Category Archives: Politics

WHO EXACTLY BENEFIT MOST BY GLOBAL PHILANTHROPISTS.

Posted on by
Reply
Published on
Wednesday, January 20, 2016
by

Just Who Exactly Benefits Most from the Global Giving of Billionaires Like Bill Gates?

Is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation promoting the interests of multinational corporations at the expense  of social and economic justice?

The Bill & Melidna Gates Foundation, argue its critics, is relentlessly promoting big business-based initiatives such as industrial agriculture, private health care and education. But many of these programs are actually exacerbating the problems of poverty and lack of access to basic resources that the foundation is supposed to be alleviating. (Cover detail: Global Justice Now report ‘Gated Development’/pdf)

As the world’s political and economic elite gather to discuss their top concerns at the annual Davos summit in the Swiss Alps and with attention this week focused on the scourge of economic inequality, a new report begs questions about the potentially disastrous role the super-wealthy are playing when it comes to addressing key problems of global inequity, endemic poverty, and international development.

Released on Wednesday, the study by the UK-based social justice group Global Justice Now takes a specific look at the impact of the world’s largest philanthropic charity, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), to assess how large-scale private giving may be “skewing” how international aid works. In its conclusion, the report argues that what may look like altruism on a grand scale may actually mask a sinister reality about how the billionaires of the world insulate their personal fortunes while using their out-sized influence to project their private ideologies and further financial interests. The result, the report suggests, is that many of the people and communities who such charities purport to be helping, may actually be worse off in the long run.

With more than $43 billion in assets, the Gates Foundation is often lauded as a global force for social good that uses its vast financial resources to launch initiatives and support existing projects in order to, according to its mission, “help all people lead healthy, productive lives.”

The new report, however—entitled Gated Development: Is the Gates Foundation Always a Force for Good?—argues that regardless of good intentions or motivations, the foundation’s “concentration of power is undemocratically and unaccountably skewing the direction of international development” which in turn is “exacerbating global inequality and entrenching corporate power internationally.”

As Mark Curtis, lead researcher and author of the report, explains in the introduction:

Analysis of the BMGF’s programmes shows that the foundation, whose senior staff is overwhelmingly  drawn from corporate America, is promoting  multinational corporate interests at the expense  of social and economic justice. Its strategy is  deepening – and is intended to deepen – the  role of multinational companies in global health  and agriculture especially, even though these  corporations are responsible for much of the  poverty and injustice that already plagues the  global south. Indeed, much of the money the  BMGF has to spend derives from investments in  some of the world’s biggest and most controversial  companies; thus the BMGF’s ongoing work  significantly depends on the ongoing profitability  of corporate America, something which is not  easy to square with genuinely realising social and  economic justice in the global south.

Polly Jones, head of campaigns and policy at Global Justice Now, highlights why the foundation’s unique role as a private organization is so troubling when it comes to putting a check on its enormous influence on the world stage.

“The Gates Foundation has rapidly become the most influential actor in the world of global health and agricultural policies, but there’s no oversight or accountability in how that influence is managed,” argues Jones.  “This concentration of power and influence is even more problematic when you consider that the philanthropic vision of the Gates Foundation seems to be largely based on the values of corporate America. The foundation is relentlessly promoting big business-based initiatives such as industrial agriculture, private health care and education. But these are all potentially exacerbating the problems of poverty and lack of access to basic resources that the foundation is supposed to be alleviating.”

Based on a careful review of the charity’s behavior, the report offers these specific criticisms of the Gates Foundation:

  • The relationship between the money that the foundation has to give away and Microsoft’s tax practices. A 2012 report from the US Senate found that Microsoft’s use of offshore subsidiaries enabled it to avoid taxes of $4.5 billion – a sum greater than the BMGF’s annual grant making ($3.6 billion in 2014).
  • The close relationship that BMGF has with many corporations whose role and policies contribute to ongoing poverty. Not only is BMGF profiting from numerous investments in a series of controversial companies which contribute to economic and social injustice, it is also actively supporting a series of those companies, including Monsanto, Dupont and Bayer through a variety of pro-corporate initiatives around the world.
  • The foundation’s promotion of industrial agriculture across Africa, pushing for the adoption of GM, patented seed systems and chemical fertilisers, all of which undermine existing sustainable, small-scale farming that is providing the vast majority of food security across the continent.
  • The foundation’s promotion of projects around the world pushing private healthcare and education. Numerous agencies have raised concerns that such projects exacerbate inequality and undermine the universal provision of such basic human necessities.
  • BMGF’s funding of a series of vaccine programmes that have reportedly lead to illnesses or even deaths with little official or media scrutiny.

In Jones’ forward to the report, she explains why the ideological underpinnings of the foundation—often overlooked or ignored in mainstream assessments—are essential to understanding the downside of BMFG’s powerful influence:

untitled-[1].plain 10 k Download View

WHAT WOULD A SAUDI-IRAN WAR LOOK LIKE

Posted on by
Reply 
Shared by Nasik Elahi
A sobering view of what is destroying the Islamic world.  People like Donald trump
feed off this ancient feud.
Nasik Elahi

http://news.yahoo.com/saudi-iran-war-look-don-165834881.html?soc_src=mediacontentsharebuttons&soc_trk=ma

THE EXECUTION OF NIMR ALNIMR-REASON TO RE-EVALUATE THE TOXIC US-SAUDI ALLIANCE

Posted on by
Reply

Shared by, Syed Ehtesham.

United States Secretary of State John Kerry (R) meets Adel Ahmed Al-Jubeir, Foreign Minister of Saudi Arabia. (Photo: Reuters)

The brutal Saudi execution of Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr Al-Nimr has led to protests around the globe, as well as the burning of the Saudi Embassy in Tehran, followed by the Saudi severing of relations with Iran. This exacerbation of Sunni-Shia tensions is the result of the reckless Saudi action against a popular, nonviolent Shia leader. Also reckless is the US government’s response, which has failed to condemn the Saudi government and distance itself from the abusive regime.

On January 2, the Saudi government executed 47 people, most of them by beheading. Those executed included Sunnis convicted of Al Qaeda-affiliated attacks, as well as Shia opponents—Sheik Nimr Al-Nimr and three others arrested when they were still juveniles. The killing of Al-Nimr has sparked a massive reaction because he was a prominent religious leader who defended the Shia minority and criticized the abuses—both domestic and foreign—of the Saudi regime. He supported the 2011 anti-government protests in the Eastern Province, protests that erupted in the wake of the Arab Spring. The oil-rich Eastern Province is home to some 2 million Shiites, who have long complained of discrimination by the Sunni government.

In response to increasingly vocal demands for reforms from Shiites, who constitute about 15 percent of the total population, Saudi authorities waged a harsh crackdown. Al-Nimr was arrested and imprisoned in 2012, then convicted of sedition, disobedience and bearing arms. He did not deny the political charges against him, but insisted he never carried weapons or called for violence.

He also distanced himself from sectarian divisions. He called for people to stand up to tyrants regardless of their sect, from the Sunni rulers in Bahrain to Syria’s Assad, who is from the Alawite sect of Shia Islam. “Sheikh al-Nimr preached that we should support the oppressed against the oppressor, regardless of religion,” said Gulf scholar Ali al-Ahmed. To add insult to injury, Sheik al-Nimr’s nephew, Ali al-Nimr, was targeted and arrested at the age of 17 for protesting government corruption, and his since been sentenced to beheading and public crucifixion.

The Saudi government was well aware that killing Sheikh al-Nimr would enrage Shia both inside and outside the country. Their actions abroad have already raised sectarian tensions, such as the 2011 Saudi military intervention in Bahrain to crush a democratic revolt dominated by the country’s majority Shiites. The Saudi military intervention in Yemen against the Houthis (a Shiite sect), an ongoing intervention that has killed thousands of innocents and caused a humanitarian crisis, has also angered the Shia community. And Saudi efforts to topple the Iranian-backed Assad regime in Syria also fuel tension between Saudi Arabia’s Sunni leadership and its Shiite citizens.

 

An additional factor fanning ethnic hatred has been ISIL attacks on Shiite mosques in the kingdom. Many Shiites hold the kingdom’s religious establishment responsible for the attacks and maintain that Saudi officials turn a blind eye to ISIL’s sectarian agenda in the kingdom.

 

The cleric’s execution will also complicate Saudi Arabia’s relationship with the Shiite-led government in Iraq, where the Saudi embassy was just reopened for the first time in nearly 25 years.

The US government has expressed concern that al-Nimr’s execution risked “exacerbating sectarian tensions at a time when they urgently need to be reduced.” The government understands that the explosive reaction to the al-Nimr execution has the potential to bring even more bloodshed to the Middle East, from derailing Syria peace talks to prolonging the war in Yemen to rekindling uprisings in Bahrain.

But instead of insisting on al-Nimr’s release during his years in prison and echoing Amnesty International’s condemnation of his “deeply flawed” trial, the US government was silent. Even after the execution, the US refused to issue a strong denunciation.

For decades US governments, both Democratic and Republican, have backed the kingdom. The US-Saudi alliance dates back to World War II, when US officials started to see Saudi’s oil as a strategic advantage. Since then, the US has blindly supported the Kingdom in almost every political and economic effort, despite the fact that Saudi Arabia is an ultraconservative monarchy rife with human rights abuses.

Saudi Arabia has consistently been ranked by Freedom House as one of the worst humans rights violators in the world. Earning the lowest possible score in all three categories of freedom, civil liberties and political rights, it is one of only ten nations considered “not free.”

The killing of Sheikh Al-Nimr should serve as a prime moment for the U.S. to reconsider its alliance with the Saudi regime, a regime that not only denies human rights to its own people but exports death and destruction abroad. An upcoming activist-based Saudi Summit, which will be held in Washington DC on March 5-6, is an effort to build a campaign to support challenge this toxic relationship.

The Unviability of an Islamic Caliphate: Ethnic Barriers by  L. Ali Khan

Posted on by
Reply

 

( Shared by Azeem Farooki)

This series of commentaries, Unviability of Islamic Caliphate, will explain that Islamic caliphate in any form, much less in image of the fetishized first caliphate (632-661 C.E.), is an utter impossibility, even though the romance of a unified Muslim ummah, free of foreign occupations, comprised of all ethnic communities and denominations, devoted to peace, social justice, piety, and glorification of One God, is a dream ideology that fascinates millions of Muslims –much like the utopias of global solidarity, environmental wholeness, scientific socialism, or racial purity that enchant other peoples and communities. The unviability of instituting a new caliphate questions the Western war on terror as well the wild conquest claims Muslim militants make to terrorize a nervous world.

For decades, Arab militants in the Middle East have been praying for the creation of Islamic caliphate modeled after the first caliphate established in Medina after the death of Prophet Muhammad. To the surprise of many Muslims across the world, the Islamic Caliphate State (also known as IS, ISIS, ISIL, Daesh) has actually inaugurated a miniature caliphate in territories purloined from Syria and Iraq. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (b. 1970), holding a doctorate in Islamic studies, is the appointed caliph.

Several maps of Islamic caliphate, attributed to the ISIS, circulate on the internet to display a future empire that stretches from Southern Spain to Western China, a contiguous mass of land stretching beyond the Arab Middle East to include Andalusia, Turkey, the Balkans, Iran, South Asia, Central Asia, and Xinjiang. Some maps include Indonesia, the largest Muslim nation in the world, and Malaysia, though not contiguous to the rest of the empire. Some maps are taken from video games. Others are constructed to show the scale of menace the ISIS poses to the world. Simply put, the maps capture a new global caliphate that will conquer lands to bring vast portions of the planet under one central Islamic authority, as did the first caliphate of the seventh century. These maps fuse the real with the fantastic, picturing fears of absurdity.

Arab Sovereignty over Caliphate

The idea of a new Islamic caliphate is built on two constructs. First, the new caliphate institutes the sovereignty of Sunnis, a matter I will discuss later in the series. Second, the new caliphate aspires to reestablish the prerogative of Arabs as natural rulers of the Muslim world. Because of these two constructs, it is understandable why the ideology of Islamic caliphate is nurtured primarily in Sunni Arab communities. The initiation of the ISIS caliphate in Syria and Iraq is not a freak coincidence but has been deliberately orchestrated (by whom? – a matter also examined in the series) to revive historical memories because Damascus and Baghdad were the seats of two Arab caliphates, the Umayyad caliphate (661-750 C.E.) and the Abbasid caliphate (750-1258 C.E.).

Much like the Wahhabi movement in Saudi Arabia, the new caliphate draws inspiration from the first Islamic state established in Medina. In 622, after forced migration from Makkah to Medina, the Prophet instituted a small state that would later turn into an enormous empire under the first caliphate. The four rulers of the first caliphate were dutiful companions, dedicated disciples, and close relatives of the Prophet. Even though the Prophet’s circle of companions included a few non-Arabs, most companions were his family members and the Arabs of Makkah and Medina. Within thirty years after the Prophet’s death, and despite inter-clan rivalries, the Arabs embarked upon an unprecedented imperial expansion. Armed with Islamic faith, the indomitable will to fight, and divine permission to acquire booty from defeated enemies, the Arabs under the aegis of the first caliphate, in less than thirty years, conquered Mesopotamians, Syrians, Palestinians, Egyptians, Iranians and others.

Click link for full article;

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/01/07/the-unviability-of-an-islamic-caliphate-ethnic-barriers/

posted by f.sheikh