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	At UN Trump declares America stands Alone by Barbara Crossette, James Goldston Open Society, Pass Blue, agencies   Oct. 2018   At UN Trump declares America stands Alone, by Barbara Crossette. (Pass Blue)   The UN audience could only gasp when Donald Trump made his stormy debut in the United Nations General Assembly in 2017 as president of the United States. This year they laughed in his face.   The gap between the US and the rest of the world has demonstrably widened under the Trump administration, and this phenomenon has consequences. Trump’s rhetoric may have been toned down by his advisers, but his belligerence has deepened and broadened. In the week after his dismissive remarks and display of raw ego — provoking laughter in the General Assembly — talk among government leaders and commentators worldwide has turned to the reality that the US has opted out of constructive leadership.   Now, the question is what the rest of the world will do about it.   Alternating between bragging about his self-proclaimed achievements and lambasting the role of the institution in which he was speaking, Trump went after his usual targets — the Iran nuclear deal, the UN Human Rights Council, the International Criminal Court, even OPEC, among others. He lavished praise on North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, last year’s villain. (He said later that he and Kim “fell in love” in an exchange of letters.)   Then, for good measure, Trump added a dose of boorish bad manners. He arrived late for every important scheduled appearance — so late for his speech in the General Assembly on Sept. 25 that the staff had to fill his spot with Lenín Moreno Garcés, the president of Ecuador. Moreno spoke from a wheelchair, and this abrupt change of precedence required that the podium be hastily reconfigured.   In the Security Council, Trump appeared more than 20 minutes late for a Sept. 26 meeting he was scheduled to chair. Noticeably, some diplomats turned their backs to him as he and his entourage strolled into the chamber. He was also late for a lunch on Sept. 25, for government leaders hosted by Secretary-General António Guterres, where Trump and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada avoided each other for most of the lunch, although their tables were side by side.   By then, Trump had made it abundantly clear where he stood on the vision and values of the UN. In addressing the nations of the world, he declared that America chose to stand alone.   “America is governed by Americans,” he said. “We reject the ideology of globalism, and we embrace the doctrine of patriotism.” On the International Criminal Court — a target of John Bolton, the US national security adviser, since its creation in 1998 by an international statute that the US signed but never ratified — Trump called the independent court “an unelected, unaccountable, global bureaucracy.”   This farewell to globalism, whose practical value to humanity’s future was eloquently defended by Guterres in his opening General Assembly speech last week, disregarded generations of growing American involvement with the rest of the world — more young people studying and living abroad, more US government exchange programs in many fields and that symbolic photograph of John Kerry at the UN in 2016, signing on to the Paris climate agreement with his eye on the future and holding a granddaughter of his in his arm.   Jeffrey Laurenti, who has been analyzing US-UN relations for many years for the United Nations Association of the USA (UNA-USA) and the Century Foundation, is watching a new era in the making. After listening to world leaders speaking at the UN and in off-the-record sessions at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York the past week, he wrote a memo about the US in the new world under Trump for PassBlue:   “There was, I thought, a palpable change in atmosphere from last year to this. Last year there was an air of apprehension about the new US president, a sense of both threat and possibility. Nations’ leaders were hoping still to find the sweet spot behind the bluster where they could reach understandings with the new regime.   “A year later, the illusions are gone, thanks to Washington’s steady stream of disruptive actions and withdrawals, from Iran and Jerusalem to trade wars and refugees, with various U.N. agencies and funds left as collateral roadkill,” he wrote. [On Oct. 1, the Pew Research Center published the results of an international poll taken in August that showed Trump’s ratings across 25 countries remains poor, dragging down the US image to levels that are “much lower than during Barack Obama’s presidency.”]   “For America’s traditional democratic allies, the president’s replacing the realist H.R. McMaster with the detested ideologue John Bolton signaled there will be no reasoning and no shared values,” Laurenti continued. “Trump’s America has gone rogue from the law-based ‘international community’ the democracies have invested so many years and so much political effort in creating. When moderate leaders of five Latin American countries joined Canada’s Justin Trudeau in referring Venezuelan crimes against humanity to the International Criminal Court, they were sending a message to Trump as much as to Nicolas Maduro, maybe even more so.   “At one level, presidential bombast is greeted with derision — and perhaps the U.N. needs more laughter. But at the same time the president chooses a Security Council meeting to accuse the Chinese — the Chinese! — of meddling in U.S. elections, as the Europeans are hammering out guarantees with them and the Russians for Iran in the wake of an American withdrawal from the nuclear agreement. Washington decides to try starving Palestinians into submission by halting its funds for the U.N. refugee program, and Arabs and Europeans work feverishly to line up alternative funding for UNRWA.   “At this General Assembly the outlines of a new policy of containment became visible — this time not containment of Stalin’s USSR, but of Trump’s USA,” Laurenti concluded.   Many speakers in this year’s General Assembly opening debate have been critical, directly or obliquely, of this extraordinary US policy of disengagement. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, spoke of a world in a deep crisis that was not an “interlude” in contemporary history that can safely be ignored. He sees the emergence and spread of a “survival of the fittest” approach, when every country makes and follows its own laws.   “What I am saying is that this path of unilateralism leads us directly to withdrawal and conflict, to widespread confrontation between everyone, to the detriment of all — even, eventually, of those who believe they are the strongest,” Macron said in a passionate speech. He later apologized for pounding the lectern.   Hassan Rouhani, the president of Iran, who is on the receiving end of very harsh charges by Trump, said at a news conference in Tehran after returning from the UN: “What’s important is that today, other than one or two countries, no one is supporting America. It is a historic political isolation that is rare for America.” In his General Assembly speech, Rouhani remarked that Trump’s decision to withdraw from the 2015 nuclear deal stemmed from “a weakness of intellect.”   Trump in his UN speech had blasted Iran as the biggest supporter of terrorism in the world, whose leaders “sow chaos, death, and destruction.”   All five other parties to the Iran agreement designed to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons — Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the European Union — have vowed to stay the course, despite threats from Trump and his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, against those who do not follow American-imposed sanctions against the Iranians.   The threats were meant to sound alarming, just as the Europeans, Asians, Africans and Latin Americans are now beginning to exert independence and maintain distance from the US — if that is even possible.   For those in the US who have said Trump’s international tirades should be considered mainly intended for the consumption of American voters, that is no excuse — or not a good-enough reason — for ignoring how the just-ended, mean-spirited performance by Trump and his hard-liners at the UN is playing out around the world, where the US may no longer be trusted and allies may soon be harder to find. http://bit.ly/2PlPFga   Statement by Philip Alston, Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights to the 38th session of the UN Human Rights Council - June 2018   I am presenting three reports today, one on the USA, one on Ghana, and one on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and social protection.   I note with regret that United States Ambassador Nikki Haley has characterized this Council as a cesspool and chosen to withdraw from it just days before my presentation. Speaking of cesspools, my report draws attention to those that I witnessed in Alabama as raw sewage poured into the gardens of people who could never afford to pay $30,000 for their own septic systems in an area remarkably close to the State capital. I concluded that cesspools need to be cleaned up and governments need to act. Walking away from them in despair, as in Alabama, only compounds the problems.   The suggestion that this Council should only consist of rights-respecting States was made long ago by the US and others, but abandoned because there are no workable criteria to determine who should qualify under such a test, and because a body composed only of self-appointed good guys would not only be tiny but would be talking unproductively among themselves. Human rights promotion requires robust engagement, not behaving like the kid who takes his football and goes home.   Ambassador Haley complained that the Council has done nothing about countries like Venezuela. In fact I and several other special rapporteurs reported earlier this year that “vast numbers of Venezuelans are starving, deprived of essential medicines, and trying to survive in a situation that is spiralling downwards with no end in sight”. We warned of “an unfolding tragedy of immense proportions.”   I turn now to my report on the United States. My starting point is that the combination of extreme inequality and extreme poverty generally create ideal conditions for small elites to trample on the human rights of minorities, and sometimes even of majorities. The United States has the highest income inequality in the Western world, and this can only be made worse by the massive new tax cuts overwhelmingly benefiting the wealthy.   At the other end of the spectrum, 40 million Americans live in poverty and 18.5 million of those live in extreme poverty. In addition, vast numbers of middle class Americans are perched on the edge, with 40% of the adult population saying they would be unable to cover an unexpected $400 expense.   In response, the Trump administration has pursued a welfare policy that consists primarily of (i) steadily diminishing the number of Americans with health insurance (‘Obamacare’); (ii) stigmatizing those receiving government benefits by arguing that most of them could and should work, despite evidence to the contrary; and (iii) adding ever more restrictive conditions to social safety net protections such as food stamps, Medicaid, housing subsidies, and cash transfers, each of which will push millions off existing benefits.   For example, a Farm Bill approved yesterday by Republicans in the House of Representatives would impose stricter work requirements on up to 7 million food stamp recipients. Presumably this would also affect the tens of thousands of serving military personnel whose families need to depend on food stamps, and the 1.5 million low-income veterans who receive them.   The US health care system already spends eight times as much to achieve the same life expectancy as in Chile and Costa Rica, and African-American maternal mortality rates are almost double those in Thailand. The World Economic Forum recently ranked the US 26th out of 29 advanced economies for promoting intergenerational equity and sustainability, and 28th for promoting inclusion. WHO data released recently shows that babies born in China today will live longer healthy lives than babies born in America. In global healthy life expectancy rankings, the US came 40th.   In an exclusive Fox News story yesterday Ambassador Haley called my report “misleading and politically motivated.” She didn’t spell out what was misleading but other stories from the same media outlet emphasized two issues. The first is that my report uses official data from 2016, before President Trump came to office. That is true, for the simple reason that there will be no Census Bureau data on the Trump era until September this year. But these data provide the best available official baseline, and my report then factors in the effects of the combination of massive tax cuts for the wealthy and systematic slashing of benefits for the less well-off.   The second criticism, as noted by Sean Hannity, is that the US “economy continues to roar to life under President Trump.” Indeed, the US economy is currently booming, but the question is who is benefiting. Last week’s official statistics show that hourly wages for workers in “production and nonsupervisory” positions, who make up 80% of the private workforce, actually fell in 2017. Expanding employment has created many jobs with no security, no health care, and often with below-subsistence wages. The benefits of economic growth are going overwhelmingly to the wealthy. Average pre-tax national income per adult in the US has stagnated at $16,000 since 1980 for the bottom 50% of the income distribution, while it has really boomed for the top 1%, a trajectory that has been quite different from that in most European countries.   Even the IMF has warned that in the US “prospects for upward mobility are waning, and economic gains are increasingly accruing to those that are already wealthy”. In other words, the American dream of mobility, is turning into the American illusion, in which the rich get ever richer, and the middle classes don’t move.   My report demonstrates that growing inequality, and widespread poverty which afflicts almost one child out of every five, has deeply negative implications for the enjoyment of civil and political rights by many millions of Americans. I document the ways in which democracy is being undermined, the poor and homeless are being criminalized for being poor, and the criminal justice system is being privatized in ways that work well for the rich but that seriously disadvantage the poor.   Underlying all of these developments is persistent and chronic racial bias. That bias also helps to explain the abysmal situation in which the people of Puerto Rico find themselves. It is the poorest non-state in the Union, without a vote in Congress, at the mercy of an unelected and omnipotent oversight board, and suffering from record poverty levels in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.   Perhaps the best illustration of the cause and effect of these trends is what might be termed the Ferguson syndrome, recalling the city in which an unarmed African-American was shot dead by a white Police Officer in 2014. What happened in Ferguson, according to the US Justice Department, and what is happening in many other cities and counties can be summed up in the following composite picture.   In a nutshell: state and county taxes are capped; public budgets are slashed; governments are left without essential resources; they instruct their police departments to impose and collect more fines to fund the general budget; these fines fall overwhelmingly upon the poor; the victims cannot pay the fines and so additional penalties and fees accumulate; most scrimp and pay but some default and are imprisoned; when they are in prison their economic and family situations collapse; and when they emerge from prison they are even less unemployable because they have a conviction.   In her statement on my report, Ambassador Haley says that “it is patently ridiculous for the United Nations to examine poverty in America,” and claims that I should instead be looking at the human rights situations in two war-torn African countries (Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo).   “Rather than using his voice to shine a light on those vulnerable populations, and so many others, the Special Rapporteur wasted the UN''s time and resources, deflecting attention from the world’ s worst human rights abusers and focusing instead on the wealthiest and freest country in the world.”   Leaving aside the fact that this Council has published many report detailing the situations in those two countries, my view is that when one of the world’s wealthiest countries does very little about the fact that 40 million of its citizens live in poverty, it is entirely appropriate for the reasons to be scrutinized.   If this Council stands for anything, it is the principle of accountability – the preparedness of States to respond in constructive and meaningful ways to allegations that they have not honoured their human rights commitments.   The United States position, expressed by Ambassador Haley seems to be that this Council should do far more to hold certain states to account, but that it should exempt the United States and its key allies from such accountability.   In terms of recommendations, I would single out three in particular. A first step would be to acknowledge that America’s proudest achievement –a vibrant democracy – is in peril unless steps are taken to restore the fabric from which it was crafted, including the adage that ‘all are created equal’.   A second step would be to stop irrationally demonizing taxation and begin exploring how reasonable taxes can dramatically increase the social well-being of Americans and the country''s economic competitiveness.   And a third step would be to provide universal healthcare, as every other developed and many developing countries already do. This would rescue millions from misery, save money on emergency care, increase employment, and generate a healthier and more productive workforce. http://bit.ly/2MfEd5k http://bit.ly/2Iyc9LZ http://srpoverty.org/country-visits/   Sep. 2018   Why John Bolton’s diatribe against the International Criminal Court is misleading, misguided, and wrong, writes James Goldston the executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative.   John Bolton, the U.S. president’s national security adviser, launched an assault on the International Criminal Court (ICC) this week that was all Trump: untethered to facts, myopic in its view of U.S. national interest, and aimed at dismantling the international order.   Modeling his boss’s tweetstorms, Bolton has sown confusion and furor among ICC defenders through equal parts deception, exaggeration, and intimidation.   It’s important to separate fact from fiction in Bolton’s diatribe. Among the many misrepresentations, here are three of the biggest:   First, Bolton wrongly portrays the ICC as a “free-wheeling global organization claiming jurisdiction over individuals without their consent.” This is plain nonsense. People rarely “consent” to being prosecuted for crimes they commit. But if you travel to another country and kill someone, guess what? You will be held to account even though you had no say in making the law or selecting the judge.   Second, Bolton’s complaint that the ICC is “unaccountable” similarly flies in the face of reality. The ICC operates under the terms of a painstakingly negotiated instrument which sets forth meticulous definitions of criminal conduct as well as numerous stages of legal processes. The entire enterprise has been ratified by more than 120 governments—every one of them determined to yield no more power to an international tribunal than necessary. If anything, the ICC is accountable to too many actors—which is one of the factors limiting its global impact (of which Bolton is so scornful).   Third, Bolton egregiously asserts that the ICC is “superfluous,” because the U.S. judicial system already holds American citizens to the highest legal and ethical standards and “takes appropriate and swift action to hold perpetrators accountable.” If only that were so. My organization represents two individuals whom, according to the European Court of Human Rights, were tortured, forcibly disappeared, and kept hidden by the CIA from the outside world for months at a time. To this date, no U.S. official has been prosecuted for these or the many other abuses perpetrated as part of the George W. Bush administration’s war on terror. U.S. courts have repeatedly declined to entertain these cases on the merits.   In short, Bolton’s crude declaration of war on the ICC is founded on falsehoods. Even more worrisome, it embodies the worst of the Trump administration’s contempt for the rule of law.   For the ICC is not just a court. It’s also the cornerstone of a worldwide movement—animated by a fundamental principle that undergirds the U.S. Constitution—that no one is above the law. It’s a product of history; of the memory of how wrong things can go when national sovereignty is taken to an extreme and demagogic leaders pit one group against another.   And despite its imperfections, the ICC is the institutional expression of a decadeslong ambition to ensure that when powerful leaders cross the line from politics to grave criminality, they will be tried and punished—fairly, and in a manner that reaffirms the global community’s collective will to do better.   So when the ICC’s watchful eye prompts Colombia’s drug lords to end a half-century-long civil war in America’s backyard, as they did in 2016, for example, that’s a win not only for Colombia’s people but also for the United States.   And when the ICC’s example sparks national prosecutors in Germany, Sweden, and other countries to bring war crimes charges against terrorist fighters and officials from Syria’s murderous regime, that’s a win not only for the hundreds of thousands killed since 2011 but also for the United States.   And when, notwithstanding similar UN blockage, a chamber of ICC judges asserts legal jurisdiction over the forced deportation of Rohingya, as was recently done, that’s a win not only for the long-suffering victims but also for the United States, which has both strategic and moral reasons to defend Muslims from persecution.   Simply put, while the ICC may be “dead” to John Bolton, the human aspiration for basic justice is alive and kicking in the United States and around the world. Blind opposition to a foreign court may excite President Trump’s political base, but it undercuts U.S. interests and ignores some of the United States’ most cherished principles. http://osf.to/2PlFQz9   http://www.passblue.com/2019/06/04/pompeo-retreats-on-universal-human-rights-as-us-looks-more-inward/ http://bit.ly/2XN4Xmv http://www.hrw.org/news/2018/12/10/atrocities-new-normal http://bit.ly/2HYIXsb http://www.hks.harvard.edu/research-insights/policy-topics/human-rights-justice/universal-declaration-human-rights-70 http://www.hks.harvard.edu/research-insights/policy-topics/human-rights-justice/samantha-power-and-salil-shetty-why-human http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/talktojazeera/2018/12/michelle-bachelet-multilateralism-attack-181201061606258.html http://www.ipsnews.net/2018/12/will-member-states-help-offset-us-funding-cuts-un/ http://www.passblue.com/2018/12/06/trump-wants-a-new-liberal-world-order-pompeo-tells-europe/ http://www.cfr.org/article/year-extreme-weather-climate-2018 http://www.thenation.com/article/journalism-asymmetric-politics-eric-alterman/ http://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/416887-food-insecurity-a-denial-of-human-rights Visit the related web page
	Hate Speech threatens Our Humanity by M. Nadarajah, Jomo Kwame Sundaram Inter Press Service   Do politicians’ words matter? Since becoming US President, Donald J Trump has dismissed his opponents and others he does not like as evil, stupid or both. He has referred to undocumented immigrants as animals, and to poor countries as shitholes.   Around the world, such harsh words have become normalized as part of the rhetoric of leaders, against perceived and manufactured enemies, to mobilize the intended ‘imagined community’ against ‘ the other’.   Such rhetoric, increasingly emulated by political, religious and community leaders the world over, has contributed greatly to the growing climate of resentment and hatred of the ‘other’, the ‘outsider’, the ‘stranger’.   Hate words and speech have become widespread globally. They have become part of dominant cultures, spreading meanings, worldviews and beliefs, all with considerable impact. When dominant, they are amplified by authority and power – political, economic, social, and cultural, increasingly recognised as ‘soft’ power.   The rhetoric of hatred has been echoed and thus amplified by traditional as well as social media, including the increasingly vicious culture online, as rivals compete to outdo one another, vying for attention.   But often, even more aggressive and vicious is the hate rhetoric of the rising cultural populists, as they manufacture new language to outdo one another and the incumbents, while trying to unify their ‘imagined communities’ behind them.   Cultural populism for imagined communities   Ethno-populists, jingoist nationalists, other chauvinists and their enablers try to convince their followers that they are victims facing threats from exaggerated or even imagined dangers, such as conspiracies by enemy ‘others’ of which they are ignorant due to obfuscation by fake news.   Around the world, they use cultural ignorance, unfamiliarity, suspicions, prejudices, animosity and fear-mongering to mobilize their followings, typically with ‘half-truths’, rather than less credible, outright fabrications.   In the era of fake news, fake alerts and ‘post-truth’, such half-truths have become more effective, and hence, more dangerous in abetting the power to demean, displace and destroy, especially when driven by ambition seeking greater influence and power.   The recent popularity, mainstreaming and legitimization of ethno-populism and jingoism in the West as well as other parts of the world, demand attention to how cultural analysis, social psychology and neuroscience can help us better understand the effects of such rhetoric.   Normalizing hate speech   Unsurprisingly, continuous or frequent exposure to hate speech is known to increase prejudice, resentment and animosity. Such influences desensitize people to verbal and even other forms of aggression, by ‘normalizing’ actions and behaviour which might otherwise be socially condemned. The culture of hate seems to thrive in the human ‘ecosystem’.   Leaders inspiring prejudice, anger and fear among their supporters, stimulate surges of stress hormones, such as norepinephrine and cortisol, affecting the amygdala, the brain centre for threat. Threatening language directly stimulates the amygdala, making it difficult for humans to ‘wind down’ their passions and emotions in order to ‘think’ before acting.   One does not have to be mentally defective or unstable to be ‘inspired’ to aggression and violence by such rhetoric. Most of us are susceptible to such ‘motivational’ speeches, especially when conditions are conducive.   Legitimizing violence against others   A study, led by Princeton psychologist Susan Fiske, has linked anger and violent impulses to distrust of ‘outsiders’ or ‘others’, especially when economic difficulties encourage viewing them as competing ‘unfairly’ for better opportunities.   By inducing or exaggerating a sense of external threat by the ‘other’, they can be thought of as not only different, but even as threatening. It is generally easier to think of outsiders as less than human, and hence, undeserving of empathy or compassion; both are cultural and socio-psychological conditions conducive to hate, aggression and violence.   A Harvard psychologist co-author of the study reportedly noted, “when a group is put on the defensive and made to feel threatened, they begin to believe that anything, including violence, is justified.”   Dehumanizing others   Cultural chauvinists also encourage antagonism to and violence against others by demonizing and dehumanizing them as sub-human or even non-human, so that they are not deemed worthy of treatment and consideration as fellow humans.   Earlier, Fiske and a colleague had found that their study subjects were so unempathetic to images of drug addicts and the homeless that they could not imagine how they felt or thought; the brain regions required to empathize with them as human beings deserving of ‘moral treatment’ could not be activated.   Instead, the brain region associated with feelings of disgust were activated. As Fiske has argued, “Both science and history suggest that people will nurture and act on their prejudices in the worst ways when these people are put under stress, pressured by peers, or receive approval from authority figures to do so.”   Thus, when a politician or some other socially influential person dehumanizes others, they are being put beyond the range of empathy, depriving them of moral protection and legitimizing inhuman treatment against them.   In another famous 1960s’ study by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, not knowing that the shocks were fake, most study subjects were willing to obey an authority figure’s instructions to give electric shocks to other participants.   Sixty-five per cent – almost two out of three — did as told, delivering the maximum shock, which could have been fatal, if real. Clearly, people can easily be influenced by authority to terribly harm others. Followers thus follow the leader in dehumanising others.   Positive agenda needed too   People are being continuously influenced by hate speech. But as dehumanisation becomes the norm, tolerated and sustained, not only by individual actions, but also by a socioeconomic culture promoting, even needing dehumanisation, then the culture of hatred, including hate speech, becomes normalized.   Hence, it is necessary to take measures to deter, delegitimize and even disallow hate speech in view of its likely consequences and the normalization of hate it thrives on and contributes to.   These threaten not only to undermine social solidarity, peaceful coexistence and mutual respect, but also to do far more damage, not only for international relations, but also for social peace, especially in multicultural societies.   As hate becomes part and parcel of our ‘way of life’, it becomes increasingly difficult to reverse these processes to recapture our lost ability to build reason, empathy and compassion.   While difficult but necessary, this is hardly sufficient as we revisit, mobilize and augment our remaining cultural resources for a positive agenda to rediscover the best in our common humanity, drawing on mutual respect and the universal ethos underlying our rich cultural diversity.   While the current culture of hate has a supportive ‘ecosystem’ of sorts in some aspects of neuroscience, human biology and social psychology also recognise our ‘compassion instinct’, an orientation of mind that recognises pain, the universality of pain and suffering, and the ‘instinctive’ need, indeed desire to help others.   * M. Nadarajah is Chair Professor, Xavier Centre for New Humanities and Compassion Studies, Xavier University, Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India. Jomo Kwame Sundaram, a former economics professor and United Nations Assistant Secretary-General, was a member of the new Malaysian Government’s Council of Eminent Persons. Visit the related web page
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