An Alternative Post-2015 Agenda

As noted in my last post, the draft of the post 2015 agenda that governments have agreed upon is the disastrous product of a dysfunctional UN. To show what a meaningful agenda could be, I’ve drafted the text below. If governments go ahead with their agreed text I invite civil society organizations to consider adapting and adopting the following.

PREAMBLE

We live at a time when the growth of global connectivity has ushered in a range of new political, economic and social realities and opened up unprecedented potentials for sustainable human development.

Within the next 15 years we can realistically look forward to ending poverty and war, the most formidable obstacles to sustainable development.

In the process we can eliminate also the interrelated scourges of drug trafficking, terrorism and organized crime which at present exact a huge cost in lives and treasure from the poorest countries of the world.

To realize these objectives there are two fundamental requirements.

One is the full partnership of men and women and nations large and small in repairing a world devastated by the poisonous processes of the industrial age.

The other is the fundamental reform of the United Nations system of agencies.

Progress towards these ends will be framed by the values set forth in the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Within that framework we recognize that nations have a sovereign right to determine their own course of development.

GOALS

We endorse the Goals set out below and will take action to achieve them within our nations and in sub-regional, regional and global frameworks. We urge international agencies to prioritize South-South and Triangular modalities of cooperation wherever possible. In listing the Goals below, we set out the rationale that will guide policies and programmes and note (in italics) the action that we will take.

1. Eliminate Poverty: The extreme poverty afflicting nearly a billion people who live on less than $1:25 a day is caused by systemic factors rooted in the colonial era and sustained by current socioeconomic arrangements, especially those noted below under other Goals. We expect that as those are addressed, the problem of extreme poverty will be greatly ameliorated. To accelerate the process, we will frame specific policies and field well-funded programs to end hunger, extend good quality education to all children and ensure that the poor have access to health care.

2. Promote Social Inclusion: Poverty is not just economic; everywhere, it is associated with forms of social exclusion and discrimination. Many who are not poor also suffer exclusion and discrimination on the basis of their gender, age and sexual preference. To counter this, we will formulate appropriate laws and policies, initiate media campaigns targeting discrimination and make social inclusion a high priority in housing, education and access to the Internet and the worldwide web.

3. Combat Organized Crime: Most of the violence visited on societies around the world is the work of criminals organized around a nexus of economic interests, especially drug trafficking. They are empowered by existing financial and legal arrangements at the global level that must be changed if we are to root out all forms of organized crime ranging from sexual exploitation of children and women to trade in counterfeit goods and environmental crimes. To that end, we pledge to:

• Revoke the existing prohibitionist conventions on the manufacture, trade and use of so called “illicit drugs,” and replace them with one that will promote a medical and social approach to addiction and abuse. This will be done at the Special Session of the General Assembly that will convene in 2016 to deal comprehensively with the issue of “illicit drugs.” 

• Declare illegal all “shell companies” that allow criminals to hide behind corporate identities, and subsequently, seize the assets of all entities whose beneficial ownership is not verified. To this end, the Sixth Committee of the current session of the General Assembly will inscribe a new item on its agenda and come to an agreement within a year.

• Decree that banks caught laundering money will automatically lose their license to do business and that the individuals involved will be subject to mandatory prison sentences. 

4. Build Peace and Security: The action under 3 a, b and c above will eliminate organized crime as a major threat to international peace and security but state-sponsored terrorism and proxy wars for control of resources or strategic space will continue. To address those sources of violence a twin-pronged approach will be necessary. On the one hand, we must make a concerted effort to end the proliferation of small arms and light weapons and stop the illicit trafficking in arms. On the other hand, the defensive responses of victimized societies must change. Instead of relying on heavily militarized police and secretive agencies that conduct massively intrusive surveillance of their own citizens, the first line of defense should be community-level organizations working with lightly armed local police organizations. To these ends, we resolve to:

• Work with corporations manufacturing weapons to create a clear, transparent and global registry of small arms and light weapons

• End the illicit trade in weapons by putting brokers out of business and into prison. 

• Explore and promote community-level networks supporting local police to ensure security.

5. Change Production/Consumption Patterns: Existing patterns of production and consumption are rooted in the realities of the industrial era that are now fading under the influence of the technologies of the Information Age. The Internet and the Worldwide Web now allow small and medium corporations to identify and sell to niche markets, in effect destroying the mass markets essential for the survival of giant corporations. The rapid evolution of 3-D printing is making it possible for the highest quality of industrial production on a very small scale, in effect, setting at naught the single greatest advantage of mega corporations. As networks of small producers emerge to maximize their efficiencies, the mega corporations with their top-down decision-making structures and concentrated production/service centers will become increasingly inefficient dinosaurs. This will inevitably affect patterns of trade and urbanization, especially as cheap off-grid renewable sources of energy become plentiful. In sum, these trends will change all the wasteful production and consumption patterns of the last few centuries. To accelerate the process, we will:

• Review all policies based on industrial era assumptions of production and consumption, especially of fossil fuels.

• Promote the evolution of 3-D printing to meet the requirements of small and remote communities.

• Set in place educational systems capable of providing the highest quality of instruction in the remotest rural locations.

• Encourage entrepreneurs to meet the cultural needs of remote or widely dispersed rural populations

• Consider how best to adapt our nations to the reversal of long standing trends towards urbanization.

6. Reduce Social Inequalities: Growing inequalities within societies has been one of the most unsustainable of trends over the last decade, accentuating injustices that have been a characteristic of all civilizations. The most obvious difference between the haves and the have-nots, and historically the most irreducible, has been access to high quality housing. However, as the connectivity of the Information Age has made crowd-funding a new economic reality, that great divide can now be closed. A crowd-funded housing sector can not only eliminate the issue of homeless populations, it can, in the process, rapidly expand employment, build infrastructure and drive economic growth. To make this possible a range of monetary and environmental issues will have to be ironed out. We will initiate a global research effort to illuminate and address those issues with an eye to providing housing for all by 2030.

7. Reform the United Nations System: The system of international agencies set in place at the end of World War II 70 years ago continues to function with little change in its modalities. It adopts hundreds of resolutions every year phrased in arcane diplomatic jargon addressed mainly to governments. No one knows what actually happens to the resolutions, for there is no systematic feedback on their implementation To rectify this state of affairs, we will move to hook the operations of the UN System into the networked world of the 21st century. That will entail crisply action-oriented resolutions circulated on all public, expert and organizational networks worldwide, eliciting feedback and responses in a fluid interactive process.

In sum, the achievement of these goals will lead towards the long-standing UN goal of general and complete disarmament, anchoring sustainable development to deepening peace and security. It will result in a world transformed by 2030.

UN's Faux Development Agenda

The United Nations seems to be headed for a summit session of the General Assembly in September that will agree on a meaningless global development agenda.

The draft of the document now being discussed in New York makes high minded declarations about "principles" and "commitment" but ignores such key issues as money laundering and drug trafficking that bedevil economic growth in poor countries.

Produced  after lengthy "consultations" by the Ambassadors of Ireland and Kenya, it does not mention drug trafficking at all. Governments only promise to "strengthen the prevention and treatment of substance abuse, including narcotic drug abuse and harmful use of alcohol."

Money laundering is noted obliquely in the pledge by governments that by 2030 they will "significantly reduce illicit financial and arms flows ... and combat all forms of organized crime."

There are four anodyne references to terrorism:

1. Governments say they will "take further effective measures and actions, in conformity with international law, to remove obstacles and constraints, strengthen support and meet the special needs of people living in areas affected by complex humanitarian emergencies and in areas affected by terrorism."

2. They will "Strengthen relevant national institutions, including through international cooperation, for building capacity at all levels, in particular in developing countries, to prevent violence and combat terrorism and crime.

The third and fourth mention of terrorism repeat those formulations word for word in other sections of the draft.

If any of this makes a difference to the lives of the billion people living on less than $1.25 a day it will be convincing proof that miracles do happen.

Why the UN Has Been Such a Failure

The UN’s main man on the environment, Achim Steiner, has just provided monumentally bad advice to government policy makers.

Speaking in Cairo on 4 March at the opening of the biennial African Ministerial Conference on the Environment, Steiner asserted that the “only insurance against climate change impacts is ambitious global mitigation action” combined “with large-scale, rapidly increasing and predictable funding for adaptation.”

If anything is clear from the UN’s 45-year record of trying to deal with the problems of the human environment, it is that “mitigation action” is completely useless unless we deal with the destructive economic forces driving a multifaceted global crisis.

The UN has been unable to say so because the major industrial countries are in thrall to mega corporations that profit hugely from ignoring environmental concerns.

They ensured UN inaction by putting a Canadian oilman in charge of the first World Conference on the Environment (Stockholm, 1972), and making him the first head of the new Nairobi-based UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

Under his direction UNEP studied problems and identified causes but never ever hinted at the need for wholesale redirection of the world economy, the only thing that can stop our slide to disaster.

UNEP's stock in trade became international agreements to deal with negative impacts.

Meanwhile, another part of the UN that did try to negotiate a Code of Conduct for corporations was quietly wound up.

This lack of cojones is not just on environmental matters.

Even more glaring is the example of the UN Security Council, which has never been able to undertake its primary task of disarming the world and building a global security system because its five veto-wielding “Permanent Members” are the world’s largest arms producers and their elites profit hugely from war.

Less known but even more venal is the organization’s failure to deal with the enormously violent crime wave that has washed around the world since the 1960s.

Analyses show that drug trafficking has been its primary driver and that it now funds all other forms of organized crime, including “Islamic terrorism.”

But the UN has pussy-footed around the matter because Britain’s primary industry, banking, is neck-deep in laundering drug money.

None of this is secret. Books and expert analyses provide the sordid details in ample measure.

But getting from expert analyses to public policy has been impossible because the Cold War empowered a fascist apparatus in major countries that constrains politicians and the Press even in the freest of societies.

Revealing detail: The New Yorker, as genteel a publication as ever graced the rough and ready world of journalism, now has an encrypted system to receive material from whistle blowers.

Is British Imperialism Reinventing Itself – Again?

In the decades after World War II, when the British Empire seemed to die, it actually reinvented itself as a global engine for money laundering and organized crime; recent international developments indicate that something similar is happening now.

Britain achieved its earlier resurrection by forging the much celebrated “special relationship” with the military-industrial complex of the United States and setting off the Cold War.(See here)

That was, in effect, a coup against American democracy, and it gave London free reign in making a host of international rearrangements, including:

• Partitioning India to create Pakistan as a proxy for use in South Asia and, in alliance with Saudi Arabia (an earlier British creation), the Islamic world.

• Developing the Muslim Brotherhood from a social service organization in Egypt into a transnational Middle Eastern support system for terrorists.

• Continuing its colonial control of Africa’s great mineral wealth through apartheid South Africa, a number of other white minority regimes, and continued subversion of independent African States.

• Expanding its colonial era interests in drug trafficking by developing, first, the “Golden Triangle” in Southeast Asia as the world centre for the production of opium and heroin, and after the end of the Vietnam War, shifting operations to Afghanistan under cover of the "Mujaheddin" war against Russian occupation.

• Developing the first large flow of cocaine from Colombia to the United States by providing transit and money laundering facilities in the Bahamas.

• Setting up a global system of off shore “tax havens” where organized crime of every sort could safely deposit income and arrange for London bankers to invest it.

By the end of the 1970s, these initiatives had resulted in Britain controlling a multi-trillion dollar underground economy rivaling the GDP of the United States. It gave Britain an unparalleled capacity to corrupt, subvert, manipulate and punish anyone, including governments, that got in its way.

In the case of India, punitive British action has involved the subversive use of our corrupt "elite" media, the assassinations of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi, and efforts to foment insurrections in several parts of the country, most visibly in West Bengal (the Purulia arms drop case), and in the Khalistan uprising in the Punjab.

In the United States it has involved the brutal early Cold War alliance with the military-industrial establishment that saw the McCarthy black list and the Kennedy/King assassinations, followed by the more nuanced manipulation of politics through proxies, especially the Bush family with its three terms in the presidency, two of which involved rigged elections. 

British influence in the United States eroded after the end of the Cold War and there were increasing transatlantic conflicts of interest, especially in oil-rich Arab States and as a result of American efforts to end money laundering.

The 9/11 attacks at the beginning of the first rigged Bush Jr. presidency ended that erosion by concentrating the power of the military-industrial elite in the deeply undemocratic “Homeland Security” arrangements. New wars followed, and there was rampant growth of domestic surveillance and militarized urban police.

In the last decade, those trends have again been reversed. The Obama administration has drawn down wars and increased pressure on British money laundering. Edward Snowden’s revelations have shone a light on the surveillance State. The “Occupy” movement has focused public attention on the vast gulf between the ultra-rich 1% and the rest of American society. Popular protests have erupted time and again over the actions of storm-trooper police forces.

Meanwhile, the rise of developing countries as a new force in world affairs has put increasing pressure on British drug trafficking and money laundering systems. In recent years Latin American countries have called for a fundamental re-examination of the prohibitionist drug conventions that make trafficking so lucrative to organized crime. African States have called for an end to "tax havens" that drain trillions of dollars from their economies.

British responses to these challenges underlie a number of recent international developments:

• The outbreak of Ebola in Africa, posing as it does, a considerable threat to other regions of the South, will certainly ease pressure from developing countries to end drug trafficking and money laundering. (The statement by former UNAIDS chief Peter Piot that the strain of Ebola in the current outbreaks is different from the one in previous incidents of the disease needs urgent investigation; where did it come from?)

• The sudden appearance of a well-funded and brutal new terrorist “Islamic State” is threatening to reverse the American draw back from foreign wars. Its televised beheading of Westerners has only one purpose, to build public support for American intervention on the ground; if that happens, the old military-industrial set in the United States will quickly regain much of its lost clout.

• The British announcement last week that it will float bonds denominated in Chinese Yuan will undoubtedly undermine the US$ role as the international reserve currency. That is clearly intended to reduce American capacity to challenge Britain's money laundering and other criminal enterprises.

On all fronts, there is an undoubted effort to reverse positive current trends, with Britain the primary beneficiary.

The only thing that can prevent it from succeeding is an informed global public, capable of seeing through the torrents of British propaganda spread by a host of proxies.

Those proxies include such "liberal" founts as The Guardian, Noam Chomsky, Michel Chossudovsky, the International Clearing House and, in India, operators ranging from our "elite Press" to such two-bit outfits as Counter Currents. A sure confirmation of proxy status is their total blindness to the entire scenario outlined above.

Why China's Iron Fist Hesitates in Hong Kong

There are complex reasons why the pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong have not provoked a Tienanmen type response from Beijing.

Perhaps the most important of them are (1) Hong Kong’s important role in facilitating official corruption in China; and (2) The possibility that harsh action could cascade into a tidal wave of protests on the mainland and bring to the fore the serious rifts that exist within the political elite.

The role of a laissez faire Hong Kong in laundering the money of corrupt Chinese officials was Margaret Thatcher’s primary – if undeclared – argument for the “one country two systems” arrangement under which Britain transferred control of the city to Beijing in 1997.

The city has also been the conduit of major flows of laundered money from other parts of the world into the Chinese economy, a key factor in its so-called miraculous growth over the last two decades. Investments have accounted for more than 50 per cent of China’s GDP growth in recent years, a proportion unprecedented in history.

At a time when the Chinese banking sector is on the verge of collapse because so much of it is a vehicle for corruption and a long-running real estate bubble seems headed into what could be a precipitous bust, Beijing dare not send out the tanks in Hong Kong.

It could upset the larger apple carts of international corruption on which the regime depends for security and sustenance.

This explains why Beijing has been reduced to mobilizing a goonda army ostensibly in the pay of Hong Kong retailers irate at losing business.

Whether that will succeed in dealing with the problems remains to be seen.

The protesters include thousands of people employed in Hong Kong’s money-laundering industry, and they could wreak major economic havoc, setting off a larger political unwinding.

The next few weeks could be crucial to the future of China – and the world.

Britain & Hinduism 8: Breaking Bad

In 1972, a British national of Pakistani origin, Agha Hasan Abedi, founded what he called a “Third World bank” in London. The Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) became a runaway success, expanding from 19 to 108 branches in three years and its assets jumping from $200 million to $1.6 billion. In less than two decades, it had $23 billion in assets and was operating in 73 countries, with offshoots in Luxembourg and Grand Cayman. It became the first foreign bank to open an office in China.

Through its Third World Foundation BCCI handed out awards to luminaries like Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang of China, Nelson and Winnie Mandela, and President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania (with Indira Gandhi making the presentation). As the bank’s senior staff hobnobbed with presidents and prime ministers and the governments of many developing countries gave it their official business, tens of thousands of small depositors in developing countries trusted it with their life savings.

What only a few people knew was that BCCI also held the accounts of Abu Nidal the terrorist, members of the Medellin drug cartel in Colombia, and Lieutenant-General Fazle Haq, the governor of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, who had set up hundreds of heroin processing plants close to the Afghan border and trucked their output to Karachi in military vehicles.

Money Launderers Discover Their Inner Policemen

In a comic opera turn of events those who run the global money-laundering system are declaring their sudden discovery of the need to oppose themselves.

Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain has written to other European Union leaders, urging that the June G-8 Summit he is hosting initiate "radical" international action to crack down on tax evasion and avoidance.

His Minister for Middle East affairs, Alistair Burt, told the Deutsch Press Agency (DPA) that the British Foreign Office would create a special team to help with the return of stolen assets to the “Arab Spring” countries. (The former dictator of Tunisia is reported to have decamped with about a ton of gold.)

Prime Minister Juliana O’Connor-Connolly of the Cayman Islands (among the most active of offshore tax havens), wrote to her British counterpart pledging support for the initiative on a multilateral automatic exchange of tax information. She called on other national leaders to participate in the system to “ensure efficiencies of cost and resources,” and “avoid the risk of multiple competing standards.” (More plainly, Don't bother investigating the specifics of who actually drained trillions of dollars from developing countries.)

Juergen Fitschen, executive head of Deutsche Bank AG declared on German Radio that there would be "zero tolerance" for tax evasion. "Tax evasion is a criminal offense. That says it all," he said.

The reason for all this righteous zeal?

The secrecy surrounding the payments system of the global black market is falling away under pressure from the American and German governments; also, developing countries, newly aware of their losses, are raising the issue in international forums.

African countries especially, have made it a joint priority to stop the haemorrhage and have established a high-level panel on the matter chaired by former South African President Thabo Mbeki. They have made it a key target of their post-Millennium Development Goals (MDG) development agenda.

Meanwhile, the super-rich around the world have been making their own adjustments to the loss of hideouts. Businessweek reported last week on how a number of Russian and Western European billionaires were running for cover. Reuters carried a story saying wealthy Americans were filing tax returns showing their long-standing secret accounts as if they were newly opened.

But does all this mean the end of money laundering and the Global Black Market?

Not by a long shot.

Last week Indian mass media ignored or reported sotto voce that British telephone giant Vodafone would be partnering with ICICI bank to introduce the “mpesa” in India. The “mpesa” is Vodafone’s system for moving money over mobile telephones, and it can undercut all efforts to make financial institutions responsible for knowing their clients and monitoring suspicious transactions.

Which part of the government authorized the launch of the “mpesa” system in India has not been reported, but the Finance Ministry cannot be without a role.

There should be an investigation to see who specifically was involved.

Did they take into consideration that ICICI bank is currently being probed for money laundering? Or that Vodafone’s massive tax problems with the Income Tax authorities centre on the use of tax haven funds to buy into the Indian mobile market? Or that the company it acquired was a joint venture of ESSAR, which was caught funding the Naxalites, and Hutchinson Whampoa, the Hong Kong conglomerate with close links to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA)?

The “mpesa” mobile phone currency would make it impossible to track the funding of violent individuals and groups in India.

There are many other ways that money can be laundered and moved, and the government should consider carefully the implications of “economic reforms” that make the country increasingly vulnerable to groups with a long record of international criminality.

Rather than pussy-foot around this issue, perhaps it is time to do some plain speaking to British governmental and corporate leaders.