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Crimeans Keep Saying No to Ukraine |
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Tuesday, 24 March 2015 08:16 |
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Parry writes: "Consistently, over the past year, polls conducted by major Western firms have revealed that the people of Crimea by overwhelming numbers prefer being part of Russia over Ukraine, an embarrassing reality that Forbes business magazine has now acknowledged."
Pro-Russian Crimeans celebrate in Sevastopol in 2014. (photo: EPA)
Crimeans Keep Saying No to Ukraine
By Robert Parry, Consortium News
24 March 15
In a rare moment of honesty, a Western news outlet, Forbes, admits that the people of Crimea expressed their legitimate will in last year’s referendum when they voted to abandon Ukraine and rejoin Russia, an inconvenient truth for the U.S. State Department and press corps, writes Robert Parry.
 central piece of the West’s false narrative on the Ukraine crisis has been that Russian President Vladimir Putin “invaded” Crimea and then staged a “sham” referendum purporting to show 96 percent support for leaving Ukraine and rejoining Russia. More recently, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland claimed that Putin has subjected Crimea to a “reign of terror.”
Both elements have been part of the “group think” that dominates U.S. political and media circles, but this propagandistic storyline simply isn’t true, especially the part about the Crimeans being subjugated by Russia.
Consistently, over the past year, polls conducted by major Western firms have revealed that the people of Crimea by overwhelming numbers prefer being part of Russia over Ukraine, an embarrassing reality that Forbes business magazine has now acknowledged.
An article by Kenneth Rapoza, a Forbes specialist on developing markets, cited these polls as showing that the Crimeans do not want the United States and the European Union to force them back into an unhappy marriage with Ukraine. “The Crimeans are happy right where they are” with Russia, Rapoza wrote.
“One year after the annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula in the Black Sea, poll after poll shows that the locals there — be they Ukrainians, ethnic Russians or Tartars are all in agreement: life with Russia is better than life with Ukraine,” he wrote, adding that “the bulk of humanity living on the Black Sea peninsula believe the referendum to secede from Ukraine was legit.”
Rapoza noted that a June 2014 Gallup poll, which was sponsored by the U.S. government’s Broadcasting Board of Governors, found that 82.8 percent of Crimeans said the March 16 referendum on secession reflected the views of the Crimean people. In the poll, when asked if joining Russia would improve their lives, 73.9 percent said yes and only 5.5 percent said no.
A February 2015 poll by German polling firm GfK found similar results. When Crimeans were asked “do you endorse Russia’s annexation of Crimea,” 93 percent gave a positive response, with 82 percent saying, “yes, definitely.” Only 2 percent said no, with the remainder unsure or not answering.
In other words, the West’s insistence that Russia must return Crimea to Ukraine would mean violating the age-old U.S. principle of a people’s right of self-determination. It would force the largely ethnic Russian population of Crimea to submit to a Ukrainian government that many Crimeans view as illegitimate, the result of a violent U.S.-backed coup on Feb. 22, 2014, that ousted elected President Viktor Yanukovych.
The coup touched off a brutal civil war in which the right-wing regime in Kiev dispatched neo-Nazi and other extremist militias to spearhead a fierce “anti-terrorism operation” against resistance from the ethnic Russian population in the east, which – like Crimea – had supported Yanukovych. More than 6,000 Ukrainians, most of them ethnic Russians, have been killed in the fighting.
Despite this reality, the mainstream U.S. news media has misreported the crisis and distorted the facts to conform to U.S. State Department propaganda. Thus, many Americans believe the false narrative about Russian troops crushing the popular will of the Crimean people, much as the U.S. public was misled about the Iraq situation in 2002-03 by many of the same news outlets.
Or, as Forbes’ Rapoza put it: “At some point, the West will have to recognize Crimea’s right to self rule. Unless we are all to believe that the locals polled by Gallup and GfK were done so with FSB bogey men standing by with guns in their hands.” The FSB is a Russian intelligence agency.
The GfK survey also found that Crimeans considered the Ukrainian media, which has been wildly anti-Russian, unreliable. Only 1 percent said the Ukrainian media “provides entirely truthful information” and only 4 percent said it was “more often truthful than deceitful.”
So, the people at the frontline of this conflict, where Assistant Secretary Nuland, detected a “reign of terror,” say they are not only satisfied with being restored to Russia, which controlled Crimea since the 1700s, but don’t trust the distorted version of events that they see on Ukrainian TV.
Practical Reasons
Some of the reasons for the Crimean attitudes are simply pragmatic. Russian pensions were three times larger than what the Ukrainian government paid – and now the Ukrainian pensions are being slashed further in compliance with austerity demands from the International Monetary Fund.
This month, Nuland boasted about those pension cuts in praising the Kiev regime’s steps toward becoming a “free-market state.” She also hailed “reforms” that will force Ukrainians to work harder and into old age and that slashed gas subsidies which helped the poor pay their heating bills.
Last year, the New York Times and other U.S. news outlets also tossed around the word “invasion” quite promiscuously in discussing Crimea. But you may recall that you saw no images of Russian tanks crashing into the Crimean peninsula or an amphibious landing or paratroops descending from the skies. The reason was simple: Russian troops were already in Crimea.
The Russians had a lease agreement with Ukraine permitting up to 25,000 military personnel in Crimea to protect the Russian naval base at Sevastopol. About 16,000 Russian troops were on the ground when the Feb. 22, 2014 putsch occurred in Kiev – and after a crisis meeting at the Kremlin, they were dispatched to prevent the coup regime from imposing its control on Crimea’s people.
That Russian intervention set the stage for the March 16 referendum in which the voters of Crimea turned out in large numbers and voted overwhelmingly for secession from Ukraine and reintegration with Russia, a move that the Russian parliament and President Putin then approved.
Yet, as another part of its false reporting, the New York Times claimed that Putin denied that Russian troops had operated inside Crimea – when, in fact, he was quite open about it. For instance, on March 4, 2014, almost two weeks before the referendum, Putin discussed at a Moscow press conference the role of Russian troops in preventing the violence from spreading from Kiev to Crimea. Putin said:
“You should note that, thank God, not a single gunshot has been fired there. … Thus the tension in Crimea that was linked to the possibility of using our Armed Forces simply died down and there was no need to use them. The only thing we had to do, and we did it, was to enhance the defense of our military facilities because they were constantly receiving threats and we were aware of the armed nationalists moving in. We did this, it was the right thing to do and very timely.”
Two days after the referendum, which recorded the 96 percent vote in favor of seceding from Ukraine and rejoining Russia, Putin returned to the issue of Russian involvement in Crimea. In a formal speech to the Russian Federation, Putin justified Crimea’s desire to escape the grasp of the coup regime in Kiev, saying:
“Those who opposed the [Feb. 22] coup were immediately threatened with repression. Naturally, the first in line here was Crimea, the Russian-speaking Crimea. In view of this, the residents of Crimea and Sevastopol turned to Russia for help in defending their rights and lives, in preventing the events that were unfolding and are still underway in Kiev, Donetsk, Kharkov and other Ukrainian cities.
“Naturally, we could not leave this plea unheeded; we could not abandon Crimea and its residents in distress. This would have been betrayal on our part.”
But to make it appear that Putin was denying a military intervention, the Times and other U.S. news outlets truncated Putin’s statement when he said, “Russia’s Armed Forces never entered Crimea.” The Western press stopped there, ignoring what he said next: “they were there already in line with an international agreement.”
Putin’s point was that Russian troops based in Crimea took actions that diffused a possibly violent situation and gave the people of Crimea a chance to express their wishes through the ballot. But that version of events didn’t fit with the desired narrative pushed by the U.S. State Department and the New York Times. So the problem was solved by misrepresenting what Putin said.
But the larger issue now is whether the Obama administration and the European Union will insist on forcing the Crimean people – against their will – to rejoin Ukraine, a country that is rapidly sliding into the status of a failed state and a remarkably cruel one at that.
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Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.
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Unions Are Powerless. Workers Aren't. |
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Tuesday, 24 March 2015 08:09 |
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McArdle writes: "Through solidarity and aggressive bargaining, the ILWU won higher wages and other concessions from an employer group that is not afraid to play hardball."
International Longshore and Warehouse Union won higher wages. (photo: unknown)
Unions Are Powerless. Workers Aren't.
By Megan McArdle, Bloomberg
24 March 15
 he long-simmering dispute between West Coast port owners and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union had already been settled, but everywhere I went at the International Home and Housewares Show, people were still talking about it. The standoff left ships sitting offshore, unable to unload their cargo, and snarled everyone's supply chains into the kind of knot that you have to spend weeks in the basement untangling. Product launches were being delayed, and retailers were making nervous noises about empty shelves.
The showdown at the ports was very bad for the U.S. economy, which lost an estimated $2 billion a day as food rotted and ships idled. But it seems to be good for the port workers, though the details of the tentative agreement are somewhat scarce. Through solidarity and aggressive bargaining, the ILWU won higher wages and other concessions from an employer group that is not afraid to play hardball.
If you're hoping that trade unionism can be resurrected in the U.S. -- and along with it the high wage growth and lower inequality that characterized mid-century America -- this might seem like a hopeful sign. In fact, it's the opposite. The very factors that enabled the longshoremen to drive such a high bargain are the same factors that are killing unions and lowering wages for low- and medium-skilled workers in the rest of the economy; the ILWU's victory just tells you how bad their bargaining position is.
Whither labor? The last year has been filled with interesting stories on this front: The United Automobile Workers union is still struggling to organize Volkswagen's plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, despite the support of the company and its German unions; local governments are mandating massive hikes in the minimum wage supported by dubious readings of the available evidence; and meanwhile, the governor who won an epic showdown with Wisconsin's public-sector unions may well be the next president of the United States. And did I mention that Wal-Mart, after spending years strenuously resisting pressure to raise wages, went ahead and announced generous increases? What the flaming heck is going on with our labor markets?
Well, let me see if I can boil it down for you:
- After years of flopping around on the ground and gasping that full employment is just too hard, labor markets have finally decided to shape up and start clearing.
- Nonetheless, unions are still dying, except in a few favored sectors that are shielded from competition.
- Wages will improve, but they won't improve much.
- Attempts to manhandle the markets into giving us the wages we would like to have risk serious disemployment.
Confused, aren't you? If labor markets are getting better, why would Big Labor's prospects be getting worse? Bear with me and I promise it will all make sense.
In February 2008, 138.3 million people were employed in the U.S. Six years later, in February 2014, that number was ... 137.8 million. The labor market had actually lost jobs over those six years, even as the working-age population grew by millions. Some of this can be explained by the aging of the baby boomers, but in fact, many workers delayed their retirements due to the financial crisis. Mostly, this is explained by the weakness of the U.S. job market. No, weak doesn't adequately describe it: America's labor market had to have its head propped up while it gingerly sipped some juice.
Then suddenly, over the last year, the labor market has had the kind of turnaround that's usually only seen at the third-act break of inspiring movies about people who get their legs crushed in terrible car crashes, then go on to win the Olympics anyway. The labor market jumped out of bed and demanded a set of free weights so that it could get back into training. Over the past 12 months -- if the preliminary numbers are to be believed -- the economy has added some 3.3 million jobs.
Many people think that's why Wal-Mart has decided to announce a major wage increase: It needs higher wages to maintain its labor force. When economic times are lean, you get better workers in not-so-great jobs, because a not-so-great job is better than no paycheck at all. As hiring picks up, those workers see their alternatives improve, so you have to raise wages to keep them in the building.
This is, obviously, very good news for people who work at Wal-Mart. And yet, we're not necessarily seeing this same turnaround story in the earnings numbers. Average hourly wages did increase by almost 50 cents over the past year, but that's not a radical change from the previous two years. It's not even that much better than wage growth during the darkest days of the financial crisis. What's going on here?
Well, for one thing, there's still a lot of slack in the labor market -- what Karl Marx called the reserve army of labor, who help keep wages down for the rest. They may not be officially unemployed; they may be "consulting" or "staying home to help Mom out" or "getting my third graduate degree." But whatever you call them, they are people who might like to work, if they could find a good enough job. Only they can't, so they're doing something else. In our reference month of February 2008, the employment-to-population ratio was 62.8. Today it's 59.3. And to reiterate, we can't blame this all on the baby boomers. That number undoubtedly represents some retirement, but it also represents millions of people who could be working, who would ideally like to be working but aren't.
As those people flow back into the labor market, they put downward pressure on wages. Until our reserve army has been demobilized, booming employment numbers won't necessarily translate into booming wages.
Even then, however, we can't expect a return to the robust wage growth that followed the Great Depression and World War II -- or even the go-go days of the 1990s. Which is why, as I say, unions are dying. At this point, it's unlikely that anything can revive them.
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To Move Beyond Boom and Bust, We Need a New Theory of Capitalism |
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Monday, 23 March 2015 14:48 |
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Mason writes: "This is the year that economics might, if we are lucky, turn a corner. There's a deluge of calls for change in the way it is taught in universities."
Terry Jones. (photo: Play4movie)
To Move Beyond Boom and Bust, We Need a New Theory of Capitalism
By Paul Mason, Guardian UK
23 March 15
Finding one is the the holy grail of economics
his is the year that economics might, if we are lucky, turn a corner. There’s a deluge of calls for change in the way it is taught in universities. There’s a global conference at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris, where the giants of radical economics – including Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis – will get their biggest ever mainstream platform. And there’s a film where a star of Monty Python talks to a puppet of Hyman Minsky.
Terry Jones’s documentary film Boom Bust Boom hits the cinemas this month. Using puppetry and talking heads (including mine), Jones is trying to popularise the work of Minsky, a US economist who died in 1996 but whose name has become for ever associated with the Lehman Brothers crash. Terrified analysts labelled it the “Minsky moment”.
Minsky’s genius was to show that financially complex capitalism is inherently unstable. Under conditions of stability, firms, banks and households will, over time, move from a position where their income pays off their debt, to one where it can only meet the interest payments on it. Finally, as instability rises, and central banks respond by expanding the supply of money, people end up borrowing just to pay back interest. The price of shares, homes and commodities rockets. Bust becomes inevitable.
This logical and coherent prediction was laughed at until it came true. Mainstream economics had convinced itself that capitalism tends towards equilibrium; and that any shocks must be external. It did so by reducing economic thought to the construction of abstract models, which perfectly describe the system 95% of the time, but break down during critical events.
In the aftermath of the crisis – which threatens some countries with a phase of stagnation lasting decades – Minsky’s insight has been acknowledged. But his supporters face a problem. The mainstream has a model; the radicals do not. The mainstream theory is “good enough” to run a business, a finance ministry or a central bank – as long as you are prepared, in practice, to ignore that theory when faced with crises.
That, effectively, describes the situation among the policymaking elite today. They are trying to wrestle the economy back into a state where their models can cope with it again, using measures their theories say are not needed: quantitative easing, bank nationalisations, partial debt defaults and currency devaluations.
The radical, pro-Minsky faction is at a disadvantage because it does not possess a complete alternative model of capitalism. Some have generated computer programs showing how financial crises happen. But, by their own admission, they do not have a complete alternative model of how capitalism works. They are, admits Dutch finance professor Theo Kocken, “roughly right” rather than “exactly wrong”. Kocken’s solution is to concentrate on why we misperceive risk. Behavioural economics has had a field day since 2008, identifying problems for the human brain when faced with complex risks: oversimplification, overconfidence and “confirmation bias”, where we ignore facts that challenge our existing beliefs. But adding behavioural insights to the Minsky model of financial mania does not turn it into a theory of capitalism.
Here, the parallels with events in physics are obvious. After Einstein’s big breakthrough, we were left with two competing – and mutually incompatible – accounts of the laws of physics. Einstein himself was dissatisfied with this, pursuing from the 1920s a “theory of everything”. It is a laudable aim in economics too. And this is where we come to the turning point. The defenders of orthodox economics and the Minsky rebels are, essentially, asking the same question: “What does capitalism normally look like?” The one answers “stable”; the other “unstable”. But it’s the wrong question. The right question is: Where are we in the long arc of capitalist development? Nearer the beginning, the middle or the end? But that question goes to the heart of darkness.
For the mainstream, their convictions about equilibrium and abstract models were always founded on the belief that capitalism is an eternal system: the social arrangement most completely reflecting human nature. Minsky’s followers, as with all followers of JM Keynes, assume that a better understanding of financial mania can stabilise an inherently unstable system. But even physicists, who study a universe that has lasted 13bn years, are prepared to countenance – indeed, are obsessed with modelling – its death.
So the pursuit of theory is obligatory in economics. The holy grail is not a new orthodoxy, cobbled together from Minsky and the remnants of mainstream thought so that bankers can construct trading models to iron out problems created by the way our brains work. The aim should be something bigger to model capitalism’s current crisis within an understanding of its destiny.
For me, the most fundamental question in economics still concerns the 2008 crisis. Was this event the last in a series of shocks needed to allow a third technological revolution to take off? Or was it evidence that capitalism’s tendency to adapt and reshape in response to technology has stalled, or is even finished? That is the shadow we have to jump over in economics. Amid a mania for “new economic thinking”, it is what we need to think hardest about.
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FOCUS | Why College Isn't (and Shouldn't Have to Be) for Everyone |
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Monday, 23 March 2015 12:14 |
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Reich writes: "I know a high school senior who's so worried about whether she'll be accepted at the college of her choice she can't sleep."
Economist, professor, author and political commentator Robert Reich. (photo: Richard Morgenstein)
Why College Isn't (and Shouldn't Have to Be) for Everyone
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
23 March 15
 know a high school senior who’s so worried about whether she’ll be accepted at the college of her choice she can’t sleep.
The parent of another senior tells me he stands at the mailbox for an hour every day waiting for a hoped-for acceptance letter to arrive.
Parents are also uptight. I’veheard of some who have stopped socializing with other parents of children competing for admission to the same university.
Competition for places top-brand colleges is absurdly intense.
With inequality at record levels and almost all the economic gains going to the top, there’s more pressure than ever to get the golden ring.
A degree from a prestigious university can open doors to elite business schools and law schools – and to jobs paying hundreds of thousands, if not millions, a year.
So parents who can afford it are paying grotesque sums to give their kids an edge.
They “enhance” their kid’s resumes with such things as bassoon lessons, trips to preserve the wildlife in Botswana, internships at the Atlantic Monthly.
They hire test preparation coaches. They arrange for consultants to help their children write compelling essays on college applications.
They make generous contributions to the elite colleges they once attended, to which their kids are applying – colleges that give extra points to “legacies” and even more to those from wealthy families that donate tons of money.
You might call this affirmative action for the rich.
The same intensifying competition is affecting mid-range colleges and universities that are doing everything they can to burnish their own brands – competing with other mid-range institutions to enlarge their applicant pools, attract good students, and inch upward on the U.S. News college rankings.
Every college president wants to increase the ratio of applications to admissions, thereby becoming more elite.
Excuse me, but this is nuts.
The biggest absurdity is that a four-year college degree has become the only gateway into the American middle class.
But not every young person is suited to four years of college. They may be bright and ambitious but they won’t get much out of it. They’d rather be doing something else, like making money or painting murals.
They feel compelled to go to college because they’ve been told over and over that a college degree is necessary.
Yet if they start college and then drop out, they feel like total failures.
Even if they get the degree, they’re stuck with a huge bill — and may be paying down their student debt for years.
And all too often the jobs they land after graduating don’t pay enough to make the degree worthwhile.
Last year, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 46 percent of recent college graduates were in jobs that don’t even require a college degree.
The biggest frauds are for-profit colleges that are raking in money even as their students drop out in droves, and whose diplomas are barely worth the ink-jets they’re printed on.
America clings to the conceit that four years of college are necessary for everyone, and looks down its nose at people who don’t have college degrees.
This has to stop. Young people need an alternative. That alternative should be a world-class system of vocational-technical education.
A four-year college degree isn’t necessary for many of tomorrow’s good jobs.
For example, the emerging economy will need platoons of technicians able to install, service, and repair all the high-tech machinery filling up hospitals, offices, and factories.
And people who can upgrade the software embedded in almost every gadget you buy.
Today it’s even hard to find a skilled plumber or electrician.
Yet the vocational and technical education now available to young Americans is typically underfunded and inadequate. And too often denigrated as being for “losers.”
These programs should be creating winners.
Germany – whose median wage (after taxes and transfers) is higher than ours – gives many of its young people world-class technical skills that have made Germany a world leader in fields such as precision manufacturing.
A world-class technical education doesn’t have to mean young people’s fates are determined when they’re fourteen.
Instead, rising high-school seniors could be given the option of entering a program that extends a year or two beyond high school and ends with a diploma acknowledging their technical expertise.
Community colleges – the under-appreciated crown jewels of America’s feeble attempts at equal opportunity – could be developing these curricula. Businesses could be advising on the technical skills they’ll need, and promising jobs to young people who complete their degrees with good grades.
Government could be investing enough money to make these programs thrive. (And raising taxes on top incomes enough to temper the wild competition for admission to elite colleges that grease the way to those top incomes.)
Instead, we continue to push most of our young people through a single funnel called a four-year college education — a funnel so narrow it’s causing applicants and their parents excessive stress and worry about “getting in;” that’s too often ill suited and unnecessary, and far too expensive; and that can cause college dropouts to feel like failures for the rest of their lives.
It’s time to give up the idea that every young person has to go to college, and start offering high-school seniors an alternative route into the middle class.
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