Chris Hedges's Blog, page 627

Tech Woes, Worsening Tensions With China Sink U.S. Stocks

NEW YORK — Stocks tumbled Monday after China raised import duties on a number of U.S. exports, bringing the two economic giants closer to a full-on trade conflict. Big technology companies, long investor favorites, suffered heavy losses.

The deepening worries over newly protectionist U.S. trade policies combined with blowback toward technology companies, including Facebook’s ever-widening privacy scandal, have prompted investors to pull money out of the market. That has meant steep drops in former big winners including Netflix, Microsoft and Alphabet, Google’s parent company.

Among other recent winners, Intel dove 6.1 percent following a report in Bloomberg News that Apple plans to start using its own chips in Mac computers, and Amazon sank following more broadsides from President Trump on Twitter.

The Dow Jones industrial average fell as much as 758 points, although major indexes regained some of their losses later in the afternoon. The Dow lost 458.92 points, or 1.9 percent, to 23,644.19. The S&P 500 index gave up 58.99 points, or 2.2 percent, to 2,581.88.

The Nasdaq composite slumped 193.33 points, or 2.7 percent, to 6,870.12. The Russell 2000 index of smaller-company stocks fell 36.90 points, or 2.4 percent, to 1,492.53.

Kate Warne, an investment strategist for Edward Jones, said the step by China is small but significant.

“The fact that a country has actually raised tariffs in retaliation is an important step in the wrong direction,” she said. “The tariffs imposed by China today lead to greater worries that we will see escalating tariffs and the possibility of a much bigger impact than investors were anticipating last week. And that could be true for Mexico as well as for China.”

Food maker Tyson dropped 6.2 percent after China raised import duties on a $3 billion list of U.S. goods in response to the tariffs on imported steel and aluminum that President Trump ordered last month.

Amazon fell another 5.2 percent. The online retailer has slumped with the market recently, although it’s still up about 17 percent in 2018. Trump has repeatedly criticized Amazon over issues including taxes and Amazon’s shipping deals with the U.S. Postal Service.

Jack Ablin, chief investment officer of Cresset Wealth Advisors, said Amazon is just the latest company to falter after it drew scrutiny from the government, as Facebook and Alphabet have slumped recently on data privacy concerns.

“It seems like the long arm of the government is interfering with investors’ expectations,” he said. “Investors are pricing in an escalating trade war and regulation of tech companies.”

Microsoft dropped 3 percent and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, shed 2.4 percent.

After a month of public negotiations between the U.S. and several other countries, Monday marked the first time another country has placed tariffs on U.S. goods in response to the Trump administration’s recent trade sanctions.

The price of gold climbed 1.2 percent to $1,343.60 an ounce and silver jumped 2 percent to $16.60 an ounce as some investors took money out of stocks and looked for safer investments.

Health insurer Humana was one of the market’s few winners following more reports Walmart could buy the company or create a new partnership with it. Humana is a major provider of Medicare Advantage coverage for people 65 and older. Humana gained 4.4 percent while Walmart slid 3.8 percent.

Bond prices finished little changed. The yield on the 10-year Treasury stayed at 2.74 percent after a sharp decline last week.

Energy companies skidded as benchmark U.S. crude lost $1.93, or 3 percent, to $63.01 a barrel in New York. Brent crude, used to price international oils, slid $1.70, or 2.5 percent, to $67.64 a barrel in London.

Wholesale gasoline dropped 5 cents to $1.97 a gallon. Heating oil fell 4 cents to $1.98 a gallon. Natural gas slid 5 cents to $2.68 per 1,000 cubic feet.

Copper rose 2 cent to $3.05 a pound.

The dollar declined to 105.85 yen from 106.50 yen. The euro edged up to $1.23 from $1.2306.

Trading in France, Germany and Britain was closed for Easter. Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 lost 0.3 percent and South Korea’s Kospi fell almost 0.1 percent. The Hang Seng in Hong Kong was closed as well.

Saving What’s Left of Paradise

That morning, three of us woke early—earlier than most people visiting New Orleans—and drove to a rural area not far from Rayne, La. A local woman there had asked Cherri to come and monitor the pipeline work being done. We came to assist. The property is home to five pipelines. Yellow marker poles run nearly the entire length, and now mud pits and excavators mark the placement for a sixth pipeline: the Bayou Bridge pipeline.

“I brought a book,” Cherri says, digging through her bag. She pulls out a work by James Baldwin and flips through a few pages before getting pulled back into conversation. She jokes about a recent phone call in which a man appeared shocked by her eloquence and depth of knowledge. “What was he expecting?” she laughs. Adopting a caricatured Native American accent, she says, “Huh—we no want pipeline.”

To the chagrin of officials and members of industry, Cherri Foytlin is neither simple nor delicate. She and her fellow “water protectors” manage to monitor both Energy Transfer Partners (ETP), the company behind the Bayou Bridge pipeline, as well as the pipeline construction itself. And they do this without anything like the massive, government-sponsored surveillance network that’s being used on them—at their homes and at the resistance camp, L’eau Est La Vie. In the most oil-friendly state in the country, putting yourself and your life directly in the path of a gigantic pipeline project is no small matter. When that project belongs to one of the most violent and destructive companies in a violent and destructive industry, the obstacles are even bigger.

The Bayou Bridge pipeline is a proposed 162-mile crude oil pipeline that would connect the oil from the Dakota Access pipeline and the shale oil fields of North Dakota to the refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. ETP, the same company behind the Dakota Access pipeline, has already shown the world what it’s willing to do to push a pipeline project through: attack unarmed protesters with dogs, tear gas, rubber bullets, concussion grenades, high-pressure water hoses in subzero temperatures and heavily armed private security. TigerSwan, the private security company that used military-style counterinsurgency tactics at Standing Rock, N.D., is currently appealing a decision in order to get a license to operate in Louisiana. ETP CEO Kelcy Warren remarked in March that pipeline protesters should be “removed from the gene pool.”

ETP’s taste for violence is not restricted merely to people, however. Its parent company, Sunoco, is famous for spilling more crude oil than any other company—racking up more than 200 leaks between 2010 and 2016. ETP is apparently on a mission to keep that No. 1 spot, logging five spills in the first six months of the Dakota Access pipeline’s operation. The ETP Mariner East 2 project in Pennsylvania, still under construction, has already wreaked havoc on both people and ecosystems along the proposed route. Last year, FracTracker reported 90 spill events in 42 distinct locations, amounting to 202,000 gallons of leaked drilling fluids. In January, Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection suspended ETP’s construction permits, citing permit violations that included even more spills and horizontal directional drilling at sites where it had no legal right to drill. About a month and $12 million later, ETP got the go-ahead to carry on with construction. In March, ETP’s existing natural gas liquids pipeline, Mariner East 1, was temporarily shut down due to the emergence of numerous sinkholes along the pipeline route.

Meanwhile, ETP’s proposed 713-mile Rover pipeline has been equally disastrous. Worked stopped in April 2017 following a 2-million-gallon drilling fluid spill, but it was allowed to pick back up again in December. This year, in January, another 150,000 gallons of drilling fluid spilled at the same site. The pipeline, slated to carry fracked gas through Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio and Michigan, has already racked up more “noncompliance incidents” than any other interstate gas pipeline.

Still, Louisiana officials and the Army Corps of Engineers feel the Bayou Bridge pipeline is worth the risk to both people and planet. Their primary argument: economic benefit for Louisiana. On March 1, a coalition of groups held a news conference at Gov. John Bel Edwards’ office in Baton Rouge. Anne Rolfes, founding director of Louisiana Bucket Brigade, asked speakers from along the proposed route of the pipeline to hold up images of license plates. The numbers were blurred but the state names were clear: Tennessee, Texas, Alabama, even Utah. The pictures were of construction vehicles at sites along the Bayou Bridge pipeline route, Rolfes explained. “The only rationale for this pipeline has been that it’s going to create jobs,” she said. But the company itself admits that the project will create only 12 permanent jobs, suggesting that the promised economic gains for Louisianians may be nothing more than a pipe dream.

Travis London, a resident of Louisiana petrochemical hub Donaldsonville and spokesman for the HELP Association of St. James Parish, explained the real “gifts” from big industry. “The economic situation in Louisiana is awful,” he said. “The pollution is killing Louisiana’s tourism, the hunting, the fishing, workforce, education … just everything. … Upcoming small businesses don’t get tax exemption, but industry does. … Ain’t enough jobs created. Ain’t enough opportunities here. Ain’t enough faith in most Republicans or Democrats, either. There are more industrial plants in Louisiana than ants in an ant pile.”

Indeed, a report released in February 2016 by the Environmental Integrity Project shows that in 2015 alone, seven liquid natural gas facilities were proposed or permitted, along with two natural gas processing and distribution plants, five fertilizer factories, five chemical plants and a petroleum refinery. According to the report, these projects boosted Louisiana’s emissions by 30 percent, taking the already high World Resource Institute estimate of about 230 million tons of greenhouse gases to roughly 300 million tons. The report warns regulators to be “vigilant in monitoring and controlling” the existing and new emission-heavy projects. Unfortunately, regulators appear either unable or unwilling to keep new and existing projects in check.

At a news conference at Gov. Edwards’ office on March 21, the HELP Association, Louisiana Bucket Brigade, L’eau Est La Vie Camp and the climate activist group 350 New Orleans released a report outlining spills and accidents in St. James Parish between Jan. 1, 2017, and Feb. 25, 2018. St. James Parish is to be the end point for the Bayou Bridge pipeline and is already home to plenty of unstable energy infrastructure. In that time period, 37 accidents were reported to the U.S. Coast Guard National Response Center (NRC). The report says that this number is actually deceptively low, as the NRC expects industry to self-report. Furthermore, there’s “not a single instance of an industry report corresponding to a neighbor’s complaint, meaning that there are at least eight occasions—and likely far more—in which industry failed to report an accident.”

Industries in St. James also routinely fail to notify residents of harmful situations. On March 4, 12,558 gallons of crude oil spilled from a storage tank belonging to the Plains All American pipeline. Despite the possibility of an underground leak, residents were not contacted or cautioned, and there was no follow-up by regulators or industry. In one week, there were two ammonia spills, and last month, an oil barge spilled oil into the St. James water system. Meanwhile, residents suffer illnesses ranging from miscarriages to nausea. Pollutants have been found in the air, soil and water, and chemical odors can linger in neighborhoods for days or weeks at a time. “The point is to say that our state clearly cannot handle the existing infrastructure in St. James Parish, so we shouldn’t put any more there,” Rolfes said.

Elsewhere along the pipeline route, direct-action tactics are being deployed, with a blend of solemnity and humor. On March 13, a water ceremony was held in the path of construction equipment. On torn-up earth and mud, a barefoot water protector spoke of honoring ancestors, the land and the water. On Monday, a dancing crawfish and friends shut down construction. In the days before, a Water Is Life Caravan paraded along the pipeline route, its members talking to people and playing music.

Legal battles are ongoing, but they often only mirror the flawed system they’re a part of. On March 15, a judge reversed a temporary injunction halting work in the Atchafalaya Basin. The work stoppage lasted less than a month and was violated at least once. Cherri responded to the decision with disappointment but resolve. “This is violence,” she said. “They’re hoping we’ll stop. But I ain’t afraid of their flags. I ain’t afraid of their easements. … I ain’t afraid of their laws. I ain’t afraid of nothing. … We’re gonna keep fighting.” She put out a call for help, both financial and on-the-ground. Despite the economic, physical, emotional and mental strains, the fight will continue. “This is the time we were made for. This is it. We can’t be afraid,” she said.

It starts to rain. Cherri hands us a couple of umbrellas and we stand and watch the construction continue—even though it’s supposed to stop during rainy weather. Later, my friend and I watch the sun set over crawfish ponds. There is paradise around the dug-up ditches, between the lines of destruction.

When you really stop to look at it, it’s easy to see why the fight will always continue. You begin to realize why, in that present fight, we build for the future—why L’eau Est La Vie Camp is growing food and teaching kids about permaculture and food sovereignty. You begin to see that this isn’t about stopping life to do battle. The battles fold into life. Life on the front lines of capitalism’s battles is a fiddle and ukulele duo serenading the camp cat while she chases gnats. It’s watching stupid YouTube videos in our tent before falling asleep. It’s rigorous planning across 160 miles of proposed pipeline. It’s coordinating different groups from different backgrounds with different ideologies. It’s holding space and blocking work. It’s taking direction from indigenous women and recognizing a 500-plus year history of colonization, now embodied by earth movers and colored flags marking pipeline easements. It’s waiting—and watching. It’s trying to figure out how we on the left can do better than just theory and talk.

For instance, can we create an action force for various areas of the country that’s ready to deploy in times like these? Can we support the battles and the life inside them? Can we stare down our time and our place and say, “I am not afraid”? Folks in Louisiana are doing these things—and they could use your help.

S. African Activist Winnie Madikizela-Mandela Dies

JOHANNESBURG—Nelson Mandela’s ex-wife Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, an anti-apartheid activist in her own right whose reputation was sullied by scandal, has died. She was 81.

The woman many South Africans have described as the “Mother of the Nation” and a champion of the black majority, died “surrounded by her family and loved ones,” according to a statement released by Madikizela-Mandela’s family.

Madikizela-Mandela was the second of Mandela’s three wives, married to him from 1958 to 1996.

Mandela, who died in 2013, was imprisoned throughout most of their marriage, and Madikizela-Mandela’s own activism against white minority rule led to her being jailed for months and placed under house arrest for years.

“She kept the memory of her imprisoned husband Nelson Mandela alive during his years on Robben Island and helped give the struggle for justice in South Africa one of its most recognizable faces,” the family said.

However, Madikizela-Mandela’s political activism was marred by her conviction in 1991 for kidnapping and assault, for which she was fined. She faced these allegations again during the 1997 hearings before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a panel that investigated apartheid-era crimes.

As a parliamentarian after South Africa’s first all-race elections, she was convicted of fraud.

Still, Madikizela-Mandela remained a venerated figure in the ruling African National Congress, which has led South Africa since the end of apartheid in 1994.

She continued to tell the party “exactly what is wrong and what is right at any time,” said senior ANC leader Gwede Mantashe.

The ANC, which was the main movement against apartheid, had lost popularity in recent years in part because of scandals linked to former President Jacob Zuma, who resigned in February.

Zuma’s successor, President Cyril Ramaphosa, described Madikizela-Mandela in a televised tribute as a “champion of justice and equality” and a “voice for the voiceless.”

Nobel laureate and former archbishop Desmond Tutu, a periodic critic of the ruling party, noted her passing by describing Madikizela-Mandela as “a defining symbol” of the fight against apartheid.

“She refused to be bowed by the imprisonment of her husband, the perpetual harassment of her family by security forces, detentions, bannings and banishment,” Tutu said. “Her courageous defiance was deeply inspirational to me, and to generations of activists.”

Madikizela-Mandela had been in and out of hospital since the start of the year, according to her family. She had back surgery a year ago.

After hearing of her death, some people gathered Monday evening outside Madikizela-Mandela’s home in the Soweto area of Johannesburg to sing tributes. She had attended Easter services in Soweto over the long weekend.

The family said it will release details of her memorial and funeral services when they are finalized.

Madikizela-Mandela’s story was told in biographies and novels as well the Hollywood movie “Winnie,” starring Oscar-winning actress and singer Jennifer Hudson.

The young Winnie grew up in what is now Eastern Cape province and came to Johannesburg as the city’s first black female social worker. Her research into the high infant mortality rate in a black township, which she linked to poverty caused by racism, first sparked her interest in politics.

In 1957, she met Nelson Mandela, an up-and-coming lawyer and anti-apartheid activist 18 years her senior, and they married a year later.

The first five turbulent years of their marriage saw Mandela going underground to build the armed struggle against apartheid, and finally to prison in 1963, while his wife gave birth to two daughters.

Madikizela-Mandela always was aware of the danger of being in the shadow of her husband’s all-encompassing personality.

Even before they were separated by Nelson Mandela’s long stay in prison, she had become politicized, being jailed for two weeks while pregnant for participating in a women’s protest of apartheid restrictions on blacks.

The apartheid police later harassed her, sometimes dragging her from bed at night without giving her a chance to make arrangements for her daughters.

In 1977, she was banished to a remote town, Brandfort, where neighbors were forbidden to speak to her. She was banned from meeting with more than one person at a time.

The woman who returned to Johannesburg in 1985 was much harder, more ruthless and bellicose, branded by the cruelty of apartheid and determined vengeance.

In her book “100 Years of Struggle: Mandela’s ANC,” Heidi Holland suggested that Madikizela-Mandela was “perhaps driven half-mad by security police harassment.” In an infamous 1986 speech she threatened “no more peaceful protests.”

Instead, she endorsed the “necklacing” method of killing suspected informers and police with fuel-doused tires put around the neck and set alight.

“Together hand-in-hand, with our boxes of matches and our necklaces, we shall liberate this country,” she said.

Madikizela-Mandela complained bitterly on a North American tour after she was forced to testify to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1997 that the commission never asked her about the treatment she suffered over 18 months in solitary confinement.

The Mandela marriage that survived decades of prison bars dissolved with a formal separation in 1992, two years after Nelson Mandela was released.

“Their personal relationship broke down,” said George Bizos, a human rights lawyer who represented Nelson Mandela at the 1960s Rivonia trial that led to his long imprisonment.

“Nelson Mandela called two other senior members of the ANC after his release and he actually said, ‘I love her, we have differences, I don’t want to discuss them, please respect her,'” Bizos said. “And he shed tears to say that we have decided to separate. He loved her to the end.”

The couple divorced in 1996, two years after Mandela became president in South Africa’s first all-race elections, with Mandela accusing his wife of infidelity.

As the mother of two of Mandela’s children, Madikizela-Mandela and her ex-husband appeared to rebuild a friendship in his final years.

After Mandela’s death, however, she became involved in disputes over his inheritance.

Teachers Rise Up Over Education Cuts

OKLAHOMA CITY—The state Capitol in Kentucky filled with teachers protesting pension changes Monday, and thousands of Oklahoma educators walked out of classrooms in the latest evidence of teacher rebellion in some Republican-led states over education cuts.

Many Oklahoma schools, including the three largest districts of Oklahoma City, Tulsa and Edmond, were closed Monday. Districts announced plans to keep campuses shut down into Tuesday with teacher demonstrations expected to last a second day.

Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin signed legislation last week granting teachers pay raises of about $6,100, or 15 to 18 percent. But some educators say that isn’t good enough and walked out.

“If I didn’t have a second job, I’d be on food stamps,” said Rae Lovelace, a single mom and a third-grade teacher at Leedey Public Schools in northwest Oklahoma who works 30 to 40 hours a week at a second job teaching online courses for a charter school.

The demonstrations were inspired by West Virginia, where teachers walked out for nine days earlier this year and won a 5 percent increase in pay. Teachers in Arizona are now considering a strike over their demands for a 20 percent salary increase.

“Their success has shown us that collective activity can work,” Kentucky teacher Corey Sayre said of the West Virginia walkout.

Some schools in Oklahoma are offering free meals to students aged 18 or younger while various churches, faith organizations and charitable agencies are providing free day-care services. Spring break was last week in many Oklahoma districts.

Oklahoma ranks 47th among states and the District of Columbia in public school revenue per student, nearly $3,000 below the national average, while its average teacher salary of $45,276 ranked 49th before the latest raises, according to the most recent statistics from the National Education Association.

Alicia Priest, president of the Oklahoma Education Association, said during the rally that drew thousands to the state Capitol that teachers will continue pressing their demands for lawmakers to approve more funding for pay raises and classrooms.

In Frankfort, Kentucky, teachers and other school employees gathered outside the Kentucky Education Association a couple of blocks from the Capitol, chanting “Stop the war on public education” and held signs that say “We’ve Had Enough.”

“We’re madder than hornets, and the hornets are swarming today,” said Claudette Green, a retired teacher and principal.

Kentucky teachers chanting “We won’t back down” crammed into the Capitol, filling the Rotunda and hallways near the House and Senate chambers. Schools across the state were closed, due either to spring break or to allow teachers and other school employees to attend the rally.

The rally is happening after hundreds of teachers called in sick Friday to protest last-minute changes to their pension system. Teachers have rallied several times during Kentucky’s legislative session to protest the pension bill, but Monday was by far their biggest event.

Republican lawmakers in Kentucky passed a pension overhaul Thursday that preserves benefits for most workers but cuts them for new teachers. The move was done in response to one of the worst-funded teacher retirement systems in the country at 56 percent and in defiance of a powerful teachers union that vowed political retribution. Opponents objected that the pension changes were inserted into an unrelated bill without a chance for public input, and worry that the changes will discourage young people from joining the profession.

Republican Gov. Matt Bevin has not yet signed the bill, but last week tweeted his support, saying public workers owe “a deep debt of gratitude” to lawmakers who voted to pass it.

During Monday’s rally, some teachers, angry at lawmakers who supported the bill, chanted “Vote them out.”

Melissa Wash, a first-grade teacher form Gallatin County who has been teaching for 19 years, said she voted for Bevin, but now plans to become a Democrat. To the lawmakers who voted for the pension overhaul, she said: “You better not count on another year in office.”

___

Schreiner reported from Frankfort, Kentucky. AP writer Tim Talley contributed to this report in Oklahoma City.

Turkey, Russia Deepen Ties Amid Troubles With the West

ANKARA, Turkey—Ties between Russia and Turkey are growing closer than ever, as Russia runs into widespread diplomatic fallout from the poisoned spy scandal and Turkey’s relations with its Western allies worsens over human rights issues and its military operations against Kurdish militia in Syria.

Russian President Vladimir Putin heads back to Turkey on Tuesday, joining Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at a symbolic ground-breaking ceremony for a Russian-made nuclear power plant being built on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast at Akkuyu. On Wednesday, Putin, Erdogan and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani are expected to hold a summit in the Turkish capital of Ankara to discuss Syria’s future.

Turkey and Russia have put aside their traditional rivalries and differences on regional issues to forge strong economic ties. In December, they finalized an agreement for Turkey to purchase Russia’s long-range S-400 missile defense system, a deal that raised eyebrows among some of Turkey’s NATO allies. Aside from the power plant, the two countries are also building the “Turkstream” pipeline to transport Russian gas to Turkey.

“Turkish-Russian relations are in a better mood compared with two years before. … ,” said Mitat Celikpala, a professor of international relations at Istanbul’s Kadir Has University.

“They managed to compartmentalize issues,” Celikpala said, citing Turkish and Russian divisions, including over the divided island of Cyprus and Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. “If you set aside all those issues . they are good partners for the resolution of immediate interests.”

Their warming relations come as ties between European Union nations and Turkey have become increasingly testy.

Turkey’s EU membership talks have stalled and many EU countries have voiced concerns over the Turkish government’s growing authoritarian turn and its crackdown on rights and freedoms, especially following an attempted coup in 2016 that Turkey blames on a U.S.-based Islamic cleric.

Turkey in turn, accuses EU countries of supporting Kurdish rebels as well as the alleged perpetrators of the 2016 failed coup.

Turkey’s relations with the United States have fared even worse, with Turkey accusing Washington of harboring the cleric, Fethullah Gulen, and backing Syrian Kurdish militia that Turkey considers to be terrorists.

Last week, Turkey announced it would not be following NATO and EU allies in ousting Russian diplomats in response to the poisoning in Britain of a former Russian spy. Britain has accused Russia of being behind the nerve agent attack on former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, prompting nearly two dozen nations to expel over 150 Russian diplomats. Russia has responded by expelling a similar number of envoys.

Turkey condemned the nerve agent attack on British soil without naming Russia, adding that it enjoyed “positive” relations with Moscow.

“Just because some countries took a step based on an allegation, we don’t have to take the same step,” Erdogan said.

Putin and Erdogan have met several times in the past year and regularly speak on the phone.

Russia and Turkey — along with Iran — are also working together to create “de-escalation zones” to reduce the fighting in Syria and bring the sides of the conflict together to negotiate Syria’s future.

The cooperation comes despite their positions on opposing sides in the Syrian conflict —with Moscow siding with Syrian President Bashar Assad and Turkey supporting his foes since the start of the Syrian war seven years ago.

The conflicting interests led to the downing of a Russian warplane by a Turkish jet at the Syrian border in November 2015, which put the two nations on the verge of a direct military conflict.

Russia responded by barring packaged tourist tours to Turkey and halting the imports of agricultural products. The two reconciled after Erdogan issued an apology.

__

Wieting reported from Istanbul.

Costa Rica Elects Same-Sex Marriage Backer as President

SAN JOSE, Costa Rica—Voters gave a resounding no to an upstart evangelical pastor who rose to political prominence by campaigning against same-sex marriage, allowing Costa Rica’s governing party to win an easy presidential victory.

While polls had indicated Sunday’s runoff would be tight, it was not even close. Carlos Alvarado, a novelist and former Cabinet minister running for the ruling Citizen Action Party, won by a wide margin.

The Supreme Electoral Council said that with 95 percent of ballots counted late Sunday, Carlos Alvarado had 60.8 percent of the votes, and evangelical Fabricio Alvarado of the National Restoration party had 39.2 percent. The two men are not related.

Fabricio Alvarado had been viewed as political also-ran when he entered the presidential contest, though he enjoyed high name recognition for his evangelism and for working on one of Costa Rica’s main TV newscasts. But then he spoke out strongly against a call by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights for Costa Rica to allow same-sex marriage and he finished first in the election’s first round in February.

Carlos Alvarado, who finished second to get the final spot in the runoff, spoke in favor of letting gays wed.

The victor wrote in his Twitter account, “Let’s celebrate our 200 years of Independence with a government worthy and up to date with the times.”

“Today, the world is watching us and we sent a beautiful democratic message.”

In a speech to supporters, Fabricio Alvarado conceded defeat but said he raised the banner of “principles and values.”

“We are not sad, because we made history, because our message touched the country’s deepest nerves,” he said.

Andrea Rodriguez, who voted in a suburb of San Jose, the capital, expressed what a lot of Costa Ricans apparently felt, saying she backed Carlos Alvarado.

“I want a country in which we all have the same rights,” Rodriguez said. “It’s not fair that they keep discriminating, above all because they want to impose religious ideas.”

The two candidates shared similarities beyond their family name. Both have backgrounds in journalism and both have recorded music — Fabricio Alvarado as a gospel singer and Carlos Alvarado as a college-age rock ‘n’ roller.

Both candidates also had economic advisers who take a conservative approach to economics, favoring the free market and calling for a reduction in the size of government.

In a First, Kim Sees a S. Korean Pop Performance in the North

SEOUL, South Korea—North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un clapped his hands and said he was “deeply moved” as he, along with his wife and hundreds of other citizens, watched a rare performance by South Korean pop stars visiting Pyongyang. The concert highlights the thawing ties between the rivals after years of friction over the North’s nuclear program.

During Sunday’s performance at the packed 1,500-seat East Pyongyang Grand Theater, North Korean concertgoers — most of the men in dark suits but some women in colorful traditional “hanbok” dresses — waved their hands from their seats when the South Korean stars joined together to sing a popular Korean song, “Our wish is unification.” After the two-hour performance ended, the North Koreans gave a thundering standing ovation.

A South Korean artistic group, including some pop legends and the popular girl band Red Velvet, flew to Pyongyang over the weekend for two performances in the North Korean capital, one on Sunday and the other on Tuesday. How North Koreans would react to Red Velvet was a focus of keen media attention in South Korea.

Kim, wearing a dark Mao-style suit, made a surprise visit to the performance with his wife Ri Sol Ju, sister Kim Yo Jong and other senior North Korean officials, including nominal head of state Kim Yong Nam. Kim Jong Un applauded during the event and shook hands with the South Korean performers. He also took a group photo with them after their performance, according to North Korea’s state news agency and South Korean media pool reports from Pyongyang.

Kim “said that he was deeply moved to see our people sincerely acclaiming the performance, deepening the understanding of the popular art of the South side,” the North’s Korean Central News Agency said.

Short South Korean media pool footage showed Kim clapping from the second-floor VIP stand as South Korean Culture Minister Do Jong-hwan bowed and greeted North Korean spectators looking on from the first floor.

“We should hold culture and art performances frequently,” Kim told South Korean performers. Mentioning the performance’s title, “Spring comes,” Kim also asked the performers to tell South Korean President Moon Jae-in that the two Koreas should hold a similar event in Seoul in the autumn, according to South Korean media pool reports.

Kim also talked about Red Velvet.

“There had been interest in whether I would come and see Red Velvet. I had initially planned to attend a performance the day after tomorrow but I came here today after adjusting my schedule,” Kim was quoted as saying. “I thank you for this kind of gift to Pyongyang’s citizens.”

It was the first time for a North Korean leader to attend such a South Korean performance in the North. During a past period of detente, South Korea occasionally sent pop singers to North Korea, but that stopped in 2005.

The 26-second South Korean video clip showed a quiet audience when members of Red Velvet, wearing clothes less revealing than their normal stage costumes, danced and sang their popular hit song “Red Flavor.”

Full video of their and other South Korean singers’ performances wasn’t immediately available. But Red Velvet said in a post-concert interview that the North Koreans gave them a big hand.

Band member Seulgi said she cried when North and South Koreans sang together the song, “Our Wish is Unification.” Another member Yeri said she was “very” nervous when she exchanged handshakes with Kim Jong Un, but she said it was still “really, really an honor” to do so. The South Korean group includes prominent singers such as Cho Yong-pil, Lee Sunhee and Cho Jin Hee, who all previously performed in Pyongyang.

The ongoing cooperation steps between the rivals began after North Korea took part in February’s Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. During the games, a North Korean art troupe performed in South Korea, and Moon and his wife watched it with visiting senior North Korean officials including Kim Yo Jong, who became the first member of the North’s ruling Kim family to visit the South since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War.

Some experts suspect Kim Jong Un may be attempting to use his outreach to Seoul and Washington as a way to weaken international sanctions and buy time to further advance his nuclear bomb program.

Kim is to meet Moon at a border village on April 27 and President Donald Trump in May in separate summit talks.

On Tuesday, the South Korean K-pop stars plan to hold a joint performance with North Koreans. Meanwhile, a South Korean taekwondo demonstration team also held a performance in Pyongyang on Sunday.

Defunct Space Station Burns Up in Re-entry Over South Pacific

BEIJING—China’s defunct Tiangong 1 space station mostly burned up on re-entry Monday into the atmosphere over the central South Pacific, Chinese space authorities said.

The experimental space laboratory re-entered around 8:15 a.m. Beijing time, the China Manned Space Engineering Office said.

Scientists monitoring the craft’s disintegrating orbit had forecast the craft would mostly burn up and would pose only the slightest of risks to people. Analysis from the Beijing Aerospace Control Center showed it had mostly burned up.

Brad Tucker, an astrophysicist at Australian National University, said Tiangong 1’s re-entry was “mostly successful” and that it would have been better if the space station had not been spinning toward Earth.

“It could have been better obviously, if it wasn’t tumbling, but it landed in the Southern Pacific Ocean and that’s kind of where you hope it would land,” Tucker said.

“It’s been tumbling and spinning for a while, which means that when it really starts to come down it’s less predictable about what happens to it,” Tucker said. He likened it to an airplane landing, saying it’s more difficult to predict where a plane that is “shaking around and moving” will land than one that is smoothly descending.

Launched in 2011, Tiangong 1 was China’s first space station, serving as an experimental platform for bigger projects, such as the Tiangong 2 launched in September 2016 and a future permanent Chinese space station.

Two crews of Chinese astronauts lived on the station while testing docking procedures and other operations. Its last crew departed in 2013 and contact with it was cut in 2016.

Since then, it has orbited gradually closer and closer to Earth on its own while being monitored.

Earlier forecasts had said only about 10 percent of the bus-sized, 8.5-ton spacecraft would likely survive re-entry, mainly its heavier components such as its engines.

“The biggest takeaway from this is that as we put more things into space, all countries, we have to be aware that we do have to plan for these sorts of issues that are happening,” Tucker said.

Roger Thompson, senior engineering specialist with the Aerospace Corporation in Virginia, said modeling of Tiangong 1’s re-entry by monitors in the U.S. had been highly accurate, leaving him feeling “great” about their predictions.

“We believe it was an uncontrolled entry,” Thompson said, adding that the corporation’s own estimate had been just 15 minutes behind the time announced by China.

The lack of control was not unusual given that about 15 percent of satellites re-enter the atmosphere prior to the end of their useful lives, he said.

The corporation, which provides technical support for the space industry, had not been in touch with the Chinese side about the re-entry, Thompson said.

China’s foreign and defense ministries said the country had relayed information about Tiangong 1’s return to earth to the United Nations’ space agency and others.

Debris from satellites, space launches and the International Space Station enters the atmosphere every few months, but only one person is known to have been hit by any of it: American woman Lottie Williams, who was struck but not injured by a falling piece of a U.S. Delta II rocket while exercising in an Oklahoma park in 1997.

Most famously, America’s 77-ton Skylab crashed through the atmosphere in 1979, spreading pieces of wreckage near the southwestern Australia city of Perth, which fined the U.S. $400 for littering.

Tiangong 1, whose name translates as “Heavenly Palace,” had two modules, one for its solar panels and engines, and one for a pair of astronauts to live in and conduct experiments. A third astronaut slept in the Shenzhou spaceships that docked with the station, which also contained facilities for personal hygiene and food preparation.

China’s space program has made rapid progress since it launched its first crewed mission in 2003 —becoming only the third country after Russia and the U.S. to do so— including placing a rover on Mars and conducting a spacewalk.

A mission to land another rover on Mars and bring back samples is set to launch in 2020, while China also plans to become the first country to soft-land a probe on the far side of the moon.

The program’s military background has at times been a barrier to greater cooperation with those run by other countries, and it was excluded from the 420-ton International Space Station that is now beginning to wind down.

___

Associated Press writer Gillian Wong contributed to this report.

The Oligarchs’ ‘Guaranteed Basic Income’ Scam

A number of the reigning oligarchs—among them Mark Zuckerberg (net worth $64.1 billion), Elon Musk (net worth $20.8 billion), Richard Branson (net worth $5.1 billion) and Stewart Butterfield (net worth $1.6 billion)—are calling for a guaranteed basic income. It looks progressive. They couch their proposals in the moral language of caring for the destitute and the less fortunate. But behind this is the stark awareness, especially in Silicon Valley, that the world these oligarchs have helped create is so lopsided that future consumers, plagued by job insecurity, substandard wages, automation and crippling debt peonage, will be unable to pay for the products and services offered by the big corporations.

The oligarchs do not propose structural change. They do not want businesses and the marketplace regulated. They do not support labor unions. They will not pay a living wage to their bonded labor in the developing world or the American workers in their warehouses and shipping centers or driving their delivery vehicles. They have no intention of establishing free college education, universal government health or adequate pensions. They seek, rather, a mechanism to continue to exploit desperate workers earning subsistence wages and whom they can hire and fire at will. The hellish factories and sweatshops in China and the developing world where workers earn less than a dollar an hour will continue to churn out the oligarchs’ products and swell their obscene wealth. America will continue to be transformed into a deindustrialized wasteland. The architects of our neofeudalism call on the government to pay a guaranteed basic income so they can continue to feed upon us like swarms of longnose lancetfish, which devour others in their own species.

“Increasing the minimum wage or creating a basic income will amount to naught if hedge funds buy up foreclosed houses and pharmaceutical patents and raise prices (in some cases astronomically) to line their own pockets out of the increased effective demand exercised by the population,” David Harvey writes in “Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason.” “Increasing college tuitions, usurious interest rates on credit cards, all sorts of hidden charges on telephone bills and medical insurance could steal away the benefits. A population might be better served by strict regulatory intervention to control these living expenses, to limit the vast amount of wealth appropriation occurring at the point of realisation. It is not surprising to find there is strong sentiment among the venture capitalists of Silicon Valley to also support basic minimum income proposals. They know their technologies are putting people out of work by the millions and that those millions will not form a market for their products if they have no income.”

The call for a guaranteed basic income is a classic example of Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci’s understanding that when capitalists have surplus capital and labor they use mass culture and ideology, in this case neoliberalism, to reconfigure the habits of a society to absorb the surpluses.

In the wake of World War II, for example, the capitalists’ problem was solved by heavy investments in the military and war industry, ideologically justified by Red baiting and the Cold War, and by massive infrastructure projects, including the building of highways, bridges and houses, to move people out of cities into suburbs, where consumption rose. The social engineering projects were done in the name of national security and progress. And they made the oligarchs of that day richer.

“The development of a whole new suburban lifestyle (acclaimed in popular TV sitcoms like The Brady Bunch and I love Lucy which celebrated a certain kind of ‘daily life of peoples’) along with all sorts of propaganda for the ‘American Dream’ of individualized homeownership stood at the centre of a huge campaign to construct new wants, needs and desires, a totally new lifestyle, in the population at large,” Harvey says in his book. “Well-paid jobs were required to support the effective demand. Labour and capital came to an uneasy compromise at the urging of the state apparatus in which a white working class made economic gains, even as minorities were left out.”

This phase of capitalism ended once industry moved overseas and wages stagnated or declined. The well-paying unionized jobs disappeared. Jobs became menial and inadequately compensated. Poverty expanded. The oligarchs began to mine government social services, including education, health care, the military, intelligence gathering, prisons and utilities such as electricity and water, for profit. As a publication of the San Francisco Federal Reserve reportedly noted, the country—and by extension the oligarchs—could no longer get out of crises “by building houses and filling them with things.” The United States shifted in the 1970s from what the historian Charles Maier called an “empire of production” to “an empire of consumption.” In short, we began to borrow to maintain a lifestyle and an empire we could no longer afford.

Profit in the “empire of consumption” is extracted not by producing products but by privatizing and pushing up the costs of the basic services we need to survive and allowing banks and hedge funds to impose punishing debt peonage on the public and gamble on tech, student debt and housing bubbles. The old ideology of the New Deal, of government orchestrating huge social engineering projects under the Public Works Administration or in the War on Poverty, was replaced by a new ideology to justify another form of predatory capitalism.

In Harvey’s book “A Brief History of Neoliberalism” he defines neoliberalism as “a project to achieve the restoration of class power” in the wake of the economic crisis of the 1970s and what the political scientist Samuel Huntington said was America’s “excess of democracy” in the 1960s and the 1970s. It achieved its aim.

Neoliberalism, Harvey wrote, is “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.”

American oligarchs discredited the populist movements of the 1960s and 1970s that had played a vital role in forcing government to carry out programs for the common good and restricting corporate pillage. They demonized government, which as John Ralston Saul writes, “is the only organized mechanism that makes possible that level of shared disinterest known as the public good.” Suddenly—as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, two of the principal political proponents of neoliberalism, insisted—government was the problem. The neoliberal propaganda campaign successfully indoctrinated large segments of the population to call for their own enslavement.

The ideology of neoliberalism never made sense. It was a con. No society can effectively govern itself by basing its decisions and policies on the dictates of the marketplace. The marketplace became God. Everything and everyone was sacrificed on its altar in the name of progress. Social inequality soared. Amid the destruction, the proponents of neoliberalism preached the arrival of a new Eden once we got through the pain and disruption. The ideology of neoliberalism was utopian, if we use the word “utopia” as Thomas More intended—the Greek words for “no” and “place.” “To live within ideology, with utopian expectations, is to live in no place, to live in limbo,” Saul writes in “The Unconscious Civilization.” “To live nowhere. To live in a void where the illusion of reality is usually created by highly sophisticated rational constructs.”

Corporations used their wealth and power to make this ideology the reigning doctrine. They established well-funded centers of propaganda such as The Heritage Foundation, took over university economic departments and amplified the voices of their courtiers in the media. Those who questioned the doctrine were cast out like medieval heretics, their careers blocked and their voices muted or silenced. The contradictions, lies and destruction within neoliberal ideology were ignored by those who dominated the national discourse, leading to mounting frustration and rage among a populace that had been abandoned and betrayed.

The propagandists for neoliberalism blamed the other—Muslims, undocumented workers, African-Americans, gays, feminists, liberals, intellectuals and, of course, government—for the downward spiral. Politicians who served the interests of the corporate oligarchs told dispossessed white workers their suffering was caused by the ascendancy of these marginalized groups and a cultural assault on their national identity and values, not corporate pillage. It was only a matter of time before this lie spawned the xenophobic, racist hate speech that dominates American political life and led to the rise of imbecilic and dangerous demagogues such as Donald Trump.

“Each of Globalization’s strengths has somehow turned out to have an opposing meaning,” Saul writes in “The Collapse of Globalization and the Reinvention of the World.” “The lowering of national residency requirements for corporations has morphed into a tool for massive tax evasion. The idea of a global economic system mysteriously made local poverty seem unreal, even normal. The decline of the middle class—the very basis of democracy—seemed to be just one of those things that happen, unfortunate but inevitable. That the working class and lower middle class, even parts of the middle class, could only survive with more than one job per person seemed to be the expected punishment for not keeping up. The contrast between unprecedented bonuses for mere managers at the top and the four-job family below them seemed inevitable in a globalized world. For two decades an elite consensus insisted that unsustainable third-world debts could not be put aside in a sort of bad debt reserve without betraying Globalism’s essential principles and moral obligations, which included unwavering respect for the sanctity of international contracts. It took the same people about two weeks to abandon sanctity and propose bad debt banks for their own far larger debts in 2009.”

The oligarchs mask their cruelty and greed with an empty moralism. They claim to champion women’s rights, diversity and inclusivity, as long as women and people of color serve the corporate neoliberal project. An example of this moralism occurred last Tuesday when NPR’s Ari Shapiro interviewed Lyft co-founder and President John Zimmer and former Obama administration official Valerie Jarrett, a member of the company’s board, about diversity and gender equality in the workplace. Shapiro asked about Lyft offering free rides to those marching against gun violence and donating to the ACLU.

“We serve our drivers, we serve our passengers, and we serve the employees that work for us,” Zimmer said in the interview. “And when it comes to [resisting gun] violence, when it comes to equality, those are things that we’re going to stand up for.”

America’s “gig economy,” as I wrote last week in my column, is a new form of serfdom. Corporations such as Lyft use lobbyists and campaign donations to free themselves from regulatory control. They force poorly paid temporary workers, who lack benefits, to work 16 hours a day in a race to the bottom. This neoliberal economic model destroys regulated taxi and livery services, forcing drivers who were once able to make a decent income into poverty, bankruptcy, foreclosures, evictions and occasionally suicide. By fighting gender, sexual and racial inequality in the workplace rather than economic inequality, by denouncing mass shootings rather than out-of-control police violence and mass incarceration, these corporations hide their complicity in societal disintegration. Their empty moralism and faux compassion is an updated version of the publicity stunt that John D. Rockefeller, whose personal fortune was $900 million in 1913, or $189.6 billion in today’s terms, used when he handed out shiny new dimes to strangers.

Neoliberalism heralds a return to the worst days of unregulated capitalism, after the Industrial Revolution when workers were denied a living wage and decent, safe working conditions. Oligarchs have not changed. They are out for themselves. They do not see government as an institution to defend and promote the rights and needs of citizens. They see it as an impediment to unrestricted exploitation and profit. Human beings, to oligarchs, are commodities. They are used to increase wealth and then discarded. Oligarchs don’t propose programs such as a guaranteed basic income unless they intend to profit from it. This is how they are wired. Don’t be fooled by the grins and oily promises of these human versions of the Cheshire Cat. The object is to spread confusion while they increase levels of exploitation.

“Alice asked the Cheshire Cat, who was sitting in a tree, ‘What road do I take?’ ” Lewis Carroll wrote. “The cat asked, ‘Where do you want to go?’ ‘I don’t know,’ Alice answered. ‘Then,’ said the cat, ‘it really doesn’t matter, does it?’ ”

The longer the elites keep us in darkness with their ideological tricks and empty moralism, the longer we refuse to mobilize to break their grip on power, the worse it will get.

China Slaps Tariffs on U.S. Pork, Fruit and More

BEIJING—China said it’s rolling out new tariffs on meat, fruit and other products from the United States as retaliation against taxes approved by U.S. President Donald Trump on imported steel and aluminum.

The Chinese finance ministry said in a statement that the new tariffs begin Monday. The announcement follows warnings Chinese officials have made for several weeks in an escalating trade dispute between the world’s two largest economies.

China’s Customs Tariff Commission is increasing the tariff rate on pork products and aluminum scrap by 25 percent. It’s also imposing a new 15 percent tariff on 120 other imported U.S. commodities, from almonds to apples and berries.

The White House didn’t respond to a message from The Associated Press on Sunday seeking comment.

The tariffs mirror Trump’s 25 percent charge on imported steel and 15 percent hike on aluminum. Trump has also announced separate plans to slap tariffs on nearly $50 billion in Chinese imports. Trump’s planned tariffs are partly aimed at punishing Beijing for allegedly stealing American technology and pressuring U.S. companies to hand it over.

But the Chinese response could end up hurting American ranchers and farmers, many of whom are from regions that voted for Trump in 2016.

U.S. farmers shipped nearly $20 billion of goods to China in 2017. The American pork industry sent $1.1 billion in products, making China the No. 3 market for U.S. pork.