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=By= Ken Jones

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] knew full well that our two February walks in the southern Arizona desert were nothing like the dangerous treks taken by thousands of migrants each year coming from south of our border. The dozen of us in the Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) borderlands delegation were safe inside of our white skin and U.S. citizenship and with our trustworthy guides and ample water. We were only visiting small bits of two migrant trails in order to leave some water for migrants and to see and feel what the unforgiving terrain was like for them.

Even so, I had a small sense of the danger our Mexican and Central American brothers and sisters must feel as I stumbled through the uneven and gravelly scrub full of mesquite, yucca, cactus and other spiny vegetation. Completely dependent on our guides to know which way to go, I was soon hot and tired and worried about two in our group who were barely able to keep up – a man who was overweight and had very bad eyesight and a woman who was red in the face and struggling to catch her breath. Both were very unstable on their feet and falling down as we hiked up and down hills, through dried up riverbeds and over rocky outcrops. How much harder it must be for those struggling for their lives over many days in these conditions.

As we walked, we could see discarded shirts and socks, empty water bottles, some footprints in the sandy bottoms of arroyos. Enough to feel the presence of the migrants. A helicopter flew overhead and we were told that there were innumerable cameras and sensors throughout the area. Maybe we were being watched, moving in broad daylight as we were. But again, we knew we were safe. We were not the ones being hunted by the Border Patrol.

Being hunted as criminals by a large, well armed, and increasingly high tech military force like the Border Patrol, the migrants are up against fearsome odds. Over 4,200 agents are employed in the Tucson sector of the borderland and they maintain a constant presence – on the roads, at checkpoints, in the cities and towns, in the air, in the outback, and with their ubiquitous surveillance cameras. And of course, there is the enormous and forbidding Wall, which is not so much a barrier to migration as it is an iconic and ominous message of unwelcome from Fortress America.

Nobody knows for sure how many die in this desert each year because many bodies are never found. The remains of over 2500 have been found in Arizona from 1999 to 2012. In the Tucson sector alone, 130 bodies were found just in 2014. Mostly, the cause of death is heat stroke. There are no signs of this toll slowing down.

Many more are captured by the Border Patrol, often in what amounts to a life-saving rescue. Nonetheless, the migrants are headed for another kind of hell. While Border Patrol agents who met with us assured us that arrests and detainments were made in a humane way, we heard reports of significant abuse and pervasive racism in the force.

In a 2011 report titled A Culture of Cruelty, the organization No More Deaths documented many abuses by the Border Patrol, including denying food, water, and medical care, physical abuse, overcrowded, unsanitary, overly cold or hot detainment conditions, and more. The report states:
“In our years of documenting abuses committed by the Border Patrol against detainees and migrants, we have found that instances of mistreatment and abuse in Border Patrol custody are not aberrational. Rather, they reflect common practice in an agency that is part of the largest federal law-enforcement body in the country, Customs and Border Protection. Many of them plainly meet the definition of torture under international law… We believe our findings demonstrate that abuse, neglect, and dehumanization of migrants is part of the institutional culture of the Border Patrol, reinforced by an absence of meaningful accountability mechanisms.”

Upon arrest, migrants are bound for a criminal justice system that is seriously stacked against them. A key element of the system is the court hearing known as Operation Streamline. This is a program of en masse, fast track prosecution of immigrants that was begun in 2005. In Tucson, up to 70 people appear together in court each weekday, shackled in chains on their hands, feet, and around their waists. In order to avoid a felony charge, they are all advised by court-appointed private attorneys to plead guilty to a lesser charge and that is exactly what they do, lined up 8-10 at a time in front of the judge. All of the defendants receive sentences of between 30 and 180 days in prison. Operation Streamline defendants serve their sentences in publicly and privately operated federal prisons throughout the country. Frequently they are sent to a prison located far from their family and community. This is normally followed by deportation. From start to finish, it is a travesty of justice.

Approximately 700,000 people have been prosecuted for illegal entry or re-entry, through Streamline or other prosecutions, since Operation Streamline began. Almost 70,000 migrants were criminally prosecuted at the border during federal fiscal year 2015 alone.

And to what end? The official reason given for this huge system of military occupation, kangaroo judiciary process, and mass incarceration is deterrence – to stop people from migrating to the U.S. from Mexico and Central America. But no one we met during this delegation thinks that it is actually serving that purpose. While there is currently a dip in the numbers of people risking their lives and freedom in coming across the border, this is largely thought to be a factor of economic realities – fewer jobs on the U.S. side, more jobs in the maquiladoras on the Mexican side.

As long as the root causes for the migration remain in place, the migration will undoubtedly continue. These causes are well known. People come because they are poor and hungry, primarily as a result of the wreckage to their livelihoods brought on by NAFTA and CAFTA. They come because of the violence they have endured from repressive governments armed and supported by the U.S., from cartels involved in the trafficking of drugs, guns, and people, and from local gangs that have grown out of the criminal and impoverished environments in their home countries.

They also come because they have been separated from their families and loved ones after being caught up in the avalanche of deportations now taking place in the U.S. The Department of Homeland Security data show that the Obama administration deported a record 438,421 unauthorized immigrants in fiscal year 2013, continuing a streak of stepped up enforcement that has resulted in more than two million deportations since Obama took office.

While visiting a soup kitchen in Nogales, Mexico that serves a great many of the recently deported, I was struck by several personal stories. One man in his mid-thirties, who spoke perfect English, had been in the US most of his life, living in Los Angeles and Utah. He was arrested as a result of a traffic ticket incurred by his mother, found to be undocumented and sent to jail for three years, then deported. He had just arrived in Mexico two hours before I met him at the soup kitchen. He has a mother, wife, and four children (two in Utah, two in LA). He will try again to enter the U.S.

I also spoke with a young man of 29 who had lived in New York City since the age of nine. He went to his mother’s funeral in Mexico and was arrested trying to come back to the US. He has tried re-entry five times, escaped back to Mexico twice, and spent time in U.S. prison three times, having gone through Streamline. He was told that next time he will receive 2 years in prison, but he is going to try again soon. He has a wife and three children in New York.

I talked with three young people from El Salvador who were escaping the gang violence and hunger there. One young man said he had to go to the US to make money so he could send it back to his mother who has no money and very little to eat. He had been arrested in Montana where he was picking potatoes and deported. He was now on his way for another try across the Arizona desert.

What struck me as I talked with these migrants is that I would do the exact same thing if I were in their shoes. Yes, I would risk death or arrest to get back to my children and family. Yes, I would cross the desert in search of food and sustenance for my mother and myself if we were hungry and desperate. Yes, I would try to return to the country I grew up in and the only home I knew, even if I were undocumented.

What also struck me is that many Americans would do it too. And that many Americans would have empathy for these migrants and extend a helping hand. If only they weren’t kept separated from these supposed “others” by walls more effective than the one that physically sits on the border – walls of fear and ignorance erected by those who profit from dividing humanity.

It is no secret who benefits from this war on immigrants. It is the corporations who enacted the supposed free trade agreements and profit from exploited labor. It is the military/police/surveillance/private prison industry. It is politicians who stay in power by creating enemies and get elected with the help of campaign contributions from those who stand to gain from our hard-hearted policies.

Each day on this CPT delegation, we had time for group prayer and reflection. Always, the contrast between Christian values and the suffering imposed on those coming across our borders to seek a better life was jarring. How can Christians – or people of any faith, or no faith, for that matter – reconcile themselves to the militarization and victimization taking place in our borderlands, in our names?

We met many good people in the southern Arizona region working to provide humanitarian aid to migrants, to accompany those in need, and to advocate for more humane immigration policies. They too are breaching walls, traveling in stark and threatening territory, caring for family – the human family. Blessed are the peacemakers.

Our walks in the desert and visits with deportees and those working to accompany them entailed no real risks on our part. Other than the risk that our consciences would call us into action. Walking on a migrant trail is, after all, a walk with ourselves

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=By= Paul Street

“Colored lights can hypnotize,” the Guess Who’s rock anti-anthem “American Woman” (1970) proclaimed, “sparkle someone else’s eyes.” Beneath the hypnotic glow of the endless fake-democratic presidential election pageant, the eco-cidal deep state of capitalist rule grinds on.  Let’s look behind the Wizard of Oz curtains a bit to confront two critical stories that have gotten unduly meager consideration from the reigning U.S. candidate- and election-obsessed media-politics culture.

…Global Investor Right Protection in the Guise of Free Trade  

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n February 4th, three days after the headline-holding Iowa Caucus (“Cruz Trumps Trump,”  “Sanders Fights Hillary to Virtual Tie”) and five days before the New Hampshire primaries (“Trump and Sanders Win Big”), trade ministers from 12 nations including the United States met in Auckland, New Zealand to sign the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). The signing took place under impressive police-state protection, with riot-ready gendarmes occupying key intersections to block large demonstrations against the regressive, authoritarian, and arch-corporatist measure.

The popular anger in New Zealand (and elsewhere) is quite understandable. Contrary to the neoliberal rhetoric of “free trade” and “improved standards” in which it is wrapped, the U.S.-sponsored measure isn’t really about trade. It certainly isn’t about meeting enhanced social and environmental requirements. Its real purpose is to strengthen corporations’ ability to defend and extend their intellectual property rights (drug patents, movie rights, and the like) and to guarantee that they will be compensated by governments for any profits they might lose from having to meet decent public labor and environmental (and other) specifications – something certain to discourage the enactment and enforcement of such standards. Key parts of the TPP permit foreign capital to freely and easily enter a country and for profits to be just as easily removed. The TPP would ban capital controls, which let nations block disruptive inflows of ‘hot money’ from speculative investors and then escape before the bubble they create explodes. It would also block the passage of financial transaction taxes, a method for checking speculation and for generating public revenue. The measure also legitimizes the extensive privatization of public enterprises.

The TPP is designed to help big multinational businesses attain special deals they would be unable to get through existing political processes, considered excessively democratic by global capital. A foreign corporation could sue and receive damages for anticipated profit losses resulting from an increase in the minimum wage (federal, state, or local) in the United States.

A U.S. state or Canadian province (or any other member-state jurisdiction) would have to compensate oil and gas companies for anticipated profits lost to bans on the environmentally disastrous practice of hydraulic fracturing (fracking).

Big Pharma and the big corporate media firms would be granted stronger and longer-lasting patent and copyright safeguards across the “free trade” zone.

Big multinational banking and investment firms would have to be paid by TPP governments that want to keep their nations’ financial systems safe through responsible regulation.

Food, chemical, consumer goods, and pesticide industries will be able to able to limit the ability of TPP governments to impose safety and environmental regulations on the things they sell and how they make them. The giant global and U.S.-based consumer packaged goods firm Procter & Gamble (just for one example) could demand compensation from any TPP nation (including the U.S.) that dared to subject its products and workplaces to basic social and environmental rules and regulations.

Beneath Obama’s claim that it is about creating a “level playing field,” the TPP is about a race to the capitalist bottom, a levelling down of people’s and government’s capacity to impose limits on business behavior. Like its ugly predecessor the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), it’s about what the New York Times calls “investor protection.”

Of special undemocratic significance, the TPP constructs a new legal structure that transcends the existing, nation-based legal system. Big global corporations who don’t think that American, Australian, Japanese, or Malaysian (etc.) courts can be trusted to give them a “fair deal” (translation: decisions consistent with their desired rate of profit) will be able to turn to “investor-state dispute settlement [ISDS] tribunals”: three-person corporate lawyer-staffed panels that will effectively make their own law on behalf of big business.

The panels will be kangaroo courts of and for global capital. Corporations will get to sue governments in these secret corporate-globalist courts if national, state-provincial, or local laws are passed that challenge any provision of the TPP, such as the one that prohibits privatization.

It doesn’t get much more sinister than that.

Obama might have attended the Auckland signing himself but that would have been unwise given the measure’s unpopularity at home and abroad. The treaty’s declared opponents include Bernie Sanders, most of the Democratic Party “progressive base,” Ted Cruz, Donald Trump (who has called the TPP “insanity”) and (disingenuously enough) the arch-neoliberal fake-progressive Hillary Clinton, who cannot follow her usual corporatist instincts on the measure during a primary campaign.

Consistent with its longstanding and remarkable efforts to keep the details of the TPP secret, the Obama administration is scurrying to get the measure through Congress before the elections this fall. Last year, the neoliberal president got enough Democrats votes in Congress to pass “fast-track” legislation so that Congress will have to vote on the treaty in a rapid, up-or-down, all-or-nothing way, with no time for careful study and amendment. With all four of the top presidential contenders – Sanders, Trump, Cruz, and Clinton – technically opposed to the measure for now, speed and stealth are the order for the day for Obama and his largely Republican congressional TPP allies. Media silence is critical for passage.

The Auckland signing and protests took place with remarkably little U.S. “mainstream” media coverage and commentary.  This is consistent with the national corporate communications complex’s enduring pattern of relative quietness on the TPP – a reflection of the multinational media oligopolies’ strong interest in the measure’s final approval on Capitol (Capital) Hill.

The pattern has been sustained in the media-managed Democratic Party presidential debates.  During the February 4th CNN-choreographed Bernie Sanders-Hillary Clinton “Town Hall” in New Hampshire, CNN questioners avoided the critical measure completely.  A Microsoft Word search of the event’s voluminous transcript (politicians’ hot air runs to high word counts) yields two scant hits for “TPP” or “Trans-Pacific Partnership” (two on the former, zero on the latter, to be precise). Both came courtesy of New Deal liberal Sanders, who made the following brief and passing references:

1. “Secretary Clinton has been a supporter in the past of various trade policies, NAFTA and PNTR with China. Reluctantly, and after a lot of pressure on her, she came out against the TPP, and I’m glad that she did.”

2. CNN’s Anderson Cooper: “Did President Obama let progressives down?”

Sanders: “I think in some areas, progressive — for example, in the trade area. Right now, I think they signed today the TPP in New Zealand. I think it is a continuation of bad trade policies. The president supports it, I strongly disagree with it.”

That was it. There was no further or serious discussion of the critical measure.

The TPP did not make it into either the questions or the answers to be searched in the 13,500-word transcript of the February 11th Hillary-Bernie debate conducted by the “Public” (Petroleum?) Broadcasting System’s obsequiously imperial Newshour hosts Gwenn Ifill and Clinton Foundation donor Judy Woodruff. (The second “P”BS anchor is a Clinton Foundation donor, by the way)

A Planet-Baking/Bakken Pipeline in the Upper Midwest

Meanwhile, 12,899 kilometers northeast of Auckland, in Des Moines, Iowa, the Big Carbon-captive Iowa Utilities Board (IUB) is moving toward final approval of the 1,134-mile Bakken Pipeline. The planet-cooking creation of Dakota Access LLC (itself a division of the eco-cidal corporation Energy Transfer Partners), this $4 billion project will carry 570,000 barrels of largely fracked crude oil from North Dakota’s “Bakken oil patch” on a diagonal course through South Dakota, 18 Iowa counties, and a Native American reservation to Patoka, Illinois. It will link with another pipeline that will transport the black gold to terminals and refineries along the Gulf of Mexico. Some of the “sweet crude” may be loaded onto rail cars for shipment to the east coast.

Besides contributing to the catastrophic problem of anthropogenic – really capital-o-genic – climate change (global warming driven largely by the excessive extraction and burning of fossil fuels), it helps capitalists make profits on the environmentally disastrous, water-wasting and water-polluting practice of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and threatens Iowa waterways, groundwater, and lands with terrible toxic leaks and spills. As Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement noted last year: “If the Bakken Pipeline is built, it would seriously harm Iowa’s already impaired water quality, threaten the integrity of the fertile farmland of thousands of everyday Iowans, and contribute to our dependence on fossil fuels. This steers us away from developing renewable energy infrastructure and curbing the most catastrophic impacts of climate change.”

The project includes the assertion of eminent domain whereby Iowa farmers and others will be forced to grant Dakota Access, well, access to their supposedly private property.  The pipeline requires a permanent easement 50 feet wide, with no structures allowed on the easement.  A wider, temporary easement will be corporately appropriated during construction. The company boasts that it has purchased voluntary easement agreements on nearly 80 percent of the properties along the route in Iowa.

Iowa’s Meskawki Indian tribe objects to the pipeline, which will defile the group’s burial grounds and treaty-ceded territory. Also voicing opposition is the Sac and Fox Tribe of the Mississippi, whose Tribal Chair Judith Bender told the IUB last year that the “pipeline will cross every major watershed in Iowa. It will only take one mistake and life in Iowa will change for the next thousands of years. As a people that have lived in Iowa for thousands of years, we have environmental concerns about the land and drinking water….Our main concern is that Iowa’s aquifers might be significantly damaged, We think that should be protected, because it is the water that gives Iowa the best way of life.” Indeed, as few Americans know, Iowa is one of the most watery states in the nation.

The Bakken Pipeline is part of why Big Carbon is undaunted by Obama’s decision not to approve the Keystone XL Pipeline late last year.

The pipeline’s builders are not especially worried about public opposition or the IUB’s decision. They have amassed vast quantities of material and equipment ready to go into destructive motion the minute the anticipated final thumbs-up is given. If all goes well for Dakota Access, the company will begin construction of the pipeline (to the standard environmentally oblivious applause of regional construction worker unions) this spring and complete the pipeline next fall – perhaps around the time of the culmination of the next “quadrennial electoral extravaganza” (Noam Chomsky). Maybe the company is counting in part on the state’s progressives being too hypnotized by the major party candidate madness – the endless rolling spectacle that is the US presidential election process and which counts as “politics,” the only politics that matters[1] – to pay all that much attention to unpleasantly plutocratic and environmentally catastrophic “background noise” like the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Bakken Pipeline.

In the days leading up to major party electoralists’ Iowa Caucus Holy Day, Iowa was briefly home to a large number of Sanders-backing political visitors with out-of-state license plates and banners proclaiming on the sides of their SUVs that “the Revolution Starts Here.” The slogan appeared inside an outline of the state of Iowa. I doubt that many of these politico-motorists will be returning to Iowa to engage in civil disobedience and other forms of resistance against the planet-baking Bakken Pipeline beneath and beyond electoral extravaganzas.

Iowa City author Paul Street’s latest book is They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, 2014)

Endnote
1. As Chomsky explained on the eve of the 2004 elections, “Americans may be encouraged to vote, but not to participate more meaningfully in the political arena. Essentially the election is a method of marginalizing the population. A huge propaganda campaign is mounted to get people to focus on these personalized quadrennial extravaganzas and to think, ‘That’s politics.’ But it isn’t. It’s only a small part of politics… So, in the election, sensible choices have to be made. But they are secondary to serious political action. The main task is to create a genuinely responsive democratic culture, and that effort goes on before and after electoral extravaganzas, whatever their outcome” (emphasis added).

 

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Senior Contributing Editor, Paul Street (www.paulstreet.org) is the author of many articles, chapters, speeches, and books, including Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008); Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007; Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Routledge, 2005); Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008); The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2010); and (co-authored with Anthony DiMaggio) Crashing the Tea Party: Mass Media and the Campaign to Remake American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, May 2011).  Street can be reached at paulstreet99@yahoo.com

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=By= Chuck Orloski

Why is the TPP not front and center in the debates? A question poetically tackled by Chuck Orloski with his Archie Bunker screen set.

Midnight in D.C. –

Smithsonian History Museum glass glare,

no one around but for security cameras.

The Bunker family stayed up late,

emerged from bunker,

and took seats upon favorite chairs.

Archie’s politics stunk for Edith,

she actually “pulled her weight,”

but Archie insisted he must find out

the Iowa caucus results prior to

spinning Glen Miller records

and “pack it in for the night.”

Wearing pink bathrobe and pumps,

Edith complained,

“Why Archie… why don’t you

do something useful and sneak

over to the Capitol and find out how

the Trans Pacific Partnership fares?”

“Nag, nag, nag,” thought Archie,

“and the dingbat barely passed 8^th grade!”

“Tell me who gives Edith such ideas?

Who gets to see the T.P.P.?

Who the hell has time to read it?

Who will let me inside Xerox room?”

Mad to a killing point,

the couple stared across empty hallway

and nobody in the Homeland laughed.

“You know, Arch, uh, Trump lost Iowa tonight!”

“Ho, ho, ho!” Triumphant laughter!

“I told lazy son-in-law Meathead

that Dubuque Jews won’t go for Carson!”

Momentarily,

Edith pondered their Seacaucus wedding.

She lived unawares on TV for seven years.

She learned compliance with majorities

as well as any housewife did before her time. .

A Security Guard’s footsteps,

a Hoover/Cruz/Rubio/Jeb tap-pity-tap-tap,

and the Bunkers fled for bunker below.

Under Archie’s supervision,

Edith slammed pick into tunnel wall

and watched Potomac droplets enter space.

“C’mon, Edith, if ‘ya want me to read the T.P.P.

over at the Rotunda Bundestag-dunda,

you gotta dig – grab Iowa by the corn!”

“Iowa.., Arch?   Why I thought all along our

producers wanted to see green, not hawkeyes!”

Perhaps it was Archie’s only way

to express Free Trade Treaty love?

Frustrated,

He shook off lead (Pb) contaminated

tunnel mud from Dickie trousers,

his eyes turned red, moaned,

“Think I’ll go to Kelsey’s Bar,

chug cold ones, watch the Super Bowl

and pray none of them fruity-tootie

Ching Chongs park their Pacific Rim

asses next to mine!”

Author’s note:   In 2002, along with my two sons (ages 11 and 6) and a work friend, we toured the Smithsonian Museum of History. Of all the historical artifacts and exhibits at hand, older son Dan most remembered the “All in the Family” display, and younger Joseph was fascinated with the Greyhound Bus interior toilet.

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Author Name Bio

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=By= Mathew Maavak

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hile various Silk Roads have been highlighted by China for a “Greater Eurasia” economic integration, it is time to look beyond infrastructure, trade and economics. A lasting foundation can buttress the building blocks of tomorrow, especially in science, technology and innovation (STI).

With the world likely entering a prolonged period of economic slowdown, as well as increasing volatilities and uncertainties, Greater Eurasia –particularly its East Asian pivot –still remains a zone of relative stability. But such stability is contingent upon maintaining a level of economic autarchy, a robust and credible medium of transaction (i.e. Global Yuan) and qualitative leaps in hi-tech innovation and exports to offset the fallouts of a shrinking global market.

East Asia can no longer depend on extra-regional exports to fund its future engines of growth. The region must leverage on its internal strengths to maintain sustainable growth; to focus more on the regional rather than the global.

Increasing regional interconnectedness therefore necessitates information and R&D collaborations at an unprecedented pace in order to “colonize” the future.

China can lead the STI Silk Road

While China-initiated Silk Routes create and merge trading, financial and infrastructural nodes, there remains a critical need to build and synergize regional STI capacity. Trade without concomitant improvements in national STI capabilities may lead to rentier-yoked economies in relatively less developed regions of East Asia (e.g..in Bangladesh, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar etc). An STI Silk Road levels the playing field by combining expertise, exchanging critical knowledge and exploring solutions to fill national developmental gaps.

Incredibly, such regional undertaking may not entail costly additional investments. Apart from already extant infrastructure, newly-laid fibre optic cables and transponders along many silk routes can be used to facilitate a regional, internet-facilitated STI superhighway.

The central nodes in each nation would ideally be its universities, science and technology parks, government agencies and indigenous NGOs which should generally be open to participation from all strata of society. An Open Source approach can be employed to gauge what the people want, need and aspire in terms of their immediate development. The central nodes in each nation may act as gatekeepers in this regard while a pan-regional cluster of nodal institutions may accelerate and amplify solutions for myriad developmental needs.

Through a process of give and take, citizen-level aspirations can be aligned to national and regional strategic needs. This way, citizens will not only take credit but will share due blame for consensus decisions made.

Unlike the developmental plans of the West to date, the people of East Asia will be the co-stakeholders and engineers of their future development. The sheer magnitude of contradictions and chaos roiling the West right now shows what happens when the “people factor” is reduced to a “paper tiger.” This elitist trap, marked by myriad fundamental and fractionating inequalities, is to be avoided at all costs.

Insulating the Future of the East

The STI Silk Road would arguably be the ultimate regional insulator and stabilizer.The China-led Belt and Road (B&R) initiatives can be aligned to synergize with national STI clusters. This knowledge-centric approach helps ensure that no particular East Asian nation will predominate at the deleterious expense of another. The STI Silk Road will leverage the particular strengths of constituent nations and institutions. The idea here is to ensure a sustainable regional equilibrium, with societies, nations and regions doing what they traditionally did best.

In terms of holistic development, it is ultimately the sciences that can bridge the rural-urban divide, the core and periphery, and the haves and have nots within the region. The ideas of children will be just as important as those of expert adults. This is an emerging axiom of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), Open Innovation and Open Government paradigms.

Where high-speed broadband cables are missing, portable and rechargeable solar packs and satellite dishes may ensure adequate connectivity, bringing the region into a single knowledge matrix. The English language – once an artificial transplantation into the region – would now smooth over linguistic divides. Asia has always had the capacity to absorb the blows of colonial outsiders, learn from the bitter experience, and turn the tables to its advantage.

Securitizing Asia’s Future

Asian media leaders are already working on an “information Silk Road” in tandem with the main Silk Road initiatives to promote Asia as “a community of shared destiny.” Why not fortify that shared Asian destiny via an Open Source matrix for science-based development?

Such an interlinked cluster can be used for transboundary crisis management as well. For example, a plant pathologist may need inputs from lecturers or experts in various sub-domains to map out the impacts of a detected rice fungus half the world away. Since rice is the primary diet of East Asia, such a threat needs to be detected and prioritized through an OSINT-based early warning system. Experts from within the STI Silk Road may consult each other to draw up a contingency management plan i.e. what action plans need be formulated, and which Silk Road university or institution should lead this rapid response project. An emerging threat can be effectively neutralized this way.

An STI Silk Road therefore not only focuses on opportunities and development, it “securitizes” our future. Apart from hi-tech innovation, citizens in an economically depressed world can be empowered to exchange forms of regional jugaad (frugal) innovation via Open Source tools.

Inaction is not an option if the region is to avoid a repeat of the East Asian financial and currency crises of 1997.The coming set of crises are slated to be far worse than preceding ones in recent memory.

China can therefore help secure the future of East Asia by adding yet another golden strand into the Silk Road tapestry. It is time to create an STI Silk Road.

 

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 Mathew Maavak is a doctoral researcher in Security Foresight at University Teknologi Malays
Article: Republished with author’s permission from CCTV.
Featured Image: Chinarch380a at Changshou Station. (wodhks123 – open source)

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vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL-QUOTES BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS.

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=By= Michael Snyder

Did you know that there are 5 “too big to fail” banks in the United States that each have exposure to derivatives contracts that is in excess of 30 trillion dollars?  Overall, the biggest U.S. banks collectively have more than 247 trillion dollars of exposure to derivatives contracts.  That is an amount of money that is more than 13 times the size of the U.S. national debt, and it is a ticking time bomb that could set off financial Armageddon at any moment.  Globally, the notional value of all outstanding derivatives contracts is a staggering 552.9 trillion dollars according to the Bank for International Settlements.  The bankers assure us that these financial instruments are far less risky than they sound, and that they have spread the risk around enough so that there is no way they could bring the entire system down.  But that is the thing about risk – you can try to spread it around as many ways as you can, but you can never eliminate it.  And when this derivatives bubble finally implodes, there won’t be enough money on the entire planet to fix it.

A lot of readers may be tempted to quit reading right now, because “derivatives” is a term that sounds quite complicated.  And yes, the details of these arrangements can be immensely complicated, but the concept is quite simple.  Here is a good definition of “derivatives” that comes from Investopedia…

A derivative is a security with a price that is dependent upon or derived from one or more underlying assets. The derivative itself is a contract between two or more parties based upon the asset or assets. Its value is determined by fluctuations in the underlying asset. The most common underlying assets include stocks, bonds, commodities, currencies, interest rates and market indexes.

I like to refer to the derivatives marketplace as a form of “legalized gambling”.  Those that are engaged in derivatives trading are simply betting that something either will or will not happen in the future.  Derivatives played a critical role in the financial crisis of 2008, and I am fully convinced that they will take on a starring role in this new financial crisis.

And I am certainly not the only one that is concerned about the potentially destructive nature of these financial instruments.  In a letter that he once wrote to shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett referred to derivatives as “financial weapons of mass destruction”…

The derivatives genie is now well out of the bottle, and these instruments will almost certainly multiply in variety and number until some event makes their toxicity clear. Central banks and governments have so far found no effective way to control, or even monitor, the risks posed by these contracts. In my view, derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal.

Since the last financial crisis, the big banks in this country have become even more reckless.  And that is a huge problem, because our economy is even more dependent on them than we were the last time around.  At this point, the four largest banks in the U.S. are approximately 40 percent larger than they were back in 2008.  The five largest banks account for approximately 42 percent of all loans in this country, and the six largest banks account for approximately 67 percent of all assets in our financial system.

So the problem of “too big to fail” is now bigger than ever.

If those banks go under, we are all in for a world of hurt.

Yesterday, I wrote about how the Federal Reserve has implemented new rules that would limit the ability of the Fed to loan money to these big banks during the next crisis.  So if the survival of these big banks is threatened by a derivatives crisis, the money to bail them out would probably have to come from somewhere else.

In such a scenario, could we see European-style “bail-ins” in this country?

Ellen Brown, one of the most fierce critics of our current financial system and the author of Web of Debt, seems to think so…

Dodd-Frank states in its preamble that it will “protect the American taxpayer by ending bailouts.” But it does this under Title II by imposing the losses of insolvent financial companies on their common and preferred stockholders, debtholders, and other unsecured creditors. That includes depositors, the largest class of unsecured creditor of any bank.

Title II is aimed at “ensuring that payout to claimants is at least as much as the claimants would have received under bankruptcy liquidation.” But here’s the catch: under both the Dodd Frank Act and the 2005 Bankruptcy Act, derivative claims have super-priority over all other claims, secured and unsecured, insured and uninsured.

The over-the-counter (OTC) derivative market (the largest market for derivatives) is made up of banks and other highly sophisticated players such as hedge funds. OTC derivatives are the bets of these financial players against each other. Derivative claims are considered “secured” because collateral is posted by the parties.

For some inexplicable reason, the hard-earned money you deposit in the bank is not considered “security” or “collateral.” It is just a loan to the bank, and you must stand in line along with the other creditors in hopes of getting it back.

As I mentioned yesterday, the FDIC guarantees the safety of deposits in member banks up to a certain amount.  But as Brown has pointed out, the FDIC only has somewhere around 70 billion dollars sitting around to cover bank failures.

If hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars are ultimately needed to bail out the banking system, where is that money going to come from?

It would be difficult to overstate the threat that derivatives pose to our “too big to fail” banks.  The following numbers come directly from the OCC’s most recent quarterly report (see Table 2), and they reveal a recklessness that is on a level that is difficult to put into words…

Citigroup

Total Assets: $1,808,356,000,000 (more than 1.8 trillion dollars)

Total Exposure To Derivatives: $53,042,993,000,000 (more than 53 trillion dollars)

JPMorgan Chase

Total Assets: $2,417,121,000,000 (about 2.4 trillion dollars)

Total Exposure To Derivatives: $51,352,846,000,000 (more than 51 trillion dollars)

Goldman Sachs

Total Assets: $880,607,000,000 (less than a trillion dollars)

Total Exposure To Derivatives: $51,148,095,000,000 (more than 51 trillion dollars)

Bank Of America

Total Assets: $2,154,342,000,000 (a little bit more than 2.1 trillion dollars)

Total Exposure To Derivatives: $45,243,755,000,000 (more than 45 trillion dollars)

Morgan Stanley

Total Assets: $834,113,000,000 (less than a trillion dollars)

Total Exposure To Derivatives: $31,054,323,000,000 (more than 31 trillion dollars)

Wells Fargo

Total Assets: $1,751,265,000,000 (more than 1.7 trillion dollars)

Total Exposure To Derivatives: $6,074,262,000,000 (more than 6 trillion dollars)

As the “real economy” crumbles, major hedge funds continue to drop like flies, and we head into a new recession, there seems to very little alarm among the general population about what is happening.

The mainstream media is assuring us that everything is under control, and they are running front page headlines such as this one during the holiday season: “Kylie Jenner shows off her red-hot, new tattoo“.

But underneath the surface, trouble is brewing.

A new financial crisis has already begun, and it is going to intensify as we head into 2016.

And as this new crisis unfolds, one word that you are going to want to listen for is “derivatives”, because they are going to play a major role in the “financial Armageddon” that is rapidly approaching.

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Michael Snyder is a graduate of the University of Florida law school and he worked as an attorney in the heart of Washington D.C. for a number of years. Today, Michael is best known for his work as the publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog and The American Dream. If you want to know what things in America are going to look like in a few years read his new book The Beginning of the End.