst ungehindert funktionieren soll – zum Wohle aller, wie von den Apologeten der Globalisierung üblicherweise hinzugefügt wird.

Für viele Unternehmensbranchen bedeutet Migration nichts anderes als die Mobilisierung von Arbeitskräften, die billig zu haben sind. Kapitalvertreter würdigen Migration dementsprechend als positiv, begleitende Medien erfinden dazu eine passende Ideologie und sprechen von „Weltoffenheit“. Manchmal äußern sich auch politische Vertreter diesbezüglich offen und ehrlich, wenn beispielsweise der bayrische Innenminister Günther Beckstein (CSU) im Jahr 2000 meint: 

„Wir wollen nicht, dass mehr Menschen in unser Land kommen, sondern wir fordern ein spürbares Umsteuern, damit weniger kommen, die uns ausnützen, und mehr, die uns nützen.“

Wenn allerdings Gewerkschafter Einwanderung als „erfreuliches Phänomen“ wahrnehmen, dann haben sie entweder – wie weiland SPD-Chef Schröder als „Genosse der Bosse“ – die Klassenseite gewechselt oder sich im Dickicht eines Begriffswirrwarrs verirrt, in dem Solidarität zu einem undefinierten Bekenntnis verkommen ist. Denn Solidarität setzt Kollektivität und Gleichheit voraus. Extreme Unterschiede in der Lebens- und Arbeitsweise, insbesondere im Lohnniveau, sind nicht durch Solidarität auszugleichen.

Der Kampf um soziale Konvergenz, also um die Herstellung von Gleichheit – ob das nun EU-weit oder weltweit geschehen soll – muss vor oder noch besser: statt der Mobilisierung der Armen und Auswanderungswilligen geführt werden. 

Bei einer Lohndifferenz von 8:1, wie sie 25 Jahre nach dem Zusammenbruch des Rats für gegenseitige Wirtschaftshilfe beispielsweise zwischen Deutschland und Bulgarien besteht, fällt Solidarität weder bei deutschen noch bei bulgarischen Arbeitern auf fruchtbaren Boden. Und bei unterschiedlichen Lebenswelten wie jenen von afghanischen oder jemenitischen Flüchtlingen auf der einen und mitteleuropäischen Haushalten auf der anderen Seite bleibt jenseits des gegenseitigen Exotismus auch kein Platz für ein solidarisches Miteinander.

Sich dies einzugestehen, darf nicht gleichbedeutend mit einer migrantenfeindlichen Einstellung sein, sollte aber zu einer migrationskritischen Haltung führen. Auf abstrakterer Ebene hat sich diese notwendige Unterscheidung in der Einschätzung des Migranten und der Migration längst durchgesetzt: Die Flucht- und Migrationsursachen sind zu bekämpfen, nicht die Flüchtlinge und Migranten, heißt es zu Recht.

Tatsächlich hat sich die Dreieinigkeit der aus Kapital, meinungsführenden Medien und liberalen Politikkreisen bestehenden Elite darauf verständigt, Einwanderung unter den Aspekt der Verwertbarkeit zu stellen; ganz nach dem Motto: 

die Brauchbaren ins Land, die Unbrauchbaren vor die Grenzbalken.

Dies ist der Konsens zwischen einer wirtschaftsliberalen Sicht, die sich gerne auch massenhafte Einwanderung vorstellt, aus der dann die besten ausgesucht werden können, Sozialdemokraten und einer eher kulturliberal geprägten migrationsaffinen Szene.

So sprach sich der damalige SPD-Parteichef und spätere Außenminister Sigmar Gabriel im Mai 2016 für ein neues Einwanderungsgesetz aus, das MigrantInnen in einer für wirtschaftliche Zwecke nutzbringenden Datenbank erfasst. Sein Thüringer Genosse und Landesvorsitzender, Andreas Brausewein, rief das kanadische Modell einer Punktetabelle in Erinnerung, in der jeder potenzielle Immigrant nach Alter, Bildungsstand, Sprachkenntnissen und Berufserfahrung katalogisiert wird, um ähnlich einer Auflistung von Qualitätsmerkmalen bei Versandkatalogen seine (Arbeits-) Marktchancen zu bestimmen.

Die Partei Die Linke steht dem Modell aufgeschlossen gegenüber, ihre thüringische Migrationssprecherin Sabine Berninger äußerte in einem Zeitungsinterview zwar Bedenken gegen „nationale ökonomische Nützlichkeitserwägungen“, war aber zugleich mit einem unverfänglicheren Wording bei der Hand und sprach von einer „aktiven Einwanderungspolitik“, auf die sie sich gemeinsam mit der SPD und den Grünen freue.

Wie eine solche marktkonforme Migration ganz konkret aussehen könnte, dafür haben die österreichischen Grünen bereits zehn Jahre zuvor ein Programm ausgearbeitet. In einem penibel aufgelisteten Punktesystem geht es dabei darum, 65 solcher Punkte zu erreichen, womit der Migrant berechtigt wäre, einen einheimischen Arbeitsplatz einzunehmen. Die langjährige grüne Migrationssprecherin und Abgeordnete zum Nationalrat, Terezija Stoisits, entwarf fünf Kategorien, in denen solche wanderungsbegünstigenden Punkte gesammelt werden könnten: Ausbildung, Alter, Sprachkenntnisse, Arbeitserfahrung und bereits ansässige Verwandte.

Bei der Kategorie Alter waren für 21- bis 35-Jährige 10 Punkte drinnen, während über 46-Jährige nur mit 4 Punkten rechnen durften. Für deutsche und englische Sprachkenntnisse konnten sich Migrationswillige 10 Punkte abholen, andere Sprachen – wie zum Beispiel die Muttersprache der Burgenlandkroatin Stoisits – wurden minder bewertet.

Stoisits war es nicht zu peinlich, noch mehr ins Detail zu gehen. So rechnete sie beispielsweise vor, dass eine Informatikerin aus einem Nicht-EU-Land knapp 65 Punkte erlangen konnte, wenn sie 26 Jahre alt, zwei Jahre Arbeitserfahrung in der Branche, gutes Englisch, aber kein Deutsch sprach und ihr Bruder bereits seit sechs Jahren in Österreich lebte. Das ergab exakt 65 Punkte – und damit die Schengen-Freifahrt mit Arbeitserlaubnis. Für eine 42-jährige Buchhalterin mit einem College-Abschluss, 15 Jahre Berufserfahrung, davon zwei Jahre in Österreich, guten Deutschkenntnissen und keinen Verwandten in Österreich ging es sich leider nicht aus: 60 Punkte – unbrauchbar.

Die grünen Vorschläge fanden sich dann ein wenig abgewandelt in dem Punkterechner der 2011 beschlossenen Rot-Weiß-Rot-Karte wieder, mit der „ein flexibles, neues Zuwanderungssystem eingeführt (wurde), das qualifizierten Arbeitskräften aus Drittstaaten eine auf Dauer ausgerichtete Zuwanderung nach Österreich ermöglicht.“ Die Einführung von Qualitätskriterien für den Import von nützlichen Arbeitskräften ist freilich so scheinheilig wie unrealistisch, sind doch die wanderungsauslösenden Pull- und Push-Faktoren mit dem Drehen einer Stellschraube am komplexen System ungleicher wirtschaftlicher und sozialer Verhältnisse nicht in den Griff zu bekommen.

Die europäischen Zentren erleben seit über einem halben Jahrhundert einen ständigen Zufluss ausländischer Arbeitskräfte, die fast im Jahrzehntetakt wellenmäßig aus unterschiedlichen Regionen des Ostens und Südens einwandern. Von den GastarbeiterInnen der 1960er-Jahre aus Jugoslawien, Portugal, Griechenland, Italien und der Türkei über die postkommunistische Migration aus Polen und der Slowakei sowie die Vertriebenen aus Bosnien und dem Kosovo in den 1990er-Jahren bis zu den Kriegsflüchtlingen aus Syrien, Afghanistan und dem Irak in den 2010er-Jahren ergießt sich ein permanenter Strom an Menschen aus Krisen- und Billiglohngebieten in die EU-europäischen Zentralräume.

Selbst die geringe historische Distanz zu den Ereignissen lässt bereits den Schluss zu, dass eine Hauptfunktion der Migration in den Zielländern darin besteht, einen ständigen Druck auf die Löhne aufrechtzuerhalten. Oder in der Sprache der Wissenschaft ausgedrückt: „Die Ausländerbeschäftigung konnte mithin (…) die Flexibilität des Kostenfaktors Arbeitskraft extrem steigern“, wie einer der führenden Migrationsforscher, Klaus Bade, meint (1).

Diese „Unterschichtung“ einheimischer durch ausländische Arbeitskräfte rechtfertigte der deutsche Wirtschaftswissenschaftler August Sartorius von Waltershausen bereits im Jahr 1903 durch eine angebliche ökonomische Rationalität. Vor allem Arbeiten in der Landwirtschaft und im Bausektor seien „anstrengend, vielfach die Gesundheit aufreibend, oft schmutzig und widerlich“, urteilt von Waltershausen und nennt die ausländischen Schwer- und Drecksarbeiter „Arbeiterschicht zweiten Grades“, die wie „der Neger in den nordamerikanischen Oststaaten, der Chinese in Kalifornien, der ostindische Kuli in Britisch-Westindien, der Japaner in Hawaii, der Polynesier in Australien“ die von ihnen erwarteten Funktionen erfüllen.

Dass es einer solchen „Arbeiterschicht zweiten Grades“ bedarf, daran ließ der Ökonom auch vor über 100 Jahren keinen Zweifel aufkommen: „Die Tatsache, daß inländische Arbeitslose vorhanden sind, darf keineswegs von vornherein die Einführung von Ausländern in allen Fällen ausschließen“ (2).

Der Zustrom an ausländischen Arbeitskräften garantiert neben dem ständigen Druck auf den Arbeitsmarkt einen Niedriglohnsektor. Billige Arbeitskräfte in der Landwirtschaft, am Bau, dem Hotel- und Gastgewerbe sowie in vielen anderen Branchen können in erheblichem Ausmaß unter Tarif in Form von nicht registrierter Arbeit – oder auch Schwarzarbeit – ausgebeutet werden. Damit ist es dem Unternehmer auch möglich, Investitionen aufzuschieben, weil die niedrigen Lohnkosten nicht zu einer Modernisierung zwingen. Zudem bilden die eingewanderten ArbeiterInnen, solange sie keine vollen Staatsbürgerrechte haben – was in der Regel mindestens zehn Jahre dauert –, einen konjunkturellen Puffer.

Dies war zum Beispiel während der Wirtschaftskrise 1966 zu beobachten, als beträchtliche Teile der ersten Gastarbeiterwelle aufgrund schlechter gewordener Konjunkturdaten wieder heimgeschickt wurden. Die Herkunftsländer hatten mit dieser unerwarteten Rückkehr sozialpolitisch schwer zu kämpfen.

Die Tatsache, dass ArbeiterInnen in Ländern wie Deutschland und Österreich seit Mitte der 1990er-Jahre trotz stetig steigender Produktivität mit Reallohnverlusten konfrontiert sind, ist unter anderem auch mit dem permanenten Zuzug immer neuer ArbeitsmigrantInnen zu erklären. 

Ausgangspunkt dafür ist eine fortschreitende Teilung von Arbeitsmärkten, die in einem zweiten Schritt auch bis dahin geschütztere Beschäftigungsverhältnisse trifft und Löhne drückt. So hat die gewerkschaftsnahe Hans-Böckler-Stiftung errechnet, dass die Reallöhne in Deutschland zwischen 1992 und 2012 um 1,6 Prozent gesunken sind (3). Die „Arbeitnehmerentgelte“, also inklusive Lohnsteuer und Sozialversicherung, sanken zwischen 2000 und 2008 um 11 Prozent. Das Statistische Bundesamt gab bekannt, dass eine Reallohnerhöhung um 2,6 Prozent im Jahr 2016 dazu beigetragen hat, dass der durchschnittliche preisbereinigte Lohn eines Arbeiters in Deutschland erstmals wieder über das Niveau von 1992 gestiegen ist. Mit anderen Worten: Erst nach 24 Jahren blieb dem deutschen Werktätigen ein klein wenig mehr im Portemonnaie.

Neben dem allgemeinen Lohndruck und Rationalisierungen wie der Digitalisierung von Produktions- und Dienstleistungssektoren trägt ein ständiger Migrationszufluss in den Zentren auch zu einer – wie es im liberalen Diskurs euphemistisch heißt – „strukturellen Arbeitslosigkeit“ bei. In den 1960er-Jahren konnte man bei Arbeitslosenzahlen von unter 2 Prozent in Deutschland (bis 1972) und ebenfalls unter 2 Prozent in Österreich (bis 1980) noch von Vollbeschäftigung sprechen, seither haben wir uns an Prozentzahlen im hohen einstelligen und sogar im zweistelligen Bereich gewöhnt.

Die Weltwirtschaftskrise 2007/2008 verschärfte dann die Situation auf den Arbeitsmärkten sowohl in den zentralen wie in den peripheren Ländern der Europäischen Union. Die Pufferfunktion der ArbeitsmigrantInnen kam hierbei wieder einmal zum Tragen. So zeigt die schwedische Migrationsstatistik deutlich, wie im Jahr 2008 bei polnischer und rumänischer Immigration ein Rückgang festzustellen ist, bei gleichzeitiger Zunahme der Rückwanderungen nach Polen und Rumänien.

Ähnliche Wanderungskurven weisen während der Wirtschaftskrise auch andere Zielländer auf. Arbeitslosenquoten von fast 12 Prozent in Deutschland (2005) ließen die Einwanderung kurzfristig zurückgehen. Die Austeritätspolitik der Troika aus Europäischer Zentralbank, EU-Kommission und IWF führte dann in der Folge der 2008er-Krise zu einem ökonomischen Roll-back insbesondere in Griechenland, Italien und Spanien. Die dortige Jugendarbeitslosigkeit explodierte im Jahr 2013 auf über 38 Prozent in Italien und Portugal und auf unfassbare 56 und 59 Prozent in Spanien und Griechenland.

Wenn ein Drittel oder gar die Hälfte der jungen Menschen keine Zukunftschancen hat, muss man von einer in ihrer Heimat unbrauchbar gewordenen Generation sprechen. Folgerichtig steigt bei den Jugendlichen der Wunsch, auszuwandern. Einer Untersuchung des weltweit agierenden Meinungsforschungsinstituts Gallup zufolge wollen 24 Prozent der Griechen, Spanier und Italiener sowie 25 Prozent der Portugiesen migrieren. Nur die Flexibelsten unter ihnen machen sich in die EU-europäischen Zentralräume auf, um dort ihr Glück zu versuchen. 

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https://www.rubikon.news/artikel/die-krise-des-systems

Global ramifications of the Russia-India Deal

Global ramifications of the Russia-India Défence deal 2018

by  General Vinod Saighal

While the Hindu government of Narendra Modi seemed to be moving closer to the United States, India has just bought five billion dollars worth of S-400 Triumph anti-aircraft missiles. This return to the historic alliance with Moscow corresponds to the the evolutions presently under way in Europe, particularly in Hungary and Turkey. For General Vinod Saighal, who has always supported this option, only a Russo-Indian military alliance coupled with economic cooperation with China can guarantee peace in Asia.

VOLTAIRE NETWORK | NEW DEHLI (INDIA) | 13 OCTOBER 2018 

For several months prior to the finalising of the defence deal that was signed in New Delhi on 4 October 2018 there were apprehensions in several quarters whether the deal would be signed or not. The threat of CAATSA (Countering America’s Adversaries through Sanctions Act) loomed large. In a sense it still does. Nevertheless both countries took the bull by the horn as the saying goes and the deal was signed. The purchase of the S 400 Triumf air defence missile systems has been effected and delivery will start around 2021-22 as per current estimates. After signing the deal both sides played it down. No fanfare and no mention referring to it in the joint statement. It could not have been more low-key. Earlier the government had conveyed to the US that it respects intellectual property rights and adheres to the contracts linked with other countries. To convey both its concerns and the fact that India was obliged to sign the deal with Russians several high level visits had taken place.

The apprehensions of the government of India prior to the signing have been discussed in the media and various quarters since long. These reached a higher pitch in the build up to the 2-plus-2 meeting in New Delhi between US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and defence Secretary James Mattis on the US side and ministers Sushma Swaraj and Nirmala Sitharaman the foreign and defence ministers on the Indian side. As reported the negotiations and signing went off smoothly. Among other aspects India was keen for access leading-edge US technologies in the defence, space and allied fields. These should be forthcoming in the coming years all things being equal. However, it has to be appreciated that as in the past there are going to be protracted and often frustrating negotiations before transfers actually take place with several conditionalities that India will find difficult to agree to leading to further negotiations and waivers. During the 2-plus-2 talks the question of India purchasing the Russian S 400 Triumf missiles would certainly have come up with the Indian side forcefully putting across their pleas about the long-standing defence relationship with Russia and the fact that the negotiations had begun far earlier and hence CAATSA waiver should not be made applicable. The growing closeness of the US-India strategic relationship would be a major factor in the waiver. Iran would have also been referred to. However, this paper limits itself to the Russian deal and its wider ramifications that impact many players in the global arena.

The dilemma that India faced was that had it acceded to the US request to not negotiate the deal with Russia and being promised in turn impressive sweeteners of US high-tech as well as latest systems similar to the Russian one. Going through with the Russian deal would have unforeseen consequences for the country should the US decide to turn its back on several other key military-related deliveries in the pipeline as a consequence. It was not an easy decision for the Prime Minister having realized that reneging on the Russian deal under US pressure would considerably lower India’s image in the region and its partners and friends around the world. It would have been a setback from which India would not have recovered for a long time. Most importantly, India’s decade long strategic bonds with Russia would have been sundered. Hardly any country would have trusted India as a reliable partner hereafter. Even countries very close to India like Japan and Vietnam would have had second thoughts. While the difficulties are not yet over India’s standing in the region and beyond has gone up. The countries around India feel reassured, more so in the subcontinent. A few of them attempting to play off one country against other will become more cautious.

While several aspects geopolitical and economic would have been considered by the Prime Minister in the coming years the key consideration would have been the dilemma that the US was facing with regard to India should it decide to go ahead with the deal with Russia. President Trump has already severely mauled it close allies and put on notice practically every major country and player in the world. India was the only major country remaining. Treating India in the same manner seeing its size and importance in the world would have isolated the US to the extent that many in Washington would have been alarmed, to put it mildly. That will hold true for the foreseeable future. Both the US and India realize that the relationship that has been maturing over the years is extremely important to both.

Having dealt with the aspect from the lens of Washington and New Delhi it needs to be remembered that the third party that was the reason for the concerns highlighted above, Russia was viewing the developments with as equal concern as India. For Russia the deal was no less important than India [1]. In the last decade or so and especially after the seizing of Crimea and the tensions in Ukraine caused by the breakaway Russian majority province in the East, Russia has come under major sanctions from the US and its allies in Europe. No matter the brave front that Moscow puts on it Russia is suffering greatly from the sanctions. Its economy seldom robust in recent years since the sharp decline of the oil prices had made its position difficult if not precarious. It had no option but to solidly ally itself with China. This had two results. China’s purchases of Russian oil and gas and advance payments for longer term commitments with the construction of pipelines and committed supplies for 20 years considerably eased Russia’s financial burdens. Additionally together China and Russia could confront the US more boldly, especially the latter. It’s negotiating position and ability to stand up to the US improved considerably once Russia was on its side. This continues to be the case.

There is an even more important aspect relating to Russia that merits consideration. In the coming years its geopolitical as well as geostrategic position could improve towards the West. Many European countries are already looking askance at US unilateral actions. Germany with the Nord Stream pipeline soon likely to come on stream at very high cost cannot allow President Trump to thwart its economic interests that are the strength of Germany and make it a global player. Other countries notably in Eastern Europe notably Hungary are keen to normalize relations with Russia. More countries would stand with Germany and possibly France to arrive at an accommodation with Russia, seeing that Turkey the NATO member with the largest Army has already started spinning away. For its part Russia would have to give cast iron guarantees that it would not again invade the Baltic Republics, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. It would further reassure the Scandinavian countries as well adding to greater trade benefits for Russia.

Once Russia is comfortable in the West its gaze will automatically turn towards China. It has become much too powerful and economically stronger for Russia’s comfort in the coming years. Its military strength now moving forward in all dimensions of warfare is causing worries in private circles in Moscow who were never comfortable with the closer relations with China that is already displacing Russia in its backyard in Central Asia. The Belt and Road Initiative with outlays ultimately reaching up to nearly one trillion dollars cannot become economically viable any time soon, if ever. It is more a geopolitical initiative reaching up to countries of Eastern Europe, the fact that is already worrying the Western countries. Russia will be the biggest loser if it is reduced to helplessly watching the way Chinese workers are flooding the countries in between. Some worry and backlash though tentative has started.

Russia’ worries do not end there as its population declines by 2050 to less than 100 million, out of which the Russian population following the Orthodox Russian Church projected as less than 70 million. Other countries in addition to Chechnya and Dagestan could also become more troublesome. Chinese are already demographically eyeing expansion in Siberia and Central Asia, in the latter case on the back of the BRI. Chinese have already started marrying locally in Kyrgystan and in the Republics bordering Xinjiang. Clandestine move into sparsely populated spaces in Kazakhstan and Siberia would be an ongoing process. Planners in Russia are aware of it. In the latter case after taking over as President after the disastrous Yeltsin years on his first visit to the far-eastern province the governor of Siberia reportedly told Mr. Putin that in fifty years the language spoken in his province would largely be Chinese and Korean.

As mentioned in an earlier paragraph the deals made in Delhi during President Putin’s visits in early October 2018 had far deeper geostrategic significance for Russia than the $ 5.43 accruing from the signing of the S 400 Triumf deal. In the coming years India’s power and prestige will continue to grow in the world. India is a very big country on the southern flank of China as viewed from Russia. The apprehensions of expansionist China would continue to be shared by both countries present accommodations necessitated by circumstances notwithstanding. That was the reason that Russia had been insisting with China for several years that India be brought into the SCO as a member going beyond its observer status. Ultimately China acceded to the Russian demand. There were bound to have been trade- offs.

As a last word it is not in the interest of Russia and India to have antagonist relations with China. The same applies for China. The looming planetary decline will demand that these three important countries in the global arena take the initiative from the US to decide on steps necessitated to reverse the decline.

General Vinod Saighal

      

[1] “Resurgence of Russia in the Twenty-First Century”. (Published in USI Journal, New Delhi in 2000, and subsequently in Global Security Paradoxes: 2000-2020, Manas Publications, 2004.).

http://www.voltairenet.org/article203446.html

General Vinod Saighal

Major-General Vinod Saighal is a former general director of the Indian army’s military training. He was an embassy military attaché in France and Benelux, and commander-in-chief of the peacekeeping forces in the Near East. Today he is the founder of the Movement for Restoration of Good Government (MRGG) and head of Eco Monitors Society (EMS). He is the author of numerous works on strategy and political analysis, and has recently published Dealing with Global Terrorism: The Way Forward. He is member of the anti-imperialist conference Axis for Peace.

 

Why is the situation in Pakistan irremediable?
The Assassination of Benazir Bhutto, according to an Indian General

 

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The Stand-off on the Iranian Nuclear Issue– A Reappraisal Before the Final Countdown

 

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US-Coalition Uses Banned White Phosphorus

US Coalition Strikes Syrian Town Using Banned White Phosphorus

12:44 13.10.2018

The reported strikes are not the first time that the US-led coalition has been accused of using the banned munitions in recent weeks. Last month, the Russian military reported that US strikes using white phosphorus had resulted in major fires and civilian casualties in the eastern Syrian province of Deir Ez-Zor.
The strikes, taking place Saturday across multiple districts in the town of Hajin, Deir Ez-Zor province, included the use of white phosphorus, the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) has reported, citing local sources.

The agency did not provide any immediate information about possible civilian casualties. Syrian state television later reported that several people had been killed and several others injured following coalition airstrikes in the area. However, it remains unclear at this point whether those casualties resulted from the alleged strikes using the banned substances.

SANA said the strikes involving the use of white phosphorus appeared to have been carried out "under the pretext of fighting Daesh (ISIS).*"

The coalition has not yet made any official commentary regarding the alleged incident.

Daesh Terrorists Again Evacuated by US Copters From Syria's Deir Ez-Zor – Report
This week, the United Nations' humanitarian watchdog expressed concern regarding the safety of an estimated 10,000 civilians believed to be trapped in the Hajin area amid reports of civilian deaths during ongoing SDF and coalition operations in the area against Daesh.
Saturday's incident was not the first suspected use of white phosphorus by the US-led coalition. Last month, the coalition denied using the substance in Syria after the Russian Center for Syrian Reconciliation issued a report of airstrikes carried out using the internationally-prohibited weapons by US F-15 fighter jets on September 8. Damascus has repeatedly accused the coalition of using white phosphorus in its attacks, charging Western forces of using the agent in strikes which have led to the deaths of multiple civilians, including children, last year.

Under Geneva Conventions, white phosphorus munitions are prohibited for use against civilians or in civilian areas.

US-led coalition operations in Syria are not sanctioned by Syrian government, nor the UN.

*Daesh is a terrorist group banned in Russia.

https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/201810131068854486-syria-airstrikes-white-phosphorus/

Naomi Klein: Rule of Pampered Princelings

Donald Trump, Brett Kavanaugh, and the Rule of Pampered Princelings

Naomi Klein

October 10 2018, 8:40 p.m.

“BORING.” That was Donald Trump’s instant verdict on the New York Times’s blockbuster investigation into the rampant tax fraud and nepotism that undergirds his fortune. Sarah Huckabee Sanders heartily concurred, informing the White House press corps that she refused to “go through every line of a very boring, 14,000-word story.”

Welcome to a new political PR strategy premised on the shredding of the American mind — you don’t want to even try to read that interminable article; check out my Twitter feed instead, and this viral video of me saying rabid things.

The Times investigation, published as a standalone supplement on Sunday, is about as boring as a car accident. It shows in lavish detail that Trump’s creation myth is and always has been a work of fiction. No, he did not take a “very, very small” million-dollar loan from his father and use his deal-making acumen to parlay it into a $10-billion global empire, while paying the original loan back with interest.

Donald Trump and Fred Trump attend “The Art of the Deal” book party on Dec. 12, 1987 at Trump Tower in New York City.

 

Photo: Ron Galella/WireImage/Getty Images

Trump has been sucking on a spigot of his father’s cash nonstop since he was in diapers, becoming a millionaire by middle school. According to the Times, when all was said and done, “Mr. Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, starting when he was a toddler and continuing to this day.” Moreover, “much of it was never repaid.” As for the rest of the mythology, not only was he spending his father’s money, he blew much of it on disastrous deal after disastrous deal. Only to be bailed out by his father’s millions time and time again.

Rather than bothering to deny any of this, Trump and his surrogates have simply spun a new creation myth. No longer the scrappy, self-made man, Trump is being reincarnated in real time as the chosen son, with he and his father acting as partners in wealth creation. “One thing the article did get right,” Sanders said, clearly reading from notes, “is it showed that the president’s father actually had a great deal of confidence in him. In fact, the president brought his father into a lot of deals and made a lot of money together. So much so that his father went on to say that ‘everything [Trump] touched turned to gold.’”

This shift is more significant than it first appears. After a couple of years of hobnobbing with Saudi monarchs and Queen Elizabeth II, the president appears ready to embrace his true identity as a scion of a dynasty who did not build his fortune by himself, but who is, instead, the product of an especially blessed family that passes a magic touch through the generations.

What makes the Times’ revelations more important is that they are a rare window into an even larger story about the growing political and economic role of inherited money in the United States — the culmination of decades in which a handful of sons and daughters of bequeathed wealth waged a fierce and relentless battle of ideas against the very concept of equality and majority rule, all based on the same corrupting belief in their own inherent superiority.

Trump may be the highest profile of such heirs to wield political power, but he never would have gotten where he is without the ideological scaffolding carefully put in place by other scions of dynastic families — from the late John M. Olin and Richard Mellon Scaife in the ’80s and ’90s to Charles and David Koch and Rebekah Mercer today. These are the key figures who bankrolled the think tanks, financed the extreme free-market university programs, and funded the tea party shock troops that moved the Republican Party so far to the right that Trump could stomp in and grab it.

It was their project that created a fake consensus about the need for the radical deregulating of markets and dismantling of environmental protections, for lowering corporate taxes and eliminating the “death tax” — and paying for it all by dismantling so-called entitlements. It was an effort that always required harnessing the emotional power of racism (think “welfare queens”), as well as the parallel construction of a highly racialized system of mass incarceration to warehouse the poor (and profit from them, of course). The Trump presidency — never mind the economic populism he bellowed on the election trail— is the near-perfect embodiment of this agenda.

A great deal of excellent investigative journalism has gone into tracking the money behind this sprawling class war, most notably by Jane Mayer in her indispensable “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.” Mayer showed that though figures like the Kochs are highly ideological, the policies pushed by these wealthy families also happen to directly benefit their bottom lines. Laxer regulations, lower taxes, weaker unions, and unfettered access to international markets tend to do that.

Much less attention, however, has been paid to the implications of so much of this financing coming not just from unfathomably rich people, but people born that way. And yet it is striking that the figures at the dead center of this campaign were not Chicago school economists, nor were most of them self-made business leaders who had pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. They were, like Trump, pampered princelings whose fortunes had been handed to them by their parents.

The Koch brothers were raised in luxury and inherited Koch Industries from their father (who built his fortune constructing refineries under Stalin and Hitler). Scaife was an heir to the Gulf Oil, Alcoa Aluminum, and Mellon Banks fortunes and grew up in an estate so lavish it was populated with pet penguins. Olin took over his father’s weapons and chemicals company.

And so it goes, right down to Betsy DeVos, who was raised by billionaire Edgar Prince and married into the Amway fortune — and who has devoted her life to dismantling public education, now from inside the Trump administration. And let’s not forget Rupert Murdoch, who inherited a chain of newspapers from his father and is in the process of handing over his media empire to his sons. Or relative newcomer Rebekah Mercer, who has chipped off a chunk of her father Robert’s hedge fund fortune to bankroll Breitbart News, among other pet projects. In short, these people are Downton Abbey lords and masters, playacting as Ayn Rand heroes.

Of course, there are some self-made billionaires, like Sheldon Adelson, who have helped bankroll the revolution on the right. But when it comes to the battle of ideas — the careful investments in pro-business academic programs at elite universities, the extreme right-wing think tanks, the strident media outlets, and now the harnessing of big data and “machine learning” in Republican political campaigns — the role of inherited wealth cannot be overstated.

Donald Trump and his father, Fred Trump, at the opening of Wollman Rink in New York on Nov. 6, 1987.

Photo: Dennis Caruso/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images

Self-Made Scions

It is worth pausing over this fact, because in a country with as powerful a meritocratic mythology as the United States, the heirs to great wealth often have a rather complicated relationship with their fortunes. Some blow it on yachts and vanity projects. Some become determined to show their fathers up by expanding their empires. Some give almost all of their wealth to charity. Some hide it from everyone they know. An all-too-rare few try to use their wealth to build a fairer economy and less toxic ecology.

But what must it take to pour large parts of a fortune that came to you by accident of birth into a relentless campaign of further affirmative action for the rich?

How exactly do you rationalize being lifted up by an intricate latticework of familial and social supports (tutors, prep schools, connections at the best universities, entry-level executive jobs, capital to play with), and then setting about shredding the meager safety net available to those without your good luck? How do you convince yourself that, despite having been handed so much, you are not just right but righteous in attacking the “handouts” received by single mothers working two jobs? How, when you know your own family fortune has benefited from enormous government subsidies (cheap housing loans for the Trumps, oil subsidies for the Kochs and Scaifes, direct weapons contracts for the Olins) do you begrudge paying the same tax rate as your employees?

What is the theory, the worldview, that makes all this OK? And how has it shaped the broader “free market” revolution paid for by these men — a crusade that has just achieved a new level of impunity with the ascent of Brett Kavanaugh, a product of this same world of unchecked privilege, to the Supreme Court?

You can claim to be a wealth-creator, sure. But because you didn’t actually create the wealth yourself — you inherited it — other rationales are required for why you deserve still more, while others should get far less. That’s where uglier ideas come in, about one’s inherent superiority, about a greater deservedness that apparently flows from being a member of a particularly good family, with better values, better breeding, a better religion, or as Trump so often claims, “good genes.”

And of course the even darker side is the often unspoken conviction that the people who do not share in this kind of good fortune must possess the opposite traits — they must be defective in both body and mind. This is where the Republican Party’s increasingly savage racial and gender politics merge seamlessly with its radical wealth-stratifying economic project. Convinced that people belong where they are on the economic and social ladder, the party can keep redistributing wealth upward to the dynastic families that fund their movement, while kicking the ladder out of the way for those reaching for the lower rungs.

In this context, the “losers” (Trump’s favorite insult, aimed disproportionately at the nonwhite and non-male), can not only be stripped of food stamps and health care and left for more than a year without roofs in Puerto Rico, but are also acceptable targets for all kinds of degradations, whether having their children caged in desert internment camps, or having their experiences of sexual assault mocked in open arenas.

The latter part of this equation is what Trump is offering to his base: Their birth will never reward them with anything like the hundreds of millions showered on the Trumps. But they are being invited to share in their own, albeit more modest, birthright entitlements as white, middle-class Americans. They are being invited to be on the winning team, “taking our country back” from any and all invaders and threats, from immigrants taking “our” jobs to women bearing damaging stories against “our” sons.

That is the grand bargain: Trump gets to fully claim his inheritance as a scion of wealth and his base gets to claim their inheritance as white citizens of a Christian, patriarchal nation. Oh, and like the royal families with whom he is so enamored, Trump will reward his loyal subjects by putting on an endless stream of entertaining shows and performances. He hasn’t gotten his military parade yet, but think of Trump’s ritualistic rallies and never-off reality show as crasser versions of royal pomp and palace intrigues. The divine right of kings has been replaced by the divine right of wealth — and it looks almost exactly the same.

None of this should be surprising. Any system marked by sharp inequality and injustice requires a narrative of justification. Colonial savagery and land theft required the doctrine of discovery, manifest destiny, terra nullius, and other expressions of Christian and European supremacy. The transatlantic slave trade, similarly, demanded an intellectual and legal system built on white supremacy and “scientific” racism. Patriarchy and the subjugation of women required an architecture of yet more pseudoscientific theories about female intellectual inferiority and emotionality.

Without these theories — and the lawyers, scientists, and other experts who stepped forward to give them credence — the injustices of all these systems would have been untenable. Our current system of ever more grotesque inequalities is no different. The mythology of the self-made elite once did the trick of justifying the United States’ wealth gap and threadbare safety net.

The ultrarich in the United States have long insisted that they built their empires with sweat and smarts, unlike their aristocratic brethren in Britain and France, and therefore deserve them more. Central to this story was the idea that anyone with smarts and drive could do the same, since there was no entrenched class system stopping them. (In the Trumpian version of this story, you could be just like him if you paid up for his how-to-get-rich books and fraudulent “university” while studying back episodes of “The Apprentice”).

“We like to pretend that no such thing as a ruling class has ever darkened an American shore or danced by the light of an American moon,” former Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham once remarked.

This was never true. The American political system began as a protection racket for propertied white men, granting inalienable rights to a minority at the direct expense of enslaved Africans and women. Serious proposals to level the playing field — from a truly integrated public school system to fair wages for domestic work — were squashed again and again.

Meanwhile, like Trump himself, many of the hypersuccessful men who proudly wear the mantle of being “self-made” are in profound denial about how much help they received from their family and social networks. Kavanaugh, a member of the American elite, if not the ultrarich, is a case in point. During the Senate hearings, he snarled that he got into Yale Law School by “busting my tail,” insisting “I had no connections there.” No connections except that his grandfather went to Yale, which means that Kavanaugh very likely didn’t get in only because he managed to do his homework with a piercing hangover, but also because he was a prime candidate for a “legacy” admittance.

An excerpt from Brett Kavanaugh’s Yale yearbook. Some personal information has been redacted for privacy.

 

Image: White House released

The truth is that many children of elite families enjoy all kinds of unacknowledged protections that make failure a herculean effort. In childhood, bad grades are fixed with expensive tutoring (and, if necessarily, remedial boarding or military schools.) At top Ivy League universities, rampant grade inflation is a poorly kept secret, with wealthy students frequently lodging successful grievances against professors and graduate students who dare give them anything less than an “A,” no matter how mediocre their work. In adulthood, bad business bets are backstopped with family money and connections. On Wall Street, it’s the government that steps in to bail out reckless bets since chances are that your workplace is too big to fail.

None of this is to say that the very wealthy are lazy or lead lives free of pain. Many work nonstop (as do the working poor, under unimaginably harder conditions). Moreover, elite institutions — prep schools, fraternities, secret societies — tend to build in their own brutal hazing rituals. Top corporate law firms and investment banks put new recruits through grueling hours and ruthlessly pit them against one another for bonuses and promotions.

Inside families with great fortunes at stake, siblings are similarly pitted against each other for control of the greatest prizes. So Trump fashioned himself as a “killer” to beat out his older brother Fred for his father’s favor. And, as Mayer reported, the three younger Koch brothers staged a mock trial accusing their oldest brother (also named Fred) of being gay so that he would relinquish his claim to the family fortune.

All of this is part of a time-tested process of training and indoctrination designed to toughen up the soft sons of privilege so they are ready to be as cutthroat as their fathers. But surviving such elite trials often convinces people like Donald Trump, Charles Koch, and Brett Kavanaugh that they are where they are solely because they worked their respective tails off.

Citadel Investment Group President and CEO Kenneth Griffin testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 13, 2008, before the House Oversight and Government Reform hearing on “Hedge Funds and the Financial Market.”

 

Photo: Kevin Wolf/AP

Failure Is for Other People

It reminds me of a talk I once heard by Kenneth Griffin, a billionaire hedge fund manager in Chicago, who at the time was in a state of distress about an Obama plan to increase taxes. Speaking to a group of elite college students about his rise to enormous wealth, he told a story about how his family had given him some capital to start a hedge fund in his Harvard dorm room (where so many rags-to-riches stories seem to begin), complete with a satellite hook-up to receive real-time market data. He confessed to the students that this first foray into trading had not gone well, that he had in fact lost a lot of other people’s money. Fortunately, however, he was entrusted with still more start-up capital, was able to start again, and that’s where he began his rise to being what he is today: the richest man in Illinois.

Asked by a student how he got through the tough times, this “self-made” billionaire replied: “America is incredibly forgiving of failure.”

What struck me most at the time was that Griffin seemed to genuinely believe what he was saying — that a country in which millions are one illness away from homelessness, and which at that time imprisoned 2.3 million people, “is incredibly forgiving of failure.” He was convinced that his personal experience of being repeatedly caught by his own personal family safety net was a universal American experience — and that let him fight to lower his tax bill and further shred the safety net with what appeared to be a clear conscience.

Chuck Collins, an heir to a family fortune who gave it up in order to fightentrenched inequality, recently wrote about the moral risks that accrue when so many powerful people, from Trump to Kavanaugh, deceive themselves about how much they were helped. “If I believe that success is based entirely on personal grit,” he wrote for CNN, “then why should I pay taxes so that someone else can have a comparable head start to mine — with early childhood education, access to quality health care and mental health services, and low-cost higher education?”

Why indeed? And why support any form of affirmative action when you are in denial about all the extra support that landed you where you are today?

There are other moral hazards that result from this denial as well — perils that put whole societies at risk when these overconfident men assume power. Because if your experience is that every time you stumble, you recover as if by magic, then you will be much more prone to upping the ante next time, convinced that you and yours will surely be alright in the end, as you have always been.

So why not refuse to regulate derivatives? The market will self-correct. Why not pour that toxic waste into a river? The solution to pollution is dilution, right? And why not invade Iraq? It will surely be a “cakewalk.” And while we’re at it, why not ignore decade after decade of warnings from climate scientists telling us that if we didn’t get emissions under control, we will run out of time? Come on, don’t be so negative, surely technology will save us, it certainly has been great for Uber.

I gave a TED talk about this mentality a decade ago called “Addicted to Risk,” and if you want to know where it all leads, have a glance at the harrowing new U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, released earlier this week.

Because now the whole thing is unraveling. The reckless bets are coming due — economically and ecologically. And the self-made mythology is unraveling too. That’s why Trump isn’t bothering to defend himself — it’s all gotten too obvious to deny. Too much money is pooling at the highest economic echelons. Single families — like the Waltons and the Cargills — are hogging too many spots on the Forbes 400 list.

Back in 2012, United for a Fair Economy published a report on the role of inherited wealth on that list. It found that “40 percent of the Forbes 400 list inherited a sizable asset from a family member or spouse, and over 20 percent inherited sufficient wealth to make the list. In addition, 17 percent of the Forbes 400 have family members on the list.”

There are signs that the role of inherited wealth has only increased since then. That’s because the assets held by the already rich — in real estate, the stock market, and in direct corporate profits — are growing at a significantly higher rate than the overall economy and the salaries of working people, which are stagnating.

This was one of the key insights of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”:

Whenever the rate of return on capital is significantly and durably higher than the growth rate of the economy, it is all but inevitable that inheritance (of fortunes accumulated in the past) predominates over saving (wealth accumulated in the present). … Wealth originating in the past automatically grows more rapidly, even without labour, than wealth stemming from work, which can be saved.

This is compounded by the successful crusade by the scions of the ultrarich to lower corporate and income taxes and chip away at the “death tax,” which once significantly shrunk the fortunes passed from one generation to the next. And then, as Collins points out, there is the complicity and creativity of tax lawyers and accounting firms who have grown ever more adept at hiding trillions in wealth from a scandalously complicit IRS. (Collins calls it the “dynasty protection racket.”)

Under Trump, who has profited so handsomely from all of these rackets, the pots of wealth being passed down within families are set to overflow even further. Among the many handouts in Trump’s tax law, the first $22.4 million gifted from parents to children is exempt from the estate tax. (“Final Tax Bill Includes Huge Estate Tax Win for the Rich,” announced a euphoric Forbes headline last December.)

Is it any surprise that, as the economy changes — with the very idea of meritocracy under sustained assault both by the new tech monopolies that quash competition and the increasing power of dynastic wealth — those uglier stories that rationalize untenable levels of inequality are roaring to the surface?

“60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl interviews President-elect Donald J. Trump and his family at his Manhattan home on Nov. 11, 2016.

 

Photo: CBS via Getty Images

Wealth and Destiny

These are the theories that hold that the wealthy and powerful deserve their lopsided share not primarily because of their hard work but because of their identity — the family they were born into, their (imagined) superior genetics, their supposedly elevated values, and of course, their race, religion, and gender. Inside the logic of this story, success does not come because you were showered with privileges. You were showered with privileges because you are better.

A few years back, Jamie Johnson, one of the heirs to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, interviewed other members of his wealthy cohort for the film “Born Rich” and its sequel, “The One Percent.” He observed that while he was struggling to understand why he deserved to be handed so much money just because he had managed to turn 21, “For some people I talked to, inequality is easy to understand. It’s preordained.”

People like Roy O. Martin III, president and CEO of the Louisiana-based Roy O. Martin Lumber Company, which was previously headed by his father and grandfather. Martin told Johnson, “If you inherit money, you feel ‘why did I get all this and somebody else is poor?’ Well, God has a reason for it. God’s never going to give you something you can’t handle.” Being rich, he went on, means that “God has given you a lot of assets to be stewards of.”

Collins told me that he has encountered these supremacist theories frequently in the moneyed circles he grew up in and in conversations around the estate tax — “and it’s happening more as we become more unequal.” In some cases, people are still genuinely convinced that they worked for all the money they have. But where this is obviously not the case, different justifications are emerging. “They responded that ‘our family is deserving. We have better values that we have passed on or a different work ethic.’” And sometimes, Collins told me, this self-justification slips into more dangerous territory. “You hear that this is all genetics. Or that ‘our health is better’ or ‘we have more energy.’”

Only ideas like these can help justify a passion to avoid taxes on a pile of wealth that has been passed through four generations. You have to believe there is something inherently superior about your family. And even if it is left unsaid, you also have to believe the corollary — that there is something inherently inferior about the people who would benefit from those taxes. Just as you deserve your unearned place at the top, so others must deserve theirs at the bottom — they are “bad hombres,” come from “shit-hole countries,” and so on.  All the easier to abuse, deport, even torture.

Indeed, if you have been raised on a narrative of your own specialness and exceptionality, you may well be prone to believe that all kinds of things are your divine right. You might believe that you have a right to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court despite never having tried a case. You might believe you have a right to become president despite having a closet full of skeletons and no history of public service.

And, in some cases, you may well feel entitled to do things to people against their will who are not in your rarefied club — whether forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy she does not choose, or grabbing women’s bodies without their consent. Or to do whatever it takes to shut her up — be it a hand over her mouth or a “catch and kill” story in the National Inquirer.

Trump’s sense of entitlement to massive amounts of inherited wealth and political power is not something his mostly middle- and working-class followers have the privilege of sharing. But that misses an important point: In boiling times like ours, supremacist thinking is contagious. When elites indulge their ugliest beliefs about their divine right to keep winning, it trickles down, giving their supporters license to assume their own imagined superior status — over anyone who seems sufficiently undefended.

This is an intensely hierarchical worldview that is completely comfortable with a minority making decisions for a majority in a rigged electoral system, just as it feels no need to reconcile two totally different visions of justice — “innocent until proven guilty” when it comes to Brett Kavanaugh’s job application and, as Trump told a gathering of police chiefs on Monday, “stop and frisk” for anyone seen as a possible criminal in Chicago (obvious code for a black person walking down the street). This is not seen as a contradiction: There are simply two classes of people — us and them, winners and losers, people deserving of rights and everyone else.

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By abandoning his Horatio Alger schtick and embracing his new identity as a chosen son, the one with the golden touch, Trump is signaling that he thinks his base is ready to abandon the whole idea not just of meritocracy, but equality itself — and we should definitely pay attention.

You can see the effects of this moral degeneration at work in the president’s own family: Trump at least felt some shame about his silver spoon, which is why he built his identity, however laughably, on being a self-made man. He knew his wealth would be less impressive if he admitted how much he had inherited.

But his children feel no such compunction to lie and, much like the crown princes of oil emirates and the “princeling” spawns of top Chinese party officials, they seem to revel in their status as heirs to a throne. All came to notoriety as bit players on “The Apprentice,” and all have built their reputations solely around being “a Trump,” as if the name alone bestowed some magical powers, and they were part of their father’s capacity to turn everything he touches into gold.

So Ivanka and Jared blithely take control over large parts of the U.S. government, despite having no relevant experience and never having been elected to anything. And when Eric and Don Jr. announced last year that they would be opening a chain of boutique hotels, the name they selected was telling indeed. It would be called “Scion,” a defiant celebration of the idle heirs to dynastic families if ever there was one. It seems that the trust fund set is tired of pretending that they have earned their good fortune and are instead ready to claim it openly for what it is: a birthright.

As more and more inherited wealth is passed, tax-free, from one generation to the next, we can expect to see much more of such shamelessness.

All of this was foretold. Almost two years ago, Trump held his first television interview after the 2016 elections. It was for “60 Minutes,” and he lined up the entire family on golden, throne-like chairs. That should have been our first clue that American capitalism was entering a new stage: the Age of the Pampered Princeling.

https://theintercept.com/2018/10/10/donald-trump-inherited-wealth/