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	Billionaires say poverty is decreasing. They couldn’t be more wrong by Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah, Jason Hickel   Jan. 2018   At the moment the SDGs simply offer UN member states a free pass to pat themselves on the back, despite their collective failures, writes Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah, secretary general of Civicus   Two years into their life, and amid the grim political realities of the last year, the sustainable development goals seem increasingly like warm words with little if any bite. With the clock counting down till 2030, we urgently need to find ways of driving real changes in behaviour, policy and investment if we are to create a more just and sustainable world. We need nothing short of an accountability revolution.   At many times in 2017, it has felt that progress towards the 17 ambitious goals is not only faltering, but going drastically backwards in too many countries, in part because the agenda lacks any real power on human rights. One only has to look to the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Yemen to see that little can be done to achieve goal 2 (freedom from hunger).   In August an estimated one third of Bangladesh was under water; a news story many may be forgiven for missing between the unprecedented hurricanes in the Caribbean. Next door in Myanmar, despite goings on that have been condemned as “ethnic cleansing”, United Nations’ various bodies seem frozen and inactive. I could go on.   One cannot help noticing that, having failed to uphold the various international conventions and norms set in decades past, it seems the international community now favours much softer, less scary frameworks, like the lofty and ambitious SDGs.   Don’t get me wrong; I am one of the biggest supporters of the global goals. Their ambitions are exactly what we need, from gender equality and climate action, to freedom from hunger and inequality.   The problem is that the goals are being framed as apolitical, devoid of the need to scrutinise states for their actions. They lack a sense of accountability. In recent discussions at the United Nations I’ve noticed that human rights have all but disappeared from the vocabulary as member states talk about implementing the sustainable development goals.   But there is nothing apolitical about sustainable development. It’s not possible to separate food security from the wider political context of human rights.   Often these problems go hand in hand with crackdowns on the people and organisations that provide assistance to the poor and marginalised. Indeed, only 3% of the world’s population live in a country where the rights to protest, organise and speak out are respected, protected and fulfilled, according to the Civicus Monitor.   In Libya, where slave auctions were recently documented by journalists, incursions on civil society and media are common. Libyan journalists face continued harassment and intimidation from Libyan authorities. Meanwhile, international NGOs operating migrant rescue missions, including MSF, Save the Children and Sea Eye have been forced to cease operations due to hostility from Libyan authorities.   Notably the sustainable development agenda includes no references to press freedom or the media, yet press freedoms have undoubtedly seriously deteriorated since the goals were adopted, with attacks from US President Donald Trump emboldening other governments. Without basic protections for those who seek to implement the UN’s sustainable development goals, achieving them becomes considerably less likely.   Much hope was placed in the goals because they incorporated targets not only for people but also for our planet. Yet, again, a lack of respect for the human rights of people who seek to protect the environment also undermines the goals. Such as in Vietnam, where another blogger has just been jailed for seven years for reporting on a toxic spill.   The climate change and environmental ambitions in the SDGs also don’t go far enough to prepare for the imminent increase in displacement caused by climate change. The only way to addressing this impending problem, is if we go back to the days of past where UN agreements meant something. That means creating new laws to meet contemporary challenges, but more importantly enforcing the protocols and norms that already exist.   Warm and cuddly ambitions are simply no longer going to cut it. The UN system has to have the courage to hold its member states accountable. Otherwise, it seems as if the SDGs simply offer member states a free pass to pat themselves on the back, despite their collective failures. And the onus is also on those of us in civil society to remind citizens that the global goals are more than warm words, and that we need to hold those responsible for their delivery to account. http://www.civicus.org/   Billionaires say poverty is decreasing. They couldn’t be more wrong, says Jason Hickel.   Last week, as world leaders and business elites arrived in Davos for the World Economic Forum, philanthropist Bill Gates tweeted an infographic to his millions of followers showing that the world has been getting better and better. “This is one of my favourite infographics,” he wrote. “A lot of people underestimate just how much life has improved over the past two centuries.”   Of the six graphs – developed by Max Roser of Our World in Data – the first has attracted the most attention by far. It shows that the proportion of people living in poverty has declined from 94% in 1820 to only 10% today. The claim is simple and compelling. And it’s not just Gates who’s grabbed on to it. These figures have been trotted out in the past year by the Davos set to argue that the global extension of free-market capitalism has been great for everyone. Some have gone even further, saying we shouldn’t complain about rising inequality when the very forces that deliver such immense wealth to the richest are also eradicating poverty before our very eyes. It’s a powerful narrative. And it’s completely wrong.   There are a number of problems with this graph, though. First of all, real data on poverty has only been collected since 1981. Anything before that is extremely sketchy, and to go back as far as 1820 is meaningless. Roser draws on a dataset that was never intended to describe poverty, but rather inequality in the distribution of world GDP – and that for only a limited range of countries. There is no actual research to bolster the claims about long-term poverty. It’s not science; it’s social media.   What Roser’s numbers actually reveal is that the world went from a situation where most of humanity had no need of money at all to one where today most of humanity struggles to survive on extremely small amounts of money.   The graph casts this as a decline in poverty, but in reality what was going on was a process of dispossession that bulldozed people into the capitalist labour system, during the enclosure movements in Europe and the colonisation of the global south.   Prior to colonisation, most people lived in subsistence economies where they enjoyed access to abundant commons – land, water, forests, livestock and robust systems of sharing and reciprocity.   They had little if any money, but then they didn’t need it in order to live well – so it makes little sense to claim that they were poor.   This way of life was violently destroyed by colonisers who forced people off the land and into European-owned mines, factories and plantations, where they were paid paltry wages for work they never wanted to do in the first place.   In other words, Roser’s graph illustrates a story of coerced proletarianisation. It is not at all clear that this represents an improvement in people’s lives, as in most cases we know that the new income people earned from wages didn’t come anywhere close to compensating for their loss of land and resources, which were of course gobbled up by colonisers. Gates’s favourite infographic takes the violence of colonisation and repackages it as a happy story of progress.   But that’s not all that’s wrong here. The trend that the graph depicts is based on a poverty line of $1.90 per day, which is the equivalent of what $1.90 could buy in the US in 2011. It’s obscenely low by any standard, and we now have piles of evidence that people living just above this line have terrible levels of malnutrition and mortality. Earning $2 per day doesn’t mean that you’re somehow suddenly free of extreme poverty. Not by a long shot.   Scholars have been calling for a more reasonable poverty line for many years. Most agree that people need a minimum of about $7.40 per day to achieve basic nutrition and normal human life expectancy, plus a half-decent chance of seeing their kids survive their fifth birthday. And many scholars, including Harvard economist Lant Pritchett, insist that the poverty line should be set even higher, at $10 to $15 per day.   So what happens if we measure global poverty at the low end of this more realistic spectrum – $7.40 per day, to be extra conservative? Well, we see that the number of people living under this line has increased dramatically since measurements began in 1981, reaching some 4.2 billion people today. Suddenly the happy Davos narrative melts away.   Moreover, the few gains that have been made have virtually all happened in one place: China. It is disingenuous, then, for billionaires to claim these gains as victories for Washington-consensus neoliberalism. Take China out of the equation, and the numbers look even worse.   Over the four decades since 1981, not only has the number of people in poverty gone up, the proportion of people in poverty has remained stagnant at about 60%. It would be difficult to overstate the suffering that these numbers represent.   This is a ringing indictment of our global economic system, which is failing the vast majority of humanity. Our world is richer than ever before, but virtually all of it is being captured by a small elite. Only 5% of all new income from global growth trickles down to the poorest 60% – and yet they are the people who produce most of the food and goods that the world consumes, toiling away in those factories, plantations and mines to which they were condemned 200 years ago. It is madness – and no amount of mansplaining from billionaires will be adequate to justify it. http://bit.ly/2FSe8ss   * Dr Jason Hickel is an academic at the University of London and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Visit the related web page
	An ultra-nationalist brand of conservatism seeks to take Russian politics back to the Middle Ages by Dina Khapaeva, Miklos Haraszti Project Syndicate, agencies   An ultra-nationalist brand of conservatism seeks to take Russian politics back to the Middle Ages, writes Dina Khapaeva for Project Syndicate.   While much of the world is busy dismantling monuments to oppressors, Russians are moving in the opposite direction, erecting statues to medieval warlords who were famous for their despotism. Understanding this revival can shed light on the direction of Russia’s politics.   In October 2016, with the endorsement of Russia’s culture minister, Vladimir Medinsky, the country’s first-ever monument to Ivan the Terrible was unveiled in the city of Orel. A month later, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, called for Lenin Avenue in Moscow to be renamed Ivan the Terrible Highway.   And in July of this year, President Vladimir Putin christened Moscow’s own tribute to the tyrant, declaring, erroneously, that “most likely, Ivan the Terrible never killed anyone, not even his son.”   Most historians agree that Ivan lived up to his name; not only did he kill his son and other relatives, he also ordered the oprichnina, the state-led purges that terrorized Russia from 1565 to 1572. He also presided over Russia’s defeat in the Livonian War, and his misrule contributed to the Time of Troubles and the state’s devastating depopulation.   Joseph Stalin initiated the modern cult of Ivan the Terrible. But, since the mid-2000s, Russia’s Eurasia Party – a political movement led by the pro-fascist mystic Alexander Dugin – has moved to position Ivan as the best incarnation of an “authentic” Russian tradition: authoritarian monarchy.   Dugin’s brand of “Eurasianism” advocates the embrace of a “new Middle Ages,” where what little remains of Russian democracy is replaced by an absolute autocrat. In Dugin’s ideal future, a medieval social order would return, the empire would be restored, and the Orthodox church would assume control over culture and education.   Eurasianism, which was marginal in the 1990s, has gained considerable popularity in recent years by contributing to the formation of the so-called Izborsky Club, which unites the Russian far right. On several occasions, Putin has referred to Eurasianism as an important part of Russian ideology; he has even invoked it as a founding principle of the “Eurasian Economic Union,” a burgeoning trade area of former Soviet states.   Eurasianism has given ultra-nationalist groups common ground around which to unite. It has also given symbols of totalitarianism, like Ivan the Terrible and Stalin, new legions of support.   Chief among them are members of the Eurasia Party, who consider political terror the most effective tool of governance and call for a “new oprichnina” – a staunchly anti-Western Eurasian conservative revolution. According to Mikhail Yuriev, a member of the political council of the Eurasia Party and author of the utopian novel The Third Empire, the oprichniks should be the only political class, and they should rule by fear.   Ivan the Terrible is not the only medieval vestige being revived in Russia. Cultural vocabulary is also reverting. For example, the word kholop, which means “serf,” is returning to the vernacular, a linguistic devolution that parallels a troubling rise in Russia’s modern slavery.   Data from the Global Slavery Index show that more than one million Russians are currently enslaved in the construction industry, the military, agriculture, and the sex trade.   Moreover, serf “owners” are also happily identifying themselves as modern-day barins.   Even Russian officials speak approvingly of modern slavery. Valery Zorkin, who chairs the Constitutional Court, wrote in Rossiyskaya Gazeta, the official government newspaper, that serfdom has long been a “social glue” for Russia. And another medieval term – lydi gosudarevy, which translates to “servants of his majesty” – has returned to favor among high-ranking bureaucrats.   Nostalgia for serfdom compliments the desire for a return to autocracy. Prominent Russian intellectuals – including the filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov, journalist Maksim Sokolov, and Vsevolod Chaplin, a Russian Orthodox cleric – call for the coronation of Putin, and petitions of support are gaining signatures online.   Significantly, the protests against Putin’s regime in 2012 have since been interpreted not as a protest against Putin himself, but rather against the social order to which Eurasianism aspires.   Mr. Putin’s tacit support for the Eurasian vision of a neo-medieval Russia invokes the historical memory of Stalinism. According to Dugin, “Stalin created the Soviet Empire,” and, like Ivan the Terrible, expresses “the spirit of the Soviet society and the Soviet people.” No wonder, then, that monuments to Stalin, too, are multiplying in Russian cities.   Neo-medievalism is rooted in nostalgia for a social order based on inequality, caste, and clan, enforced by terror. The lionization of historical despots reflects the contemporary embrace of such pre-modern, radically anti-democratic and unjust values. For Ivan’s contemporary champions, the past is prologue.   * Dina Khapaeva is Professor of Russian at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Modern Languages: http://bit.ly/2lS82wA   * A few links on Russia & Eurasia region:   http://www.osce.org/odihr/elections/375661 http://ab.co/2FVLza2 http://www.fidh.org/en/region/europe-central-asia/russia/russia-2012-2018-50-anti-democracy-laws-entered-into-force-within http://www.transparency.org/country/RUS http://eu-russia-csf.org/ http://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/apr/25/unequal-russia-is-anger-stirring-in-the-global-capital-of-inequality http://www.opendemocracy.net/od-russia http://hrdn.eu/ http://www.omct.org/ http://iphronline.org/en/ http://iwpr.net/   Mar. 2018   Belarus: UN expert calls for end to rights abuses and deplores State repression. (OHCHR)   A new wave of arbitrary arrests, the use of the death penalty and violations of media freedom in Belarus have prompted a UN expert to call on the authorities there to respect their human rights obligations and implement recommendations made over the past two decades.   The Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Belarus, Miklos Haraszti, said: “Last weekend, the authorities in Belarus again massively violated the right of citizens to assemble peacefully in the capital, Minsk, and elsewhere in the country. This shows both a symbolic and practical rejection by the country’s President for any progress on human rights.”   Demonstrators had gathered on Sunday, 25 March to mark the centenary of the independence of Belarus, Freedom Day. However, more than 100 peaceful marchers, political activists and journalists were either prevented from leaving their apartments or were detained during the rally.   Many were charged with failing to respect the procedure for organising a mass event under a much-criticised law which treats lack of authorisation for any public gathering as a crime.   Leading opponents and former candidates for the presidency were among a number of people subjected to pre-emptive house arrest a few days earlier on 21 March. Among them were former presidential candidate Mikhail Statkevic and prominent writer Uladzimir Nyakljajeu.   “Reports that activists were arbitrarily detained in cities such as Babrujsk, Brest, Sluck and Mahiliou, should remind us that repression in Belarus is centrally planned and organised by the authorities,” Mr. Haraszti said.   “This unending wave of repression keeps society in a constant state of paralysis,” the Special Rapporteur stressed. “In March last year, hundreds of individuals were arbitrarily detained and charged after taking part in unauthorised protests over a presidential decree that levied taxes on those unemployed for more than six months. Similarly, in October last year, a round of retaliation hit both alleged and actual participants of the so-called March of the Discontent.”   In Sunday’s clampdown, volunteers of the respected human rights organisation “Viasna” were again specifically targeted, he said.   “Suppression of the right to free speech also continues unabated throughout the country where the State exercises absolute control of the media. The Ministry of Information in January 2018 announced the blocking of the Charter97.org website, which is known as a hub for critical views of the government. It had been alleged that the law on mass media had been infringed but no proof was provided,” the expert added.   “Belarus continues to hold opponents in jail, despite claims of having released all political prisoners. I am particularly worried about the situation of Mikhail Zhamchuzhny, who was reportedly beaten by another prisoner recently. I urge the authorities to look carefully into this matter and to release Mr. Zhamchuzhny and other political opponents,” Mr. Haraszti said.   The Special Rapporteur also called for an end to the use of the death sentence in Belarus, saying the country continued to distinguish itself in Europe by refusing to do so. There are currently seven people on death row, including two sentenced in January this year.   “The judicial killing machine continues to blatantly ignore international criticism and recommendations for death sentences to be commuted into life sentences, while calls for the adoption of a moratorium on the death penalty remain unheard,” the expert regretted.   “Last year marked a severe degradation of the human rights situation in Belarus. During the first quarter of this year, I see neither changes nor attempts or even plans to end the deprivation of the Belarusian people of their basic rights and fundamental freedoms.”   Mr. Haraszti repeated his calls for the authorities to respect the rights and fundamental freedoms of Belarusian citizens. http://bit.ly/2GIz4Ci Visit the related web page
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