Category: Jonathan Power

The Fulcrum is Female

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By Jonathan Power

Over 200 years we have watched with a mixture of fascination and horror the explosion of population in most parts of the world. In the 1960s and 70’s many people were convinced that it was the single most important issue of our times. Government aid agencies, especially in the Western world, gave overriding priority to distributing condoms wherever and whenever they had the chance.

Some people like the bishops of the Catholic Church and the mullahs of Iran got very hot under the collar. Indeed, these two groups would unite together to vote the “no” in UN population conferences.

In the Third World militants argued that this was one more perfidy carried out by the West – to rid the world of dark skinned people.

Half a century later it all looks very different. Attitudes have changed everywhere. Only a few islands of Catholics continue to be anti artificial birth control. Whatever the Pope might say, not many listen.

Now we stand on the cusp of a profound change in the human condition. Forecasts show a dramatic, unprecedented, fall in fertility rates, even affecting some of the poorest parts of the world. Within a few decades we could be living in a world with a stable population.Read More »

TFF PressInfo # 373: What Obama should do in Hiroshima tomorrow

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By Jonathan Power

Lund, Sweden, May 26, 2016

Introduction
By Jan Oberg

President Barack Obama visits Hiroshima on May 27; it’s the first time since the U.S. used nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 that a sitting U.S. president visits Hiroshima

It is known that he will not apologize for the crime that killed and crippled about a quarter of a million innocent people.

Disturbingly, the White House has also announced that he will “not have the time” to meet any victims, the Hibakusha.

According to Time he shakes off the ethical dimension of this unique mass killing by stating that “it is important to recognize that in the midst of war, leaders make all kinds of decisions”(!)

His commitment to peace and a nuclear weapons-free world has been an utter failure, according to TFF Associate Jonathan Power.

And it seems that Obama will not use this unique opportunity to show any moral leadership or this last chance to announce even the smallest step in the direction of what the huge majority of the world’s people want: living in a more peaceful world with fewer and, eventually, no nuclear weapons.

Jonathan Power starts out in Hiroshima

“We were standing in Hiroshima looking at a stone wall. All there was to see was a shadow of a man. Read More »

What to do about ISIS

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By Jonathan Power

May 24th 2016

“ISIS is not an existential threat to the United States”, President Barack Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic magazine recently.

What becomes clear in this long article, much of it Obama’s own words, is that Obama shies away from the idea that war can make bad things good. The unquenchable wars that he inherited – Iraq and Afghanistan – were set alight by his predecessor, George W. Bush, and no amount of Obama fire engines have been able to douse them with enough water to put them out.

As for the rest of the waterfront of foreign affairs, he argues that after a period of uncertainty he decided that the US should not militarily involve itself in the civil war in Syria. He decided that Ukraine is not a core American interest, although it is a Russian one, and he was convinced that Iran would agree through peaceful negotiation to renounce the dangerous parts of its nuclear program.

As for the toppling of Muammar Gaddafi and the mess that followed he agrees that he made a bad mistake when he put on one side his own philosophy of not intervening militarily in a situation that was not a core US interest.

In the Atlantic article, Obama says believes he has broken with what he calls, derisively, the “ playbook”. “It’s a playbook that comes out of the foreign-policy establishment. The playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized”.Read More »

Obama has failed on nuclear disarmament

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By Jonathan Power

During the Cold War barely a week went by without some reportage or debate on nuclear weapons. Not today. Yet most of the nuclear weapons around then are still around.

It would be alright if they were left to quietly rust in their silos. But they are not. When in 2010 President Barack Obama made a deal with Russian President Dimitri Medvedev to cut their respective arsenals of strategic missiles by one-third the Republican-dominated US Congress, as the price for its ratification of the deal, decreed that Obama and future presidents be made to spend a trillion dollars on updating and modernizing America’s massive arsenal.

Now that chicken is coming home to roost – and a few other chickens too.

President Barack Obama’s unexpected legacy is that he has presided over an America that has been at war longer than any previous president. Moreover, of recent presidents, apart from Bill Clinton, he has cut the US nuclear weapon stockpile at the slowest rate.

The Republican’s extreme right clipped Obama’s wings. Of that there is no doubt, making it impossible thus far, to negotiate with Russia any further cuts.

At the same time the counterproductive US/EU confrontation with Russia over Ukraine pushed President Vladimir Putin into the foolish tactic of talking about the possible use of nuclear weapons and deploying intimidating flights over the airspace of the Baltic Sea. When Putin was asked a year ago if Russia was prepared to bring nuclear weapons into play in the confrontation over Crimea, he replied, ”We were ready”.

Yet not all can be pinned on Congress or Putin. Obama’s vision of a nuclear-free world Read More »

TFF PressInfo # 373: What Obama should do in Hiroshima on May 27

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By Jonathan Power

We were standing in Hiroshima looking at a stone wall. All there was to see was a shadow of a man. It had been etched into the wall at the moment of his obliteration by the blinding light of the first atomic bomb. Olof Palme, prime minister of Sweden, stared hard at it.

An hour later he gave a speech as head of the Independent Commission on Disarmament of which I was a member. “My fear”, he remarked, “is that mankind itself will end up as nothing more than a shadow on a wall.”

President Charles de Gaulle of France once observed, “After a nuclear war the two sides would have neither powers, nor laws, nor cities, nor cultures, nor cradles, nor tombs.”

What if, contrary to the received wisdom, it was shown that nuclear weapons played no role in the surrender of Japan at the end of World War 2, as has been their justification?

Perhaps the terrible acts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are no worse, despite their two hundred thousand deaths, than many other scathing memories of war waged against mainly civilian populations. Then we would have to start a big rethink of the value of nuclear arsenals.

Nuclear deterrence, many thoughtful generals have long concluded, is nonsense on stilts and long has been. Read More »

Another dimension to the Holocaust

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By Jonathan Power

May 3rd 2016

Tomorrow [May 4th] is Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day. The Holocaust was committed by a nation whose church attendance was then high and whose creation of the most sublime sacred music ever written was etched deep into the minds of most people. Yet only the rare Catholic bishop and Protestant pastor spoke out against Hitler.

Today Germans admit the guilt of their nation. School children are taught every detail of the Holocaust’s evil – not least about Adolf Eichmann, the personification of Nazi extermination policy.

At the end of World War II, Adolf Eichmann, the chief organiser of the eradication of the Jews in the concentration camps went into hiding. Later he got himself, with the aid of sympathetic clergy, to Argentina.

For the next 10 years he worked in several odd jobs in the Buenos Aires area – from factory foreman, to junior water engineer and professional rabbit farmer.

In June 2006, old CIA documents about Nazis were released. Read More »

A woman to lead the UN? If so, Angela Merkel

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By Jonathan Power

April 26th 2016.

A woman for the next secretary-general of the United Nations? Well, it’s a lot more complicated than that. There are other criteria in play – there is an unwritten rule that the regions of the world should take it in turns to occupy the UN’s top job.

The east Europeans are saying it is their turn. Ironically, since eastern Europe is now part of western Europe, the EU, the would-be candidates are in effect appealing to Russia to vote for them, since only as geographically part of the old Soviet alliance can they be regarded as an entity separate from western Europe.

How about a South Asian? Now that would make sense, since there has never been a secretary-general from there before and the subcontinent contains 1.7 billion people. However, no-one has put themselves forward.

Or an Australasian? The former New Zealand prime minister, Helen Clark, has cast her hat into the ring.

I would argue that it is time to forget gender or place of origin. It is character that should be the critical element by which the candidate is judged.

We need a leadership that knows how to transcend mankind’s divisions, to diminish our most primitive instincts and to enhance our nobler ones.

It must have the power of personality that inspires the best of us and takes us onward and beyond what we do now, so often unsatisfactorily and insufficiently, to what we could do if human energies were liberated from the confines of too simple and narrow a perspective.

We need to move much further than we have so far, beyond country, race, religion, culture, language and life-style to being part of what Martin Luther King called the beloved community. “We seek only”, he said, “to make possible a world where men can live as brothers”.

Leadership, we know, is Read More »

Concocting lies before the Iraq war

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By Jonathan Power

April 19th, 2016.

President Barack Obama has observed, “ISIL – Islamic State – is a direct outgrowth of Al Qaeda in Iraq that grew out of our invasion – which is an example of unintended consequences – which is why we should generally aim before we shoot”.

Many of us, looking at the horror of the Iraq war, waged by the US and the UK against the regime of Saddam Hussein when 200,000 civilians died and a total of 800 billion US dollars was spent on the campaign, need little to be persuaded that there was a Machiavellian plot to find an excuse to make war. Yet there are many in the circles of power in Washington who believe the US should shoot on sight and to kill whenever danger is thought to have appeared- in Iraq, Syria, Libya and, before that, in Vietnam.

The so-called “justification” for going to war in Iraq 13 years ago was based on a 93 page classified CIA document that allegedly contained “specific information” on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction programs and his close links with Al Qaeda.

The document has now been declassified thanks to the work of the investigative journalist, Glenn Greenwald. His findings have just been published in the on-line magazine, VICE.

The document, before published with a large number of deletions, is available for everyone to read in its entirety. It reveals that there was zero justification for the war. It reveals that there was “no operational tie between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda” and no weapons of mass destruction programs.

President George W. Bush’s secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, claimed that the US had “bulletproof evidence” linking Saddam Hussein to the terrorist group. “We do have solid evidence Read More »

Brazil’s great achievement must survive

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By Jonathan Power

April 12th, 2016

If worst comes to worst and Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff is deposed and her widely beloved predecessor, Luiz “Lula” da Silva, is discredited they will long be remembered for the “Bolsa Familia”. This is a government program that has cut Brazil’s once appalling poverty rate by half and reduced the number of poor very sharply to 3% of the population. It reaches 55 million people and 36 million have been lifted out of poverty. It has been such a winner that around sixty countries have sent their experts to study it. Indeed, it has been so successful politically that we shouldn’t be surprised that if Rousseff is felled by the shenanigans of Congress masses will go out on the street and riot.

Before the Bolsa Familia program was put into effect by Lula, Brazil had many welfare and food subsidy programs. Like in most developing countries the benefits didn’t reach the poor in the way that was intended. Middle men, black marketeers, corrupt officials and politicians skimmed and diverted much of them.

Bolsa Familia absorbed these into one direct cash payment. If you were a poor mother of a family- women were more trusted than men- you received an electronic card which you could slip into a bank cash dispenser and immediately get your monthly allowance, often doubling your cash income. There would be no intermediaries and no skims and no scams.

There were some conditions. Her children had to go to school, be immunized and have regular health check ups. She herself, if pregnant again, had to go to the maternity clinic. So not only were incomes being raised above the poverty line but infant and maternal mortality rates fell fast.

The income of the poorest 20% of Brazilians rose by 6.2% between 2002 and 2013, while that of the country’s richest 20% rose by only 2.6%. (In the US in the same time period the income of the richest 10% rose by 2.6% and that of the poorest 10% shrank by 8.6%.)

Innoculations reached 99% of the population. Deaths from malnutrition fell by 58%. Longevity steadily increased. Literacy became almost universal and education gave young people a better chance in life. The number of children forced to work instead of attending school dropped by 14%.

I’ve been out to the villages in the North East and seen with my own eyes the visible and dramatic improvements. I’ve been visiting Read More »

Brazil must not fire its president

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By Jonathan Power

The Brazilians have an elected president. They must keep her. If Dilma Rosseff is pushed to resign democracy has failed.

Two years ago she won re-election handsomely. That is the source of her mandate. From that she derives her legitimacy. The only thing that could topple her is if hard evidence emerges that she is crook- in her case supposedly stole millions of dollars from the Brazilian oil giant, Petrobras, of which she was once head of the board. Then Congress would be within its rights to discuss her impeachment.

But there is no evidence of her personal corruption- although there is evidence aplenty that her party, The Workers’ Party, has received a lot of black money, not just from Petrobras.

Brazil is not a parliamentary democracy. It is not necessary for her to have a majority in parliament to rule, anymore than Barack Obama does in the US Congress. Unlike in, say the UK or Denmark, if members of parliament withdraw support for a head of government he/she does not fall.

Nevertheless, the Economist, a long-time supporter of democracy, argues in its latest issue she should resign, ignoring the rules of democracy, even though it admits impeachment would be wrong and even though her only “crime” is to have mishandled the economy.Read More »