AMERICANS NOT THREATENED BY TERRORISM

US Homeland Security now states that domestic terrorism is more of a concern that foreign-based terrorism. But can the incident a few months ago of a man firing into a Denver movie theatre be considered terrorism, if the perpetrator did not have a clear political motive? Many definitions of terrorism includes political motivation. Here is an article from the Atlantic Monthly, June 6, 2012. It is entitled
 

Americans Are as Likely to Be Killed by Their Own Furniture as by Terrorism

By Micah Zenko
""The National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC) has  released its 2011 Report on Terrorism. The report offers the U.S. government's best statistical analysis of terrorism trends through its Worldwide Incidents Tracking System (WITS), which compiles and vets open-source information about terrorism--defined by U.S. law as "premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents.
Although I invite you to read the entire thirty-one page report, there are a few points worth highlighting that notably contrast with the conventional narrative of the terrorist threat:

• "The total number of worldwide attacks in 2011, however, dropped by almost 12 percent from 2010 and nearly 29 percent from 2007." (9)
• "Attacks by AQ and its affiliates increased by 8 percent from 2010 to 2011. A significant increase in attacks by al-Shabaab, from 401 in 2010 to 544 in 2011, offset a sharp decline in attacks by al-Qa'ida in Iraq (AQI) and a smaller decline in attacks by al-Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and al-Qa'ida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM)." (11)
• "In cases where the religious affiliation of terrorism casualties could be determined, Muslims suffered between 82 and 97 percent of terrorism-related fatalities over the past five years." (14)
• Of 978 terrorism-related kidnapping last year, only three hostages were private U.S. citizens, or .003 percent. A private citizen is defined as 'any U.S. citizen not acting in an official capacity on behalf of the U.S. government.' (13, 17)
• Of the 13,288 people killed by terrorist attacks last year, seventeen were private U.S. citizens, or .001 percent. (17)

According to the report, the number of U.S. citizens who died in terrorist attacks increased by two between 2010 and 2011; overall, a comparable number of Americans are crushed to death by their televisions or furniture each year. This is not to diminish the real--albeit shrinking--threat of terrorism, or to minimize the loss and suffering of the 13,000 killed and over 45,000 injured around the world. For Americans, however, it should emphasize that an irrational fear of terrorism is both unwarranted and a poor basis for public policy decisions."
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/06/americans-are-as-likely-to-be-killed-by-their-own-furniture-as-by-terrorism/258156/
""

Ahmadinejad Never Said Israel ‘Must Be Wiped Off the Map’

  Students often write that Iranian leader Ahmadinejad had said that ""Israel must be wiped off the map." It is now widely agreed that it was a mis-translation. 
 
 
As the Guardian columnist Jonathan Steele explained in 2006, a more direct translation of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s remarks would be: “this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time,” echoing a statement once made by the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. See this article 
Israeli Minister Agrees Ahmadinejad Never Said Israel ‘Must Be Wiped Off the Map’
 
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/17/israeli-minister-agrees-ahmadinejad-never-said-israel-must-be-wiped-off-the-map/
 

R2P UPDATE

Excellent discussions again in my UMUC class this week. We discussed the Responsibility to Protect principle, which is aimed at giving nations the ability to intervene in other nations' affairs in the case of widespread human rights abuses. It was noted that only the wealthy countries can actually ''do'' interventions of this nature.  R2P is usually discussed in terms of the UN Security Council making the decision to intervene, but I think it should be the UN General Assembly.
What of self-determination and national sovereignty?  Should the UNSC, as a sort of one world government, or a superpower such as the US,  violate the national sovereignty of country, even if for a good cause? And if so, what about nation building to prevent conflict, or after the intervention?
R2P makes a conceptual link between operations to aid the development of democratic institutions, and the prevention of humanitarian disasters such as wars and widespread human rights abuses.
This brings up the question of the difference between poverty and a humanitarian disaster. For example, India suffers from widespread poverty, and yet it is a democracy with quite a good record for political human rights.  Rwanda is a democracy now, but still suffers enormously from the 90s humanitarian disaster. Nation building may follow a UN war and sanctions, which in themselves cause humanitarian disaster?

(BTW,  I've joined an excellent organization, called Women to Women, and am helping a woman in the Democratic Republic of Congo, to get on her feet. It’s only $30 a month, and I highly recommend it. Unfortunately, her project has had to close temporarily due to a flare up of violence there). 


Some students wrote that the US is always called on to help, because it is the most powerful country in the world. What are some alternatives to the power of the Western governments to render aid? There are many regional organizations recognized by the UN.
For example, the African Union could be empowered to act much more efficiently, effectively, and credibly; they do not currently. They require training, resources, and guidance beyond what they currently possess. The ICISS (the INGO that promotes R2P) downplays the role of regional organizations in implementing 2P, and emphasizes the leadership role of the UNSC.

The African Union has accused the West of double standards. Attempts by the International Criminal Court to bring about the arrest of war criminals, has been met with accusations of racism. It's true that the majority of war criminals indicted by the ICC happen to be Africans.  For example...

THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT INDICTMENT OF  President al-Bashir of N Sudan.

The ICC has recently released a second international warrant for Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir’s arrest, this time adding the crime of genocide to his list of offenses. Bashir already faces previous charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, all of which he has denied.

In fact, only 1 or 2 African countries support the decision of the ICC. The others consider it illegal intervention in another country's domestic affairs The AU will send its troops (if funded) but draws the line when it comes to arresting leaders.

AU forces are under-funded, which is why they have failed to materialize. Personally, I think AU should be funded by the UN. They've done the most to broker an agreement.


Sometimes, individual countries attempt to bring to justice war criminals in other countries. 

A Turkish court is trying four senior Israeli officers  for deadly attack on peace activists at sea in 2010."Senior Israeli Officers Charged With War Crimes Over Flotilla Attack." Meanwhile, 

"Ankara may be facing a daunting probe of its own now, as a report in the weekly Der Spiegel on Thursday prompted German politicians to call for an urgent inquiry into the Turkish military’s alleged use of chemical weapons against Kurdish freedom protestors."
 

 As we are learning in this class, hardly any event in international relations is easily categorized. A good overall question for  R2P interventions, is ''who guards the guardians"? 

The US however, does remain the world's superpower, at least, militarily. Obama came into office promoting R2P. Susan Rice, newly appointed US ambassador to the UN in 2009, said this at the time:

"...we must find more effective means to protect innocent civilians around the world....In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the fighting rages on and is reported to have resulted directly or indirectly in more than 5 million deaths, as well as countless rapes, sexual assaults, recruitment of child soldiers, and other major human rights violations...The United States is determined to act to prevent such violations of international humanitarian law. This means, in practical terms, preventing conflicts in the first place, keeping existing conflicts from escalating to mass atrocities, acting early and decisively when they occur, and ensuring that peacebuilding and post-conflict assistance consolidates peace durably once conflict ends. As agreed to by member states in 2005 and by the Security Council in 2006, the international community has a responsibility to protect civilian populations from violations of international humanitarian law when states are unwilling or unable to do so. But this commitment is only as effective as the willingness of all nations, large and small, to take concrete action."

http://www.responsibilitytoprotect.org/index.php/crises/37-the-crisis-in-darfur/2109-us-ambassador-to-the-un-susan-rice-voices-us-support-for-rtop

It is now 2012, and the matter of helping the DRC has been dropped. My feeling is that Obama is not promoting R2P anymore.
 

SOMEONE IS OUT THERE (I DO BELIEVE) by Philippa Winkler, Copyrighted

HOW WOULD MARX EXPLAIN DERIVATIVES?

A student in my International Political Economy class wrote:

"However, I'd say that it's the reverse that's more true, that the Central Banks are slaves to the markets. The Central Banks can only do so much, and you can bet a million that the private banks will be there to make money when they've done all that they can..."

Which elements in the market are slave to whom, could be analyzed from a Marxist perspective. The capitalist system is the market. The market is motivated by the pursuit of capital above all, not the pursuit of survival. Physical assets and financial products are bought and sold on the market.


Since Marx' death, financial derivatives have arisen that are not based on industrial labor or surplus value derived from labor power. He predicted the rise of credit, but not derivatives, which are a form of gambling ...even on the weather (did you know there are weather derivatives?)

Marx'' analysis of money as a commodity, is useful here. A commodity has use value and exchange value. It's useful for its commensurability in the exchange of commodities, in this case, financial assets like derivatives.

Marx teaches us to relate assets, capital and money back to class interests. Derivatives are a form of competition among hoarders of money. In other words, derivatives hoard and withhold money from the production process (not to speak of the tax shelters that also hoard trillions of dollars). Derivatives prevent the freedom of money to circulate. But I don't think that just eliminating derivatives is going to 'solve' a capitalist crisis, which occur regularly with or without derivatives.

What do you think?

THE LIBOR RATE: SHOULD THE GLASS-STEAGL ACT BE REVIVED?

UPDATED April 28, 2015
UPDATED July 8, 2013
UPDATE: Timothy Geitner, US Treasury Secretary, knew of Libor corruption in 2008, but used the rigged Libor rate to back up bail out funds. See this:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/26/timothy-geithner-libor-in_n_1707012.html
I guess the fox is looking after the chicken coop.

For those of you that think corruption is the purview of low income countries, consider the Libor scandal of last year and ongoing. According to Bloomberg.co,  the survey system Libor was established 26 years ago to determine banks’ daily estimates of how much it would cost them to borrow from one another for different time frames and in different currencies. Banks self-reported  their interest rates. Libor was not regulated or monitored by an outside, independent agency.

Recall that the current Western-based business model allows the high-street bank to speculate using clients’ monies. 

The  US Banking (also known as Glass-Steagall) Act of 1933 made speculation and investment banking illegal and introduced government-backed insurance for bank deposits.   The Act is often referred to as part of the New Deal, to restore credibility and fairness in the banking industry.

It was repealed in 1999 under President Clinton, under the principle of free trade. In fact, the repeal led to an orgy of gambling with savings and checking accounts of ordinary people, which some analysts say is a cause of the 2008 economic crisis.

Investment banking led to interbank borrowing to maintain investments in money markets. 

The financial crisis of 2008 made inter bank borrowing more difficult. There was less liquid cash. This in turn led investment bankers to lie to each other through Libor, about their interest rates – fixing them at virtually identical lower rates.   

This gave the impression that more liquid cash was available  to banks in the short term,  and that interbank loans were secure even though actual borrowing costs were higher. Individual bankers themselves stood to gain personally from bonuses and their own investments.

On Sept. 13, 2006, a senior Barclays trader in New York e- mailed the person who submitted a falsely low rate, “Hi Guys, We got a big position in 3m libor for the next 3 days. Can we please keep the lib or fixing at 5.39 for the next few days. It would really help.”

At least a dozen firms are being probed by regulators worldwide for colluding to rig the Libor rate. Barclays bank in the UK is being investigated for this fraud, by the UK Parliament. Anyone who purchased derivatives based on an artificially lowered Libor rate, has lost money.  Barclay's president Bob Diamond has stepped down in disgrace.  Barclays was fined a record $451 million. A friend of mine's  Barclays “relationship manager” said he was under orders not to comment, and referred to an incomprehensible statement by Diamond.

Since 1997, Diamond had built up Barclays Capital - the banks' investment wing – producing $4.7bn profits in 2011. 

An editorial in the Financial Times stated: 'For all the diversification benefits, the cultural tensions between investment and retail banking can only be resolved by totally separating the two, of formal Glass-Steagall-style lines.'

LIBOR FIXING PROMPTED BY FEARS OF NATIONALIZED BANKING

The revival of the Glass-Steagl Act is not the only threat to ‘free market’ banking. The biggest fear, according to Diamond himself, is that the government might nationalize Barclays as a response to the global economic crisis.

"If Whitehall was told 'Barclays is at the highest of Libor', they might say to themselves, 'My goodness, they can't fund, we need to nationalize them,' as they had nationalized other British banks," said Mr. Diamond. "We were desperate. We had £6.7 billion of equity being raised. If rumors got on the market that we couldn't fund, then maybe we wouldn't have been able to complete the equity raising."

According to James Cox, an expert on securities law at Duke University Law School: "The other shoes have finally dropped in the LIBOR investigation. Seven other shoes, in fact. Attorneys general in New York and Connecticut have subpoenaed seven of the world's biggest banks, including Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase here in the U.S. In broad strokes, the allegations are similar to the ones Barclays settled last month: that the banks abused their power when self-reporting the LIBOR interest rate -- the rate banks use when lending to each other."

Bloomberg.com suggests that US banks will be let off the hook, see:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-27/where-are-the-libor-cases-against-u-s-banks-.html

The Volcker  Rule of 2013 attempts to restrict some kinds of speculative investment by US banks, i.e. curb big risky bets. 

Sources:

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/libor-scandal-reaches-major-us-banks

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304141204577506602345146644.html

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2168716/Libor-scandal-live-Bob-Diamond-physically-sick-evidence-Barclays-staff-fixing-rates.html#ixzz1zfWg9PXD

ALTRUISM VS SELFISHNESS - WHAT STUDIES SHOW

Updated July 24, 2015

The human nature question is, I believe, absolutely pivotal to the study of politics and economics. Very often, I hear my students say that competitiveness and aggression combined with profit making, are driven by biological urges. But biological studies are positing another scenario.

There is an 'altruistic gene' according to biologists:

"...researchers discovered that people with either of two of the variations of the COMT gene (called the Val/Val and Val/Met variations) donated twice as much money to the charity as people with the other variation (called Met/Met), regardless of their gender. In fact, more than 20 percent of the people with the altruistic variations donated all of their money.

In the general population, the number of people with the altruistic variations of the COMT gene varies by ethnicity, says study author Christian Montag, a psychologist at the University of Bonn. Among Caucasians, the ethnicity of all the participants in this particular study, roughly 75 percent carry one of the two altruistic variations: 25 percent carry the val/val, 50 percent carry the val/met, and 25 percent carry the met/met variant.

While researchers have had evidence for years that altruistic behavior is at least partly influenced by genetics, that evidence has come mainly from studies of twins reporting how altruistic they are, which have found that people with identical genetic material show similar patterns of altruism. This is the first study to link altruism to a specific gene.

Psychologist Sebastian Markett, a study co-author also at the University of Bonn, says the results show how a single genetic mutation can have a large effect on our behavior. But he believes science still has much to learn about the genetics of altruism.

'There must be more genes which influence altruistic behavior whose association has not been discovered yet,” he says. “Our future objective will be to identify all of those genes and how they interact with each other to eventually put a pretty complicated puzzle together—with the goal to understand who we are and why we are how we are.'"

http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/is_there_an_altruism_gene

But...the richer you get, the more selfish you are! See this

"Lower-class” individuals—i.e., folks without much money or education—demonstrate more compassion and empathy than their wealthy counterparts, according to a series of psychological studies".

Read more: http://moneyland.time.com/2011/08/12/study-the-rich-really-are-more-selfish/#ixzz1yFoStV91

A new book, WEALTH SECRETS OF THE 1 % by economist Sam Wilkin, posits the very wealthy are more likely to skirt the law by using certain mechanisms that. "involve 'some sort of scheme for defeating the forces of market competition'. Many involve legal manoeuvrings or the exercising of political influence.I haven't read the book so I can't say what methodology Wilkin used to arrive at this conclusion.