Scathing Government Watchdog Report Details Bleak Outlook on Afghanistan

BY ROBBIE GRAMER-FEBRUARY 1, 2017

The government barely controls half its country, hundreds of thousands have fled their homes due to conflict and opium production is at a historic high in Afghanistan. That’s just a glimpse of Afghanistan’s spiral of dysfunction, compiled by the U.S. government watchdog that oversees the billions of dollars the United States pours into Afghanistan each year.

In a new quarterly report to Congress released Wednesday, the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) office, John Sopko, outlined a stark backslide in progress in Afghanistan — a country the United States has sunk over $117 billion in since 2002.

Just over a week into his new administration, President Donald Trump hasn’t solidified his foreign policy priorities outside of boosting military spending and defeating ISIS. But in Afghanistan, Trump is inheriting a costly and messy conflict from his two predecessors, as the SIGAR report shows.
Among the most damning aspects of the SIGAR report:

The Afghan government had 57.2 percent of the country under its control by the end of 2016 — a 6.3 percent decrease from 2015. That doesn’t bode well, given the number of Afghan security forces is decreasing while its casualties are increasing.

583,000 people fled their homes due to conflict in 2016. SIGAR added that that is “the highest number of displacements since record keeping started in 2008.”
Some 23 percent of the 8,397 conflict-related casualties in Afghanistan were attributed to Afghan security forces and the U.S.-led coalition.

Afghan opium production rose 43 percent from 2015 levels. Afghan opium bankrolls the Taliban and other insurgent groups. And it’s the country’s largest export; 90 percent of the world’s opium came from Afghanistan in 2014 alone.

There were 3 million fewer students actually attending classes in Afghanistan than previously thought. The Afghan Ministry of Education had to strikes the number of students attending classes down to 6 million; some students simply don’t show up, others cannot because of conflict or school closures. Security concerns closed more than 1,000 schools down around the country.

SIGAR suspended and disbarred U.S. funded projects due to corruption, fraud, or poor management, valued at over $137 million in 2016 alone. U.S.-funded projects have a sordid history of mismanagement; the U.S. government squandered nearly half a billion dollars on Afghan mining projects through 2016.
Nearly every trend line is going in the wrong direction — with one notable exception: procurement reform. The Afghan government’s efforts to fight corruption and reform its procurement processes saved $200 million that may have otherwise been lost to corruption, the SIGAR report said.

Sopko added a personal warning in the report to the new Trump administration. “Unfortunately in the nearly five years I’ve been traveling to Afghanistan, I first witnessed the United States put in way too much, way too fast,” he said. “More recently, I’ve watched the U.S. remove way too much, way too fast. 

Policy makers both in Congress and the new Trump Administration should take note of this,” he said.

Photo credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images

How NATO is becoming a threat to Europe

A young boy looks down the sights of a gun on a Stryker vehicle during the ''Dragoon Ride'' military exercise in Kupiskis some 160 kms (100 miles) north of the capital Vilnius, Lithuania, Sunday, June 12, 2016. PAimages/Mindaugas Kulbis. All rights reserved.

HARRY BLAIN 27 January 2017

“Is Russia preparing for war?” read the headline of an International Business Times article on January 12. The story was about the movement of 4000 US troops, along with 87 American tanks and 144 armoured vehicles, into Poland.

BBC News ran a similar story the previous week, headlined “US tanks arrive in Germany to help NATO defences.” It was about “the largest shipment of US brigades since the fall of the Soviet Union” arriving in Northern Germany, ready to move east.

A welcome ceremony was led by Poland’s Prime Minister, while the Deputy Commander of U.S. Land Forces in Europe labelled the troop build-up a “concrete sign of the continued U.S. commitment to the defence of Poland and the NATO alliance.”

The troops will be stationed at a number of Polish military bases over the next nine months, and also carry out training exercises in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary. A Kremlin spokesman, predictably, characterised this as “a threat to us” adding that “this is a third nation that is increasing its military presence near our borders in Europe, and it’s not even a European nation.”

"Enhanced security"

The reasons for jitters in Eastern European and Baltic countries are well-known, stemming mainly from Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014, as well as the new US president’s willingness to question the purpose and funding of NATO. Russian military exercises and reinforcements add to the anxiety.

The Alliance, however, has not hesitated to engage in what the foreign policy think-tanks like to call “shows of resolve”, “greater allied cooperation,” or “enhanced security.” In 2016 alone, NATO and its partners planned around 150 different military exercises, many of which were obviously aimed at Russia. Here is an incomplete list from NATO’s own record:

• “Brilliant Jump Alert” from April 1-10, which “tested the activation process of NATO’s Spearhead force, the Very High Readiness Joint Task Force (VJTF)”, and involved “numerous military headquarters and units” in Poland and Albania, as well as Spain and the UK.
• -
• “Ramstein Alloy” in Estonia from April 19-20, an “air exercise focused on enhancing interoperability among Allies and with partners, as well as exercising Baltic Air Policing aircraft.”
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• “Flaming Sword” from May 1-20 in Lithuania and Latvia: “a multinational exercise testing special operations forces”, which involved “forces from NATO nations and partners, including: Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, Latvia, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Ukraine, the United Kingdom and the United States.”
• -
• “Baltops 16”: “a US-led multinational exercise” in and around the Baltic Sea, “focused on interoperability with regional partner nations in the maritime, air, and land domains.” 2016’s exercise “involved around 5,800 troops from Allied and partner nations.”
• -
• “Flaming Thunder”: An “annual Lithuanian-led live-fire exercise” focusing on “artillery and mortar fire training” from August 1-12.
• -
• And, in June, “the largest Allied exercise” of the year – “Anakonda”. A “Polish-led exercise” which “tested the readiness and interoperability of Polish Armed Forces with participating Allies and partners”, involving around 31,000 troops from 23 different countries.

Although many of these exercises occur regularly, they are clearly escalating. “Anakonda” was the largest war game in Eastern Europe since the end of the Cold War, “Flaming Thunder” involved Ukrainian troops for the first time, and the Obama Administration’s parting gift to NATO’s European Reassurance Initiative was a quadrupling of funding over 2016 levels to around $3.42 billion in 2017.

This will eventually ensure a “persistent, rotational presence of air, land, and sea forces in Central and Eastern Europe”, an expansion in “the scope of 28 joint and multi-national exercises”, “additional combat vehicles and supplies” and “a continuous presence of three fully equipped Army Brigade Combat Teams” in Europe. 

Source: US Department of Defence.

"Deterrence"

Is there any problem with this? War games are not secretive – in fact, they are announced months in advance. Russia always knows exactly when and where a NATO exercise is taking place; its president also surely knew they would become more frequent and forceful as a result of the annexation of Crimea and the deepening turmoil in Ukraine. The point, say NATO’s supporters, is to simply send the message that an act of aggression will not be tolerated: “deterrence.”

The Russian leadership sees it differently. As US troops march into Poland, they ask how the Americans would react to thousands of Russian soldiers in, say, Cuba. Cuba has had every reason to fear US aggression – regular assassination attempts on their former president, an invasion, the harbouring of exiled plane hijackers, an endless economic war – but 4,000 Russian troops would represent a dangerous escalation, as was the presence of Soviet nuclear missiles on the island in the 60s.

Many Latin American countries share Cuba’s complaints: Nicaragua faced a long and bloody war against a US-trained mercenary army in the 80s; Panama was invaded in 1989; Guatemala suffered irreparable damaged from a CIA-sponsored coup in 1954; Venezuela had to face down a US-backed coup as late as 2002; and a coup in Honduras was lied about and then rubber-stampedby Hillary Clinton’s State Department in 2009.

So, when a Polish militiaman tells Sky News that he is taking up arms because “history shows us what our neighbours can do,” many people in Latin America know exactly what he means. Yet, in both cases, the involvement of foreign forces is perfectly capable of inflaming, rather than reducing fears and tensions.

Militias, autocracy, corruption

A good lesson of European history is that wars can arise not just from expansionist dictators, but also from foolish military posturing and alliances capable of turning the murder of an Austrian Duke into a world war. Sometimes, Europe marches to catastrophe; often, it stumbles there. 

With this in mind, is it possible that the Polish government’s encouragement of “pro-defence” armed paramilitary groups – now with around 100,000 members – could backfire? Tens of thousands of angry, patriotic young men with guns and armoured vehicles near the border with Russia’s Kaliningrad territory? Wages paid by a government described by the former president of the Constitutional Court as taking the country down “the road to autocracy” and which has promised to lead a “cultural counter-revolution” in Europe? Apparently, NATO is unconcerned. It was even kind enough to include some of Poland’s paramilitary units in the Anakonda exercise in June.

While Poland is a full NATO member that must be defended in the event of conflict with Russia, Ukraine, a NATO “partner”, is already mired in one. Ukraine is such a good “partner” that it hosted around 2,000 troops from the US and “11 other Allied and partner nations” for Exercise Rapid Trident last year, during which Ukrainian soldiers practiced “setting up roadblocks”, “urban combat”, and “air assaults”, with “equipment from individual rifles to helicopters and tanks.”

In the almost total absence of western media coverage, we could be forgiven for not knowing that there were NATO troops in Ukraine. We could also be forgiven for not knowing that the Speaker of Ukraine’s Parliament co-founded the neo-Nazi Social-National Party, or that its Interior Minister has promoted neo-Nazis to senior positions in the National Police, or that the government renamed a major boulevard “in honour of Stepan Bandera, the leader of partisan groups responsible for the slaughter of thousands of Jews and over 100,000 Poles during WWII.”

Ukraine is also a “corrupt swamp.” In 2015, Joe Biden told Ukraine’s parliamentthat corruption was “eating” the country “like a  cancer” – days after pledging $190 million in extra aid. The Panama Papers revealed how the president, Petro Poroshenko, set up a secret offshore firm in August 2014 “when his troops were being wiped out in eastern Ukraine”, while the Economy Minister resigned in February 2016, citing the presence of “covert corruption” in the government. Since the “Euromaidan Revolution”, President Poroshenko’s approval ratings have even fallen below Viktor Yanukovych’s on the eve of his ouster.

There’s no doubt that Russia has stoked political unrest in Ukraine and breached the 1994 Budapest Memorandum ensuring Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for the dismantling of its nuclear weapons. But to reduce the country’s predicament to Russian adventurism is to ignore the dangers of militarily and politically supporting a regime that we know to be corrupt, at times brutal and too close to the far-right.

What could go wrong?

Recent history gives us some guide of what can go wrong. Georgia – also a NATO partner, rather than member – had its membership bid endorsed in principle by the Alliance in April 2008. By August, it was at war with Russia.

The war, fought over the breakaway Georgian territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, was widely presented as a case of Russian aggression; however, the EU’s investigation led by the Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini blamed Georgia for starting it. Georgia’s President, Mikheil Saakashvili, was left disappointed at the lack of support from western allies.  

Bizarrely, Mr Saakashvili – whose party lost office in 2012 – was appointed Governor of Ukraine’s Odessa region by Poroshenko in May 2015. He resignedjust over a year later, accusing the Ukrainian president of supporting “a criminal bandit clan” of politicians in the region. “Nobody in my life has lied so much or so cynically to me”, he said.

“Knowing him, he tends to exaggerate,” Ukraine's former health minister retorted. These are the men who NATO has trusted and invested in.   

"Obsolete"?

The founding goal of NATO, in the words of its first Secretary-General, was to “keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down.” This has been complicated by the fall of the Soviet Union and the expansion of the Alliance to the east, which has led it into alignment with volatile governments expecting support in the event of conflict with Russia. If that time comes, Crimea will look like a historical footnote.

NATO may not yet be “obsolete”, as President Trump has suggested. But, having helped maintain Europe’s “brutal peace” since 1945, the Alliance could now be a threat to it.  

Ukraine clashes leave several dead and test Trump's Russia stance

Both sides accuse the other of shelling, and water and power shortages in -18C weather raise fears of humanitarian crisis

A woman grieves over the body of her mother who was killed by shelling in Avdiivka, Ukraine. Photograph: Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images

Shaun Walker in Moscow-Wednesday 1 February 2017 

Parts of east Ukraine are on the brink of a humanitarian crisis as the worst violence for a year in the conflict between Kiev and Russia-backed separatists has left up to 19 dead and thousands of people without water and heating in freezing temperatures.

The violence is an early test of Donald Trump’s stated desire for better US relations with Russia. Kiev has watched nervously as Trump has repeatedly praised Vladimir Putin and floated the idea of lifting sanctions. 

The conflict in Ukraine has raged for nearly three years and cost more than 10,000 lives. A ceasefire was agreed in Minsk two years ago, and although little progress has been made since on a political solution, large-scale clashes have been rareover the past year.

However, in the last few days both sides have accused the other of using Grad systems, imprecise weapons that rain down multiple rockets over a wide area.

On Wednesday the Ukrainian military said three soldiers had died overnight, and separatist authorities claimed four civilians had been killed. 

In a clear sign that US policy towards Russia could indeed be heading for a sharp change of course under Trump, the state department made no criticism of Russia or the separatist side, in contrast to most of its statements in response to similar spikes in violence in the past.

The acting state department spokesman Mark Toner said the US was “deeply concerned” by the violence and called for “an immediate, sustained ceasefire”. However, the statement stopped short of apportioning blame.

Russia’s state newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta excitedly noted the change in tone. “Washington is not blaming the unrecognised republics for breaking the ceasefire, is not stating any support for Kiev, is not saying a single word about the role of Russia … Different variations of these elements were, as a rule, a key part of all statements of Ukraine under Barack Obama’s administration.”

The state department statement was markedly different in tone to comments from the US mission to the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe(OSCE), which is staffed by career diplomats and may be out of step with the new mood in Washington.

“Russia and the separatists initiated the violence in Avdiivka,” said the US chargé d’affaires to the OSCE, Kate Byrnes. “We call on Russia to stop the violence, honour the ceasefire, withdraw heavy weapons and end attempts to seize new territory beyond the line of contact.”

There are several rounds of US and EU sanctions on Russia over its annexation of Crimea and actions in east Ukraine. Trump has suggested it could be time to lift them, and has spoken of the potential for a grand deal with Putin. The two leaders spoke by telephone at the weekend and agreed to meet soon.

Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, said during a meeting with security officials on Tuesday: “The shelling is massive. Who would dare to talk about lifting the sanctions in such circumstances?”

In Moscow, officials accused Kiev of provoking the fighting to derail the rapprochement between Putin and Trump. “Kiev is trying to use the fighting it provoked itself as a pretext to refuse to observe the Minsk agreement and blame Russia,” the foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov said on Wednesday.

Fighting has centred on the town of Avdiivka, which lies a few miles from the separatist capital, Donetsk, but is controlled by Ukrainian authorities. The violence has come during a cold snap, with temperatures falling as low as minus 18C.

Giovanna Barberis, Unicef’s representative in Ukraine, said: “Not only are the lives of thousands of children in Avdiivka, and on all sides of the conflict, at risk, but to make matters worse the lack of water and electricity means that homes are becoming dangerously cold and health conditions deteriorating as we speak.”

Also on Wednesday, Ukraine’s defence minister, Stepan Poltorak, claimed a Ukrainian military cargo plane had been shot at from a Russian-held gas rig on the Black Sea. “The shot damaged the plane. The crew were not hurt,” he wrote on Facebook.

So far there has been no comment on the increased violence in Ukraine from Trump’s inner circle. The new US president has repeatedly made favourable statements about Russia and Putin and signalled a very different approach towards Moscow. This month Trump tweeted: “Both countries will, perhaps, work together to solve some of the many great and pressing problems and issues of the WORLD!”

Diplomats who served during the Obama administration have cautioned against making deals with Russia. “For almost three years the United States has worked closely with our European partners to support a peaceful resolution to the conflict through full implementation of the Minsk agreements, including by using sanctions to encourage Putin to comply,” said Dan Baer, formerly the US ambassador to the OSCE. “This should continue to be US policy going forward; anything else would be irresponsible.”

Most of Trump’s executive orders aren’t actually executive orders. Here’s why that matters.

President Trump announced two executive actions, one relating to vetting refugees, the other to increased military funding, on Jan. 27 at the Pentagon. (The Washington Post)

By Andrew Rudalevige January 30

The flood of executive directives flowing from the White House — or from other photogenic signing spots — was a notable part of President Donald Trump’s first week in office.

There will be plenty to analyze as the administration continues — many more such directives have been promised, and rumored. But a preliminary primer seems in order.

Some of the actions taken would have been tempting to any president — for instance, the freeze on the prior administration’s regulatory agenda. Others have been partisan constants — such as the renewal of the so-called Mexico City Policy, called by its opponents the “global gag rule.”

Most, though, have checked off President Trump’s most salient campaign promises — complete with press release-friendly “purpose” sections making extravagant claims not usually found in executive orders. “Sanctuary jurisdictions,” for example, are said to “have caused immeasurable harm to the American people and to the very fabric of our Republic.” The order cracking down on refugees starts with three long paragraphs seeking to blame the 9/11 attacks on the visa process. And crafting an emergency budget amendment for military readiness does not require a formal signing ceremony — a phone call to the Office of Management and Budget would do the trick.

Do these executive actions actually do everything that Trump claims they do?

Thus one role of these directives is to permit Trump to take a public, symbolic stand: For instance, signaling that refugees and oppressive environmental regulations and the Affordable Care Act are bad, while new factories and American-made steel pipelines and big border walls are good.

But another goal, of course, is to spur substantive change. What might these executive actions achieve, in the agencies and (literally) in and on the ground?

The answer varies by the kind of authority each directive assumes. Withdrawing from a trade pact that was not in effect is easy enough. But anything needing new appropriations will in turn need legislative action. There is probably some money in the Homeland Security budget that can be reprogrammed toward construction of a few feet of wall between the United States and Mexico, for instance. But to build more than that — or to hire the 5,000 new Border Patrol agents or 10,000 immigration enforcement officers also “ordered” by the president — Congress will have to approve funding.

Other orders also rely on other actors. However eager Trump may be to fast-track the Keystone XL oil pipeline, for instance, that project still faces state-level hurdles. Efforts to use federal money to browbeat states and localities probably will run up against Supreme Court decisions protecting federalism — law professor Ilya Somin, for example, recently argued that the “sanctuary city” order is likely to be found unconstitutional. Friday’s order on visas, immigrants and refugees has already been challenged in court, and part of it temporarily suspended.

Still other of Trump’s directives create a new process, rather than a new outcome. For instance, the order “Expediting Environmental Reviews and Approvals for High Priority Infrastructure Projects” puts the chair of the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) in charge of identifying such projects and working with departments to speed up permitting. It’s safe to say CEQ does not have a reputation as a bureaucratic powerhouse, and there’s no guarantee that its chair — who hasn’t yet been named in any case — will have the clout needed to browbeat Cabinet secretaries.

More generally, several of the memos ask departments to review existing laws and regulations and to produce new plans. These sorts of assigned tasks can easily sink to the bottom of a new secretary’s long to-do list without sustained White House attention.

Issuing orders without consultation may undermine implementation

The fact that many of the directives issued seem to have been drafted without input from the departments they affect will probably not help with their implementation. Normally executive orders go through a central clearance process managed by OMB. This is both to produce buy-in from the wider bureaucracy, and to protect the president against unintended policy consequences (and/or from the effects of sloppy or misleading language.)

Orders are also supposed to be reviewed by the Justice Department for “form and legality,” ensuring that they are consistent with existing law and presidential authority.

Still, presidential direction matters

As a result, some observers have dismissed the directives as “memos to his advisers.”  Yet any presidential signal to the bureaucracy needs to be taken seriously. This is especially true where presidents use such tools to inform those advisers how vagueness in statutory language should be interpreted.

For example, President Barack Obama used the discretion he read in the Immigration and Nationality Act to try to shield specific groups from deportation. Trump now seeks to use the same principle to broaden deportation priorities, expanding the definition of criminality and giving immigration officials wider latitude in assessing who counts as “a risk to public safety or national security.”  The wall order goes back to a 2006 law authorizing border security measures (although not everyone sees building a wall as legally “necessary and appropriate” under that statute.)

It is less clear what specific actions department heads will or will not be able to take under the order urging them to undermine the Affordable Care Act. Even so, the order makes clear the direction of action the president expects.

They’re not all executive orders. They’re mostly presidential memoranda.

One last point — on vocabulary. Though nearly every headline (and White House staffer for that matter) has trumpeted a spate of “executive orders,” so far these directives are mostly not executive orders but “presidential memoranda.”

Does this matter? Yes. Executive orders (EOs) and presidential memoranda (PMs) have slightly different purposes, though they blend together at the margins and have equivalent legal effect.

Orders do just that: they order people in the executive branch to act a certain way, normally by changing structure or process. They might delegate presidential power, or set up an interagency committee, or a process by which the costs and benefits of regulatory proposals should be evaluated, or conditions with which federal contractors must comply.

Memoranda tend to prompt action rather than to direct it. A president might use one to “suggest” to an agency with its own statutory power over a given area how that power should be used — that the agency should issue certain guidance about how a law should be implemented, or that it should come up with an action plan to review extant regulations and come up with new ones.

Executive orders, which are numbered and published in the Federal Register, are easy to count. As a result, they often are used as a proxy for assessing the scale of presidential unilateralism overall. But if that’s how the batting average is calculated, presidents have an incentive to pad their stats.

When accused of executive overreach, for example, Obama and his allies responded by pointing to the small number of EOs he had issued relative to his predecessors. Their count was accurate enough — but their implication was misleading. Obama was a frequent user of other tools, like PMs, that provided new policy guidance, prompted new regulation, and generated new interpretations of old statutes in ways that matched presidential preferences. On Friday the Trump administration invented the Presidential National Security Memorandum — again, something that won’t be in the count of executive orders.

So taking a full inventory of the toolbox of directives available to presidents helps us better understand the scope of executive authority more generally. And judging by Trump’s first week as president, that will be something we want to understand.

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Andrew Rudalevige is Thomas Brackett Reed Professor of Government at Bowdoin College. He specializes in the study of American political institutions, primarily the presidency and the interbranch relations, with a recent focus on presidential management of the executive branch.

How To Be A Democracy Under Trump

John Perkins-01.31.2017

I watched President Trump’s inauguration from an airport TV in Guatemala. I’d just finished leading 22 people on a pilgrimage to live, study and participate in ceremonies with Mayan shamans at sacred sites. For me, it was the first leg of a two-month working-journey. I am still in Latin America, teaching and speaking at a variety of venues. In the days since that inauguration, I, like so many, have felt the horror of the emerging Trump policies.

Latin Americans cannot understand why so few of us voted in the last election and why so many who did, voted for Trump. A larger percentage of people vote in most Latin American countries than in the US; in several countries, voter turnout exceeds 90%. Many of these countries have a history of brutal dictatorships. Once free of these dictatorships, they revel in their rights to hold democratic elections; they see their ability to vote for their leaders as both a responsibility and a privilege. They wonder why such a relatively small percentage of voters would elect a potential dictator. And moreover, why those non-voters did not vote against him.

The participants on the Guatemala trip ranged from successful business executives to community organizers and healers – with lots of other professions in between. They came from Canada, Ecuador, England, France, Indonesia, Italy, the United States, and Guatemala. Many – especially those from the US – arrived in Guatemala feeling disenfranchised, disempowered, depressed, and – yes, horrified – by the election.

However, as we moved through the shamanic ceremonies, they grew increasingly convinced that the election is a wakeup call for Americans. We have been lethargic and allowed our country to continue with policies that hurt so many people and destroy environments around the world (including Washington’s involvement in the genocidal Guatemalan Civil War against the Mayas that raged for more than three decades). This election exposed a shadow side. It stepped us out of the closet.

Many people expressed the realization that Americans had failed to demand that President Obama fight harder to end the wars in the Middle East, vacate Guantánamo, reign in Wall Street, confront a global economic system where eight men have as much wealth as half the world’s population, and honor so many of the other promises he had made. They recognized that he was up against strong Republican opposition and yet it was he who continued to send more troops and mercenaries to the Middle East and Africa, brought Wall Street insiders into his inner circle, and failed to inspire his party to rally voters to defeat Trump and what is now a Republican majority in both houses.

We talked about how throughout the world, the US is seen as history’s first truly global empire. Scholars point out that it meets the basic definition of empire: a nation 1) whose currency reigns supreme, 2) whose language is the language of diplomacy and commerce everywhere, 3) whose economic expansions and values are enforced through military actions or threats of action, and 4) whose armies are stationed in many nations.

The message became clear: we must end this radical form of global feudalism and imperialism. Those who had arrived in Guatemala disillusioned and depressed now found themselves committed to transforming their sense of disempowerment into actions.

At the end of WWII, Prime Minister Churchill told his people that England could choose the course of empire or democracy, but not both.  We in the US are at such a crossroads today. For far too long we have allowed our leaders to take us down the path of empire.

President Franklin Roosevelt ended a meeting with union leaders by telling them that now they knew he agreed with them, it was their job to get their members to force him to do the right thing. FDR understood that democracy depends on We the People insisting that our leaders do what they promise to do.

We failed with our last president. Let’s not repeat that mistake with the new one.

It is extremely important that We the People force Trump and his band of corporatocracy henchmen to keep the promises we heard in his inaugural address.  Let us hear “making America great” as “making America a true democracy!”  Let us hear “we are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the American People” and “we do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone, but rather to let it shine as an example for everyone to follow” as an echo of Prime Minister Churchill’s contention that a country cannot be both a democracy and an empire.

It is up to us to insist upon democracy. It is essential that we continue to demonstrate and march, to bombard Trump and our other elected officials with tweets, posts, phone calls, and emails; to rally, clamor, and shout; and in every way to get out the word that we must end the wars, feudalism, economic and social inequality, and environmental destruction; we must become the model democracy the world expects of us.

When General George Washington was hunkered down with extremely depressed troops at Valley Forge in the bleak winter of 1777, he ordered that an essay by Thomas Paine be read to all his men. Some of the most famous lines are as applicable today as they were then:

These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he who stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.  .  . A generous parent should say, “If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace” . . .I love the man who can smile in trouble, who can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection.  By perseverance and fortitude we have the prospect of a glorious future.

We have arrived at such a time again. We must each do our part. Let’s here and now commit to taking positive actions. I commit to writing and speaking out at a wide variety of venues. I commit to supporting the Love Summit business conference, a powerful event that is committed to bringing love and compassion into business and politics, to transforming a Death Economy into a Life (Love) Economy. What are your commitments?

We have arrived at a time that tries our souls. We must gather strength from distress, grow brave by reflection, and know that by perseverance and fortitude we can achieve a glorious future. Let’s make sure that the combined legacies of Presidents Obama and Trump will create the opportunity – indeed the mandate – to show the world how a country can be a true democracy. These are the times. . .

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John is a founder and board member of Dream Change & The Pachamama Alliance, non-profit organizations devoted to establishing a world future generations will want to inherit & the author of the NY Times bestseller, Confessions Of An Economic Hitman.

India unveils budget for recovery, and the poor, after cash crackdown

Thu Feb 2, 2017

India unveiled a budget on Wednesday to help the poor with hikes in government spending and cuts in taxes as Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeks to win back the sympathy of voters hit hard by his recent crackdown on "black money".

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley announced increases in spending on rural areas, infrastructure and fighting poverty, and sought to assure lawmakers and the country that the economic impact of the government's cash crackdown would wear off soon.

Jaitley also halved the basic personal income tax rate, and cut taxes on small firms that account for 96 percent of India's businesses, while imposing a surcharge on the better off.

"It's an election budget, to all intents and purposes, with a massive push on rural spending and some quite big tax cuts," said Shilan Shah, India economist at Capital Economics in Singapore.

The budget sops come days before India holds five regional elections that will go some way in determining whether Modi can win a second term as Indian leader in 2019.

"This budget is yet again devoted to the wellbeing of villages, farmers and the poor," Modi said in a national TV address soon after Jaitley delivered his two-hour budget speech.

DEFICIT SLIPPAGE

As economists polled by Reuters had expected, Jaitley raised the target for the federal fiscal deficit to 3.2 percent of gross domestic product in 2017/18 - effectively postponing the goal of bringing it down to 3 percent.

Economists, however, said that the sheer scale of the government's promises on tax cuts and spending increases cast Jaitley's higher deficit goal into doubt.

Balancing the books will depend on him hitting his target to sell 725 billion rupees ($10.7 billion) of state assets - or nearly 60 percent more than the expected proceeds this year.

"Jaitley is leaving room to exceed it at a later time," said Varun Khandelwal, managing director at Bullero Capital in New Delhi.

The finance ministry estimated that the deficit will come in at 3.5 percent this year, in line with target.

ENGINE OF GROWTH

While calling India "an engine of global growth", Jaitley highlighted risks from likely U.S. interest rate hikes, rising oil prices and worries of growing global protectionism.

Modi's shock decision in November to scrap high-value banknotes worth 86 percent of India's cash in circulation has hit consumers, disrupted supply chains and hurt investment.

The worst of the cash crunch is now over, however, and Jaitley said he expected it would not spill over into the next fiscal year. Still, the finance ministry forecasts growth could dip as low as 6.5 percent this fiscal year before picking up to between 6.75 and 7.5 percent in 2017/18.

That is below the target rate of 8 percent or more that Modi needs to create enough jobs for the 1 million young Indians who enter the workforce each month.

While opinions vary on how long the disruptions caused by the crackdown on untaxed and illicit wealth will last, most analysts say Asia's third-largest economy needs a helping hand.

Jaitley hiked capital investment by 25.4 percent, and announced a 24 percent increase in rural and farm spending. Health spending will rise by 28 percent - as reported by Reuters earlier this week.

But there was no extra room to increase support for India's troubled state banks. Jaitley said he would pump in 100 billion rupees ($1.5 billion), in line with earlier plans.

TAX CUTS TO HELP POOR, SMALL BUSINESS

On the tax side, Jaitley's standout announcements were the halving of the lowest rate of personal tax to 5 percent that applies on incomes between 250,000 and 500,000 rupees ($3,700-$7,400). Better-off taxpayers will pay a 10 percent surcharge.

Small businesses with turnover up to 500 million rupees a year will see their tax rate cut to 25 percent from 30 percent. Taken together, the cuts in direct taxes would cost the public purse close to $3 billion.

In a surprise move, Jaitley said India would abolish the Foreign Investment Promotion Board, in a move to cut a layer of bureaucracy and make India an easier place to do business.

"Abolishing the FIPB will further boost foreign direct investment," said Pravin Kumar Agrawal, a tax partner at Deloitte Haskins & Sells.

Modi has vowed to improve the ease of doing business in India, which ranks 130th in the World Bank's global rankings.

Jaitley also announced a tightening of rules governing the funding of political parties, which are notorious for relying on undeclared donations to cover the vast expense of campaigning in the world's largest democracy.

This included slashing the maximum cash donation to 2,000 rupees ($30) and requiring parties to file income tax returns.

Jaitley's fiscal largesse will not only boost consumer spending, but may also shore up the fortunes of Modi's nationalist party in five regional elections for which voting begins on Saturday.

Punjab and Goa go to the polls first, to be followed by the big battleground state of Uttar Pradesh, and finally the small northern states of Uttarakhand and Manipur. Results of all five elections are due on March 11.

(Reporting by New Delhi and Mumbai bureaux; Writing by Rajesh Kumar Singh and Douglas Busvine; Editing by Kim Coghill)

Philippines: ‘Condoms-in-schools’ nixed after Education Dept blocks initiative

 1st February 2017

PHILIPPINE health authorities this week called off a nationwide plan to distribute condoms in schools for a HIV-prevention campaign, following protests from conservatives and the Education Department’s (DepEd) refusal to support the drive.

The decision will likely be seen by rights groups as a major setback in the Duterte administration’s controversial push for improvements to the country’s reproductive health and family planning policy.

According to an Inquirer report, however, this does not mean an abrupt end to the HIV campaign in schools. The report says DepEd will continue with efforts to spread awareness and disseminate information on the virus at education institutions nationwide.

“The recommendation to involve schools to provide services to improve condom access is not anymore a primary consideration after DOH (Health Department) and DepEd agreed to take a different path but which shall still complement each other’s prerogatives,” Health Secretary Paulun Ubial explained Wednesday.

Ubial added that DepEd will focus on HIV education where appropriate, while the DOH will work with other agencies to ensure such information is linked to the provision of HIV prevention services, which include condom access.

SEE ALSO: Philippines: Condoms in schools necessary to prevent HIV, group says as protests mount

The DOH official’s remarks follows DepEd Secretary Leonor Magtolis Briones’ decision Monday that the department would not participate in the “condom-in-schools” drive.

In a statement on DepEd’s website, Briones cited the department’s responsibilities as outlined in an Executive Order and a Supreme Court decision, and said its primary role is to review and strengthen the basic education curriculum.

“We will follow the UNESCO guidelines on reproductive health, including the requirements of the Constitution and the law. . . obviously what we’re allowed to do is to improve the curriculum,” she said.

She further noted, “Nothing within the school premises because right now you have the health centers who are already tasked with that function. . . Yung consequence ng (the consequences of) pre-marital sex, the dangers involved but not the distribution.”

(File) Protesters display placards and condoms in a basket during a rally at the 2010 Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines. Source: AP Photo/Bullit Marquez

Ubial, in her response, also said the DOH respects and “totally supports” the decision.

“The DOH totally supports DepEd’s stance to develop and roll out age-appropriate reproductive health education in public schools, at the same time raising HIV awareness among at risk and vulnerable population, now increasingly affecting the youth,” Ubial said, as quoted by Inquirer.

“This is an essential component of the DOH’s HIV comprehensive prevention and control program focusing on abstinence, condom use, early HIV testing, peer counseling, antiretroviral treatment and ending stigmatisation and discrimination. Improving condom access is critical to reverse current HIV trends,” she said.

Condom distribution will proceed at health centers now, following DepEd’s decision.

Earlier this month, several top Philippine officials expressed objection to the DOH’s condom drive, claiming the initiative would only promote promiscuity among youths, which conservatives regard as a social ill.

SEE ALSO: Fearing promiscuity, Philippine city mayor says no to free condoms in public schools

Their objections, however, appear to contradict President Rodrigo Duterte’s national policy on contraception. The president had on Jan 10 signed an executive order (EO) to ensure free contraceptive access to six million Filipino women, triggering outcry from conservative elements in the majority Catholic Christian country.

The measure is said to be necessary to help the government reduce poverty incidence. It is believed that one in five Filipinos currently live in poverty.

Last year, at the urging of elements of the church, conservative lawmakers reportedly cut PHP1 billion (US$20 million) from the PHP2.2 billion (US$44 million) budget meant for family health and responsible parenting. This reportedly deprived low-income Filipinos to government-supplied contraceptive products.

In December 2016, a Human Rights Watch report decried the cuts as one of several government policies that it said has fueled the country’s worsening HIV epidemic among men who have sex with men.

The report also said that due to the budget cut, government clinics are likely to exhaust their condom supplies by early 2017.