Saturday, June 10, 2017

تجارب حصار

حسام كنفاني
تجارب حصار


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لا يمكن وضع الحملة الرباعية، الثنائية بالأساس، على قطر، إلا في خانة إعلان الحرب، حتى وإن كان لا تحركات عسكرية، لا حاضراً ولا مستقبلاً، ستحصل. الحصار المفروض على قطر من الدول المحيطة، وتحديداً من السعودية والإمارات، يرتقي إلى هذه المرتبة بحسب التعريفات القانونية، وتكفي الإشارة إلى حالات غزة حالياً، والعراق وليبيا وكوبا سابقاً لإيضاح هذه المسألة. فالحرب ليست، ولم تكن، دائماً قائمةً على الأرض، لكن معطياتها حاضرةٌ بشكل كبير. والقطيعة والتضييق وإقفال الحدود وإغلاق الأجواء جزء أساسي من هذه المعطيات. 
والصمود اليوم هو الخيار القطري الأساسي والضروري في مواجهة حملة الافتراءات والادّعاءات الموتورة التي يسوقها "الحلف الرباعي" (السعودية، الإمارات، البحرين، مصر) ضد قطر، وفي وجه سقف المطالبات المرتفع الذي يُطلب من الدوحة الاستسلام التام والخضوع لوصاية الدول المحيطة بسياستها واقتصادها، وربما بثرواتها، وخصوصاً بعد كم المليارات التي رميت تحت أقدام الرئيس الأميركي، دونالد ترامب، خلال زيارته أخيراً الرياض.
مقوّمات الصمود لدى الدوحة كبيرة جداً، ومؤكّد أن كل الإجراءات التي اتخذها "الحلف الرباعي" لا يمكن أن تؤثر على قرار قطر، وهو ما أعلنه صراحةً وزير الخارجية القطري، محمد بن عبد الرحمن آل ثاني، حين قال إن كل ما تقوم به هذه الدول لن يؤثر على الدوحة التي تستطيع البقاء على هذه الحالة إلى الأبد. ولا يأتي الكلام القطري من فراغ، خصوصاً أن المعطيات التي انعكست على الأرض في الدوحة أظهرت أن كل البدائل متاحةٌ، وخيارات المواجهة متعدّدة ومتنوعة إقليمياً ودولياً، واستنساخ تجربة غزة على قطر لا يمكن لها النجاح، وهي التي لم تفلح في القطاع أساساً. 

وإعطاء غزة نموذجاً ليس اعتباطياً، ولا سيما أن الدول نفسها ساهمت وتساهم في حصار القطاع منذ عام 2006، ومنذ ما قبل الحسم العسكري، إضافة إلى أنه من التهم التي تسوقها دول "الحلف الرباعي" ضد قطر أنها تدعم "حماس"، على اعتبارها حركة إرهابية، متبنية التعريف الإسرائيلي الأميركي بالكامل، من دون حتى الإشارة إلى دورها الفلسطيني المقاوم والذي لا يمكن الاختلاف عليه، سواء كنت مؤيداً لحكم "حماس" في القطاع أم لا. لم تحاول الدول مداراة هذا التماهي مع الموقف الإسرائيلي مداراته، بل جاء صريحاً على لسان وزير الخارجية السعودي، عادل الجبير الذي أدرج دعم الشعب الفلسطيني وتخفيف المعاناة عن أهالي قطاع غزة في إطار "دعم الإرهاب". ليس الموقف جديداً بالمطلق، لكنه الأكثر وضوحاً وعلانية، فالتماهي مع إسرائيل كان يتم، في السابق، من خلف الستار، غير أنه اليوم أضحى مكشوفاً ولا خجل منه. 

في إطار هذا التماهي، تأتي محاولة نقل تجربة حصار غزة إلى قطر، والسعي إلى توسيع رقعة المقاطعة لها، وهو ما سقط منذ اليوم الأول، فتجارب الحصار بالمطلق لم تفلح يوماً في تحقيق مبتغياتها ضد دول ومناطق كانت قدرتها على الصمود أقل بكثير من القدرة القطرية حالياً، خصوصاً مع الطبيعة الجغرافية والعلاقات السياسية والقدرات الاقتصادية التي خوّلت الدوحة إفراغ الطوق من مضمونه، وإبطال أي مفاعيل اقتصادية واجتماعية كانت تعوّل عليها دول "الحلف الرباعي". وهو ما يمكن أن يستمر "إلى ما لا نهاية".

Dan Rather's full interview with Don Lemon

ما وراء الخبر- الأزمة الخليجية.. دعوات دولية للحل

Layla Moran becomes Britain's first MP of Palestinian descent

The Liberal Democrat is one of 51 ethnic minority politicians elected to the "most diverse" UK parliament ever
Layla Moran, Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate for Oxford West and Abingdon

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Britain elected its first member of parliament to be of Palestinian descent, after a snap election resulted in the "most diverse" House of Commons ever.
Layla Moran, who stood as a Liberal Democrat candidate in the Oxford West and Abingdon constituency, ousted Conservative health minister Nicola Blackwood by a winning margin of just 816 votes. Blackwood had held the seat since 2010, holding it in 2015 with a near-10,000 majority. 
Her election victory came as the ruling Conservative Party failed to gain an overall majority in the House of Commons and was forced to seek a partnership with the Democratic Unionist Party from Northern Ireland.
Theresa May's most senior advisers, Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, have both stepped down in the wake of the shock election losses, after calls by Tory MPs for the prime minister to resign.
Moran has already voiced concerns over the Conservative Party's partnership with the DUP because of its views on equality issues, abortion and human rights.
She will be one of 11 new "class of 2017" ethnic minority MPs, alongside eight Labour MPs and two Conservatives who will help form the most diverse House of Commons to date.

Palestinian descent

Born to a British father who is an EU ambassador and a Palestinian mother from Jerusalem, Moran told the New Arab before the election that her Palestinian background had encouraged her to be interested in politics at a global level.
"Politics was always at the dinner table, it primed me to engage," said Moran. "De facto, I will be a representative of our community in parliament, and it will be a great honour, which I take humbly."
Before her involvement in politics, 36-year-old Moran was a physics teacher from Oxford and a community activist in her local area.
She graduated with a degree in physics from Imperial College London. She has lived in Belgium, Greece, Ethiopia, Jamaica and Jordan, and is reported to speak French, Arabic, Spanish and some Greek.
Her victory in Oxford will make her one of the 12 MPs to represent the Liberal Democrat party in the House of Commons and she will represent a constituency that voted overwhelmingly to remain in the European Union.
This election also saw the election of Preet Kaur Gill, the country's first female Sikh MP, and an increase in ethnic-minority MPs from 41 to 51.
The 2017 election also saw a record number of 207 female MPs elected. 
Meanwhile, votes by the UK Muslim community appear to have made a difference in the UK election, the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) has said. The MCB earlier identified 39 constituencies where votes by the Muslim community might have a high or medium impact, and identified a swing to Labour among Muslim voters.

THE WORST OF DONALD TRUMP’S TOXIC AGENDA IS LYING IN WAIT – A MAJOR U.S. CRISIS WILL UNLEASH IT

By Naomi Klein

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DURING THE PRESIDENTIAL campaign, some imagined that the more overtly racist elements of Donald Trump’s platform were just talk designed to rile up the base, not anything he seriously intended to act on. But in his first week in office, when he imposed a travel ban on seven majority-Muslim countries, that comforting illusion disappeared fast. Fortunately, the response was immediate: the marches and rallies at airports, the impromptu taxi strikes, the lawyers and local politicians intervening, the judges ruling the bans illegal.
The whole episode showed the power of resistance, and of judicial courage, and there was much to celebrate. Some have even concluded that this early slap down chastened Trump, and that he is now committed to a more reasonable, conventional course.
That is a dangerous illusion.
It is true that many of the more radical items on this administration’s wish list have yet to be realized. But make no mistake, the full agenda is still there, lying in wait. And there is one thing that could unleash it all: a large-scale crisis.
Large-scale shocks are frequently harnessed to ram through despised pro-corporate and anti-democratic policies that would never have been feasible in normal times. It’s a phenomenon I have previously called the “Shock Doctrine,” and we have seen it happen again and again over the decades, from Chile in the aftermath of Augusto Pinochet’s coup to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
And we have seen it happen recently, well before Trump, in U.S. cities including Detroit and Flint, where looming municipal bankruptcy became the pretext for dissolving local democracy and appointing “emergency managers” who waged war on public services and public education. It is unfolding right now in Puerto Rico, where the ongoing debt crisis has been used to install the unaccountable “Financial Oversight and Management Board,” an enforcement mechanism for harsh austerity measures, including cuts to pensions and waves of school closures. This tactic is being deployed in Brazil, where the highly questionable impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in 2016 was followed by the installation of an unelected, zealously pro-business regime that has frozen public spending for the next 20 years, imposed punishing austerity, and begun selling off airports, power stations, and other public assets in a frenzy of privatization.
As Milton Friedman wrote long ago, “Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.” Survivalists stockpile canned goods and water in preparation for major disasters; these guys stockpile spectacularly anti-democratic ideas.
Now, as many have observed, the pattern is repeating under Trump. On the campaign trail, he did not tell his adoring crowds that he would cut funds for meals-on-wheels, or admit that he was going to try to take health insurance away from millions of Americans, or that he planned to grant every item on Goldman Sachs’ wish list. He said the very opposite.
Since taking office, however, Donald Trump has never allowed the atmosphere of chaos and crisis to let up. Some of the chaos, like the Russia investigations, has been foisted upon him or is simply the result of incompetence, but much appears to be deliberately created. Either way, while we are distracted by (and addicted to) the Trump Show, clicking on and gasping at marital hand-slaps and mysterious orbs, the quiet, methodical work of redistributing wealth upward proceeds apace.
This is also aided by the sheer velocity of change. Witnessing the tsunami of executive orders during Trump’s first 100 days, it rapidly became clear his advisers were following Machiavelli’s advice in “The Prince”: “Injuries ought to be done all at one time, so that, being tasted less, they offend less.” The logic is straightforward enough. People can develop responses to sequential or gradual change. But if dozens of changes come from all directions at once, the hope is that populations will rapidly become exhausted and overwhelmed, and will ultimately swallow their bitter medicine.
But here’s the thing. All of this is shock doctrine lite; it’s the most that Trump can pull off under cover of the shocks he is generating himself. And as much as this needs to be exposed and resisted, we also need to focus on what this administration will do when they have a real external shock to exploit. Maybe it will be an economic crash like the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. Maybe a natural disaster like Superstorm Sandy. Or maybe it will be a horrific terrorist attack like the Manchester bombing. Any one such crisis could trigger a very rapid shift in political conditions, making what currently seems unlikely suddenly appear inevitable.
So let’s consider a few categories of possible shocks, and how they might be harnessed to start ticking off items on Trump’s toxic to-do list.
Police officers join members of the public to view the flowers and messages of support in St Ann's Square in Manchester, northwest England on May 31, 2017, placed in tribute to the victims of the May 22 terror attack at the Manchester Arena. / AFP PHOTO / OLI SCARFF        (Photo credit should read OLI SCARFF/AFP/Getty Images)
Police officers join members of the public to view the flowers and messages of support in St. Ann’s Square in Manchester, England, on May 31, 2017, placed in tribute to the victims of the May 22 terror attack at the Manchester Arena.
 
Photo: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images

A Terror Shock

Recent terror attacks in London, Manchester, and Paris provide some broad hints about how the administration would try to exploit a large-scale attack that took place on U.S. soil or against U.S. infrastructure abroad. After the horrific Manchester bombing last month, the governing Conservatives launched a fierce campaign against Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party for suggesting that the failed “war on terror” is part of what is fueling such acts, calling any such suggestion “monstrous” (a clear echo of the “with us or with the terrorists” rhetoric that descended after September 11, 2001). For his part, Trump rushed to link the attack to the “thousands and thousands of people pouring into our various countries” — never mind that the bomber, Salman Abedi, was born in the U.K.
Similarly, in the immediate aftermath of the Westminster terror attacks in London in March 2017, when a driver plowed into a crowd of pedestrians, deliberately killing four people and injuring dozens more, the Conservative government wasted no time declaring that any expectation of privacy in digital communications was now a threat to national security. Home Secretary Amber Rudd went on the BBC and declared the end-to-end encryption provided by programs like WhatsApp to be “completely unacceptable.” And she said that they were meeting with the large tech firms “to ask them to work with us” on providing backdoor access to these platforms. She made an even stronger call to crack down on internet privacy after the London Bridge attack.
More worrying, in 2015, after the coordinated attacks in Paris that killed 130 people, the government of François Hollande declared a “state of emergency” that banned political protests. I was in France a week after those horrific events and it was striking that, although the attackers had targeted a concert, a football stadium, restaurants, and other emblems of daily Parisian life, it was only outdoor political activity that was not permitted. Large concerts, Christmas markets, and sporting events — the sorts of places that were likely targets for further attacks — were all free to carry on as usual. In the months that followed, the state-of-emergency decree was extended again and again until it had been in place for well over a year. It is currently set to remain in effect until at least July 2017. In France, state-of-emergency is the new normal.
This took place under a center-left government in a country with a long tradition of disruptive strikes and protests. One would have to be naive to imagine that Donald Trump and Mike Pence wouldn’t immediately seize on any attack in the United States to go much further down that same road. In all likelihood they would do it swiftly, by declaring protests and strikes that block roads and airports (the kind that responded to the Muslim travel ban) a threat to “national security.” Protest organizers would be targeted with surveillance, arrests, and imprisonment.
Indeed we should be prepared for security shocks to be exploited as excuses to increase the rounding up and incarceration of large numbers of people from the communities this administration is already targeting: Latino immigrants, Muslims, Black Lives Matter organizers, climate activists, investigative journalists. It’s all possible. And in the name of freeing the hands of law enforcement to fight terrorism, Attorney General Jeff Sessions would have the excuse he’d been looking for to do away with federal oversight of state and local police, especially those that have been accused of systemic racial abuses.
And there is no doubt that the president would seize on any domestic terrorist attack to blame the courts. He made this perfectly clear when he tweeted, after his first travel ban was struck down: “Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril. If something happens blame him and court system.” And on the night of the London Bridge attack, he went even further, tweeting: “We need the courts to give us back our rights. We need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety!” In a context of public hysteria and recrimination that would surely follow an attack in the U.S., the kind of courage we witnessed from the courts in response to Trump’s travel bans might well be in shorter supply.
FILE - In this Friday, April 7, 2017 file image provided by the U.S. Navy, the guided-missile destroyer USS Porter (DDG 78) launches a tomahawk land attack missile in the Mediterranean Sea as the United States blasted a Syrian air base with a barrage of cruise missiles in fiery retaliation for a gruesome chemical weapons attack against civilians earlier in the week. North Korea has vowed to bolster its defenses to protect itself against airstrikes like the ones President Donald Trump ordered against an air base in Syria. The North called the airstrikes "absolutely unpardonable" and said it proves that its nuclear weapons are justified to protect the country against Washington's "evermore reckless moves for a war." (Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Ford Williams/U.S. Navy via AP, File)
This April 7, 2017, photo shows the USS Porter launching a tomahawk missile at a Syrian air base.
Photo: Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Ford Williams/U.S. Navy via AP

The Shock of War

The most lethal way that governments overreact to terrorist attacks is by exploiting the atmosphere of fear to embark on a full-blown foreign war (or two). It doesn’t necessarily matter if the target has no connection to the original terror attacks. Iraq wasn’t responsible for 9/11, and it was invaded anyway.
Trump’s likeliest targets are mostly in the Middle East, and they include (but are by no means limited to) Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and, most perilously, Iran. And then, of course, there’s North Korea, where Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has declared that “all options are on the table,” pointedly refusing to rule out a pre-emptive military strike.
There are many reasons why people around Trump, particularly those who came straight from the defense sector, might decide that further military escalation is in order. Trump’s April 2017 missile strike on Syria — ordered without congressional approval and therefore illegal according to some experts — won him the most positive news coverage of his presidency. His inner circle, meanwhile, immediately pointed to the attacks as proof that there was nothing untoward going on between the White House and Russia.
But there’s another, less discussed reason why this administration might rush to exploit a security crisis to start a new war or escalate an ongoing conflict: There is no faster or more effective way to drive up the price of oil, especially if the violence interferes with the supply of oil to the world market This would be great news for oil giants like Exxon Mobil, which have seen their profits drop dramatically as a result of the depressed price of oil — and Exxon, of course, is fortunate enough to have its former CEO, Tillerson, currently serving as secretary of state. (Not only was Tillerson at Exxon for 41 years, his entire working life, but Exxon Mobil has agreed to pay him a retirement package worth a staggering $180 million.)
Other than Exxon, perhaps the only entity that would have more to gain from an oil price hike fueled by global instability is Vladimir Putin’s Russia, a vast petro-state that has been in economic crisis since the price of oil collapsed. Russia is the world’s leading exporter of natural gas, and the second-largest exporter of oil (after Saudi Arabia). When the price was high, this was great news for Putin: Prior to 2014, fully 50 percent of Russia’s budget revenues came from oil and gas.
But when prices plummeted, the government was suddenly short hundreds of billions of dollars, an economic catastrophe with tremendous human costs. According to the World Bank, in 2015 real wages fell in Russia by nearly 10 percent; the Russian ruble depreciated by close to 40 percent; and the population of people classified as poor increased from 3 million to over 19 million. Putin plays the strongman, but this economic crisis makes him vulnerable at home.
We’ve also heard a lot about that massive deal between Exxon Mobil and the Russian state oil company Rosneft to drill for oil in the Arctic (Putin bragged that it was worth half a trillion dollars). That deal was derailed by U.S. sanctions against Russia and despite the posturing on both sides over Syria, it is still entirely possible that Trump will decide to lift the sanctions and clear the way for that deal to go ahead, which would quickly boost Exxon Mobil’s flagging fortunes.
But even if the sanctions are lifted, there is another factor standing in the way of the project moving forward: the depressed price of oil. Tillerson made the deal with Rosneft in 2011, when the price of oil was soaring at around $110 a barrel. Their first commitment was to explore for oil in the sea north of Siberia, under tough-to-extract, icy conditions. The break-even price for Arctic drilling is estimated to be around $100 a barrel, if not more. So even if sanctions are lifted under Trump, it won’t make sense for Exxon and Rosneft to move ahead with their project unless oil prices are high enough. Which is yet another reason why parties might embrace the kind of instability that would send oil prices shooting back up.
If the price of oil rises to $80 or more a barrel, then the scramble to dig up and burn the dirtiest fossil fuels, including those under melting ice, will be back on. A price rebound would unleash a global frenzy in new high-risk, high-carbon fossil fuel extraction, from the Arctic to the tar sands. And if that is allowed to happen, it really would rob us of our last chance of averting catastrophic climate change.
So, in a very real sense, preventing war and averting climate chaos are one and the same fight.
LONDON - JANUARY 22:  A cyclist passes in front of a financial display screen showing the DOW on January 22, 2008 in West London. There are fears amid the financial market of a recession.  (Photo by Cate Gillon/Getty Images)
A screen displays financial data on Jan. 22, 2008.
 
Photo: Cate Gillon/Getty Images

Economic Shocks

A centerpiece of Trump’s economic project so far has been a flurry of financial deregulation that makes economic shocks and disasters distinctly more likely. Trump has announced plans to dismantle Dodd-Frank, the most substantive piece of legislation introduced after the 2008 banking collapse. Dodd-Frank wasn’t tough enough, but its absence will liberate Wall Street to go wild blowing new bubbles, which will inevitably burst, creating new economic shocks.
Trump and his team are not unaware of this, they are simply unconcerned — the profits from those market bubbles are too tantalizing. Besides, they know that since the banks were never broken up, they are still too big to fail, which means that if it all comes crashing down, they will be bailed out again, just like in 2008. (In fact, Trump issued an executive order calling for a review of the specific part of Dodd-Frank designed to prevent taxpayers from being stuck with the bill for another such bailout — an ominous sign, especially with so many former Goldman executives making White House policy.)
Some members of the administration surely also see a few coveted policy options opening up in the wake of a good market shock or two. During the campaign, Trump courted voters by promising not to touch Social Security or Medicare. But that may well be untenable, given the deep tax cuts on the way (and the fictional math beneath the claims that they will pay for themselves). His proposed budget already begins the attack on Social Security and an economic crisis would give Trump a handy excuse to abandon those promises altogether. In the midst of a moment being sold to the public as economic Armageddon, Betsy DeVos might even have a shot at realizing her dream of replacing public schools with a system based on vouchers and charters.
Trump’s gang has a long wish list of policies that do not lend themselves to normal times. In the early days of the new administration, for instance, Mike Pence met with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker to hear how the governor had managed to strip public sector unions of their right to collective bargaining in 2011. (Hint: He used the cover of the state’s fiscal crisis, prompting New York Times columnist Paul Krugman to declare that in Wisconsin “the shock doctrine is on full display.”)
Taken together, the picture is clear. We will very likely not see this administration’s full economic barbarism in the first year. That will only reveal itself later, after the inevitable budget crises and market shocks kick in. Then, in the name of rescuing the government and perhaps the entire economy, the White House will start checking off the more challenging items on the corporate wish list.
Cattle graze by a wildfire near Protection, Kan., on Tuesday, March, 7, 2017. Grass fires fanned by gusting winds forced the evacuations of several towns and the closure of some roads. (Bo Rader/Wichita Eagle/TNS via Getty Images)
Cattle menaced by a wildfire near Protection, Kansas, on March, 7, 2017.
 
Photo: Bo Rader/Wichita Eagle/TNS/Getty Images

Weather Shocks

Just as Trump’s national security and economic policies are sure to generate and deepen crises, the administration’s moves to ramp up fossil fuel production, dismantle large parts of the country’s environmental laws, and trash the Paris climate accord all pave the way for more large-scale industrial accidents — not to mention future climate disasters. There is a lag time of about a decade between the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and the full resulting warming, so the very worst climatic effects of the administration’s policies won’t likely be felt until they’re out of office.
That said, we’ve already locked in so much warming that no president can complete a term without facing major weather-related disasters. In fact, Trump wasn’t even two months on the job before he was confronted with overwhelming wildfires on the Great Plains, which led to so many cattle deaths that one rancher described the event as “our Hurricane Katrina.”
Trump showed no great interest in the fires, not even sparing them a tweet. But when the first superstorm hits a coast, we should expect a very different reaction from a president who knows the value of oceanfront property, has open contempt for the poor, and has only ever been interested in building for the 1 percent. The worry, of course, is a repeat of Katrina’s attacks on public housing and public schools, as well as the contractor free for all that followed the disaster, especially given the central role played by Mike Pence in shaping post-Katrina policy.
The biggest Trump-era escalation, however, will most likely be in disaster response services marketed specifically toward the wealthy. When I was writing “The Shock Doctrine,” this industry was still in its infancy, and several early companies didn’t make it. I wrote, for instance, about a short-lived airline called Help Jet, based in Trump’s beloved West Palm Beach. While it lasted, Help Jet offered an array of gold-plated rescue services in exchange for a membership fee.
When a hurricane was on its way, Help Jet dispatched limousines to pick up members, booked them into five-star golf resorts and spas somewhere safe, then whisked them away on private jets. “No standing in lines, no hassle with crowds, just a first-class experience that turns a problem into a vacation,” read the company’s marketing materials. “Enjoy the feeling of avoiding the usual hurricane evacuation nightmare.” With the benefit of hindsight, it seems Help Jet, far from misjudging the market for these services, was simply ahead of its time. These days, in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, the more serious high-end survivalists are hedging against climate disruption and social collapse by buying space in custom-built underground bunkers in Kansas (protected by heavily armed mercenaries) and building escape homes on high ground in New Zealand. It goes without saying that you need your own private jet to get there.
What is worrying about the entire top-of-the-line survivalist phenomenon (apart from its general weirdness) is that, as the wealthy create their own luxury escape hatches, there is diminishing incentive to maintain any kind of disaster response infrastructure that exists to help everyone, regardless of income — precisely the dynamic that led to enormous and unnecessary suffering in New Orleans during Katrina.
And this two-tiered disaster infrastructure is galloping ahead at alarming speed. In fire-prone states such as California and Colorado, insurance companies provide a “concierge” service to their exclusive clients: When wildfires threaten their mansions, the companies dispatch teams of private firefighters to coat them in re-retardant. The public sphere, meanwhile, is left to further decay.
California provides a glimpse of where this is all headed. For its firefighting, the state relies on upwards of 4,500 prison inmates, who are paid a dollar an hour when they’re on the fire line, putting their lives at risk battling wildfires, and about two bucks a day when they’re back at camp. By some estimates, California saves a billion dollars a year through this program — a snapshot of what happens when you mix austerity politics with mass incarceration and climate change.
TOPSHOT - Migrants and refugees gather close to the gate at the Greek-Macedonian border near the Greek village of Idomeni, on March 5, 2016, where thousands of people wait to cross the border into Macedonia.<br />  Some 13,000 refugees are crammed in unhygienic conditions on Greece's border with Macedonia, officials said on March 5, 2016, with all eyes on a key EU-Turkey summit on March 7 that is seen as the only viable solution to the crisis. / AFP / DIMITAR DILKOFF        (Photo credit should read DIMITAR DILKOFF/AFP/Getty Images)
Migrants and refugees gather close to a border crossing near the Greek village of Idomeni, on March 5, 2016, where thousands of people wait to enter Macedonia.
 
Photo: Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images

A World of Green Zones and Red Zones

The uptick in high-end disaster prep also means there is less reason for the big winners in our economy to embrace the demanding policy changes required to prevent an even warmer and more disaster-prone future. Which might help explain the Trump administration’s determination to do everything possible to accelerate the climate crisis.
So far, much of the discussion around Trump’s environmental rollbacks has focused on supposed schisms between the members of his inner circle who actively deny climate science, including EPA head Scott Pruitt and Trump himself, and those who concede that humans are indeed contributing to planetary warming, such as Rex Tillerson and Ivanka Trump. But this misses the point: What everyone who surrounds Trump shares is a confidence that they, their children, and indeed their class will be just fine, that their wealth and connections will protect them from the worst of the shocks to come. They will lose some beachfront property, sure, but nothing that can’t be replaced with a new mansion on higher ground.
This insouciance is representative of an extremely disturbing trend. In an age of ever-widening income inequality, a significant cohort of our elites are walling themselves off not just physically but also psychologically, mentally detaching themselves from the collective fate of the rest of humanity. This secessionism from the human species (if only in their own minds) liberates the rich not only to shrug off the urgent need for climate action but also to devise ever more predatory ways to profit from current and future disasters and instability. What we are hurtling toward is a world demarcated into fortified Green Zones for the super-rich, Red Zones for everyone else — and black sites for whoever doesn’t cooperate. Europe, Australia, and North America are erecting increasingly elaborate (and privatized) border fortresses to seal themselves off from people fleeing for their lives. Fleeing, quite often, as a direct result of forces unleashed primarily by those fortressed continents, whether predatory trade deals, wars, or ecological disasters intensified by climate change.
In fact, if we chart the locations of the most intense conflict spots in the world right now — from the bloodiest battlefields in Afghanistan and Pakistan, to Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Iraq — what becomes clear is that these also happen to be some of the hottest and driest places on earth. It takes very little to push these regions into drought and famine, which frequently acts as an accelerant to conflict, which of course drives migration.
And the same capacity to discount the humanity of the “other,” which justifies civilian deaths and casualties from bombs and drones in places like Yemen and Somalia, is now being trained on the people in the boats  — casting their need for security as a threat, their desperate flight as some sort of invading army. This is the context in which well over 13,000 people have drowned in the Mediterranean trying to reach European shores since 2014, many of them children, toddlers, and babies. It is the context in which the Australian government has sought to normalize the incarceration of refugees in island detention camps on Nauru and Manus, under conditions that numerous humanitarian organizations have described as tantamount to torture. This is also the context in which the massive, recently demolished migrant camp in Calais, France, was nicknamed “the jungle” — an echo of the way Katrina’s abandoned people were categorized in right-wing media as “animals.”
The dramatic rise in right-wing nationalism, anti-Black racism, Islamophobia, and straight-up white supremacy over the past decade cannot be pried apart from these larger geopolitical and ecological trends. The only way to justify such barbaric forms of exclusion is to double down on theories of racial hierarchy that tell a story about how the people being locked out of the global Green Zone deserve their fate, whether it’s Trump casting Mexicans as rapists and “bad hombres,” and Syrian refugees as closet terrorists, or prominent Conservative Canadian politician Kellie Leitch proposing that immigrants be screened for “Canadian values,” or successive Australian prime ministers justifying those sinister island detention camps as a “humanitarian” alternative to death at sea.
This is what global destabilization looks like in societies that have never redressed their foundational crimes — countries that have insisted slavery and indigenous land theft were just glitches in otherwise proud histories. After all, there is little more Green Zone/Red Zone than the economy of the slave plantation — of cotillions in the master’s house steps away from torture in the fields, all of it taking place on the violently stolen indigenous land on which North America’s wealth was built. And now the same theories of racial hierarchy that justified those violent thefts in the name of building the industrial age are surging to the surface as the system of wealth and comfort they constructed starts to unravel on multiple fronts simultaneously.
Trump is just one early and vicious manifestation of that unraveling. He is not alone. He won’t be the last.
RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL - AUGUST 05: Fireworks explode over Maracana stadium with the Mangueira 'favela' community in the foreground during opening ceremonies for the Rio 2016 Olympic Games on August 5, 2016 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The Rio 2016 Olympic Games commenced tonight at the iconic stadium. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Residents of the Mangueira ‘favela’ community, foreground, watch fireworks explode over Maracana stadium during opening ceremonies for the 2016 Olympic Games on Aug. 5, 2016, in Rio de Janeiro.
Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images

A Crisis of Imagination

It seems relevant that the walled city where the wealthy few live in relative luxury while the masses outside war with one another for survival is pretty much the default premise of every dystopian sci-fi movie that gets made these days, from “The Hunger Games,” with the decadent Capitol versus the desperate colonies, to “Elysium,” with its spa-like elite space station hovering above a sprawling and lethal favela. It’s a vision deeply enmeshed with the dominant Western religions, with their grand narratives of great floods washing the world clean and a chosen few selected to begin again. It’s the story of the great fires that sweep in, burning up the unbelievers and taking the righteous to a gated city in the sky. We have collectively imagined this extreme winners-and-losers ending for our species so many times that one of our most pressing tasks is learning to imagine other possible ends to the human story in which we come together in crisis rather than split apart, take down borders rather than erect more of them.
Because the point of all that dystopian art was never to act as a temporal GPS, showing us where we are inevitably headed. The point was to warn us, to wake us — so that, seeing where this perilous road leads, we can decide to swerve.
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” So said Thomas Paine many years ago, neatly summarizing the dream of escaping the past that is at the heart of both the colonial project and the American Dream. The truth, however, is that we do not have this godlike power of reinvention, nor did we ever. We must live with the messes and mistakes we have made, as well as within the limits of what our planet can sustain.
But we do have it in our power to change ourselves, to attempt to right past wrongs, and to repair our relationships with one another and with the planet we share. It’s this work that is the bedrock of shock resistance.
Adapted from the new book by Naomi Klein, No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need, to be published by Haymarket Books on June 13. www.noisnotenough.org

To save the left – look to Britain's Labour party

To win back popular support, it seems that the left only needs to remember that it is, unashamedly, the left.


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The shock result of Britain's general election this week should be a message of hope to the ailing left wing across Europe and the United States. The UK Labour party did not win - the outcome of Thursday's snap election was a hung parliament, meaning that no party has enough seats to form an overall majority and govern. But against all odds, most commentators and most polls, the party took just over 40 percent of the vote - an impossibly good result and better than has been attained in decades.
The UK Labour party, led from the left by Jeremy Corbyn, had been written off as a political force by many of the country's political pundits. Corbyn came to Labour's helm unexpectedly in 2015 after changes to the party rules meant that ordinary members could vote for its leadership. They selected a then 66-year-old candidate, whom conventional wisdom cast as too beardy, too scruffy and too radical. Last summer, he saw down a challenge to his leadership by his own parliamentary party who took a vote of no confidence against him and then took turns to explain to the media why he was not a competent leader.
He has been subjected to constant criticism along these lines, his leadership qualities, his political affiliations and his dress sense all routinely scrutinised and pilloried by politicians and by Britain's predominantly right-wing press. By the time the ruling Conservative party, under Theresa May, called a snap election six weeks ago, Labour's political fortunes did not look good: it was 20 percentage points behind in the polls, while Corbyn's personal ratings were frighteningly low.
His embattled supporters insisted that, once people had a real chance to engage with Corbyn and his politics, those ratings would turn around. And Britain's six-week election campaign provided the opportunity for that to happen. As Corbyn toured the country, his rallies swelled in numbers, as people were drawn to his integrity, his refusal to attack opponents and, most of all, his message of hope, optimism and the possibility of change.
Running a populist left programme, the Labour party tapped into a disillusion and discontent over current politics, perceived as dishonest, disconnected and in the service of the very wealthy. His was also an energetic, innovative and youthful campaign, using social media to drive up enthusiasm and support with video clips and memes that swiftly went viral. It made the left both credible and cool, generating support from rappers, football players, soap stars and celebrities - whose messages and campaigning efforts on behalf of Corbyn also garnered viral shares.
Corbyn's leadership refashioned the party, making it more about democratic socialism, pushing redistributive policies to deal with rampant inequalities, taxing the most-wealthy few to benefit the many.

But at the heart of the campaign were the party's politics, which under Corbyn's leadership tacked firmly to the left. Before he came to the helm, the party - like much of the centrist left across Europe - had been in a state of managed decline, bleeding support from its working-class heartlands in England's north. It was a part of the neoliberal consensus, the "third way" approach of triangulation that had come to dominate the political spectrum, essentially: trust in unfettered free-market capitalism, but throw in some small, lukewarm measures intended to mitigate its ravaging effects on the public.
Corbyn's leadership refashioned the party, making it more about democratic socialism, pushing redistributive policies to deal with rampant inequalities, taxing the most-wealthy few to benefit the many.
The party's manifesto, fully costed - to bat away lingering myths over Labour's mismanagement of the economy - carried this left alternative to politics in its DNA: it was all about major investment in the economy, renationalisation of rail and energy companies, investment in the welfare state, the scrapping of university tuition fees, free school meals, chasing after corporate tax avoiders while raising taxes only for the wealthiest five percent of the population.
Confounding the naysayers, it proved popular: a public that has for some time been struggling with stagnating wages, work insecurity, spiralling living costs, unaffordable housing and savage Conservative-party cuts to public services, grabbed this optimistic vision of a kinder, fairer society. Young people, in particular, long-disenfranchised and disempowered by politics, leapt at the chance to vote for a better future: youth turnout surged in this election.
The Labour party seems also to have gained support from those who have not previously voted, as well as from smaller parties, the Greens and the centrist Liberal Democrats. It has regained those swaths of voters that had been disillusioned and economically neglected by the party's centrist approach.
There were, of course, many more factors to the Labour surge: the Conservative Party ran a terrible campaign, its leader Theresa May exposed as weak and arrogant. She had taken voters for granted and seemed to avoid both the public and the press during her campaign.
The Labour party, along with Momentum, the grassroots organisation of Corbyn supporters, galvanised the party's 500,000 strong members into taking to the streets, the phones and the internet to campaign for Labour. It was thought that two deadly terror attacks during the campaign - in London and the northern city of Manchester - would have an adverse affect on the fortunes of the Labour party, especially since it's leader was relentlessly smeared as a terrorist sympathiser. In reality, the party's principled foreign policy - criticising the government's arms sales to Saudi Arabia; speaking of the increased threat of terror that came with Britain's destabilising interventions in the Middle East - was in line with public opinion on such matters. The party also chimed with the public mood in its attacks on Conservative cuts to police numbers, which police chiefs had warned might have an effect on security. 
For progressives, the Labour party under Corbyn has shown how to regain political relevance. You can't triangulate hope, integrity and credibility and you don't need an overwhelmingly right-wing print media to like you. To win back popular support, it seems that the left needs to simply remember that it is, unashamedly, the left.
Rachel Shabi is a journalist and author of Not the Enemy: Israel's Jews from Arab Lands.

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أسئلة خالدة
بمقدور أي إنسان عاقل أن يقارن نظرة العرب إلى أنفسهم، ونظرة العالم إليهم عام 2011 حين أخرج التطلع إلى العدالة والكرامة والحرية أفضل ما فيهم، مع نظرتهم إلى أنفسهم ومزاجهم العام ونظرة العالم إليهم في المرحلة الراهنة التي أخرجت أسوأ ما فيهم، حين وقعوا بين عنف الطغيان والعسكر وتحالفات الأنظمة القديمة في وجه الشعوب وعنف القوى الرجعية المتطرفة من داخل المجتمع.
 تجري في هذه الأيام محاولة منهجية لتصفية أي أمل بالتغيير مستقبلا بقمع الناس جسديا بالقتل والتعذيب والنفي، ومعنويا بقوات المرتزقة الإعلامية والجيوش الالكترونية المجوقلة التي تشوه كل قيمة معنوية  سامية وكل فكر ورمز وشخص يحظى بمصداقية، وتعمل ليلا ونهارا على لوم الضحية وإقناعها أنها المسؤولة عن وضعها، وبالتمثيل بأحلام الناس التي يريدون إحالتها كوابيسا. لكن أي إنسان عاقل يمكنه أن يقارن بين غرور وصلف هؤلاء اليوم (بما فيه المجاهرة بالتحالف مع إسرائيل ومغازلتها) وانكماشهم وانزوائهم عام 2011 بأجوائه الملونة وبريق الأمل في عيون شبابه وتطلعات أهاليهم لمستقبل أفضل، تلك الأجواء التي لا يريدون لها أن تعود، وذلك باقتلاع إي حلم بالعدالة والحرية والكرامة الشخصية والوطنية، وبإقناع الناس أن الأمل ضرب من الجنون.
 تواجه قوى الطغيان والتخلف والتطرف التي تبدو الأن وكأنها تغرق المنطقة في طوفانها أسئلة محرجة وحرجة لا مفر من مواجهتها: أي حل لديهم للقضايا التي أخرجت الناس إلى الشارع عام 2011 (الفقر، غياب الحريات العامة، الإذلال الجسدي، الفساد والاستبداد)؟ ليس لديهم حلول، بل لديهم وصفات جاهزة لمفاقمتها. إذا هل يمكنهم إقناع الناس طويلا ان الخيار هو بين الطغيان والفوضى؟ هل يمكن منع الناس من التطلع إلى الأفضل والإصغاء للأفضل حين يكون هذا كل ما في جعبتهم؟ بالطبع لا.
عزمي بشارة

سر الهجوم على عزمي بشارة

نزار السهلي

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تساءل البعض عن سرّ الهجمة التي يتعرض لها الدكتور عزمي بشارة،رئيس 'المركز العربي للأبحاث ودراسة السياسات'. تساؤل ليس في محله، خصوصاً عندما يصدر عن فئة تعمل أو تهتم بمجال الكتابة أو العمل الصحافي أو الإعلامي أو الفكري، أو مهتمة بالشأن العام على الأقل.
منذ ثورات عام 2011 السبع الأخيرة، ركزت بعض الدوائر الأمنية والمخابراتية هجومها المنسق على الدكتور عزمي بشارة، وجندت لهجمتها بعض وسائل الإعلام والصحافيين، وأفردت لها مساحات شاسعة في تلك الوسائل. والحقيقة أن رصد تحرُّكات بشارة وتصريحاته ليس أمرا جديدا، وهناك مئات التصريحات للمؤسسة الإسرائيلية الأمنية والسياسية المتعلقة ببشارة المستمرة منذ ما قبل أكثر من عقدين. لكن شراسة الهجمة بدأت بعد العام 2006، وما تبع تلك القضية لاختيار بشارة لمنفاه. والسر أن الرجل غزير الإنتاج فكرياً، ومثقف متورط في قضايا الشعب الفلسطينيوالشعوب العربية، وصاحب شخصية وخطاب مؤثرين على الرأي العام، وبالأخص جيل الشباب.
في 22 مارس/آذار من العام 2011، كانت صحيفة 'الوطن' التابعة للنظام السوري، تعنون افتتاحيتها بمقال 'نصائح مسمومة'، يبدأ بـ'مناضل عربي شرب من بردى وركب ثلاث طائرات وسيارتين ليحظى بقبلة من يد السيد الرئيس'. ومن ثم تتناول الصحيفة بشارة، كمقدم للسم في السياسة السورية.
كان هذا في أيام الثورة السورية الأولى. لقد صدمهم موقف عزمي بشارة بسبب مصداقيته التي ساهموا في ترويجها عندما حاولوا الاستفادة منه ومن مصداقيته على مستوى الرأي العام العربي. وكانوا يقفون بانتظار أن يحظوا منه بتحية أو مقابلة صحافية. لتبدأ حفلة الردح في وسائل إعلام النظام وتصور أن قضية الشعب السوري لا علاقة لها بكل تاريخ الاستبداد، ولا بعمليات القتل التي بدأت تحصد أرواح السوريين آنذاك، بل في إطلالات بشارة الإعلامية ورأيه وانحيازه الأخلاقي والإنساني لجانب معاناة الشعب السوري، رغم تملق النظام لبشارة (وليس العكس، فهم تملقوه وهو لم يتملقهم).
لن نعيد سرد كم الوقاحة المزعومة التي ربطت دور بشارة وقطر في زعزعة استقرار نظام بشار الأسد. حتى في النقاشات التي كانت تدور بيننا وبين مجموعة من يحسب نفسه على طبقة الكتاب والروائيين والمثقفين، كان لهم نفس الرؤية المطروحة في إعلام النظام، ليكون جواب: 'إذا كان بشارة بمقدوره زعزعة أركان نظام بهذا الشكل، بالتأكيد هذا لا يعيب الرجل بل يعيب هشاشة النظام التي اعتبرت أصلا صوت وكتابات أطفال درعا جريمة تستوجب قتلهم واقتلاع أظافرهم، فما بالك باختلاف الرأي'.
هذا حال معظم الطبقة 'الثقافية والسياسية' المرتبطة بتلابيب النظام السوري. انتهى دورها ووظيفتها منذ أكثر من عقدين، وجدت في ما يجري انعكاساً لعجزها المفضوح. عجز اتخذ من ذرائع النظام ورواياته وفبركته بوصلة أبعدت ما تدعيه تلك الطبقة من حملها لأدمغة بين منكبيها. تعاد الرواية اليوم بإخراجات جديدة وحماسة أكبر في تجديد فتح جبهة الهجوم على بشارة من بوابة العلاقة مع قطر.
ببساطة شديدة، حتى لا يعاد تكرار المثبت في نقاط الاشتباك، بشارة ليس دولة ولا تنظيما سياسيا أو إعلاميا. الرجل باحث مرجعي، ومفكر بارز، ومناضل إنسان قبل أي شيء آخر، يحمل كل ذلك في بوتقة مشاعر واحدة، له آراء ووجهات نظر في ما يجري، لأنه مثقف حقيقي منتم لشعبه وأمته، وله فكر وقلب وأخلاق. من الطبيعي أن يكون منسجما مع كل ذلك في ما يطرحه بما يخص الشارع العربي وسياساته. ولأن 'خصومة' الأنظمة قائمة على معرفة بشارة لطبيعتها ودورها، تكون الهجمة بهذا القدر الذي تعرفه تلك الأنظمة والأجهزة عن تأثير بشارة الذي شكت المؤسسة الصهيونية 'خطورته'، وتأثيره في جيل عربي كامل في الداخل الفلسطيني، وفي شباب الشارع العربي من خلال أطروحاته الفكرية والنقدية.
تعاد الهجمة على بشارة، ضمن سياق مضاد لتطلعات الشارع العربي التي يقودها بعض النظام العربي وأجهزته الأمنية، لمعرفتها ويقينها المشترك مع المؤسسة الصهيونية، أن تصفية بشارة سياسيا أو حتى جسديا كما نادى أقطاب اليمين الصهيوني، يفتح الباب أمام عودة الاستقرار لتلك الأنظمة المهزوزة والمرتعبة. المشكلة أنّ مركز أبحاث أكاديمي ورصين أو وسيلة إعلامية مهنية تدب الرعب في قلوب تلك الأنظمة، وأبواق ونخب تلعلع لاعنة علاقة بشارة بالدوحة وبمركز الأبحاث، في الوقت الذي تخلو كل الساحة من تقدّم أي مدع نخبوي بمشروع مماثل يخدم العقل العربي والإنسان العربي بصورة مماثلة ومنافسة، لكن ليس على طريقة مشروع العتيبة وبن سلمان أو دحلان أو أزلام النظام السوري.
(العربي الجديد)