It is a con­cert­ed effort in the ero­sion of nation­al sov­er­eign­ty.

The Hon­duras ‘Mod­el Cities’ is rem­i­nis­cent of Macau & Hong Kong in the 19th cen­tu­ry.

Oh, good. Anoth­er oppor­tu­ni­ty to call out Adam David­son for the con­temptible toady that he is. He can put a plau­si­ble tint on a win­dow into hell. Well done.

Well, it looks like all the folks that have des­per­ate­ly want­ed to see pub­lic employ­ees lose their gold-plat­ed pen­sion plans — so that the entire soci­ety can shift back towards the tra­di­tion­al par­a­digm of just assum­ing and accept­ing mass pover­ty for peo­ple in their “gold­en years” — might get their wish:

July 27, 2013, 1:14 p.m. EDT
Today, Detroit. Tomor­row, Home­town, USA
How Detroit’s bank­rupt­cy fil­ing will have nation­al reper­cus­sions
By Chuck Jaffe, Mar­ket­Watch

Back when I was a rook­ie reporter at the Detroit Free Press near­ly 30 years ago, the big debate the staff had over lunch­es was which would go bank­rupt first: the big automak­ers or the city. And which expe­ri­ence would be worse.

You could make argu­ments for each pos­si­bil­i­ty, but most of the staffers thought there was no way either event would ever actu­al­ly hap­pen. They insist­ed that the ear­ly signs of trou­ble were an anom­aly or some­thing that could be reversed before it became a calami­ty.

Hav­ing just earned my degree in eco­nom­ics, I thought back then that both were pos­si­ble — many years in the future — and that bank­rupt­cies for the Big Three would be bad for the city, but that a bank­rupt­cy for the city would be bad for the entire coun­try.

Sad­ly, what was once lit­tle more than a the­o­ry is now a real­i­ty, but what’s worse is that so many peo­ple — like my old col­leagues — don’t rec­og­nize what the city’s finan­cial woes mean on a nation­al lev­el.

Detroit owes rough­ly $20 bil­lion to over 100,000 cred­i­tors, but the big cred­i­tors peo­ple will be watch­ing are the city’s pub­lic-sec­tor labor unions, which fear that a bank­rupt­cy judge might let the city reduce or can­cel pen­sions and retiree health ben­e­fits.

Sure, the unions have the law on their side — Michigan’s state con­sti­tu­tion pro­tects work­ers’ pen­sions from being reduced — but they still have rea­son to be wor­ried. After all, Michi­gan law also requires pub­lic pen­sions to be ful­ly fund­ed every year, and yet Detroit appar­ent­ly only man­aged that using account­ing tricks that, by some esti­mates, have left the city as much as $3.5 bil­lion off the mark.

That’s why the Detroit bank­rupt­cy fil­ing serves as a warn­ing bea­con for every­one expect­ing a pen­sion and oth­er ben­e­fits when they retire, a sig­nal that it’s dan­ger­ous to entrust your finan­cial future to oth­ers, assum­ing they are going to keep their promis­es.

How much prece­dent Detroit will set for oth­er com­mu­ni­ties remains to be seen, but clear­ly every­one is watch­ing to see what’ll be allowed. Oth­er com­mu­ni­ties on the brink will see how the Motor City comes through the expe­ri­ence finan­cial­ly and decide if they want to mark a sim­i­lar course on the map, even if it is as a last resort.

There is plen­ty of prece­dent for cor­po­ra­tions using bank­rupt­cy to cut or elim­i­nate pen­sion oblig­a­tions — Delta Air­lines being the most-recent big-name com­pa­ny to go that route — leav­ing the Pen­sion Ben­e­fit Guar­an­ty Corp. to step in with small­er pen­sions and the work­ers with a much less secure future.

The Pew Cen­ter for the States esti­mates that pub­lic pen­sion plans nation­wide were under­fund­ed by $1.4 tril­lion in 2010. While the stock mar­ket has reached record highs — nar­row­ing the gap some­what — since then, the unde­ni­able prob­lem is that most state and local gov­ern­ment pen­sion funds don’t have enough mon­ey to live up to the promis­es they have made.

If employ­ers can’t live up to their oblig­a­tions, you can bet that the Pen­sion Ben­e­fit Guar­an­ty Corp. — the nation’s pen­sion back­stop — will fol­low suit and run out of mon­ey too.

Even if the Detroit sit­u­a­tion is resolved with­out set­ting some bench­mark for oth­er trou­bled munic­i­pal­i­ties to use and fol­low, the nation’s pen­sion short­falls aren’t going away; this sto­ry is going to play out again and again, and while it will be cor­po­ra­tions, cities and towns in the head­lines, it will be the name­less, face­less indi­vid­u­als who are the real sto­ry.

That’s not a sto­ry any­one wants play­ing out in their own home.

...

This is one of those sto­ries that reminds us that the crit­i­cal con­tract that the far-right oli­garchs want destroyed isn’t just the pen­sion con­tracts with employ­ees. It’s the social con­tract that must be destroyed before their far-right par­adise can be achieved. Until soci­ety accepts that we sim­ply must embrace a “you’re on your own” men­tal­i­ty that oli­garch-man­aged par­adise can’t tru­ly come to fruition. Not that it could any­ways, but you get the idea...

Oh wow, there’s a new Robo­Cop movie com­ing out in 2014. Like the orig­i­nal film, the sto­ry take in 2028 Detroit after it’s been tak­en over by a cor­po­rate enti­ty. Hope­ful­ly this means that the cur­rent “Emer­gency Finan­cial Manager”-led take over and loot­ing of Detroit is actu­al­ly just part of a real­ly elab­o­rate adver­tise­ment for the upcom­ing film. It’s just real­ly nice to imag­ine that this is all an attempt to cre­ate art as opposed to loot­ing it.

The Detroit von Clause­witz expe­ri­ence: com­ing to a state near you:

Forbes
7/19/2013 @ 2:58PM
Detroit’s Bank­rupt­cy Is Just Pol­i­tics By Oth­er Means
Daniel Fish­er, Forbes Staff

Pruss­ian mil­i­tary the­o­rist Carl von Clause­witz famous­ly declared war is “mere pol­i­cy by oth­er means.” Detroit’s bank­rupt­cy is sim­i­lar. Sad­dled with bil­lions of dol­lars in bond debt and pen­sion oblig­a­tions it can nev­er repay, Michigan’s largest city has resort­ed to set­tling its deep-root­ed fis­cal and polit­i­cal prob­lems in court.

By fil­ing Chap­ter 9 bank­rupt­cy, Detroit has effec­tive­ly hand­ed its fate over to a fed­er­al bank­rupt­cy judge, along with the dif­fi­cult ques­tions of how to divide its inad­e­quate resources among more than 100,000 cred­i­tors. Among oth­er things, that judge will have to tack­le the polit­i­cal­ly charged ques­tion of whether the city’s pub­lic employ­ees can jump ahead of bond­hold­ers and oth­er cred­i­tors to col­lect pen­sion pay­ments that vast­ly exceed both finan­cial reserves and the city’s like­ly abil­i­ty to repay.

“This was going to be bat­tled out polit­i­cal­ly inside or out­side of bank­rupt­cy, and that’s not going to change,” said David A. Skeel, a pro­fes­sor at the Uni­veristy of Penn­syl­va­nia Law School who has writ­ten exten­sive­ly about the polit­i­cal and legal ques­tions swirling around gov­ern­ment insol­ven­cy. “The court is a ref­er­ee, an umpire, but ulti­mate­ly the par­ties have to make the pro­pos­als.”

...

Con­gress first passed a pro­vi­sion of the bank­rupt­cy code allow­ing for munic­i­pal bank­rupt­cies back in 1934, which the Supreme Court prompt­ly found uncon­sti­tu­tion­al for vio­lat­ing both the 10th Amend­ment (pow­ers not explic­it­ly grant­ed to Con­gress are reserved to the states) and the clause pro­hibit­ing impair­ment of con­tracts. Con­gress slight­ly amend­ed the law and the Supreme Court — chas­tened by FDR’s 1937 threat to pack it with more coop­er­a­tive jus­tices — approved Chap­ter 9 in 1939.

Since then there have been rel­a­tive­ly few munic­i­pal bank­rupt­cies, although the num­ber has ticked up in recent years. Much like air­lines, which entered a ser­i­al bank­rupt­cy phase after the indus­try was dereg­u­lat­ed in order to rework union con­tracts, more cities have turned to fed­er­al bank­rupt­cy court to solve intractable dis­putes over debt loads and pub­lic pen­sions. The city of Valle­jo, Calif. was pro­hib­it­ed under state law from clos­ing non-essen­tial fire sta­tions or mod­i­fy­ing pen­sions, for exam­ple, but achieved both in bank­rupt­cy court.

When Skeel wrote an influ­en­tial arti­cle propos­ing the equiv­a­lent of Chap­ter 9 for over­lever­aged states, crit­ics said “no real city uses Chap­ter 9,” he said. With Detroit’s fil­ing, that state­ment is no longer accu­rate. “I real­ly think it changes your per­spec­tive on that, and it forces you to think Chap­ter 9 is one of the main tools in the tool kit when a munic­i­pal­i­ty is in trou­ble.”

Is that a bad thing? Skeel thinks not. Cities like Detroit — and states like Illi­nois, Cal­i­for­nia and Con­necti­cut — got into fis­cal trou­ble because their polit­i­cal lead­ers spent too much and promised too much to pub­lic-sec­tor employ­ees in the form of future pen­sion ben­e­fits. That’s a fun­da­men­tal prob­lem with elec­tive pol­i­tics, of course: It’s eas­i­er for today’s politi­cians to make promis­es they can’t keep than deliv­er finan­cial real­i­ty to their con­stituents. In that sense, pen­sion under­fund­ing is one of the main tools politi­cians use to get around state laws requir­ing bal­anced bud­gets.

...

Michi­gan, like oth­er states, has attempt­ed to pro­tect munic­i­pal pen­sions through its con­sti­tu­tion. But Skeel thinks a fed­er­al judge, com­pelled under the law to treat cred­i­tors equal­ly, might lim­it that pro­tec­tion to the por­tion of the pen­sion backed by actu­al pen­sion assets. The promise of future pay­ments might fall into the cat­e­go­ry of an unse­cured debt, although courts haven’t actu­al­ly decid­ed this pre­cise issue yet.

Skeel is crit­i­cized by Richard C. Schrag­ger, a pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia School of Law who says it is incor­rect and unfair to blame the prob­lems of cities like Detroit on their elect­ed lead­ers. Detroit, like a lot of north­ern indus­tri­al cities, is also the vic­tim of state neglect and laws that allowed afflu­ent sub­urbs to shield them­selves from the city’s finan­cial prob­lems. As busi­ness­es and rich cit­i­zens moved out­side the city’s bor­ders, Schrag­ger said, Detroit was left with 700,000 most­ly poor res­i­dents with the same demand for schools and oth­er gov­ern­ment ser­vices.

“Peo­ple say the decline is attrib­ut­able to bad man­age­ment, but that’s just not the real­i­ty,” he said. “There are struc­tur­al imped­i­ments to their well-being, and you can ignore those.”

Schrag­ger has argued bank­rupt­cy unfair­ly yanks such ques­tions from the polit­i­cal realm, and may give cities cov­er for push­ing the costs of insol­ven­cy on city employ­ees and the poor, while pro­tect­ing cred­i­tors.

But Skeel says the oppo­site is more like­ly to occur. Bank­rupt­cy judges are specif­i­cal­ly pro­hib­it­ed from order­ing cities to raise tax­es or change spend­ing, he said, and they must treat cred­i­tors in a sim­i­lar man­ner. The main effect of fil­ing Chap­ter 9 is the pos­si­bil­i­ty of restruc­tur­ing pub­lic pen­sions, he said, which sim­ply can’t be accom­plished out­side of bank­rupt­cy. By forc­ing cred­i­tors to take hair­cuts on their bonds as well, he said, a judge might help inject a lit­tle fis­cal dis­ci­pline into the finan­cial sys­tem by rais­ing inter­est rates on prof­li­gate spenders.

The exam­ples of gov­ern­ments from Greece to Cal­i­for­nia to Argenti­na argues oth­er­wise, how­ev­er.

“Just increas­ing the cost of bor­row­ing doesn’t stop peo­ple from bor­row­ing,” he acknowl­edged.

In Clausewitz’s day, that’s when the armies marched to plun­der new ter­ri­to­ries. Detroit and its many cred­i­tors can only slug it out in court.

@Pterrafractyl–
ical
MORE than a lit­tle inter­est­ing to see a main­stream, con­ser­v­a­tive busi­ness pub­li­ca­tion such as “Forbes” dis­cussing mat­ters fiscal/economic in terms of Von Clause­witz’s the­o­ret­i­cal for­mu­la­tions!!

Oth­er than this website/blog and my pro­grams, where, and when, have you EVER seen or heard con­tem­po­rary economic/financial/political mat­ters dis­cussed in terms of Von Clause­witz. (“Ger­many Watch,” whcih feeds along this web­site on the front page being an obvi­ous excep­tion.)

Best,

Dave

@Dave: Let’s hope the report­ing trend con­tin­ues because, if any­thing, the grow­ing num­ber of glob­al free-trade agree­ments is going to make the temp­ta­tion to engage in economic/financial war­fare almost irre­sistible. That’s part­ly because mon­ey and entire indus­tries can be relo­cat­ed across the globe like nev­er before but also because glob­al eco­nom­ic inte­gra­tion of some sort is kind of inevitable, but it’s a lot eas­i­er to do it wrong than do it right (like most things). And as the euro­zone expe­ri­ence is teach­ing us, doing it wrong is the right way to win the war. So we’ll prob­a­bly see a lot more von Clause­witz expe­ri­ence on com­ing years.

So this was hap­pen­ing in the lead up to the Novem­ber 24 elec­tion in Hon­duras:

Land to be Usurped and Votes to Be Bought: The Pre-Elec­tion Hon­duran Land­scape
Sun­day, 24 Novem­ber 2013 10:19 By Andalu­sia Knoll
Truthout | News Analy­sis

“When was the last time I was threat­ened?” asks Alfre­do Lopez, repeat­ing my ques­tion. He laughs and then responds, “Today, yes­ter­day, the day before, every­day. They tell me they want to mess me up.”

Lopez is the vice pres­i­dent of the Hon­duran Black Fra­ter­nal Orga­ni­za­tion (OFRANEH) and speaks with such a jovial tone that you would­n’t guess that he’s talk­ing about pre-elec­tion vio­lence in Hon­duras. We’re in the Afro-Indige­nous Garí­fu­na town of Tri­un­fo de la Cruz in the north­ern coast of Hon­duras. The first true pres­i­den­tial elec­tions, since the 2009 coup that oust­ed pres­i­dent Mel Zelaya, are just days away.

Lopez is the host of the Notibime­tu show on the Faluma Bime­tu (Sweet Coconut) FM radio sta­tion. We accom­pa­ny him to his after­noon pro­gram where he plays tra­di­tion­al Gar­i­fu­na music, cou­pled with local and inter­na­tion­al news focused on land strug­gles of indige­nous com­mu­ni­ties. The sta­tion has been a stal­wart of “La Resistencía,” the resis­tance move­ment birthed in the after­math of the 2009 coup d’e­tat.

His phone rings var­i­ous times dur­ing the pro­gram, but he does­n’t answer, cit­ing it as anoth­er exam­ple of peo­ple try­ing to dis­rupt his activ­i­ties. Lopez and OFRANEH have been involved in a long bat­tle to pro­tect their fer­tile coastal col­lec­tive land from inter­na­tion­al investors attempt­ing to turn these pris­tine coasts into a Hon­duran Can­cun.

Repres­sion of their move­ment to defend their land has increased in the pre-elec­tion sea­son, but it is hard­ly some­thing new to their com­mu­ni­ty. Lopez him­self served six years in jail for false drug charges. He was lat­er released, vin­di­cat­ed of all charges and grant­ed a ret­ri­bu­tion pay­ment. In 2009, Faluma Betu was burned down by arson­ists assumed to be linked to the coup gov­ern­ment. The com­mu­ni­ty’s resilience allowed them to recon­struct the sta­tion. A month lat­er, they were back on the air, trans­mit­ting at dou­ble the sta­tion’s pri­or wattage.

Cur­rent Hon­duran Pres­i­dent Por­firio Lobo Sosa held a con­fer­ence in 2011 titled “Hon­duras, Open For Busi­ness.” The 46 Gar­i­fu­na com­mu­ni­ties dot­ting the coast have nev­er adver­tised that they are open for invest­ment, but the fact that they haven’t giv­en their con­sent has made lit­tle dif­fer­ence to the pow­er­ful busi­ness­men vying for their chunk of Hon­duran beach­front prop­er­ty. Accord­ing to Con­ven­tion No. 169, all indige­nous and trib­al peo­ples have the right to “decide their own pri­or­i­ties,” espe­cial­ly when it “affects their lives, beliefs, insti­tu­tions and spir­i­tu­al well-being and the lands they occu­py.” The lack of con­sent has formed the basis for three cas­es that OFRANEH has before the Inter-Amer­i­can Com­mis­sion on Human Rights in Wash­ing­ton, DC, and two cas­es that have passed on to the Inter-Amer­i­can Court of Human Rights in Cos­ta Rica.

While these pend­ing cas­es have helped throt­tle the devel­op­ment, they sure­ly have not been able to stop it. In 2011 the Hon­duran Nation­al Con­gress approved the Law for Spe­cial Devel­op­ment Regions (RED) which allows the devel­op­ment of Char­ter Cities, which will oper­ate autonomous­ly from state juris­dic­tion and be allowed to enter into agree­ments with inter­na­tion­al agen­cies.

Tim Rus­so, a com­mu­ni­ty media activist with the orga­ni­za­tion Pop­u­lar Com­mu­ni­ca­tors for Auton­o­my (COMPPA), has worked in Hon­duras over the past decade and tells Truthout that the Char­ter Cities, with “their lev­el of auton­o­my and all the spe­cial reg­u­la­tions that apply to the RED zones, are basi­cal­ly a Hon­duran ver­sion of the Green Zone in Iraq. But sup­pos­ed­ly this is not a war zone.”

Just recent­ly The Los Micos Golf Resort opened up in the near­by Tela Bay, with 750 acres of beach hous­es and a hotel, despite count­less protests by local Garí­fu­na orga­ni­za­tions. The project has been financed by Randy Jor­gensen, a Cana­di­an busi­ness­man who struck it rich in the porn indus­try and told Kae­lyn Forde of the Real News Net­work that “We want to bring back life to the banana booms,” ref­er­enc­ing the Banana Repub­lic that Cen­tral Amer­i­ca was once con­sid­ered. Jor­gensen denied usurp­ing com­mu­nal Garí­fu­na land and stat­ed that which bor­ders delin­eate the com­mu­ni­ty and indi­vid­ual land is “a debate that they need to have amongst them­selves.”

Mem­bers of the Garí­fu­na com­mu­ni­ty are not opposed to tourism and in fact are in favor of devel­op­ment it as long as guar­an­tees dig­ni­fied work with fair wages for local res­i­dents, cou­pled with the pro­tec­tion of the col­lec­tive land, crops and ocean. One exam­ple of com­mu­ni­ty-led tourism is the Panchy Cabanas, where close to a hun­dred for­eign­ers have stayed in the pre-elec­tion sea­son. These vis­i­tors hail­ing from Cana­da, Ger­many and the Unit­ed States have not come to catch the waves, but instead to par­tic­i­pate in var­i­ous inter­na­tion­al del­e­ga­tions that will mon­i­tor the elec­tions.

The upcom­ing elec­tions are the first that Hon­duras has seen since 2005, because the 2009 elec­tions in which Pepe Lobo was elect­ed were boy­cotted by many in protest of the coup gov­ern­ment. Accord­ing to a recent Gallup poll, Xiomara Zelaya de Cas­tro, wife of oust­ed pres­i­dent Mel Zelaya, can­di­date with the new polit­i­cal par­ty Libre, holds a few point mar­gin over the rul­ing Nation­al Par­ty Can­di­date, Juan Orlan­do Hernán­dez. Yet jour­nal­ists and elec­tion observers have ques­tioned why the mar­gin is so small, point­ing to Nation­al Par­ty-ruled con­gress fund­ing of the poll. Regard­less of Xiomara’s sup­posed lead in the polls, no one in the streets responds with any kind of cer­tain­ty regard­ing Hon­duras’ next pres­i­dent. In a coun­try where cor­rup­tion and polit­i­cal vio­lence is ram­pant, peo­ple’s faith that their vote will be respect­ed is incred­i­bly low.

The inter­na­tion­al del­e­ga­tions are meet­ing with Lopez and oth­er mem­bers of OFRANEH at the town pool hall that also serves as a com­mu­ni­ty cen­ter. Out­side, three young Rasta­fari men sit on the curb, kick­ing back as the sun sets on this beach town. They share with Truthout their nick­names Dibu, Capri and Dia­blo and their desire for change.

Unem­ploy­ment has sky­rock­et­ed since the coup, and these three have found them­selves with­out work. Capri and Dibu said they worked in con­struc­tion in a near­by port town, but when the com­pa­ny got wind that they were part of the resis­tance, they were laid off. Dia­blo is a crafts­men and says that his cash flow has been low because the increased vio­lence in post-coup Hon­duras has severe­ly reduced the num­ber of tourists com­ing to Tri­um­fo and that while fling­ing its arms open to for­eign invest­ment, Hon­duras has also opened the flood­gates to Chi­nese imports, mak­ing hand-craft­ed goods, which cost more, less desir­able.

When ques­tioned whether they are afraid to vote, all respond with a con­fi­dent “no,” but say this sense of secu­ri­ty is only because they will be vot­ing in their local Garí­fu­na com­mu­ni­ty. Dibu says that some folks told them “if you go over there to vote, peo­ple will kill you.”

While they say they don’t fear for their lives in the elec­tions, they do say they have seen a cli­mate of intim­i­da­tion and bribes. Clara Flo­res of OFRANEH con­firmed this in an inter­view with Truthout, say­ing that peo­ple in the com­mu­ni­ty “fear what will hap­pen if the Libre par­ty wins because they think that there might be anoth­er coup d’e­tat or action take against the pres­i­dent.” She also men­tioned that peo­ple con­nect­ed to the Nation­al Par­ty offered 10,000 lem­pi­ras, the equiv­a­lent of 500 dol­lars to peo­ple in Tri­un­fo in exchange for their vote. “This mon­ey was sup­posed to be mon­ey from the gov­ern­ment for poor peo­ple, but since Juan Orlan­do was the head of con­gress, he is using these funds to influ­ence the peo­ple’s vote.” In a com­mu­ni­ty with high lev­els of unem­ploy­ment, some were bought off, but Dibu says the major­i­ty of peo­ple “know what’s up” and with “a strong desire for change, they are not so eas­i­ly will­ing to sell their votes.”

...

As the work­shop con­tin­ues, par­tic­i­pants speak about the impor­tance of broad­cast­ing, to break the media siege. DJ Antony decides its worth tak­ing the risks to par­tic­i­pate in the coor­di­nat­ed broad­casts with the oth­er indige­nous and Garí­fu­na sta­tions. In the mid­dle of the work­shop, the WiFi stops func­tion­ing, as the inter­net in Hon­duras is any­thing but reli­able. The com­mu­ni­ty broad­cast­ers say that if their inter­net gets blocked or just stops work­ing, they will take to their cells, inform­ing the peo­ple with phone calls.

Tomas Gomez Mem­breño from Radio Guara­jam­bala, says every time that they have broad­cast­ed a large event, most recent­ly an anti-mil­i­ta­riza­tion mobi­liza­tion, their elec­tric­i­ty has been cut off.

Hon­duran media is abysmal, not just because it is con­trolled by monop­o­lies known for their sen­sa­tion­al­ist yel­low jour­nal­ism, but also for ram­pant cen­sor­ship stem­ming from the vio­lence per­pe­trat­ed against jour­nal­ists. Hele­na Roux is accom­pa­ny­ing a Ger­man observers del­e­ga­tion and works with the press free­dom group Reporters With­out Bor­ders in Paris. She says that Hon­duras ranks as the most dan­ger­ous coun­try in Latin Amer­i­ca to exer­cise jour­nal­ism, and con­stant threats from state forces, nar­co-traf­fick­ers and com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers aligned with these ele­ments leads to auto-cen­sor­ship by jour­nal­ists who fear for their lives. Roux com­ments, “With this kind of cli­mate, the jour­nal­ists do not have the right to car­ry out their work of inform­ing the pop­u­la­tion, and in turn, the pop­u­la­tion does not have the right to be prop­er­ly informed about what is hap­pen­ing in the elec­tions.”

Two weeks before the elec­tions, pho­to­jour­nal­ist Manuel Muril­lo, who was work­ing for LIBRE con­gres­sion­al can­di­date Rasel Tomé, was killed with three bul­lets to the head. More than 30 jour­nal­ists have been killed since the 2009 coup. A Rights Action Report has doc­u­ment­ed the assas­si­na­tion of 18 mem­bers of the Libre Par­ty in this elec­tion cycle, and aligned jour­nal­ists have not escaped the vio­lence.

The major media out­lets have launched an all-out cam­paign against pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Xiomara, label­ing her a com­mu­nist and crim­i­nal­iz­ing mem­bers of indige­nous and campesino orga­ni­za­tions such as the Civ­il Coun­cil of Pop­u­lar and Indige­nous Orga­ni­za­tions of Hon­duras (COPINH.)

...

And then this hap­pened:

CSMon­i­tor
Hon­duras recount: Can a free and fair elec­tion also be fraud­u­lent?

Inter­na­tion­al observers say Hon­duras pres­i­den­tial elec­tion results are ‘trans­par­ent,’ but pro­test­ers are alleg­ing fraud. A recount may set­tle the dis­pute.

By Seth Rob­bins, Cor­re­spon­dent / Decem­ber 9, 2013

TEGUCIGALPA, Hon­duras

With clouds of tear gas hang­ing in the air, hun­dreds of stu­dents shel­tered them­selves behind the Nation­al University’s gates two days after the hot­ly con­test­ed pres­i­den­tial elec­tion here

The stu­dent groups didn’t come out look­ing for trou­ble, they say, but to reg­is­ter their dis­gust with the country’s elec­tion sys­tem – which had just pro­claimed rul­ing par­ty Con­gress­man Juan Orlan­do Hernán­dez Hon­duras’ next pres­i­dent.

Many of these youth were among thou­sands of uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents who sac­ri­ficed their chance to vote in order to serve as elec­tion cus­to­di­ans, run­ning polling cen­ters in far-flung parts of the coun­try. Though none would give his or her full name, cit­ing fears of reprisal, sev­er­al recalled wit­ness­ing signs of fraud, like the buy­ing of votes and polling cre­den­tials; vot­ers pre­sent­ing false IDs; and peo­ple hand­ing out gifts on the eve of the Nov. 24 elec­tion.

“We thought [this elec­tion] was going to be dif­fer­ent, and it was the same as always,” says a 23-year-old IT stu­dent who served as an elec­tion vol­un­teer. “What hap­pened is a mock­ery for us.”

Per­haps unsur­pris­ing­ly, the los­ing pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates say the same. Two are demand­ing recounts, alleg­ing fraud, and, in the case of left-wing hope­ful Xiomara Cas­tro de Zelaya, call­ing sup­port­ers into the streets for row­dy, defi­ant march­es.

These alle­ga­tions run con­trary to the find­ings of some 700 inter­na­tion­al observers who served in Hon­duras last month. In their offi­cial reports, the mis­sions described the elec­tions as large­ly trou­ble-free. Experts say such dis­agree­ment is typ­i­cal, as mon­i­tor­ing mis­sions – which are often com­posed of pro­fes­sors, lawyers, human rights activists, and col­lege stu­dents – are inclined to look more at the gen­er­al qual­i­ty of the elec­tion process than fer­ret out every tiny irreg­u­lar­i­ty.

“Almost all elec­tions have some prob­lems,” says Susan Hyde, an expert on inter­na­tion­al elec­tion obser­va­tion mis­sions at Yale Uni­ver­si­ty. “It’s a dif­fi­cult judg­ment to make.”

But the dis­putes between the elec­tion author­i­ty and detrac­tors could exac­er­bate exist­ing polar­iza­tion here, build­ing on polemic issues of poor secu­ri­ty and eco­nom­ic oppor­tu­ni­ty. The elec­tion author­i­ty agreed to hold a recount, but has yet to do so.

Fraud ... or sore losers?

Can­di­dates can be loath to accept observers’ find­ings, espe­cial­ly in coun­tries where pol­i­tics are polar­ized and demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions are weak, experts say. Elec­tions in war-torn Afghanistan have repeat­ed­ly thrust elec­tion observers into the spot­light. Venezuela’s oppo­si­tion can­di­date still con­tests last April’s pres­i­den­tial elec­tion results, despite observers hav­ing char­ac­ter­ized them as fair. And after Mexico’s 2006 elec­tions, also deemed fair, los­ing can­di­date Andrés Manuel López Obrador went so far as to set up a par­al­lel gov­ern­ment.

The Euro­pean Union mission’s report on the Hon­duran elec­tions, issued with­in days of the offi­cial results, praised both the “the trans­paren­cy of vot­ing” and “respect of the will of the vot­ers dur­ing the count­ing process,” despite some irreg­u­lar­i­ties. The Orga­ni­za­tion of Amer­i­can States’ report sim­i­lar­ly con­grat­u­lat­ed Hon­duras for an orga­nized elec­tion and high vot­er turnout.

Hon­duran pres­i­den­tial can­di­date and tele­vi­sion per­son­al­i­ty Sal­vador Nas­ral­la says he has no faith in the inter­na­tion­al elec­tion monitors.“There are com­plaints from a ton of peo­ple sig­ni­fy­ing that the process was not trans­par­ent,” he says.

Mr. Nas­ral­la, whose Anti-Cor­rup­tion Par­ty, or PAC, fin­ished with 14 per­cent of the vote, has for­mal­ly demand­ed a full recount, claim­ing that “unof­fi­cial modems” were used to trans­mit elec­tion results. He also says he has evi­dence of incon­sis­ten­cies between tal­ly sheets and votes record­ed, and of masked men mark­ing paper bal­lots to accord with offi­cial tal­lies. The real results, he con­tends, would show him win­ning.

Mean­while, Ms. Cas­tro, of the new­ly formed left-wing Libre par­ty, has refused to con­cede the pres­i­den­cy to Mr. Hernán­dez. The elec­toral authority’s offi­cial results give Hernán­dez 37 per­cent of the votes, and Cas­tro 29 per­cent.

In her first appear­ance since the elec­tions, Cas­tro – whose hus­band is deposed for­mer Pres­i­dent Manuel Zelaya – held a press con­fer­ence to declare the elec­tions a “dis­gust­ing mon­stros­i­ty.” With­in days thou­sands of Libre sup­port­ers poured into the streets, with Cas­tro and Mr. Zelaya march­ing along­side the cof­fin of a Libre activist who they alleged was killed for polit­i­cal rea­sons just after the elec­tion. Police could not con­firm that the killing was polit­i­cal.

Cas­tro also demand­ed a recount, and elec­tion offi­cials con­sent­ed to review results from more than 16,000 vot­ing sta­tions with Libre par­ty rep­re­sen­ta­tives present. The recount has stalled over dis­agree­ments between Libre and elec­tions offi­cials, and on Fri­day Cas­tro and Zelaya filed a for­mal com­plaint demand­ing the out­right annul­ment of the elec­tion results.

Honduras’s elec­toral author­i­ty is “doing the right thing” by help­ing the par­ties set­tle dis­crep­an­cies in the vote, says Jen­nifer McCoy, direc­tor of the Amer­i­c­as Pro­gram at the Carter Cen­ter, which sent a small del­e­ga­tion last month in sup­port of the larg­er EU and OAS mis­sions.

“The impor­tant part that often gets short shrift is the dis­pute process,” Ms. McCoy says.

...

‘More voic­es’

The elec­tion mon­i­tor­ing agen­cies did cite irreg­u­lar­i­ties in their assess­ments. The EU’s report spoke not only of the trade in cre­den­tials, but crit­i­cized Hon­duras’ elec­tion sys­tem for its lack of trans­paren­cy in cam­paign financ­ing, its unre­li­able vot­er reg­istry, and for mak­ing it dif­fi­cult for vot­ers to sub­mit com­plaints on elec­tion day.

Still, the report’s men­tion of irreg­u­lar­i­ties didn’t go far enough for one EU observ­er, Leo Gabriel of Aus­tria, who broke pro­to­col and in an inter­view with a Brazil­ian web­site Opera Mun­di denounced the mission’s gen­er­al­ly pos­i­tive report. Mr. Gabriel said there was heat­ed debate between observers and EU mis­sion lead­ers before the report was issued.

The Unit­ed States and its ambas­sador may not have helped the sit­u­a­tion, says Rose­mary Joyce, a Hon­duras expert at Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley. The US State Depart­ment con­grat­u­lat­ed Hon­duras on “gen­er­al­ly trans­par­ent” elec­tions when votes were still being tal­lied.

“We had more pres­sure to put [on Hon­duras] than any­body else,” Ms. Joyce says. “We didn’t use it.”

Yet Joyce says that, pro­vid­ed a trans­par­ent recount is done, Hon­duras will like­ly come out of this elec­tion stronger. The con­gres­sion­al gains made by upstart par­ties like LIBRE and PAC sig­ni­fy a his­toric shift in polit­i­cal pow­er, as the two tra­di­tion­al­ly pow­er­ful par­ties, Nation­al and Lib­er­al, won’t con­trol con­gress any­more. “You will have more voic­es,” she says.

Note that this also hap­pened:

Panampost.com
Anony­mous Hacks Honduras’s Elec­tions Web­site
Hack­tivist Group Protests Alleged Wrong­do­ing in Lat­est Pres­i­den­tial Race
By Sofía Ramírez Fion­da on Mon­day, Decem­ber 2, 2013

As of the evening of Decem­ber 2, the inter­na­tion­al net­work of hack­tivists, Anony­mous, has suc­cess­ful­ly hacked the web­site of Honduras’s Supreme Elec­toral Tri­bunal (TSE). This came just a few hours after the tri­bunal announced its will­ing­ness to recount the votes and review the offi­cial elec­toral records of the recent pres­i­den­tial elec­tions, held on Novem­ber 24.

In the web­site, Anony­mous Hon­duras declares “we com­mit the sin of giv­ing you the ben­e­fit of the doubt, even when we are cer­tain that your insti­tu­tions are use­less, and don’t serve any­one but the one that has the mon­ey and the pow­er in this coun­try. We can no longer tol­er­ate this and the help of your bribed media, who want the peo­ple to stay qui­et and con­sume the process no mat­ter what.”

In their mes­sage, they inform of a por­tal where they have alleged­ly col­lect­ed evi­dence of elec­toral fraud. They also call for peace­ful protests as a way to demand free­dom. They ask peo­ple to “remem­ber they have the weapons and mon­ey, we only have our voice, indig­na­tion and our desire for free­dom. If you’re abroad, protest in front of embassies. If we don’t wake up now that we can, there won’t be anoth­er pos­si­ble moment.”

...

So the right-wing forces in favor of sell­ing off Hon­duras to bil­lion­aires just had a big win.

Also, this just hap­pened:

Hon­duras TV jour­nal­ist found shot to death, inter­na­tion­al press groups demand inves­ti­ga­tion

By The Asso­ci­at­ed Press Decem­ber 9, 2013

MEXICO CITY — Two inter­na­tion­al press groups are call­ing for a full inves­ti­ga­tion into the death of Hon­duran jour­nal­ist Juan Car­los Arge­nal Med­i­na, who was found shot to death at his home in the south­east­ern city of Dan­li.

The Com­mit­tee to Pro­tect Jour­nal­ists and Jour­nal­ists With­out Bor­ders say Arge­nal was a cor­re­spon­dent for Radio y TV Globo, which has come under attack for its oppo­si­tion to the 2009 coup that deposed Pres­i­dent Manuel Zelaya.

Zelaya’s wife, Xiomara Cas­tro, lost the Nov. 24 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion and is con­test­ing the results.

The groups say Arge­nal’s body was found Sat­ur­day.

Arge­nal was also own­er of Vida Tele­vi­sion. He was the third TV jour­nal­ist killed this year in Hon­duras.

Sad, scary ques­tions of the day: The Dark Enlight­en­ment: Is it scar­i­ly sad or sad­ly scary?

The Tele­graph
The ‘neo-fas­cist’ Dark Enlight­en­ment is more sad than scary
By Tim Stan­ley US pol­i­tics Last updat­ed: Jan­u­ary 22nd, 2014

If you’re going to take time out of your busy day to think, think big. And so it’s quite excit­ing to dis­cov­er that some online con­ser­v­a­tives say the best way to deal with the world’s prob­lems is to abol­ish the demo­c­ra­t­ic state and replace it with a Jaco­bite monar­chy. Let’s not waste time on reform­ing the NHS. Let’s just ban pub­lic health­care and go back to the leech­es.

I joke, but accord­ing to the Telegraph’s Jamie Bartlett, a group of inter­net philoso­phers clas­si­fy­ing them­selves as “the Dark Enlight­en­ment” reck­on that every­thing’s been down­hill since the Enlight­en­ment and that we need to start all over again. The project is:

…a loose col­lec­tion of neo-reac­tionary ideas, mean­ing a rejec­tion of most mod­ern think­ing: democ­ra­cy, lib­er­ty, and equal­i­ty. Par­tic­u­lar con­tempt is reserved for democ­ra­cy, which [writer Nick Land] believes “sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly consolidate[s] and exacerbate[es] pri­vate vices, resent­ments, and defi­cien­cies until they reach the lev­el of col­lec­tive crim­i­nal­i­ty and com­pre­hen­sive social cor­rup­tion.”

Jamie reports that there is a “neo-fas­cist” ele­ment to this because they “obsess over IQ test­ing and pseu­do­science that they claim proves racial dif­fer­ences”. Pre­sum­ably, this is because they are anti-egal­i­tar­i­an and would argue that nature makes us unequal, which is one more rea­son why democ­ra­cy is a sham. The weak and idi­ot­ic ally togeth­er to form a major­i­ty and rip off the intel­li­gent minor­i­ty. Now, can any­one remem­ber who John Galt is…?

That these “neo-reac­tionar­ies” admire monar­chies is what makes they seem way-out and new. But, actu­al­ly, their phi­los­o­phy is the log­i­cal exten­sion of where an ele­ment of the Right has been head­ing for some time. The Tea Par­ty has been say­ing since 2009 that Amer­i­ca was intend­ed to be a repub­lic, not a democ­ra­cy. In a repub­lic, the pow­er of the major­i­ty is lim­it­ed by its con­sti­tu­tion; in a democ­ra­cy, the major­i­ty can use the state to impose their will on every­one else. So for the Right, the re-elec­tion of Oba­ma, the mas­sive increase in food stamps, Oba­macare and even the NSA over­reach are all evi­dence of the US evolv­ing from a con­sti­tu­tion­al frame­work that pro­tects indi­vid­ual lib­er­ty to one that enables col­lec­tivism. Tech­ni­cal­ly, they are not wrong – and as the Supreme Court con­tin­ues to try to reflect pop­u­lar opin­ion rather than the law as strict­ly defined by the Con­sti­tu­tion, some con­ser­v­a­tives are retreat­ing into states rights, or even seces­sion, to escape the Leviathan.

And some lib­er­tar­i­ans are tak­ing refuge in the past. The imag­ined ben­e­fit of pre-mod­ern monar­chies was that they did­n’t tam­per too much with civ­il soci­ety for fear of pro­vok­ing rebel­lion (con­sid­er how many British medieval revolts were to do with tax). Matt Lewis thinks there is a “log­ic (if tor­tured)” to the lat­ter-day con­ser­v­a­tive dream­ing of a restora­tion of the crown:

“Under monar­chy,” Hans-Her­mann Hoppe, author of Democ­ra­cy: The God That Failed, explained, “the dis­tinc­tion between rulers and ruled is clear. I know, for instance, that I will nev­er become king, and because of that I will tend to resist the king’s attempts to raise tax­es. Under democ­ra­cy, the dis­tinc­tion between rulers and ruled becomes blurred. The illu­sion can arise ‘that we all rule our­selves,’ and the resis­tance against increased tax­a­tion is accord­ing­ly dimin­ished. I might end up on the receiv­ing end: as a tax recip­i­ent rather than a tax­pay­er, and thus view tax­a­tion more favor­ably.”

Now, I’m not say­ing that the neo-reac­tionar­ies are either right or wrong, sim­ply that these views are not plucked from the ether or are an over-elab­o­rate exper­i­ment in trolling. On the con­trary, the idea of “shop­ping” for an ide­al gov­ern­ment is quite attrac­tive. Think Britain is tax­ing you too much? Switch your cit­i­zen­ship to http://www.Austro-Hungarian-Empire.com. You won’t get health­care or a police force – but you also won’t be con­script­ed or asked to put out your cig­a­rette.

...

Jamie inter­prets the rise of the Dark Enlight­en­ment in terms of a resur­gence of his­tor­i­cal fas­cism. He maybe right. But I also think it’s an insight into how des­per­ate ele­ments of the Right have become. They believe they’ve lost the bat­tle for con­trol of the West and would now like to with­draw from democ­ra­cy alto­geth­er. Some are dri­ven into the arms of Putin, some into the Far, Far Right and some up trees with guns. As such, the Dark Enlight­en­ment is prob­a­bly more trag­ic than it is scary. Or, at least, let’s hope it stays that way.

Note that the idea of “shop­ping” for your ide­al gov­ern­ment — where you can just “switch your cit­i­zen­ship to http://www.Austro-Hungarian-Empire.com” (but can’t vote) — has been gain­ing in pop­u­lar­i­ty from anoth­er recent trend that sounds awful­ly sim­i­lar to some old, bad ideas:

Paul Romer is a bril­liant econ­o­mist – but his idea for char­ter cities is bad
His wheeze that poor coun­tries swap sov­er­eign­ty for pros­per­i­ty smacks of colo­nial­ism

Aditya Chakrabort­ty
The Guardian, Mon­day 26 July 2010

Some pro­fes­sors hold on to their careers for dear tenure, eking out thread­bare research mate­r­i­al and des­per­ate­ly plac­ing arti­cles in whichev­er jour­nal will take them. When retire­ment comes, the waters of acad­e­mia swal­low them up so that they become bare­ly a foot­note on a con­fer­ence paper. And then there are men like Paul Romer.

Romer is bulge-brack­et acad­e­mia, a depar­ture-lounge econ­o­mist: the kind of intel­lec­tu­al as like­ly to be found turn­ing left on a plane as in sem­i­nar rooms. For­ev­er men­tioned as a future Nobel prizewin­ner, this Cal­i­forn­ian is a world expert on how and why economies grow. When Gor­don Brown made that infa­mous speech about post-neo­clas­si­cal endoge­nous growth the­o­ry, it was­n’t Balls – as Hes­el­tine jibed – but Romer he was quot­ing.

He’s one of Time’s “25 most influ­en­tial Amer­i­cans” (true, Time was the mag­a­zine that ran a joint pro­file of Cyn­di Lau­per and Madon­na in 1985, and firm­ly declared that Cyn­di was the big­ger star, but that nei­ther came “with­in a mile of Tina Turn­er’s splen­did album of racked soul, Pri­vate Dancer”, but acco­lades such as these are still to be tak­en with due grav­i­ty of expres­sion) . And then there are the ador­ing jour­nal­is­tic pro­files, one of which began with the reporter turn­ing up cap in hand to meet the aca­d­e­m­ic loung­ing “pool­side at his house, which over­looks a huge expanse of rolling ranch­land”. That, it per­haps won’t sur­prise you to learn, was the hard­est-hit­ting moment.

So Romer is a bril­liant econ­o­mist, and he has a new and big idea. And because he is The Great Romer, he gets to present this wheeze to nation­al lead­ers, high-pro­file con­fer­ences and invi­ta­tion-only gath­er­ings of pol­i­cy-mak­ers. And because he has some spare cash (views over rolling ranch­land don’t come cheap, you know), Romer can afford to jack in his for­mal posi­tion at Stan­ford and start up his own think tank to make his case.

Trou­ble is, the idea stinks. With lit­tle track record in deal­ing with poor coun­tries, Romer has come up a grand scheme for lift­ing Africa and Asia out of pover­ty. What they need to do, he argues, is give up a big chunk of their land to a rich coun­try. Pol­i­cy experts from Wash­ing­ton can take over a patch of Rwan­da, and invite along GM and Microsoft and Gap to come and set up fac­to­ries. Poor coun­tries give up their sov­er­eign­ty in return for the promise of greater pros­per­i­ty.

His big exam­ple is Hong Kong. At the end of the first opi­um war in 1842, the Chi­nese were marched on board a British war­ship anchored off Nan­jing and forced to sign Hong Kong away to Queen Vic­to­ria. Over the next 150 years, the lit­tle island turned into Asi­a’s num­ber one cap­i­tal­ist suc­cess sto­ry. It was an exam­ple that Deng Xiaop­ing end­ed up copy­ing on the main­land, in coastal provinces such as Guang­dong – to explo­sive eco­nom­ic effect.

Chi­na’s loss of Hong Kong should not be seen as a nation­al humil­i­a­tion or great inter­na­tion­al injus­tice, Romer has writ­ten, but “an inter­ven­tion” which has “done more to reduce world pover­ty than all the world’s offi­cial aid pro­grammes of the 20th cen­tu­ry com­bined — and at a frac­tion of the cost”. What the world needs, the econ­o­mist argues, is not one but 100 Hong Kongs.

You think this is colo­nial­ism? For Romer, that “kind of emo­tion . . . can get in the way” (see what he did there? You have emo­tions; the elite econ­o­mist has evi­dence). Sure, the poor peo­ple liv­ing and work­ing in these new char­ter cities would­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly have any demo­c­ra­t­ic priv­i­leges such as the right to vote, but they could vote with their feet. And in the mean­time, the Africans or the Asians would get the undoubt­ed ben­e­fit of all this huge west­ern exper­tise.

...

One result of the great eco­nom­ic cri­sis is that aca­d­e­m­ic prac­ti­tion­ers are final­ly acknowl­edg­ing that eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy is not just a series of equa­tions applied to the real world, but ques­tions that ulti­mate­ly have a polit­i­cal answer. Yet the old pseu­do- sci­en­tif­ic blank slate-ism still sur­vives, as Paul Romer’s lat­est project demon­strates.

If art imi­tates life, what kind of art is going to be inspired by Detroit’s new “kick ’em when their down and take the art”-social con­tract get­ting estab­lished in Detroit’s loom­ing bank­rupt­cy:

Detroit emer­gency man­ag­er pleads for state funds
Kath­leen Gray, Nathan Bomey and Mark Stryk­er, Detroit Free Press 10:35 p.m. EDT May 13, 2014

DETROIT — Detroit’s emer­gency man­ag­er on Tues­day plead­ed with state law­mak­ers to kick in $195 mil­lion in upfront cash as part of a grand bar­gain to help resolve the city’s his­toric Chap­ter 9 bank­rupt­cy — while some of city’s largest cred­i­tors devised strate­gies to block the fund meant to shore up pen­sions and pro­tect the city’s art muse­um from hav­ing to sell its trea­sures to pay off debt.

“We have what we think is a rea­son­able plan, but to put it blunt­ly, we need your mon­ey,” emer­gency man­ag­er Kevyn Orr tes­ti­fied before the new­ly cre­at­ed state House Com­mit­tee on Detroit’s Recov­ery and Michi­gan’s Future. “If we don’t get the state set­tle­ment, our cred­i­tors like­ly would not approve the plan.”

Orr wants the state to con­tribute the lump sum as part of an $816 mil­lion grand bar­gain fund that is the cen­ter­piece of his restruc­tur­ing plan because it lim­its cuts to pen­sion­ers and pro­tects art by inject­ing new mon­ey into the sit­u­a­tion.

A group of local and nation­al foun­da­tions would con­tribute more than $366 mil­lion to the fund, but only if a sweep­ing set­tle­ment is reached and pen­sion­ers and oth­ers agree not to sue. The Detroit Insti­tute of Arts, for its part, has agreed to raise $100 mil­lion.

The fund has drawn sup­port from the city’s major retiree groups. But finan­cial cred­i­tors, includ­ing bond insur­ers and banks owed hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars are try­ing to kill the deal, argu­ing in court fil­ings that the city should con­sid­er sell­ing the art mas­ter­pieces. They say the cur­rent plan unfair­ly favors pen­sion­ers over city debt hold­ers and investors.

The legal fight has emerged as one of the most impor­tant hur­dles to a quick res­o­lu­tion of Detroit’s bank­rupt­cy. The con­flict will cul­mi­nate in a mas­sive tri­al start­ing in July when U.S. Bank­rupt­cy Judge Steven Rhodes will decide the fate of the largest munic­i­pal bank­rupt­cy in U.S. his­to­ry.

...

Pen­sions at risk

The House com­mit­tee’s first hear­ing Tues­day began the process of con­sid­er­ing an 11-bill pack­age that will gov­ern the state’s poten­tial con­tri­bu­tion to the set­tle­ment.

The bills would attach some con­tro­ver­sial con­di­tions to the fund­ing, includ­ing the cre­ation of an over­sight com­mis­sion that would retain author­i­ty over the city’s spend­ing, bor­row­ing and con­tracts for 20 years and the require­ment that new Detroit employ­ees receive 401(k)-style retire­ment plans instead of tra­di­tion­al defined-ben­e­fit pen­sions.

As part of the grand bar­gain fund­ing from law­mak­ers and pledges from foun­da­tions, Detroit retirees would have to relin­quish their right to sue the state over pen­sion cuts in exchange for bet­ter treat­ment in the city’s restruc­tur­ing plan.

Civil­ian retirees would get 4.5% pen­sion cuts and no more annu­al cost-of-liv­ing adjust­ment increas­es if they vote “yes” on the city’s restruc­tur­ing plan and Lans­ing law­mak­ers also approve the state’s con­tri­bu­tion. Police and fire retirees would get no month­ly pen­sion cuts and would accept a decrease in COLA from 2.25% to about 1%.

If the state fails to con­tribute $195 mil­lion upfront — the sta­tis­ti­cal equiv­a­lent of $350 mil­lion spread out over 20 years — Detroit would lose the $366 mil­lion pledged by char­i­ta­ble foun­da­tions and the $100 mil­lion in dona­tions the DIA is work­ing to raise.

With­out the grand bar­gain cash, some civil­ian pen­sion­ers could endure cuts of up to 40% when includ­ing the impact of the city’s plan to claw back exces­sive annu­ity pay­ments over the last 10 years.

“With­out this set­tle­ment, we’re going to have to go back to the draw­ing board,” Orr tes­ti­fied. “And for some peo­ple, it would be cat­a­stroph­ic.”

A typ­i­cal retiree with a $20,000 a year pen­sion would drop to $12,000 a year with­out the state’s par­tic­i­pa­tion. Retired police and fire­fight­ers, who don’t get Social Secu­ri­ty to sup­ple­ment their retire­ment, would drop from $35,000 to about $20,000 a year, Orr said.

...

Let’s see...so the pro­posed Grand Bar­gain includes:
— Cut­ting exist­ing pen­sion by 4.5% and elim­i­nat­ing cost of liv­ing increas­es which is going to guar­an­tee pover­ty for these retirees as the years tick by (and it’s poten­tial­ly clos­er to a 20% cut when claw backs are fac­tored in).
— Tran­si­tion all new employ­ees to the bad joke that is 401k sys­tem.
— Detroit gets an “over­sight com­mis­sion” that would retain author­i­ty over the city’s spend­ing, bor­row­ing and con­tracts for 20 years.
— Local and nation­al foun­da­tions would con­tribute more than $366 mil­lion to the fund, but only if a sweep­ing set­tle­ment is reached and pen­sion­ers and oth­ers agree not to sue.
— The Detroit Insti­tute of Arts would raise $100 mil­lion.

And this is the deal the cred­i­tors are say­ing is too gen­er­ous to the pen­sion­ers. Instead, the cred­i­tors want the art. Bad. And they’re even argu­ing that they should be allowed to remove the art in order to have their own apprais­ers inspect the pieces. While it’s quite under­stand­able that there would be a strong desire to put peo­ple’s pen­sions over art works, keep in mind that this is large­ly a false choice because the groups oppos­ing this plan and advo­cat­ing a sell­off of the art don’t want the addi­tion­al pro­ceeds to go towards pen­sion­ers. The pro­ceeds are intend­ed to for the cred­i­tors:

Detroit bank­rupt­cy judge nix­es art access request
May 15th 2014 6:36PM

By Ed White

DETROIT (AP) — A judge in Detroit’s bank­rupt­cy refused to grant hands-on access to a valu­able trove of art Thurs­day, telling cred­i­tors who face steep loss­es in the case that they can vis­it a city muse­um and browse the walls like any oth­er patron.

Bond insur­ers have point­ed to the art as a pos­si­ble bil­lion-dol­lar source of cash in the bank­rupt­cy. But the city is firm­ly opposed to any sale and instead is bank­ing on a sep­a­rate, unique deal that would pro­tect the art for­ev­er and soft­en pen­sion cuts for thou­sands of retirees.

Attor­neys for Syn­co­ra Guar­an­tee and Finan­cial Guar­an­ty Insur­ance said poten­tial buy­ers should be allowed to look at cer­tain pieces at the Detroit Insti­tute of Arts, even remove them from the walls and exam­ine the backs.

“The record fails to jus­ti­fy this extra­or­di­nary relief,” Judge Steven Rhodes said after hear­ing argu­ments for more than an hour.

He said cred­i­tors don’t deserve spe­cial treat­ment and instead can go to the muse­um and look at the art “like every­one else.”

Art has been a hot issue in the bank­rupt­cy because many cred­i­tors believe pieces could be sold to pay debts. City-owned art has been val­ued at $450 mil­lion to $870 mil­lion, but some Wall Street cred­i­tors say that’s way too low.

A so-called grand bar­gain favored by Detroit, wrap­ping in illus­tri­ous art and city retiree pen­sions, involves $816 mil­lion from foun­da­tions, phil­an­thropists, the muse­um and the state of Michi­gan. The state’s part, a $194.8 mil­lion lump sum, remains unset­tled in the Capi­tol.

The mon­ey would be exclu­sive­ly ear­marked for pen­sions.

“To us, the grand bar­gain is not grand. It’s more grandiose than grand,” said Marc Kiesel­stein, an attor­ney for New York-based Syn­co­ra, which could lose hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars in the bank­rupt­cy.

He acknowl­edged the art is a “glit­ter­ing link to the glo­ry days of Detroit.”

“But in bank­rupt­cy, some of those rar­i­fied things, those edi­fy­ing things, have to yield to things more base. Per­haps peo­ple would say more grub­by” — such as cred­i­tor loss­es, Kiesel­stein said.

The cred­i­tors said they’ve found buy­ers will­ing to pay more than $1 bil­lion for parts or all of the col­lec­tion; one wants all Chi­nese art.

But under Detroit’s bank­rupt­cy exit plan, the muse­um would take con­trol of thou­sands of pieces of city-owned art already there. The DIA, as it is known, has promised to raise $100 mil­lion of the $816 mil­lion pledged to ease cuts for retirees whose pen­sions are being reduced.

Rhodes, who will approve or reject the city’s entire bank­rupt­cy strat­e­gy lat­er this year, has repeat­ed­ly sig­naled that one-time asset sales prob­a­bly are not a good idea. He said the art would not have been avail­able to cred­i­tors if Detroit had cho­sen to skip bills and fix its finances out­side of bank­rupt­cy.

In a state­ment, Finan­cial Guar­an­ty sug­gest­ed the fight over art isn’t over.

“We main­tain that the dras­ti­cal­ly under­val­ued DIA set­tle­ment under the ‘grand bar­gain’ places pol­i­tics over the finan­cial and legal real­i­ties of the sit­u­a­tion and will almost cer­tain­ly result in drawn-out lit­i­ga­tion that no one wants,” the com­pa­ny said.

Also note that it isn’t just bond insur­ers like Syn­co­ra Guar­an­tee and Finan­cial Guar­an­ty Insur­ance that have been hold­ing out for more. Euro­pean banks that were amongst the largest recip­i­ents of the back­door Fed bailout, Dex­ia and Dep­fa, have also been big investors in Detroit’s bonds. Yes, Dex­ia and Dep­fa. Where they stand on the recent ‘grand bar­gain’ pro­pos­al isn’t clear from reports, but as of last Octo­ber these banks weren’t exact­ly inter­est­ed in set­tling soon either:

The Wall Street Jour­nal
Euro­pean Banks Hold Out on Detroit
Lenders Hire Lawyers to Pro­tect Stake Rather Than Sell

By Matt Wirz and Emi­ly Glaz­er
Oct. 2, 2013 6:55 p.m. ET

Banks in Ger­many, Bel­gium and Lux­em­bourg that own about $1 bil­lion of bank­rupt Detroit’s bonds are tak­ing a page out of the hedge-fund play­book to carve out their share of the city’s mea­ger cash pile.

Dep­fa Bank PLC, Dex­ia SA and a unit of Com­merzbank AG have hired lawyers to pro­tect their stake rather than imme­di­ate­ly sell­ing the debt—pri­mar­i­ly bonds issued to help fund the city’s pen­sions. The move is unusu­al for banks, which typ­i­cal­ly don’t want to be mired in long bank­rupt­cy-court fights, and it has frus­trat­ed a num­ber of hedge funds that want to buy some of Detroit’s most bat­tered bonds from the banks at deeply dis­count­ed prices.

By hold­ing out and fight­ing in Michi­gan bank­rupt­cy court, the banks could boost their pay­outs from the record-set­ting bank­rupt­cy com­pared with what they might get from sell­ing quick­ly to dis­tressed investors. Even if the banks ulti­mate­ly decide to sell before the process is com­plet­ed, as some are con­tem­plat­ing, their pub­lic argu­ments before medi­a­tors could help dri­ve up the prices of their bonds, said peo­ple famil­iar with the sit­u­a­tion.

The banks and the invest­ment firms inter­est­ed in the debt—including Brigade Cap­i­tal Man­age­ment, Claren Road Asset Man­age­ment LLC, Fun­da­men­tal Advi­sors LP and Monarch Alter­na­tive Cap­i­tal LP—thus far remain apart on their val­ues for the Detroit debt. Small amounts of the bonds recent­ly trad­ed at 44 cents on the dol­lar, accord­ing to the Munic­i­pal Secu­ri­ties Rule­mak­ing Board, but dis­tressed buy­ers want to pay prices around 40 cents on the dol­lar, or less for larg­er trades, said peo­ple famil­iar with the mat­ter.

The appetite for Detroit’s bonds shows how the munic­i­pal-bond mar­ket is evolv­ing into a play­ground for dis­tressed invest­ing. Hedge funds, which typ­i­cal­ly focus on buy­ing the debt of trou­bled cor­po­ra­tions, have been hom­ing in on the debt of cities, states and oth­er munic­i­pal­i­ties as the num­ber of those bank­rupt­cies has risen while defaults by cor­po­ra­tions are declin­ing. Most of the funds inter­est­ed in Detroit also are own­ers of debt sold by Jef­fer­son Coun­ty, Ala., home of the coun­try’s sec­ond-largest munic­i­pal bank­rupt­cy.

...

Hedge-fund man­agers thought the banks—including Fran­co-Bel­gian lender Dex­ia and a Ger­man state agency that took over bad assets from Dep­fa Bank—would write down the Detroit pen­sion bonds they hold and sell them. Instead, the Euro­pean lenders are mark­ing down the bonds, but most aren’t sell­ing yet. Dex­ia has pro­vi­sioned for a rough­ly 50% loss, and hired the lawyer rep­re­sent­ing hedge funds in Jef­fer­son Coun­ty’s bank­rupt­cy, to advise it. They also are talk­ing to restruc­tur­ing bankers for advice, peo­ple famil­iar with the mat­ter said.

The Euro­pean bank cred­i­tors are play­ing an unusu­al­ly activist role, in part because many of them were nation­al­ized dur­ing the Euro­pean finan­cial cri­sis and now are seek­ing to make a prof­it for tax­pay­ers by unload­ing assets at the high­est prices they can get. They have been sell­ing some loans and bonds and in oth­er cas­es, includ­ing Detroit, they are nego­ti­at­ing with bor­row­ers to recov­er the max­i­mum amount pos­si­ble.

...

So we’ll have to wait and see if the Euro­pean banks hold­ing these bonds joined the bond insur­ers in hold­ing our for more art sales to cov­er their loss­es. As the above arti­cle indi­cates, that these banks were hold­ing back in the first place was some­what sur­pris­ing but there’s anoth­er group oppos­ing the plan that’s per­haps even more sur­pris­ing con­sid­er­ing that it strips Detroit of self rule for the next two decades: The far right Mack­inac Cen­ter, the archi­tects of Michi­gan’s “emer­gency finan­cial man­ag­er” scheme, is also opposed to the deal.

All this oppo­si­tion to a deal that basi­cal­ly sends Detroit to democ­ra­cy prison for two decades, ends pub­lic pen­sions, and guar­an­tees old age pover­ty for the cur­rent employ­ees that won’t receive cost of liv­ing increas­es and the future employ­ees are basi­cal­ly hand­ing their retire­ment sav­ings to Wall Street. Why the oppo­si­tion when this seems like a far right dream come true? Because there’s so much more that could be done to undo the social con­tract. So much more:

The Amer­i­can Spec­ta­tor
Don’t Save Detroit — Sell It

Belle Isle alone could fetch $1 bil­lion.

By John H. Fund – From the Sep­tem­ber 2013 issue

IN THE 1983 movie Dr. Detroit, the flam­boy­ant lead char­ac­ter goes on a ram­page warn­ing of trou­ble to come. “I am talk­ing about scorched earth, no sur­vival, whole­sale destruction…body-bags and fire!” he yells. That’s pret­ty much what has hap­pened to Detroit over the last three decades.

Its pop­u­la­tion has shrunk by half to below 700,000. The wait for police response is five times the nation­al aver­age, and only 8 per­cent of crimes are solved. Rough­ly a third of the city’s 140 square miles is either unoc­cu­pied or dilap­i­dat­ed. About 40 per­cent of its tax rev­enue is direct­ed to retire­ment or debt, and the city hasn’t been in the black since 2004. Bank­rupt­cy should have been declared years ago. The best experts say there is no way the city can ever crawl out of its predica­ment using con­ven­tion­al means.

In the short term, Detroit could sell assets. Kevyn Orr, the city’s emer­gency man­ag­er, says all assets must be poten­tial­ly on the table. Experts con­sult­ed by the Detroit Free Press say the col­lec­tions of the Detroit Insti­tute of Arts—works by every­one from Van Gogh to Matisse to the orig­i­nal Howdy Doo­dy children’s TV doll—would fetch some $2.5 bil­lion. But that’s only one-eighth of the city’s pro­ject­ed long-term debt of $20 bil­lion. Art experts say any sales from the muse­um would have to be spaced out over a long peri­od.

“There are only so many bil­lion­aires that could absorb all of that mate­r­i­al,” art apprais­er Bet­ty Kru­lik told reporters.

With a fed­er­al or state bailout effec­tive­ly off the table because of the bad prece­dent it would set for oth­er near-bank­rupt cities, it’s time for tru­ly cre­ative think­ing.

...

One of the most intrigu­ing parts of Detroit is Belle Isle, a 1.5 square-mile park with real mar­ket val­ue that sits in the Detroit Riv­er between the two cities. Designed by Fred­er­ick Law Olm­st­ed, one of the cre­ators of New York’s Cen­tral Park, it was once an urban jew­el but has been left decrepit by years of neglect. One pro­pos­al is to revi­tal­ize Belle Isle by hav­ing the city sell it for $1 bil­lion to investors inter­est­ed in set­ting up a self-gov­ern­ing “free enter­prise zone.” While it would func­tion as a mini-Hong Kong, some strings could be attached (no fac­to­ries, for exam­ple). The idea has been endorsed by no less than for­mer Chrysler pres­i­dent Hal Sper­lich, who says the island could bring eco­nom­ic dynamism back to the area and cre­ate a “Mid­west tiger.”

Oth­er com­men­ta­tors point to oth­er prop­er­ties that could be sold to Cana­da or pri­vate investors. The city’s water depart­ment begs for new man­age­ment. There are prime water­front sites owned by the city such as the Joe Louis Are­na and Hart Plaza. The Detroit Zoo sits on 125 acres of prime land. Its ani­mals are much in demand, too; the Free Press report­ed that a breed­ing female giraffe can fetch $80,000.

The Cana­di­an media out­let Glob­al News went fur­ther with a poll ask­ing “Should Cana­da buy Detroit?” It point­ed out that Canada’s sports cred would instant­ly be enhanced by adding the Detroit Red Wings, Detroit Pis­tons, and Detroit Lions. Its music sta­tus would rise, too, as it could lay claim to local artists Ste­vie Won­der, Eminem, and Iggy Pop. As of press time, the win­ning answer was “yes”: 36 per­cent of respon­dents agreed with buy­ing Detroit. Close behind, with 29 per­cent, were those who agreed it was a good idea, but “only if we’re able to get rid of the guns.”

AT THIS POINT, sell­ing assets to Cana­da or even pri­vate investors is polit­i­cal­ly unten­able. But wait a few months, until the crush­ing bur­den of Detroit’s debt makes it clear that rad­i­cal solu­tions are in order. Bold ideas are often ridiculed or scorned in the begin­ning. In 1985, for­mer British Prime Min­is­ter Harold Macmil­lan upbraid­ed Mar­garet Thatch­er for her pro­gram to pri­va­tize state-owned enter­pris­es. He shout­ed that his suc­ces­sor was “sell­ing off the fam­i­ly sil­ver.” Thatch­er ignored such crit­i­cism and stuck to her guns.

Detroit needs a Mar­garet Thatch­er fig­ure, some­one who can ignore the screams of out­rage that inevitably accom­pa­ny the imple­men­ta­tion of any bold pro­gram. All over the world, once-dev­as­tat­ed cities have revi­tal­ized them­selves after their indus­tri­al bases decayed: Belfast, North­ern Ire­land, after ship­build­ing went else­where; Turin, Italy, after Fiat dras­ti­cal­ly down­sized; Pitts­burgh, Penn­syl­va­nia, after steel fac­to­ries fold­ed. Detroit can ulti­mate­ly do the same if it sets no lim­it on who it will do busi­ness with—whether they be pri­vate investors or even Cana­di­ans.

“AT THIS POINT, sell­ing assets to Cana­da or even pri­vate investors is polit­i­cal­ly unten­able. But wait a few months, until the crush­ing bur­den of Detroit’s debt makes it clear that rad­i­cal solu­tions are in order”. That was John Fund’s pre­dic­tion back in Sep­tem­ber, and here we are, 8 months lat­er with a “grand bar­gain” on the table that should make the far right gid­dy, and there’s still oppo­si­tion to the plan from not just the cred­i­tors, but also ide­o­log­i­cal cham­pi­ons of shred­ding the social con­tract like the Mack­inac Cen­ter.

On top of that, the House Speak­er Jase Bol­ger, of the GOP, is demand­ing that Detroit’s unions also throw some mon­ey into the bailout fund (pre­sum­ably the pen­sion cuts weren’t enough). And until that hap­pens he won’t back the ‘bar­gain’. And keep in mind that the pro­pos­al to sell off Belle Island and turn it into self-gov­erned Hong Kong was pro­posed by the Mack­inac Cen­ter specif­i­cal­ly to address Detroit’s pen­sion cri­sis. So we could be look­ing at not only an extend­ed peri­od of court bat­tles but also extend­ed polit­i­cal oppo­si­tion to any deal that does­n’t utter­ly crush Detroit’s pub­lic sec­tor and sell parts of it off. If folks like John Fund get their way, Cana­da might need to start look­ing into the val­ue of that art too since it’ll pre­sum­ably come with the pack­age deal.

Will Michi­gan’s Repub­li­cans kiss the ring? A cer­tain pair of oli­garchs can’t wait to find out:

Koch Broth­ers Group Fight­ing Detroit Bank­rupt­cy Deal
DAVID EGGERT – May 20, 2014, 6:17 AM EDT

LANSING, Mich. (AP) — Amer­i­cans for Pros­per­i­ty, the con­ser­v­a­tive advo­ca­cy group sup­port­ed by the Koch broth­ers, has launched an effort to tor­pe­do a pro­posed set­tle­ment in the Detroit bank­rupt­cy case, poten­tial­ly com­pli­cat­ing chances for com­plet­ing the deal just as its prospects seemed to be improv­ing.

The orga­ni­za­tion, formed to fight big gov­ern­ment and spend­ing, is con­tact­ing 90,000 con­ser­v­a­tives in Michi­gan and encour­ag­ing them to ral­ly against a plan to pro­vide $195 mil­lion in state mon­ey to help set­tle Detroit pen­sion hold­ers’ claims in the case, a key ele­ment of the deal.

The group has threat­ened to run ads against mem­bers of the Repub­li­can-con­trolled Leg­is­la­ture who vote in favor of the appro­pri­a­tion before the state’s August pri­ma­ry. An ini­tial leg­isla­tive vote may come this week.

Using pub­lic mon­ey for Detroit’s case “is very tox­ic, espe­cial­ly to out-state and Repub­li­can, con­ser­v­a­tive-lean­ing indi­vid­u­als,” said Scott Hager­strom, direc­tor of the Amer­i­cans for Pros­per­i­ty’s chap­ter in the state. “Even out-state Democ­rats, why send any more mon­ey to Detroit? Cer­tain­ly oth­er areas of the state have needs.”

The group’s move is a blow to Repub­li­can Gov. Rick Sny­der, who pro­posed the state cash as a final ingre­di­ent to bring the 10-month-long bank­rupt­cy case to a con­clu­sion. Some cred­i­tors are fight­ing the “grand bar­gain,” but it recent­ly drew sup­port from major retiree groups and unions. The bank­rupt­cy court tri­al on the city’s case will be held this sum­mer.

“This is a set­tle­ment. This not a bailout,” Sny­der said. “And I want to be very, very clear about that.”

Ten-year-old Amer­i­cans for Pros­per­i­ty, which plans to spend at least $125 mil­lion nation­al­ly help­ing con­ser­v­a­tives in the midterm elec­tions, is becom­ing more active in state pol­i­tics. Its will­ing­ness to spend mil­lions for adver­tis­ing has made it a pow­er­ful play­er in polit­i­cal con­tests.

Dave Doyle, a polit­i­cal strate­gist and for­mer chair­man of the Michi­gan Repub­li­can Par­ty, said the orga­ni­za­tion’s oppo­si­tion could make a dif­fer­ence even though polling shows con­sid­er­able pub­lic sup­port for a set­tle­ment.

“What does have an impact is if they start spend­ing a lot of mon­ey on TV and radio and doing mail­ings into peo­ple’s dis­tricts. The threat of that would get some peo­ple to pay atten­tion,” he said.

Sny­der, who took the lead in resolv­ing Detroit’s fis­cal cri­sis by appoint­ing an emer­gency man­ag­er for the city’s oper­a­tions, pro­posed the $195 mil­lion to match com­mit­ments from pri­vate foun­da­tions. The mon­ey would lim­it pen­sion cuts for the approx­i­mate­ly 30,000 retirees and city work­ers to no more than 4.5 per­cent and avert the need to liq­ui­date the Detroit Insti­tute of Art’s col­lec­tion to raise mon­ey. Sny­der and city lead­ers say the muse­um is impor­tant to rebuild­ing Detroit as a world-class city.
...

Keep in mind that in addi­tion to the 4.5% pen­sion cut there’s also the loss of any cost of liv­ing adjust­ments and a “claw­back” of the last decade of pen­sion con­tri­bu­tions that sub­stan­tial­ly rais­es the cuts.

Skip­ping down...

...

Repub­li­can House Speak­er Jase Bol­ger has warned that the bills may not advance unless the city work­ers’ unions agree to kick in some cash toward the set­tle­ment. Sny­der must also per­suade Democ­rats despite their unhap­pi­ness with his use of his exec­u­tive pow­ers to take over con­trol of Detroit’s finances.

Amer­i­cans for Pros­per­i­ty intends to turn up the heat on the Repub­li­cans, who hold 26 of the 38 seats in the Sen­ate and 59 of 110 House dis­tricts.

“Tell Lans­ing politi­cians that Detroit has got­ten enough of our tax dol­lars,” the group says on a web­site cre­at­ed to oppose the aid. “More mon­ey can’t fixDe­troit.”

Notice how there’s no actu­al plan from the Kochs beyond let­ting Detroit die and danc­ing on its grave (and then rean­i­mat­ing the body as part of hor­ri­ble exper­i­ment). Con­sid­er this a pre­view.

Here’s anoth­er pre­view of what life will be like once the oli­garchs are fin­ished pri­va­tiz­ing the com­mons: Don’t have enough mon­ey for water? Oh well. You can dig a well or go to hell. Your oli­garchs don’t real­ly care either way. They only care if you can pay:

The Guardian
True North
Detroit’s Water War: a tap shut-off that could impact 300,000 peo­ple

A right-wing state and cor­po­rate push to cut off water is eco­nom­ic shock ther­a­py at its most ruth­less and racist, but resis­tance is grow­ing
by Mar­tin Lukacs
June 25, 2014

It was six in the morn­ing when city con­trac­tors showed up unan­nounced at Char­i­ty Hicks’ house.

Since spring, up to 3000 Detroit house­holds per week have been get­ting their water shut-off – for owing as lit­tle as $150 or two months in bills. Now it was the turn of Char­i­ty’s block – and the con­trac­tor would­n’t stand to wait an hour for her preg­nant neigh­bour to fill up some jugs.

“Where’s your water ter­mi­na­tion notice?” Char­i­ty demand­ed, after stag­ger­ing to the con­trac­tor’s truck. A wide­ly-respect­ed African-Amer­i­can com­mu­ni­ty leader, she has been at the fore­front of cam­paigns to ensure Detroi­ters’ right to pub­lic, acces­si­ble water.

The con­trac­tor’s answer was to dri­ve away, knock­ing Char­i­ty over and injur­ing her leg. Two white police­men soon arrived – not to take her report, but to arrest her. Mock­ing Char­i­ty for ques­tion­ing the water shut-offs, they brought her to jail, where she spent two days before being released with­out charge.

Wel­come to Detroit’s water war – in which upward of 150,000 cus­tomers, late on bills that have increased 119 per­cent in the last decade, are now threat­ened with shut-offs. Local activists esti­mate this could impact near­ly half of Detroit’s most­ly poor and black pop­u­la­tion – between 200,000 and 300,000 peo­ple.

“There are peo­ple who can’t cook, can’t clean, peo­ple com­ing off surgery who can’t wash. This is an affront to human dig­ni­ty,” Char­i­ty said in an inter­view with Kate Levy. To make mat­ters worse, chil­dren risk being tak­en by wel­fare author­i­ties from any home with­out run­ning water.

Deny­ing water to thou­sands, as a swel­ter­ing sum­mer approach­es, might be bad enough in itself. But these shut-offs are no mere exer­cise in cost-recov­ery.

The offi­cial ratio­nale for the water shut-downs – the Detroit Water Depart­men­t’s need to recoup mil­lions – col­laps­es on inspec­tion. Detroit’s high-end golf club, the Red Wing’s hock­ey are­na, the Ford foot­ball sta­di­um, and more than half of the city’s com­mer­cial and indus­tri­al users are also owing – a sum totalling $30 mil­lion. But no con­trac­tors have showed up on their doorstep.

The tar­get­ting of Detroit fam­i­lies is about some­thing else. It is a ruth­less case of the shock doc­trine – the exploita­tion of nat­ur­al or unnat­ur­al shocks of cri­sis to push through pro-cor­po­rate poli­cies that could­n’t hap­pen in any oth­er cir­cum­stance.

The first shock was the slow dis­as­ter that struck Detroit over the last four decades: the flight of cor­po­ra­tions toward cheap­er, over­seas labour; the move­ment of white, wealth­i­er Detroi­ters to the sub­urbs, drain­ing the city’s tax base; a Wall Street-dri­ven finan­cial cri­sis that left many home­less or job­less; and the delib­er­ate starv­ing of the city of funds owed them by the Repub­li­can state leg­is­la­ture.

On its heels has come a round of eco­nom­ic shock ther­a­py: tak­ing advan­tage of the severe decline in rev­enue from Detroit’s first shock, the media, cor­po­ra­tions and right-wing politi­cians drummed up a cri­sis of fear about finan­cial debt. This has become the pre­text for a rapid-fire assault on Detroit’s pub­lic resources: an attempt to dis­man­tle its schools, to slash its pen­sions, and to trans­fer its parks and art and land into the hands of pri­vate cor­po­ra­tions.

The pub­lic water sys­tem, a prized resource worth bil­lions and sit­ting on the Great Lakes, is now the lat­est tar­get – and the water shut-offs are a way to make the bal­ance-sheet more attrac­tive in the lead up to its pri­va­ti­za­tion.

As Detroi­ters like Char­i­ty Hicks have tak­en a stand, they have been met by a third shock: lit­er­al blows of police force and vio­lence, intend­ed to damp­en any resis­tance.

Tak­ing full advan­tage of Detroit’s plight required the removal of anoth­er obsta­cle: democ­ra­cy. No Detroit politi­cian, sub­ject to the pres­sures of an elec­torate, could imag­ine going after the city’s water. But in 2013, using Detroit’s debt as his excuse, Michi­gan’s Repub­li­can gov­er­nor Rick Syn­der imposed an “emer­gency manger” – a trustee to gov­ern Detroit uni­lat­er­al­ly. When Detroi­ters over­whelm­ing­ly vot­ed in a ref­er­en­dum against the “emer­gency man­ag­er” law, Syn­der passed a new one overnight – with a pro­vi­sion ren­der­ing ref­er­en­dums mean­ing­less.

Hav­ing made his reign democ­ra­cy-proof, Detroit’s emer­gency man­ag­er has pro­ceed­ed to dri­ve the city toward bank­rupt­cy. With the bank­rupt­cy dom­i­nat­ing media head­lines across the coun­try, the real nature of Detroit’s cri­sis has been obscured and ignored. It has left the banks and cor­po­ra­tions free to pur­sue a liq­ui­da­tion of the city’s assets. And noth­ing is off the table.

...

The US banks and cor­po­ra­tions who now have Detroit on the hook want these ugly truths to stay sub­merged. They haven’t flinched while the water has been shut-off. Nor did they flinch when Detroi­ters’ heat was cut – in 2013, before the worst win­ter on record, 169,407 house­holds were dis­con­nect­ed. But they loud­ly protest­ed when orga­ni­za­tions pro­posed a tour of the city for the US judge who will rule on Detroit’s bank­rupt­cy – that, they insist­ed, would be too “dan­ger­ous.”

The view the judge would see is in rad­i­cal con­trast to Detroit’s pre­vail­ing image: a city with a flow­er­ing net­work of com­mu­ni­ty gar­dens, more than any in the Unit­ed States, feed­ing res­i­dents and nur­tur­ing sol­i­dar­i­ty; a rich artis­tic and musi­cal cul­ture; and neigh­bour­hoods orga­niz­ing for mean­ing­ful edu­ca­tion and to restore local democ­ra­cy. No one denies Detroit is racked by crime, pover­ty and unem­ploy­ment – but it is also hard to miss its vibrant renew­al.

It is from this incred­i­ble web that a chal­lenge to the water shut-offs is emerg­ing. Com­mu­ni­ty orga­ni­za­tions have filed a human rights com­plaint to the Unit­ed Nations, demand­ing Michi­gan state impose a mora­to­ri­um on the shut-offs. UN experts have already respond­ed crit­i­cal­ly. There are dai­ly acts of civ­il dis­obe­di­ence: cars being parked over water valves to pre­vent shut-offs; neigh­bours teach­ing each oth­er to turn the water back on. A new ini­tia­tive called the Detroit Water Brigade – an Occu­py Sandy-style response to dis­as­ter zones cre­at­ed by the depri­va­tion of water instead of its excess – is accept­ing sup­plies from around the coun­try, open­ing local ser­vice hubs, and coor­di­nat­ing calls to action.

And the Detroit Peo­ple’s Water Board, a broad coali­tion co-found­ed by Char­i­ty Hicks, con­tin­ues its work of rais­ing con­scious­ness about water jus­tice and con­ser­va­tion, set­ting out a vision for water as a pub­lic trust, not a com­mod­i­ty – a source of life, not of pri­vate enrich­ment.

“This is a test being looked at by cities across the US — even the world,” Char­i­ty says. “We will not let water be used as a weapon to remake the city in a cor­po­rate image. We will re-estab­lish what it is to live in a democ­ra­cy, with a water sys­tem that is part of the com­mons, that affirms human dig­ni­ty and that ensures every­one’s access.”

“This is a test being looked at by cities across the US — even the world.” Yes indeed.

“An investor, either inter­na­tion­al or local, builds infrastructure…The ter­ri­to­ry in which they invest becomes an autonomous zone from Honduras…The invest­ing com­pa­ny must write the laws that gov­ern the ter­ri­to­ry, estab­lish the local gov­ern­ment, hire a pri­vate police force, and even has the right to set the edu­ca­tion­al sys­tem and col­lect tax­es.” Sounds pret­ty nice, does­n’t it? At least nice if you’re the own­er. But Hon­duras’s char­ter city oli­garchs are about to get anoth­er gift: Mil­i­ta­rized police for their brand new city-states:

Alter­net
Thurs­day, Jan 29, 2015 10:45 AM CST
Night­mare lib­er­tar­i­an project turns coun­try into the mur­der cap­i­tal of the world
Even Ayn Rand would be tak­en aback
Mike LaSusa

Since the 2009 coup against Pres­i­dent José Manuel Zelaya and sub­se­quent elec­tion of Por­firio “Pepe Lobo” Sosa and his favored suc­ces­sor Juan Orlan­do Her­nan­dez, Hon­duras has embarked on a dev­as­tat­ing neolib­er­al eco­nom­ic pro­gram that has con­tributed to its sta­tus as one of the poor­est and most unequal coun­tries in the region. The pri­va­ti­za­tion of Hon­duran soci­ety has been accom­pa­nied by a mil­i­ta­riza­tion of pub­lic secu­ri­ty efforts in the coun­try, both of which have been fueled by a net­work of U.S.-supported poli­cies and pro­grams.

Despite the country’s crack­down on crime, vio­lence in Hon­duras has sky­rock­et­ed in recent years. Hon­duras now has the world’s sec­ond-high­est nation­al mur­der rate and is home to two of the world’s five most vio­lent cities. Unchecked gang activ­i­ty has con­tributed to wide­spread cor­rup­tion and impuni­ty with­in police and gov­ern­ment insti­tu­tions.

This week­end, a coali­tion of left­ist oppo­si­tion par­ties came togeth­er tem­porar­i­ly to defeat a pro­posed amend­ment to the Hon­duran con­sti­tu­tion that would have giv­en per­ma­nent sta­tus to the country’s mil­i­ta­rized police force, known as the Policía Mil­i­tar de Orden Públi­co, or PMOP.

This “elite” police unit, which serves under the direct com­mand of the pres­i­den­cy, is intend­ed to sup­port Pres­i­dent Hernandez’s heavy-hand­ed crime reduc­tion efforts. Pres­i­dent Her­nan­dez cre­at­ed the PMOP short­ly after com­ing to office in 2014, with sup­port from a leg­is­la­ture dom­i­nat­ed by his con­ser­v­a­tive Nation­al Par­ty. The Her­nan­dez administration’s police mil­i­ta­riza­tion efforts also had the back­ing of the country’s busi­ness sec­tor.

Accord­ing to one study, in 2013, only 27 per­cent of Hon­durans expressed con­fi­dence in the civil­ian police while 73 per­cent thought the mil­i­tary should be involved in polic­ing efforts. Nev­er­the­less, both the mil­i­tary and the police have a long his­to­ry of cor­rup­tion and crim­i­nal­i­ty as well as abus­es com­mit­ted against civil­ians in Hon­duras.

The PMOP plan isn’t the only ini­tia­tive with dubi­ous impli­ca­tions for human rights put forth by Hernandez’s gov­ern­ment. Hon­duras is also exper­i­ment­ing with Zonas de Empleo y Desar­rol­lo Económi­co (spe­cial employ­ment and eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment zones), also known as ZEDEs or “char­ter cities.”

Accord­ing to report­ing by Danielle Marie Mack­ey for the as last month, here is how the project works: “An investor, either inter­na­tion­al or local, builds infrastructure….The ter­ri­to­ry in which they invest becomes an autonomous zone from Honduras…The invest­ing com­pa­ny must write the laws that gov­ern the ter­ri­to­ry, estab­lish the local gov­ern­ment, hire a pri­vate police force, and even has the right to set the edu­ca­tion­al sys­tem and col­lect tax­es.”

An ear­li­er arti­cle by Eri­ka Piquero at Latin Cor­re­spon­dent described the law as “allow­ing the cor­po­ra­tions and indi­vid­u­als fund­ing the ZEDEs to dic­tate the entire struc­tur­al orga­ni­za­tion of the zone, includ­ing laws, tax struc­ture, health­care sys­tem, edu­ca­tion and secu­ri­ty forces. This kind of flex­i­bil­i­ty is unprece­dent­ed even in sim­i­lar mod­els around the world.”

George Rodríguez report­ed for the Tico Times that the plan was pre­vi­ous­ly chal­lenged and ruled uncon­sti­tu­tion­al in Hon­duras’ supreme court, but Her­nan­dez “twist­ed arms, had the [dis­sent­ing] judges removed, and brought in obe­di­ent replace­ments.” Her­nan­dez then re-tooled the bill and pushed it through the con­gress.

As Mack­ey report­ed, “The ZEDE’s cen­tral gov­ern­ment is stacked with lib­er­tar­i­an for­eign­ers,” includ­ing a for­mer speech­writer for pres­i­dents Ronald Rea­gan and George Bush Sr., con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal oper­a­tive Grover Norquist, a senior mem­ber of the Cato Insti­tute think tank, and Ronald Reagan’s son Michael, as well as “a Dan­ish banker, a Peru­vian econ­o­mist, and an Aus­tri­an gen­er­al sec­re­tary of the Friedrich Hayek Insti­tute.”

Accord­ing to the offi­cial ZEDE web­site, the zones place a heavy empha­sis on secu­ri­ty, offer­ing “a 21st cen­tu­ry, busi­ness-effi­cient, non-politi­cized, trans­par­ent, sta­ble, sys­tem of admin­is­tra­tion, plus a spe­cial police and insti­tu­tion­al secu­ri­ty to over­come region­al issues and meet world stan­dards.” A new bill intro­duced by Her­nan­dez min­utes after los­ing the vote this week­end would allow munic­i­pal­i­ties and ZEDEs to request that the PMOP or oth­er branch­es of the Armed Forces pro­vide them with secu­ri­ty ser­vices.

Hon­duras’ con­tin­u­ing mil­i­ta­riza­tion of secu­ri­ty efforts appears to have the back­ing of the Unit­ed States, which has pro­vid­ed more than $65 mil­lion in secu­ri­ty aid to Hon­duras since 2008. Pres­i­dent Her­nan­dez has also met fre­quent­ly with high-lev­el U.S. offi­cials for talks on secu­ri­ty and migra­tion issues. As the U.S. amassador’s Twit­ter account wrote on Fri­day, “U.S. coop­er­a­tion with Hon­duras’ fight against nar­co­traf­fick­ing and crime is strong and con­tin­u­ing.”

How­ev­er, con­trary to com­mon­ly held per­cep­tions, most of the vio­lence in Hon­duras is not caused by large, transna­tion­al drug traf­fick­ing orga­ni­za­tions, but rather by small­er gangs fight­ing over ter­ri­to­ry (includ­ing street cor­ners, neigh­bor­hoods and even pris­ons) in which to con­duct extor­tion rack­ets, small-scale smug­gling efforts and pros­ti­tu­tion oper­a­tions among oth­er ille­gal activ­i­ties.

Pri­va­ti­za­tion and para­mil­i­ta­riza­tion are also con­cerns in Hon­duras, with one recent report esti­mat­ing that there are three times as many pri­vate secu­ri­ty guards as police in Hon­duras, up to a third of whom work for unreg­is­tered com­pa­nies, some of whom report­ed­ly employ off-duty police offi­cers look­ing to sup­ple­ment often-mea­ger salaries.

While inter­na­tion­al investors may be seek­ing to cap­i­tal­ize on Hon­duras’ vol­un­tary sur­ren­der of its nation­al sov­er­eign­ty to make a “legal” prof­it, even more nefar­i­ous actors are already oper­at­ing in a com­plete­ly unreg­u­lat­ed, free-mar­ket crim­i­nal under­world in Honduras—one that has helped turn the coun­try into the world’s “mur­der cap­i­tal” in recent years.

Even Hon­duran schools have become scenes of ram­pant gang activ­i­ty. In a recent chill­ing arti­cle for the Asso­ci­at­ed Press, jour­nal­ist Alber­to Arce wrote that gang mem­bers “rely on kids to do much of their ille­gal grunt work, know­ing that even if they get caught, they won’t face long jail sentences…School admin­is­tra­tors say that teach­ers gen­er­al­ly are more afraid of the gangs than the remain­ing stu­dents are, because so many chil­dren admire gang­sters.” Arce also writes that “a 14-year-old can earn $500 a month in pros­ti­tu­tion — more than a police officer’s salary.”

U.S.-backed poli­cies in Hon­duras have fed a cycle of crime, vio­lence, exploita­tion and abuse of vul­ner­a­ble pop­u­la­tions by state and non-state actors alike. Accord­ing to the research orga­ni­za­tion Secu­ri­ty Assis­tance Mon­i­toror, gang-dri­ven “vio­lence has been one of the pri­ma­ry dri­vers behind the surge in migra­tion to the Unit­ed States from Hon­duras,” but iron­i­cal­ly, “[t]he U.S. gov­ern­ment prac­tice of deport­ing thou­sands of Hon­durans with crim­i­nal records, which began in the 1990s, has only fueled the growth of these gangs.”

When these migrants, many of them women and children—along with those from El Sal­vador, Guatemala, Mex­i­co and elsewhere—flee to the Unit­ed States, they are rou­tine­ly appre­hend­ed and “fast-tracked” for depor­ta­tion. In the case of Hon­duras, migrants are some­times sent back to some of the most vio­lent cities in the world. Many women and chil­dren flee­ing vio­lence in Cen­tral Amer­i­ca also expe­ri­ence abus­es and vio­la­tions of their legal rights at the hands of U.S. author­i­ties if they are detained after cross­ing the bor­der.

...

As Maya Kroth wrote in Sep­tem­ber for For­eign Pol­i­cy, “[c]ritics wor­ry that evi­dence to date — the government’s opaque approach, the ZEDEs’ unde­mo­c­ra­t­ic fea­tures, the cast of char­ac­ters back­ing the scheme, and the vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties of peo­ple like­ly to be affect­ed by devel­op­ment — indi­cate that char­ter cities would be lit­tle more than preda­to­ry, pri­va­tized utopias, with far-reach­ing, neg­a­tive impli­ca­tions for Hon­duran sov­er­eign­ty and the well-being of poor com­mu­ni­ties.”

The U.S. has cou­pled its neolib­er­al eco­nom­ic pre­scrip­tions with its drug war secu­ri­ty frame­work in oth­er coun­tries in the Amer­i­c­as, includ­ing at home, with dis­as­trous results. While the vote against the PMOP this week­end was an impor­tant vic­to­ry for human rights advo­cates, from the per­spec­tive of many, much work remains to be done. It appears that the pre­car­i­ous sit­u­a­tion of Hon­duras’ most vul­ner­a­ble cit­i­zens could get worse before it gets bet­ter.

Once again:

Accord­ing to report­ing by Danielle Marie Mack­ey for the as last month, here is how the project works: “An investor, either inter­na­tion­al or local, builds infrastructure…The ter­ri­to­ry in which they invest becomes an autonomous zone from Honduras…The invest­ing com­pa­ny must write the laws that gov­ern the ter­ri­to­ry, estab­lish the local gov­ern­ment, hire a pri­vate police force, and even has the right to set the edu­ca­tion­al sys­tem and col­lect tax­es.”

That does indeed sound night­mar­ish. But in case that did­n’t send a strong enough chill down your spine, here’s a bit more on how the rules of how that night­mare is sup­posed to oper­ate. Yes, night­mares have rules. The scari­est kinds of night­mares. The night­mares you can’t wake up from:

For­eign Pol­i­cy

Under New Man­age­ment

The coast of Hon­duras could be the site of a rad­i­cal exper­i­ment: one in which for­eign investors bankroll a qua­si-sov­er­eign city. Back­ers say it will lift the region out of pover­ty — but res­i­dents are any­thing but con­vinced.

By Maya Kroth
Sep­tem­ber 1, 2014

Ama­pala, Hon­duras — In a cin­der-block build­ing at the end of a nar­row, washed-out dirt road, Alber­to Cruz, the may­or of Ama­pala, wipes the sweat from under his white base­ball cap. The July heat is oppres­sive, and beads of mois­ture form as Cruz faces the insis­tent stares of hun­dreds of his con­stituents, gath­ered for a town-hall meet­ing. Peo­ple fill the small room before him and spill out into an adja­cent, dusty lot, peer­ing in through met­al win­dow screens. They are eager to pep­per him with ques­tions about a provoca­tive new law that could change their lives per­ma­nent­ly.

“I’m not here to defend or con­demn a law that I didn’t make or a project that I don’t know about,” Cruz tells the crowd. “But we need to be open to invest­ment.” In a cin­der-block build­ing at the end of a nar­row, washed-out dirt road, Alber­to Cruz, the may­or of Ama­pala, wipes the sweat from under his white base­ball cap. The July heat is oppres­sive, and beads of mois­ture form as Cruz faces the insis­tent stares of hun­dreds of his con­stituents, gath­ered for a town-hall meet­ing. Peo­ple fill the small room before him and spill out into an adja­cent, dusty lot, peer­ing in through met­al win­dow screens. They are eager to pep­per him with ques­tions about a provoca­tive new law that could change their lives per­ma­nent­ly.

“I’m not here to defend or con­demn a law that I didn’t make or a project that I don’t know about,” Cruz tells the crowd. “But we need to be open to invest­ment.”

“This law was passed with­out con­sult­ing any­one here,” protests one man in the crowd.

“We’re only fish­er­men and farm­ers,” says anoth­er, ris­ing from his chair and stab­bing the air with an angry fin­ger. “We won’t stand for the inva­sion of these mod­el cities cre­at­ed for the ben­e­fit of the rich!”

The room erupts in applause.

Here, in a poor cor­ner of one of the poor­est coun­tries in the Amer­i­c­as, a rad­i­cal eco­nom­ic and polit­i­cal exper­i­ment may soon be under­way. In May, the Supreme Court of Hon­duras ruled in sup­port of a con­sti­tu­tion­al amend­ment and atten­dant statute that allow for the cre­ation of “zones for eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment and employ­ment” (ZEDEs). Some­times called “char­ter cities” or “mod­el cities,” these zones would be qua­si-sov­er­eign enti­ties built on Hon­duran soil with back­ing from for­eign investors. Unlike the world’s thou­sands of “spe­cial eco­nom­ic zones,” such as Shen­zhen in Chi­na, which attract for­eign direct invest­ment through tax breaks and oth­er flex­i­ble eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy mea­sures, ZEDEs would oper­ate with “func­tion­al and admin­is­tra­tive auton­o­my that includes the func­tions, pow­ers, and duties” of ordi­nary cities, accord­ing to the con­sti­tu­tion­al amend­ment. They could enact their own laws, set up their own courts, even estab­lish their own police forces.

The first zone may be built on south­ern Honduras’s pic­turesque Gulf of Fon­se­ca, specif­i­cal­ly in the small province of Valle (home to some 176,000 peo­ple, accord­ing to a recent esti­mate). The Hon­duran gov­ern­ment has men­tioned Ama­pala, which com­pris­es sev­er­al islands, as a poten­tial char­ter-city site, and it is among the Valle munic­i­pal­i­ties that the Korea Inter­na­tion­al Coop­er­a­tion Agency (KOICA), South Korea’s bilat­er­al aid bureau, is ana­lyz­ing in a $4 mil­lion fea­si­bil­i­ty study.

ZEDE sup­port­ers — both in Hon­duras and around the world, includ­ing famous free mar­ket cham­pi­ons in the Unit­ed States — cheer what they see as a way to bring invest­ment, jobs, and the rule of law to parts of Hon­duras, a noto­ri­ous­ly unsta­ble coun­try. And admit­ted­ly, with the world’s high­est mur­der rate, ram­pant legal impuni­ty and pover­ty, and tens of thou­sands of peo­ple flee­ing across its bor­ders, it’s hard not to look at Hon­duras and think that some­thing dras­tic needs to be done.

But are char­ter cities too dras­tic? Count­less ques­tions about how they would oper­ate remain unan­swered because the gov­ern­ment enact­ed the ZEDEs leg­is­la­tion with min­i­mal trans­paren­cy and has offered lit­tle infor­ma­tion since. Crit­ics wor­ry that evi­dence to date — the government’s opaque approach, the ZEDEs’ unde­mo­c­ra­t­ic fea­tures, the cast of char­ac­ters back­ing the scheme, and the vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties of peo­ple like­ly to be affect­ed by devel­op­ment — indi­cate that char­ter cities would be lit­tle more than preda­to­ry, pri­va­tized utopias, with far-reach­ing, neg­a­tive impli­ca­tions for Hon­duran sov­er­eign­ty and the well-being of poor com­mu­ni­ties. Dimin­ish­ing con­fi­dence fur­ther, the recent Supreme Court deci­sion is mired in con­tro­ver­sy and alle­ga­tions of cor­rup­tion.

In the town-hall meet­ing, people’s anx­i­ety is pal­pa­ble. Some want more hon­est talk from the gov­ern­ment about what ZEDEs would mean for them. Oth­ers, how­ev­er, insist they will nev­er allow char­ter cities in their back­yards.

“This is the most dan­ger­ous thing I’ve read in my life,” says one woman, hold­ing up a well-worn pho­to­copy of the ZEDEs leg­is­la­tion. “The whole law is a decep­tion.”

...

Every morn­ing in Tegu­ci­gal­pa, econ­o­mist Fer­nan­do Gar­cía buys at least three of the capital’s four dai­ly news­pa­pers, clip­ping sto­ries and fil­ing them in binders orga­nized by sub­ject. His ZEDEs binder is fat with more than 100 pages of sto­ries and legal doc­u­ments, includ­ing a copy of La Gac­eta, the offi­cial state paper, from Feb. 11, 2014 — the day the names of the 21 mem­bers of the Com­mit­tee for the Adop­tion of Best Prac­tices (CAMP) were pub­lished. Under the new char­ter-city law, the CAMP is the suc­ces­sor to the Trans­paren­cy Com­mis­sion; its func­tions include approv­ing reg­u­la­tions and rec­om­mend­ing judges in a ZEDE, and set­ting aside areas for a zone’s future expan­sion, in accor­dance with an unde­fined set of “inter­na­tion­al best prac­tices.”

“I had an expec­ta­tion that they would be peo­ple with great inter­na­tion­al renown and impor­tance, but when you inves­ti­gate,” Gar­cía says, that isn’t the case.

The CAMP is stacked with free-mar­ke­teers, most­ly non-Hon­duran: Bar­bara Kolm, the lib­er­tar­i­an pres­i­dent of Austria’s Hayek Insti­tute; Cato Insti­tute senior fel­low Richard Rahn; Ronald Reagan’s son Michael; Mark Skousen, pro­duc­er of the lib­er­tar­i­an Free­dom­Fest con­fer­ence; U.S. anti-tax cru­sad­er Grover Norquist; and even a mem­ber of the Hab­s­burg fam­i­ly. A sub­set of this com­mit­tee, a five-mem­ber per­ma­nent com­mis­sion, will han­dle the fin­er details of zone over­sight. A tech­ni­cal sec­re­tary, approved by the CAMP, will run each zone day to day. Crit­i­cal­ly, unlike with REDs, there is no legal pro­vi­sion out­lin­ing how a local pop­u­la­tion would ulti­mate­ly gain con­trol of a ZEDE.

Gar­cía and oth­er crit­ics wor­ry that the back­ing of free-mar­ke­teers and the lack of demo­c­ra­t­ic safe­guards indi­cate that char­ter cities will cater to their cor­po­rate bene­fac­tors. “They may estab­lish any rules and reg­u­la­tions that its gov­ern­ing pan­el deter­mines are right, with­out sub­mit­ting them to the entire pop­u­la­tion for approval,” Rus­sell Shep­tak and Rose­mary Joyce of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley, and co-authors of the Hon­duras Cul­ture and Pol­i­tics blog, wrote in an email. Even some vocal sup­port­ers of char­ter cities as a gen­er­al con­cept are wor­ried about what might take shape. Romer, for one, says he is “con­cerned that the far-reach­ing del­e­ga­tion of what real­ly are pow­ers of gov­ern­ment to pri­vate enti­ties and for­eign, pri­vate indi­vid­u­als is tak­ing place with­out suf­fi­cient debate” between the gov­ern­ment and crit­ics of ZEDEs.

Klug­mann, who is one of the per­ma­nent commission’s co-chairs and lives in Tegu­ci­gal­pa, argues that dis­senters who don’t pro­pose bet­ter ideas are just defend­ers of the sta­tus quo. “What if we say, ‘OK, done’? Every­body on this com­mit­tee resigns; the gov­ern­ment repeals the law,” he says. “Then where are we?”

A plebiscite is tech­ni­cal­ly required for a char­ter city to be cre­at­ed. There are exemp­tions, how­ev­er, for areas with low pop­u­la­tion den­si­ty, includ­ing some along Honduras’s coasts — places that are “too emp­ty to fight over,” Klug­mann says.

Cur­rent­ly, there is strong momen­tum for a char­ter city in Valle province, which includes exempt­ed areas. In no small part this is because South Korea’s KOICA is con­duct­ing the fea­si­bil­i­ty study, due out in Sep­tem­ber, and cre­at­ing a mas­ter plan for a poten­tial ZEDE there. In June, a del­e­ga­tion of Hon­duran offi­cials, includ­ing May­or Cruz and oth­er local lead­ers, trav­eled to Seoul, where, among oth­er things, they heard a pre­sen­ta­tion on how to work with investors. “They also talked about the com­plex issue of financ­ing and the efforts that the Hon­duran gov­ern­ment must make” to find invest­ment part­ners, says José Alfre­do Saave­dra, a Valle con­gress­man. “They were clear that they have an inter­est in Valle because Hon­duras is the cen­ter of Cen­tral Amer­i­ca and Valle is the path from the Pacif­ic to the Atlantic.”

...

Yes, even Paul Romer, the guy behind this whole char­ter city idea, is “con­cerned that the far-reach­ing del­e­ga­tion of what real­ly are pow­ers of gov­ern­ment to pri­vate enti­ties and for­eign, pri­vate indi­vid­u­als is tak­ing place with­out suf­fi­cient debate” between the gov­ern­ment and crit­ics of ZEDEs. Hope­ful­ly he’ll have some luck tak­ing his con­cerns to the Com­mit­tee for the Adop­tion of Best Prac­tices (CAMP) that reg­u­lates best prac­tices for the ZEDEs, although it did­n’t sound like CAMP was stacked with peo­ple prone to being con­cerned about things like ‘suf­fi­cient debate between the gov­ern­ment and crit­ics of ZEDEs’:

The CAMP is stacked with free-mar­ke­teers, most­ly non-Hon­duran: Bar­bara Kolm, the lib­er­tar­i­an pres­i­dent of Austria’s Hayek Insti­tute; Cato Insti­tute senior fel­low Richard Rahn; Ronald Reagan’s son Michael; Mark Skousen, pro­duc­er of the lib­er­tar­i­an Free­dom­Fest con­fer­ence; U.S. anti-tax cru­sad­er Grover Norquist; and even a mem­ber of the Hab­s­burg fam­i­ly. A sub­set of this com­mit­tee, a five-mem­ber per­ma­nent com­mis­sion, will han­dle the fin­er details of zone over­sight. A tech­ni­cal sec­re­tary, approved by the CAMP, will run each zone day to day. Crit­i­cal­ly, unlike with REDs, there is no legal pro­vi­sion out­lin­ing how a local pop­u­la­tion would ulti­mate­ly gain con­trol of a ZEDE.

Wow, giv­en that list of CAMP mem­bers, the Hab­s­burg on the board, Gabriela von Hab­s­burg, just might be the best bet at lend­ing a sym­pa­thet­ic ear to Romer’s con­cerns and that’s most­ly due to the fact that she appears to be focused on revi­tal­iz­ing her fam­i­ly’s pow­er and influ­ence and main­tain­ing the appear­ance of decen­cy as opposed to just try­ing to make a lot of mon­ey or cre­ate a more hor­ri­ble world on prin­ci­ple like all the Lib­er­tar­i­ans involved. And when the aris­to­crats are your best bet, you already lost.

So, all in all, it’s quite a night­mare.

A num­ber of eye­brows were raised when Rudy Giu­liani recent­ly assert­ed that Pres­i­dent Oba­ma did­n’t love Amer­i­ca, which was a lit­tle eye­brow-rais­ing since Giu­liani has been say­ing stuff like that for years and most Repub­li­cans agree with him any­ways and want to see more.

No, the real eye­brow-rais­er in Rudy’s lat­est con­tri­bu­tion the GOP’s Nev­erend­ing Ever­grow­ing Histri­on­ics Parade is that he includ­ed the sug­ges­tion that Pres­i­dent Oba­ma was dri­ven by a sense of anti-colo­nial sen­ti­ments. Not that we should­n’t expect Repub­li­cans to accuse Oba­ma of desir­ing to destroy the Unit­ed States out of a desire for anti-colo­nial revenge. We should expect that. But if any­one has a rea­son to avoid ‘going there’ with the anti-colo­nial stuff, it’s Rudy Giu­liani:

The Nation
Giuliani’s Love for His Coun­try Is Equal to the Mon­ey He Makes
Tim Shorrock on Feb­ru­ary 25, 2015 — 12:55 PM ET

Over the last few days we’ve seen a slew of arrows direct­ed at Rudy Giu­liani for the hate­ful, deri­sive com­ments he made about Barack Obama’s alleged lack of “love for his coun­try.” There’s even been a few grunts of dis­sat­is­fac­tion from fel­low Repub­li­cans wor­ried about the impact of Giuliani’s out­landish com­ments on the 2016 elec­tions.

Few com­men­ta­tors, how­ev­er, have seen his dif­fer­ences with the pres­i­dent in eco­nom­ic terms.

That’s a mis­take: Giuliani’s dis­gust with our first African-Amer­i­can pres­i­dent is deeply root­ed in his own secu­ri­ty-busi­ness inter­ests, which depend on mag­ni­fy­ing the poten­tial dan­ger from ter­ror­ism and gang vio­lence to the high­est extent pos­si­ble.

Seen in this con­text, the Giu­liani flap is a sim­ple case of a reac­tionary busi­ness­man angry that his mar­ket is threat­ened by a rival. Kind of like the Mafia.

Specif­i­cal­ly, Giu­liani seems deeply con­cerned about Obama’s more con­cil­ia­to­ry approach to ter­ror­ism and crime, par­tic­u­lar­ly his view (albeit some­what naïve) that some Islamists may have eco­nom­ic griev­ances with their Mid­dle East or Euro­pean gov­ern­ments. That runs counter to the aggres­sive, war­like tac­tics Giu­liani sells to pri­vate clients, oli­garchies and gov­ern­ments, espe­cial­ly over­seas.

Last Thurs­day, Oba­ma explained his views in a speech to a White House sum­mit on “Coun­ter­ing Vio­lent Extrem­ism” this way:

“Ter­ror­ist groups are all too hap­py to step into a void. They offer salaries to their foot sol­diers so they can sup­port their fam­i­lies. Some­times they offer social services—schools, health clinics—to do what local gov­ern­ments can­not or will not do,” Oba­ma added. “So if we’re going to pre­vent peo­ple from being sus­cep­ti­ble to the false promis­es of extrem­ism, then the inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty has to offer some­thing bet­ter.”

To Giu­liani, this smacks of treason—or, as he calls it, “ social­ism and anti-colo­nial­ism.” His approach is always to use the big stick.

“The best answer to ter­ror­ist groups and gangs is to con­front them,” Giu­liani likes to say in his many speech­es, accord­ing to a recent pro­file in The Econ­o­mist. In an address last year to a con­ser­v­a­tive busi­ness asso­ci­a­tion in Guatemala about crime, for exam­ple, he warned that “you are not going to solve it with schools, libraries, nice neigh­bor­hoods and sports teams. You have to empha­size law enforce­ment.”

It’s all part of the Giu­liani method: cul­ti­vat­ing fear and loathing to mar­ket him­self as the sav­ior of good, old-fash­ioned impe­ri­al­ist val­ues. For Rudy, that means one thing: the greater the threat or the insta­bil­i­ty, the more he makes.

...

Since almost the minute he left office, Giu­liani has been using the glob­al fame he acquired on 9/11 and its after­math to rake in mil­lions of dol­lars from con­sult­ing with “cor­po­ra­tions, indi­vid­u­als, and gov­ern­ments” (as his web­site describes his client base) on secu­ri­ty mat­ters, finan­cial audits and cri­sis man­age­ment.

Cor­po­ra­tions that have sought his help over the years include Aon, the glob­al risk-man­age­ment firm that lost 175 peo­ple in the World Trade Cen­ter attack; Enter­gy, the nation’s largest oper­a­tor of nuclear pow­er plants (and, iron­i­cal­ly, the num­ber one cor­po­rate donor to Pres­i­dent Obama’s 2008 pres­i­den­tial cam­paign; and Delta Air­lines and US Air­ways.

Oth­er promi­nent clients include Tran­sCana­da, the devel­op­er of the con­tro­ver­sial Key­stone XL Pipeline Project (which Oba­ma oppos­es, fur­ther dam­ag­ing Rudy’s eco­nom­ic inter­ests); Pur­due Phar­ma, which man­u­fac­tur­ers Oxy­con­tin, once Rush Limbaugh’s drug of choice: Nex­tel, the wire­less ser­vices com­pa­ny now owned by Sprint; Shell Oil; and the Gov­ern­ment of Mex­i­co.

His lat­est big-name client is Uber, the Inter­net ride com­pa­ny that’s drawn fire from police depart­ments around the coun­try for hir­ing dri­vers who’ve assault­ed pas­sen­gers.

But iron­i­cal­ly, as his recent stop in Guatemala illus­trates, much of his mon­ey is now being made over­seas, in places like El Sal­vador, where a right-wing busi­ness asso­ci­a­tion has brought him to advise on curb­ing crime. Appar­ent­ly Giu­liani him­self loves the Latin Amer­i­can oli­garchies far more than he loves the Amer­i­can elite.

Wayne Bar­rett, the New York Dai­ly News reporter who wrote a dev­as­tat­ing biog­ra­phy of Giu­liani, laid out the full spec­trum of the hypocricy in a rip-roar­ing com­men­tary last week:

Rudy said Oba­ma is “more of a crit­ic than he is a sup­port­er of Amer­i­ca,” an odd admo­ni­tion com­ing from a secu­ri­ty sales­man who told a Tijua­na audi­ence of con­sult­ing clients in Octo­ber: “Amer­i­ca needs to stop lec­tur­ing oth­er coun­tries and start work­ing on how to stop drug use in its cit­i­zens,” shift­ing the onus for the Mex­i­can drug trade onto us. He’s a con­sul­tant in Mex­i­co, El Sal­vador, Hon­duras and Guatemala, the very coun­tries where right-wing gov­ern­ments, traf­fick­ers and/or gangs are dri­ving chil­dren and teenagers across the U.S. bor­der.

He was a con­sul­tant for the gov­ern­ment of Qatar, the coun­try his friend and FBI direc­tor Louis Freeh accused of hid­ing 9/11 mas­ter­mind Khalid Sheik Mohammed before the attack. That’s the ulti­mate tri­umph of mon­ey over mem­o­ry, since he’s still talk­ing, as recent­ly as a week ago, about the 10 friends and 343 fire­fight­ers he lost on 9/11.

But here’s the irony: for­eign gov­ern­ments and busi­ness groups make up his pri­ma­ry mar­ket after a series of failed busi­ness deals and part­ner­ships in New York and Wash­ing­ton since he left the mayor’s office in 2001. The over­whelm­ing­ly for­eign nature of his busi­ness is revealed in an sta­tis­tic embed­ded in the offi­cial biog­ra­phy of CEO John P. Huvane , a twen­ty-one-year vet­er­an of the NYPD. Huvane’s work for Giu­liani Secu­ri­ty & Safe­ty, it states, “has tak­en him on over 280 inter­na­tion­al trips, in 56 dif­fer­ent coun­tries.” The company’s news feed offers more details).

...

Rudy loves the oli­garchies

Anoth­er new Giu­liani-Schwartz sub­sidiary, NSM Sur­veil­lance, devel­ops “sur­veil­lance and sen­sor” sys­tems to fed­er­al agen­cies and the mil­i­tary to “pro­vide sit­u­a­tion­al aware­ness to the war fights, the inves­ti­ga­tor, the com­man­der and/or senior lead­er­ship to enable effec­tive tac­tics and deci­sion-mak­ing.”

Which brings us to Giuliani’s work with El Salvador’s largest busi­ness asso­ci­a­tion, the Nation­al Asso­ci­a­tion of Pri­vate Enter­prise, or ANEP.

For any­body who lived through the 1980s, the very thought of a Sal­vado­ran busi­ness asso­ci­a­tion brings to mind the hor­rif­ic repres­sion of that era. From the late 1970s to the ear­ly 1990s, tens of thou­sands of labor and social activists were mur­dered by death squads fund­ed by El Salvador’s busi­ness elite. The Unit­ed States was direct­ly involved, send­ing Spe­cial Forces and the CIA to help the Sal­vado­ran gov­ern­ment crush the left­ist resis­tance.

Last March, Sal­vador Sánchez Cerén, a for­mer guer­ril­la com­man­der with the Farabun­do Martí Nation­al Lib­er­a­tion Front, was nar­row­ly elect­ed pres­i­dent. A key part of his plat­form was to defuse crime by nego­ti­at­ing with the country’s pow­er­ful gangs. But his con­cil­ia­to­ry approach has not gone down well with Salvador’s busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty. So in Decem­ber, ANEP hired Giu­liani as a secu­ri­ty con­sul­tant. He and CEO John Huvane made their first trip in Jan­u­ary, where the “drew up a plan” for El Salvador’s crime prob­lem. They are doing sim­i­lar work in Hon­duras, now ruled by a right-winger who seized pow­er in a 2009 coup.

On Mon­day, Hiz­zon­er tried to back down from his incen­di­ary com­ments about Oba­ma in an op-ed in The Wall Street Jour­nal. But there’s not much he can do to repair the dam­age to his image—except, per­haps, in the far-right nether­world of Fox News and the 1 per­cent of Cen­tral Amer­i­ca.

That’s right, in addi­tion to shar­ing his wis­doms with El Sal­vador, Rudy Giu­liani has been hired by the gov­ern­ment of Hon­duras to pre­sum­ably tell them things like, “you are not going to solve it with schools, libraries, nice neigh­bor­hoods and sports teams. You have to empha­size law enforce­ment,” while they set up their new pri­vate­ly-owned char­ter cities. There’s noth­ing colo­nial about that!

And he’s already start­ed issu­ing a num­ber or sim­i­lar rec­om­men­da­tions to some of Hon­duras’s neigh­bors. For instance, let’s take a peek at Rudy wield­ing his social heal­ing mag­ic in Guatemala:

Bloomberg Busi­ness
Giu­liani Lends Crime-Fight­ing Advice to Guatemala

by Michael D McDon­ald
4:08 PM CDT
Octo­ber 8, 2014

Oct. 8 (Bloomberg) — For­mer New York City May­or Rudy Giu­liani land­ed in one of the world’s most vio­lent cities with advice on how the gov­ern­ment could fight crime that has helped fuel a surge in child migrants to the U.S.

Speak­ing in Guatemala City, Giu­liani said stronger law enforce­ment should trump social pro­grams when try­ing to get spi­ral­ing crime rates under con­trol. With a pop­u­la­tion of 14 mil­lion, Guatemala had about 17 homi­cides per day last year, com­pared with less than one per day for New York, pop­u­la­tion 8.4 mil­lion, over the same peri­od.

“My top rec­om­men­da­tion is to set up a sys­tem to mea­sure the effec­tive­ness of your police, your pros­e­cu­tors and your pris­ons,” Giu­liani, 70, said today at a forum spon­sored by the not-for-prof­it Guatemalan Devel­op­ment Foun­da­tion. “That helps give you the right answers to ques­tions like how many more police do you need. At what lev­el should they be com­pen­sat­ed so you can reduce the lev­el of cor­rup­tion.”

Along with El Sal­vador and Hon­duras, Guatemala forms part of Cen­tral America’s “north­ern tri­an­gle,” where street gangs with ties to Mex­i­can drug car­tels extort busi­ness­es and kid­nap peo­ple for ran­som, fuel­ing the high­est homi­cide rates in the world, accord­ing to the Unit­ed Nations. That has prompt­ed thou­sands of unac­com­pa­nied chil­dren from the region to trek toward the U.S., often led by smug­glers, in the hopes of find­ing refuge.

‘Empha­size Enforce­ment’

Giu­liani said he spent four months review­ing Guatemalan crime data and prac­tices before vis­it­ing the coun­try today. The coun­try needs to strength­en pros­e­cu­tors and boost its con­vic­tion rate for mur­ders, which he said stood at 10 per­cent.

“When you have a tremen­dous amount of crime in your soci­ety, you are not going to solve it with schools, libraries, nice neigh­bor­hoods and sports teams,” Giu­liani said. “You have to empha­size law enforce­ment. As soon you get the crime down, the next thing you do is build up the social pro­grams. That’s when you cre­ate more jobs, bet­ter neigh­bor­hoods, bet­ter schools.”

As may­or from 1994–2001, Giu­liani cut crime 63 per­cent and led the city through the Sept. 11 ter­ror­ist attacks. Cur­rent New York May­or Bill de Bla­sio tapped Giuliani’s first police com­mis­sion­er, William Brat­ton, to lead the force after tak­ing office in Jan­u­ary.

...

“When you have a tremen­dous amount of crime in your soci­ety, you are not going to solve it with schools, libraries, nice neigh­bor­hoods and sports teams,” Giu­liani said. “You have to empha­size law enforce­ment. As soon you get the crime down, the next thing you do is build up the social pro­grams. That’s when you cre­ate more jobs, bet­ter neigh­bor­hoods, bet­ter schools.”

Giv­en New York City’s his­toric drop in crime dur­ing Giu­lian­i’s admin­is­tra­tion (which also took place every­where else in the world for rea­sons we have yet to iden­ti­fy), we should prob­a­bly expect Giu­lian­i’s advice to Hon­duras to involve a heavy empha­sis on crack­ing down on crime. But Hon­durs should wait until after it’s solved its endem­ic prob­lems with ram­pant crime before it makes invest­ments in things like bet­ter schools or more jobs accord­ing to Rudy.

You can see why the Hon­duran gov­ern­ment would love to pay for his views on these kinds of top­ics. Espe­cial­ly since he’s call­ing for the same failed strat­e­gy that has worked out so well for Hon­duras thus far...

Alter­net
Night­mare lib­er­tar­i­an project turns coun­try into the mur­der cap­i­tal of the world
Even Ayn Rand would be tak­en aback

Mike LaSusa
Thurs­day, Jan 29, 2015 10:45 AM CST

Since the 2009 coup against Pres­i­dent José Manuel Zelaya and sub­se­quent elec­tion of Por­firio “Pepe Lobo” Sosa and his favored suc­ces­sor Juan Orlan­do Her­nan­dez, Hon­duras has embarked on a dev­as­tat­ing neolib­er­al eco­nom­ic pro­gram that has con­tributed to its sta­tus as one of the poor­est and most unequal coun­tries in the region. The pri­va­ti­za­tion of Hon­duran soci­ety has been accom­pa­nied by a mil­i­ta­riza­tion of pub­lic secu­ri­ty efforts in the coun­try, both of which have been fueled by a net­work of U.S.-supported poli­cies and pro­grams.

Despite the country’s crack­down on crime, vio­lence in Hon­duras has sky­rock­et­ed in recent years. Hon­duras now has the world’s sec­ond-high­est nation­al mur­der rate and is home to two of the world’s five most vio­lent cities. Unchecked gang activ­i­ty has con­tributed to wide­spread cor­rup­tion and impuni­ty with­in police and gov­ern­ment insti­tu­tions.

This week­end, a coali­tion of left­ist oppo­si­tion par­ties came togeth­er tem­porar­i­ly to defeat a pro­posed amend­ment to the Hon­duran con­sti­tu­tion that would have giv­en per­ma­nent sta­tus to the country’s mil­i­ta­rized police force, known as the Policía Mil­i­tar de Orden Públi­co, or PMOP.

This “elite” police unit, which serves under the direct com­mand of the pres­i­den­cy, is intend­ed to sup­port Pres­i­dent Hernandez’s heavy-hand­ed crime reduc­tion efforts. Pres­i­dent Her­nan­dez cre­at­ed the PMOP short­ly after com­ing to office in 2014, with sup­port from a leg­is­la­ture dom­i­nat­ed by his con­ser­v­a­tive Nation­al Par­ty. The Her­nan­dez administration’s police mil­i­ta­riza­tion efforts also had the back­ing of the country’s busi­ness sec­tor.

Accord­ing to one study, in 2013, only 27 per­cent of Hon­durans expressed con­fi­dence in the civil­ian police while 73 per­cent thought the mil­i­tary should be involved in polic­ing efforts. Nev­er­the­less, both the mil­i­tary and the police have a long his­to­ry of cor­rup­tion and crim­i­nal­i­ty as well as abus­es com­mit­ted against civil­ians in Hon­duras.

The PMOP plan isn’t the only ini­tia­tive with dubi­ous impli­ca­tions for human rights put forth by Hernandez’s gov­ern­ment. Hon­duras is also exper­i­ment­ing with Zonas de Empleo y Desar­rol­lo Económi­co (spe­cial employ­ment and eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment zones), also known as ZEDEs or “char­ter cities.”

Accord­ing to report­ing by Danielle Marie Mack­ey for the New Repub­lic last month, here is how the project works: “An investor, either inter­na­tion­al or local, builds infrastructure….The ter­ri­to­ry in which they invest becomes an autonomous zone from Honduras…The invest­ing com­pa­ny must write the laws that gov­ern the ter­ri­to­ry, estab­lish the local gov­ern­ment, hire a pri­vate police force, and even has the right to set the edu­ca­tion­al sys­tem and col­lect tax­es.”

An ear­li­er arti­cle by Eri­ka Piquero at Latin Cor­re­spon­dent described the law as “allow­ing the cor­po­ra­tions and indi­vid­u­als fund­ing the ZEDEs to dic­tate the entire struc­tur­al orga­ni­za­tion of the zone, includ­ing laws, tax struc­ture, health­care sys­tem, edu­ca­tion and secu­ri­ty forces. This kind of flex­i­bil­i­ty is unprece­dent­ed even in sim­i­lar mod­els around the world.”

George Rodríguez report­ed for the Tico Times that the plan was pre­vi­ous­ly chal­lenged and ruled uncon­sti­tu­tion­al in Hon­duras’ supreme court, but Her­nan­dez “twist­ed arms, had the [dis­sent­ing] judges removed, and brought in obe­di­ent replace­ments.” Her­nan­dez then re-tooled the bill and pushed it through the con­gress.

As Mack­ey report­ed, “The ZEDE’s cen­tral gov­ern­ment is stacked with lib­er­tar­i­an for­eign­ers,” includ­ing a for­mer speech­writer for pres­i­dents Ronald Rea­gan and George Bush Sr., con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal oper­a­tive Grover Norquist, a senior mem­ber of the Cato Insti­tute think tank, and Ronald Reagan’s son Michael, as well as “a Dan­ish banker, a Peru­vian econ­o­mist, and an Aus­tri­an gen­er­al sec­re­tary of the Friedrich Hayek Insti­tute.”

Accord­ing to the offi­cial ZEDE web­site, the zones place a heavy empha­sis on secu­ri­ty, offer­ing “a 21st cen­tu­ry, busi­ness-effi­cient, non-politi­cized, trans­par­ent, sta­ble, sys­tem of admin­is­tra­tion, plus a spe­cial police and insti­tu­tion­al secu­ri­ty to over­come region­al issues and meet world stan­dards.” A new bill intro­duced by Her­nan­dez min­utes after los­ing the vote this week­end would allow munic­i­pal­i­ties and ZEDEs to request that the PMOP or oth­er branch­es of the Armed Forces pro­vide them with secu­ri­ty ser­vices.

Hon­duras’ con­tin­u­ing mil­i­ta­riza­tion of secu­ri­ty efforts appears to have the back­ing of the Unit­ed States, which has pro­vid­ed more than $65 mil­lion in secu­ri­ty aid to Hon­duras since 2008. Pres­i­dent Her­nan­dez has also fre­quent­ly with high-lev­el U.S. offi­cials for talks on secu­ri­ty and migra­tion issues. As the U.S. amassador’s Twit­ter account wrote on Fri­day, “U.S. coop­er­a­tion with Hon­duras’ fight against nar­co­traf­fick­ing and crime is strong and con­tin­u­ing.”

How­ev­er, con­trary to com­mon­ly held per­cep­tions, most of the vio­lence in Hon­duras is not caused by large, transna­tion­al drug traf­fick­ing orga­ni­za­tions, but rather by small­er gangs fight­ing over ter­ri­to­ry (includ­ing street cor­ners, neigh­bor­hoods and even pris­ons) in which to con­duct extor­tion rack­ets, small-scale smug­gling efforts and pros­ti­tu­tion oper­a­tions among oth­er ille­gal activ­i­ties.

Pri­va­ti­za­tion and para­mil­i­ta­riza­tion are also con­cerns in Hon­duras, with one recent report esti­mat­ing that there are three times as many pri­vate secu­ri­ty guards as police in Hon­duras, up to a third of whom work for unreg­is­tered com­pa­nies, some of whom report­ed­ly employ off-duty police offi­cers look­ing to sup­ple­ment often-mea­ger salaries.

While inter­na­tion­al investors may be seek­ing to cap­i­tal­ize on Hon­duras’ vol­un­tary sur­ren­der of its nation­al sov­er­eign­ty to make a “legal” prof­it, even more nefar­i­ous actors are already oper­at­ing in a com­plete­ly unreg­u­lat­ed, free-mar­ket crim­i­nal under­world in Honduras—one that has helped turn the coun­try into the world’s “mur­der cap­i­tal” in recent years.

Even Hon­duran schools have become scenes of ram­pant gang activ­i­ty. In a recent chill­ing arti­cle for the Asso­ci­at­ed Press, jour­nal­ist Alber­to Arce wrote that gang mem­bers “rely on kids to do much of their ille­gal grunt work, know­ing that even if they get caught, they won’t face long jail sentences…School admin­is­tra­tors say that teach­ers gen­er­al­ly are more afraid of the gangs than the remain­ing stu­dents are, because so many chil­dren admire gang­sters.” Arce also writes that “a 14-year-old can earn $500 a month in pros­ti­tu­tion — more than a police officer’s salary.”

...

Yes, even before hir­ing Rudy Giu­liani for crim­i­nal advise, Hon­duras was already years into an effort to pri­va­tize secu­ri­ty forces, mil­i­ta­rize the police, and cut social spend­ing. It’s almost as if Hon­duras’s rul­ing Nation­al Par­ty has been lis­ten­ing to Rudy all along.

Check out Rand’s Grand Plan for the US: turn the 10 most impov­er­ished states into “Eco­nom­ic Free­dom Zones”:

Salon
Rand Paul’s ter­ri­fy­ing vision for Amer­i­ca: The truth about his plan for “Eco­nom­ic Free­dom Zones”
The sen­a­tor’s detailed eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy agen­da is like some­thing out of an Ayn Rand fever dream
Matthew Pul­ver

Tues­day, Apr 7, 2015 04:39 PM CST

Pres­i­den­tial cam­paigns are usu­al­ly long on slo­ga­neer­ing and short on sub­stance. The first Repub­li­can can­di­date out of the gate for 2016, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, gave an announce­ment speech ask­ing lis­ten­ers to “imag­ine” Cruz’s Amer­i­ca — the word appears near­ly 40 times in the address — which is actu­al­ly great advice, because he sure as hell wasn’t describ­ing his plans in any detail.

Unlike Cruz, and many of his even­tu­al con­tenders for the nom­i­na­tion, Sen. Rand Paul, who announced his can­di­da­cy on Tues­day, has offered up a detailed vision for how to change Amer­i­ca: his “Eco­nom­ic Free­dom Zones” plan, an exhaus­tive 50-page blue­print for giv­ing the coun­try a rad­i­cal free-mar­ket face lift. The plan, which was orig­i­nal­ly intro­duced as leg­is­la­tion in 2013, was cham­pi­oned by Paul’s wife Kel­ley dur­ing his cam­paign announce­ment today, while the sen­a­tor him­self allud­ed to the bill as a cen­ter­piece of his eco­nom­ic vision.

Paul also roused the crowd with men­tion of his “Read the Bill” res­o­lu­tion, which would man­date that mem­bers of Con­gress be per­mit­ted suf­fi­cient time to read each piece of leg­is­la­tion. Paul is a details guy, after all. His cam­paign is already dis­tinct in his will­ing­ness — or eager­ness, even — to dis­cuss the details of his vision. And, heck, the “Read the Bill” idea is not a bad one. So, why not take a clos­er look at those “Eco­nom­ic Free­dom Zones” Paul is so high on.

Paul’s big idea is to take the country’s most eco­nom­i­cal­ly dis­tressed places and use them as a lab­o­ra­to­ry for exper­i­ments in remov­ing gov­ern­ment and allow­ing hyper-cap­i­tal­ism to gov­ern. Detroit is the can­di­date that leaps to mind, espe­cial­ly since Paul chose the old Motor City as the back­drop for his pub­lic intro­duc­tion of the bill.

But while Detroit is the stand­out can­di­date for the “bank­rupt or eco­nom­i­cal­ly dis­tressed areas” Paul’s bill aims to rad­i­cal­ly change, the cri­te­ria are writ­ten loose­ly enough to make vast amounts of the coun­try eli­gi­ble for so-called “eco­nom­ic free­dom.” In the end, selec­tion can be at the dis­cre­tion of the Trea­sury Sec­re­tary, a pres­i­den­tial appoint­ment. Cities, coun­ties and munic­i­pal­i­ties don’t have to be in bank­rupt­cy like Detroit but sim­ply be “at risk of insol­ven­cy.” But who isn’t at risk of insol­ven­cy these days? Then the bill’s cri­te­ria widen even fur­ther: “An eli­gi­ble enti­ty shall be des­ig­nat­ed as a low eco­nom­ic or high pover­ty zone if…the enti­ty is locat­ed with­in one of the 10 most impov­er­ished States.”

This is not a care­ful­ly tar­get­ed exper­i­ment. Vast sec­tions of the coun­try could be tar­get­ed and made into these zones. I guess if you’re in the busi­ness of bestow­ing free­dom, why not try to give to as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble, right?

So what hap­pens in these zones?

Well, for one, tax­es for the rich are slashed to an insane rate of 5 per­cent. That goes for cor­po­ra­tions, too: 5 per­cent. It’s 5 per­cent for every­body, basi­cal­ly, far low­er than the already ambi­tious 17% flat tax he pro­pos­es for every­one else. Cap­i­tal gains tax­es are essen­tial­ly nonex­is­tent in the zones, and even pay­roll tax­es are reduced sub­stan­tial­ly to 4.2% for both employ­er and employ­ee. You might ask, “But isn’t that how Social Secu­ri­ty is fund­ed, through pay­roll tax­es?” Yes, but the rev­enue lost by slash­ing social secu­ri­ty inputs in the zones is made up by the rest of us, accord­ing to the bill. Because free­dom.

Of course, if tax­es just aren’t your thing at all, zone inhab­i­tants of means can have their char­i­ta­ble con­tri­bu­tions count­ed as tax cred­its, not deduc­tions. Give a few thou­sand to Amer­i­can Leg­isla­tive Exchange Coun­cil (ALEC) this year? Con­sid­er that amount tax­es paid!

You’ve nev­er real­ly been free until you cool off from a swel­ter­ing day under a smog-choked sky by hop­ping in the near­est pol­lut­ed water­way. The Clean Air and Clean Water Acts are effec­tive­ly made tooth­less and null in “Free­dom Zones,” with cru­cial reg­u­la­to­ry linch­pins expert­ly elim­i­nat­ed in the bill. The Wild and Scenic Rivers Act looks to be toast as well. Also, any Nation­al Her­itage Area, which includes our many Native Amer­i­can sites, lose any pro­tec­tion in a zone des­ig­nat­ed for “free­dom”; they are now sim­ply real estate.

Paul’s bill embarks on an ambi­tious school pri­va­ti­za­tion plan in the zones, because free­dom for chil­dren is expos­ing them to the cold and indif­fer­ent winds of the cap­i­tal­ist mar­ket in their school­ing. Noth­ing says free­dom like show­ing up to your school bright and ear­ly to find it shut­tered because the hedge fund that owns it made some bad bets. But Paul goes all in, prim­ing the pri­va­ti­za­tion pump by man­dat­ing that local school money–tax dollars–be fun­neled to for-prof­it schools if stu­dents choose to exit the pub­lic sys­tem. And pre­dictably, up to $5,000 of tuition paid to a for-prof­it school is a tax cred­it, not a deduc­tion, in the zone.

So what if all this “free­dom” doesn’t work? What if tak­ing insol­vent gov­ern­ments and the nation’s most des­per­ate pop­u­la­tions and using them as insane lab­o­ra­to­ries ends up blow­ing up? Paul’s bill takes care of that in its very first sub­stan­tive sec­tion: No bailouts, guar­an­teed or dis­count loans, or any sort of finan­cial assis­tance from the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment are per­mit­ted once a place is made into a free­dom zone.

The neolib­er­al exper­i­ment in hyper-cap­i­tal­ism and the ero­sion of the state, which used to be run in places like Chile, after Wash­ing­ton helped install a dic­ta­tor, has now come home. The vision out­lined in Paul’s bill is noth­ing less than an upend­ing of the Amer­i­can ideal–a repub­lic of citizens–and the cre­ation of a repub­lic of prop­er­ty, with the state reced­ing into incon­se­quen­tial­i­ty.

...

To sum­ma­rize:

So what hap­pens in these zones?

Well, for one, tax­es for the rich are slashed to an insane rate of 5 per­cent. That goes for cor­po­ra­tions, too: 5 per­cent. It’s 5 per­cent for every­body, basi­cal­ly, far low­er than the already ambi­tious 17% flat tax he pro­pos­es for every­one else. Cap­i­tal gains tax­es are essen­tial­ly nonex­is­tent in the zones, and even pay­roll tax­es are reduced sub­stan­tial­ly to 4.2% for both employ­er and employ­ee. You might ask, “But isn’t that how Social Secu­ri­ty is fund­ed, through pay­roll tax­es?” Yes, but the rev­enue lost by slash­ing social secu­ri­ty inputs in the zones is made up by the rest of us, accord­ing to the bill. Because free­dom.

Of course, if tax­es just aren’t your thing at all, zone inhab­i­tants of means can have their char­i­ta­ble con­tri­bu­tions count­ed as tax cred­its, not deduc­tions. Give a few thou­sand to Amer­i­can Leg­isla­tive Exchange Coun­cil (ALEC) this year? Con­sid­er that amount tax­es paid!

Wow, that idea sounds...uh...awe­some!

Part of the fun of this plan is when you fac­tor in all the oth­er mas­sive tax and spend­ing cuts he’s propos­ing in addi­tion to the “Eco­nom­ic Free­dom Zones” scheme, plus his calls for bal­anc­ing the bud­get with vast­ly reduced rev­enues, we can’t real­ly just look at today’s top ten poor­est states. We won’t real­ly know which states end up being the 10 poor­est until after Pres­i­dent Paul nukes the econ­o­my, although since the top 10 poor­est states are also heavy recip­i­ents of Fed­er­al spend­ing odds most of today’s poor 10 states would still be on the list post-Paulpoca­lypse.

Still, there is kind of a fun lot­tery ele­ment to this for all the peo­ple liv­ing in, say, the 20 poor­est states. Will they get knocked down into the poor­est 10 and “Free­dom Zoned” after Rand guts the Fed­er­al bud­get or not? We’ll just have to wait and let the chips fall where they may. It’s like a spe­cial lot­tery for the states!

Paul Krug­man had a recent post about a twit­ter exchange between Brad DeLong (a sane economost) and James Pethok­oukis (an Amer­i­can Enter­prise Insti­tute econ­o­mist, so...) over why Repub­li­cans won’t acknowl­edge that Ben Bernanke over­all helped the econ­o­my dur­ing his tenure as the head of the Fed­er­al Reserve. Pethok­oukis’ reply?

The New York Times
The Con­science of a Lib­er­al
John Galt Hates Ben Bernanke

Paul Krug­man
April 3, 2015 5:53 pm

h: I see that there was a Twit­ter exchange among Brad DeLong, James Pethok­oukis, and oth­ers over why Repub­li­cans don’t acknowl­edge that Ben Bernanke helped the econ­o­my, and claim cred­it. Pethok­oukis — who pre­sum­ably gets to talk to quite a few Repub­li­cans from his perch at AEI — offers a fair­ly amaz­ing expla­na­tion:

B/c many view BB as enabling Obama’s spend­ing and arti­fi­cial­ly prop­ping up debt-heavy econ­o­my in need of Mel­lon-esque liq­ui­da­tion

Yep: that das­tard­ly Bernanke was pre­vent­ing us from hav­ing a finan­cial cri­sis, curse him.

Actu­al­ly, there’s a lot of evi­dence that this was an impor­tant part of the sto­ry. As I point­ed out a cou­ple of months ago, Paul Ryan and John Tay­lor went all-out con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry on the Bernanke Fed, claim­ing that its efforts were not about try­ing to ful­fill its man­date, but rather that

This looks an awful lot like an attempt to bail out fis­cal pol­i­cy, and such attempts call the Fed’s inde­pen­dence into ques­tion.

Basi­cal­ly, lead­ing Repub­li­cans didn’t just expect a dis­as­ter, they want­ed one — and they were furi­ous at Bernanke for, as they saw it, head­ing off the cri­sis they hoped to see. It’s a pret­ty awe­some posi­tion to take. But it makes a lot of sense when you con­sid­er where these peo­ple were com­ing from.
...

Yes, as has been obvi­ous for ever since the finan­cial cri­sis start­ed in 2008, the GOP has been fum­ing that the US has­n’t been forced to go though a “Mel­lon-esque” nation­al fire sale. And why would they be fum­ing about it? There’s so much more to liq­ui­date now than in the ear­ly 1930’s! Like the New Deal and social safe­ty nets! Those can be liq­ui­dat­ed.

But keep in mind that folks like Pethok­oukis don’t just want to see a Mel­lon-esque liq­ui­da­tion that dis­man­tles the social safe­ty net. That’s just a start. Why not sell of the poor cities to the wealth­i­er ones?

The Nation­al Review
Remake Detroit, or Emp­ty It

We should restruc­ture its entire gov­ern­ment into a free-enter­prise zone, or encour­age peo­ple to leave.
by James Pethok­oukis July 22, 2013 12:00 AM

If Detroit were its own city-state — a bizarro ver­sion of pros­per­ous Sin­ga­pore — it would be a place the U.S. State Depart­ment would reg­u­lar­ly issue trav­el warn­ings about, where “long-term, pro­tract­ed con­di­tions make a coun­try dan­ger­ous or unsta­ble.” Detroit’s mur­der rate, for instance, would be high­er than that of all but a hand­ful of oth­er coun­tries. The Demo­c­ra­t­ic Repub­lic of Detroit would also be rel­a­tive­ly poor, with annu­al per capi­ta income of around $15,000, mak­ing it a mid­dle-income coun­try like Mex­i­co.

Except Detroit would be a nation in decline rather than on the rise. Detroit would be a nation lit­er­al­ly dying off, its shrink­ing pop­u­la­tion aban­don­ing ter­ri­to­ry the cen­tral gov­ern­ment could no longer afford to sup­ply with basic ser­vices. Oh, yeah, its dis­as­trous pub­lic finances. Well, maybe those would be a minor bright spot in this alter­nate real­i­ty: Detroit could always pay cred­i­tors, at least for a while, with deval­ued Fords, the local cur­ren­cy named after one of its found­ing fathers.

Even­tu­al­ly, how­ev­er, this shrunk­en, crime-rid­den, impov­er­ished city-state — with no one will­ing to bail it out — might be forced to make a choice: cap­i­tal­ism or col­lapse. Out of options, it might just make the Chi­na choice. A key part of Deng Xiaoping’s pro-mar­ket eco­nom­ic reforms in 1979 was the cre­ation of four Hong Kong–inspired “spe­cial eco­nom­ic zones” of lib­er­al­ized labor laws and tax incen­tives to attract for­eign invest­ment. One of these lit­tle pock­ets of eco­nom­ic free­dom, Shen­zhen, locat­ed just north of Hong Kong itself, is now a cen­ter for tech­nol­o­gy man­u­fac­tur­ing and one of China’s rich­est cities.

The stun­ning suc­cess of China’s eco­nom­ic exper­i­ment showed econ­o­mist Paul Romer how bet­ter rules and insti­tu­tions could work won­ders for eco­nom­ic growth. Romer has pro­posed that devel­op­ing nations allow the cre­ation of “char­ter cities,” where the host nation would pro­vide a large, unin­hab­it­ed piece of land to be gov­erned by mar­ket-friend­ly rules and per­haps run by a for­eign gov­ern­ment. Work­ers, busi­ness­es, and investors from any­where could move in and out freely. Basi­cal­ly, Hong Kong in a box, ready for deliv­ery. For exam­ple, instead of giv­ing for­eign aid to some poor African nation such as Mau­ri­ta­nia, New Zealand and Nor­way might part­ner togeth­er to run a char­ter city there. With good gov­er­nance in place and cheap land and labor avail­able, the the­o­ry goes, pri­vate invest­ment would pour in.

Although Romer’s con­cept remains just a fas­ci­nat­ing thought exper­i­ment — a deal with Hon­duras fell through in 2012 — and was intend­ed for what used to be called “Third World nations,” why not turn aban­doned Detroit into New Detroit, a busi­ness-friend­ly char­ter city where tax­es are low and reg­u­la­tion light? Gov­er­nance could be guar­an­teed by some out­side enti­ty. Although neigh­bor­ing, well-run Cana­da is an obvi­ous choice, maybe an Amer­i­can city could play the role in exchange for a cut of future tax rev­enue. Rea­son Foun­da­tion ana­lyst Shikha Dalmia sug­gests Hous­ton as a can­di­date.

...

If Detroit can’t fix itself, maybe Wash­ing­ton could help, with an idea pro­posed by econ­o­mist Enri­co Moret­ti, author of The New Geog­ra­phy of Jobs: Peo­ple liv­ing in areas of high unem­ploy­ment, such as the Motor City, could receive part of their unem­ploy­ment check in the form of a relo­ca­tion vouch­er. The idea might even inspire a film, Escape from Detroit.

Yes, you read that right:

Although Romer’s con­cept remains just a fas­ci­nat­ing thought exper­i­ment — a deal with Hon­duras fell through in 2012 — and was intend­ed for what used to be called “Third World nations,” why not turn aban­doned Detroit into New Detroit, a busi­ness-friend­ly char­ter city where tax­es are low and reg­u­la­tion light? Gov­er­nance could be guar­an­teed by some out­side enti­ty. Although neigh­bor­ing, well-run Cana­da is an obvi­ous choice, maybe an Amer­i­can city could play the role in exchange for a cut of future tax rev­enue. Rea­son Foun­da­tion ana­lyst Shikha Dalmia sug­gests Hous­ton as a can­di­date.

Hey, yeah, why don’t we hand over Detroit to Hous­ton (which would pre­sum­able have “Emer­gency Finan­cial Man­ag­er” sta­tus or some­thing), then have Hous­ton turn it into a low-tax/no reg­u­la­tion busi­ness haven, and Detroit can pay Hous­ton back for the favor with a cut of Detroit’s future tax rev­enue.

Also, the gov­ern­ment should ‘encour­age’ Detroit’s unem­ployed res­i­dents to just leave by con­vert­ing some of their unem­ploy­ment checks into a relo­ca­tion vouch­er. Although, aren’t jobs sup­posed to be cre­at­ed for them under this scheme? Isn’t that the whole point of this scheme? No?

With an elec­tion just around the cor­ner, Turkey’s main oppo­si­tion par­ty, the CHP, has a plan. A mega­plan:

The Gau­r­dian
Turkey’s main oppo­si­tion par­ty plans new megac­i­ty in cen­tre of coun­try

Match­ing pres­i­dent Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ‘crazy projects’, the Repub­li­can People’s par­ty said the city would cre­ate 2.2 mil­lion new jobs over two decades

Fri­day 22 May 2015 00.39 EDT

Try­ing to out­flank the rul­ing party’s ambi­tious infra­struc­ture elec­tion promis­es, Turkey’s main oppo­si­tion par­ty on Thurs­day unveiled a plan to build a new megac­i­ty in the cen­tre of the coun­try.

Upping the ante on pres­i­dent Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s self-pro­claimed “crazy projects”, the Repub­li­can People’s par­ty (CHP) said the new city would cre­ate 2.2 mil­lion new jobs over the next two decades.

“The project would give a great push to the Turk­ish econ­o­my and would make our coun­try an eco­nom­ic actor in the region that can­not be ignored,” CHP leader Kemal Kil­ic­daroglu said in Istan­bul.

He said the new city would even­tu­al­ly have three mil­lion inhab­i­tants and could start work­ing as soon as 2020.

At a cross­roads between Europe and Asia, the city would be the “project of the cen­tu­ry”, Kil­ic­daroglu said.

In order to realise the project, $160 bil­lion in for­eign and Turk­ish invest­ments would be need­ed over the next 20 years, he added.

Kil­ic­daroglu did not give the pre­cise loca­tion of the new city but said it would be at the geo­graph­i­cal heart of Turkey which would put it in Ana­to­lia east of Ankara.

CHP, the par­ty of mod­ern Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, has con­sis­tent­ly failed to make inroads at elec­tions since the rul­ing Islam­ic-root­ed Jus­tice and Devel­op­ment par­ty (AKP) swept to pow­er in 2002.

The project received a mixed reac­tion on social net­works with some applaud­ing its ambi­tion but oth­ers say­ing CHP would have to do more to beat.

“At last a smart project that does not con­sist of bridges, roads and tun­nels only,” tweet­ed Zafer Gur­soy.

But user @doctorhan said: “This is what hap­pens when you feel oblig­ed to promise some­thing. Try hard­er.”

Polls show AKP is almost cer­tain to again win the most seats in the 7 June elec­tion but CHP is hop­ing to erode its major­i­ty and pre­vent it from achiev­ing the con­sti­tu­tion­al major­i­ty it wants to cre­ate a new pres­i­den­tial sys­tem in Turkey.

Erdo­gan, who co-found­ed the AKP and served over a decade as pre­mier before becom­ing pres­i­dent in 2014, has put ambi­tious infra­struc­ture projects at the heart of his dri­ve for a “new Turkey”.

The author­i­ties have already built a metro line under­neath the Bospho­rus between Europe and Asia in Istan­bul, and are now promis­ing a third air­port in the city and an ultra-fast train line that will reduce trav­el time to Ankara to just 90 min­utes.

...

“The 7 June elec­tions are very impor­tant. Either old Turkey will pre­vail or the new Turkey,” Erdo­gan said.

A whole new megac­i­ty where noth­ing cur­rent­ly exists is quite a plan! But will is be a polit­i­cal­ly pop­u­lar plan? That’s going to depend on a lot, like how pop­u­lar that megac­i­ty is going to be if it’s a Char­ter City too:

Today’s Zaman
CHP’s ‘mega project’

ABDÜLKADIR CIVAN
May 26, 2015, Tues­day

Two weeks to the nation­al elec­tion, and the main oppo­si­tion Repub­li­can Peo­ple’s Par­ty (CHP) keeps announc­ing new pol­i­cy pro­pos­als on the eco­nom­ic front.

Its lat­est plan is to con­struct a new city in Cen­tral Ana­to­lia. The spe­cif­ic loca­tion has not yet been dis­closed, but par­ty offi­cials indi­cate the pop­u­la­tion of the pro­posed city would be about sev­er­al mil­lion.

In my opin­ion, there are three impor­tant aspects of the “mega project.” It is going to be a new city. It will be a “logis­tics cen­ter” of Turkey and also of the wider region. It is going to have a dif­fer­ent and sep­a­rate gov­er­nance struc­ture from oth­er parts of the coun­try.

...

How­ev­er, the “why do we need a logis­tics cen­ter city” ques­tion still needs an answer. To be frank, I am not sat­is­fied with the giv­en answers. The CHP offi­cials indi­cate that Turkey has a very advan­ta­geous geo­graph­i­cal posi­tion. It is close to the Euro­pean, Asian and African mar­kets and so is at the cen­ter of world trade. Thus it would be desir­able for multi­na­tion­al com­pa­nies to have man­u­fac­tur­ing and logis­tics sup­port cen­ters in Turkey. The CHP claims that once the phys­i­cal infra­struc­ture and reg­u­la­to­ry frame­work are estab­lished, pri­vate investors will flood to the new city. They empha­size that Turkey cur­rent­ly does not uti­lize that geo­graph­i­cal advan­tage, and not enough trade vol­ume pass­es through Turkey. The CHP sug­gests that those kinds of gigan­tic logis­tics cen­ters are the new norm in this glob­al­ized world. Sim­i­lar plans in Chi­na and Sau­di Ara­bia are high­light­ed as proof of the eco­nom­ic fea­si­bil­i­ty of this mega-project.

Final­ly, the CHP sug­gests the new city would have a dif­fer­ent gov­er­nance struc­ture than the rest of Turkey. It would have a much reduced lev­el of bureau­crat­ic over­sight, and the gov­er­nor of the city would have much greater con­trol than may­ors and gov­er­nors in oth­er parts of the coun­try. From that per­spec­tive, it sounds like the so-called char­ter cities of Paul Romer, a promi­nent eco­nom­ics pro­fes­sor at New York Uni­ver­si­ty. Dr. Romer has con­tributed sig­nif­i­cant­ly to the lit­er­a­ture of eco­nom­ic growth. How­ev­er, he was also inter­est­ed in putting his ideas into prac­tice. He con­sid­ers the fail­ure of gov­er­nance mech­a­nisms as the main rea­son for under­de­vel­op­ment. Accord­ing to him, most under­de­vel­oped coun­tries are under­de­vel­oped not because of their geog­ra­phy, their cli­mate, their nat­ur­al resources or their cul­ture, but because of erro­neous struc­tures of gov­er­nance.

He claims that autar­kic cities can pro­vide an attrac­tive envi­ron­ment for eco­nom­ic and social devel­op­ment even in under­de­vel­oped coun­tries. How­ev­er, it is nor­mal­ly not pos­si­ble to pro­vide “good gov­er­nance islands” in these bad gov­er­nance coun­tries. Dr. Romer sug­gests that devel­oped coun­tries like Eng­land and Cana­da can be a guar­an­tor coun­try to the gov­er­nance of cer­tain cities in under­de­vel­oped coun­tries. He claims that if these cities become suc­cess­ful, it will be easy to expand the new sys­tem to oth­er regions of the coun­try. So far char­ter cities were seri­ous­ly con­sid­ered in two coun­tries: Mada­gas­car and Hon­duras.

The Mada­gas­car episode end­ed after the pres­i­dent of the coun­try, who believed firm­ly in char­ter cities, was over­thrown by a mil­i­tary coup. Recent­ly, Dr. Romer dis­tanced him­self from the char­ter cities project in Hon­duras as well. He says the cur­rent devel­op­ments wor­ry him because he believes the found­ing fathers of the char­ter city in Hon­duras are cre­at­ing a new unac­count­able rul­ing class. Both attempts show that good gov­er­nance is a very dif­fi­cult result to achieve. To impose it from out­side even with the best inten­tions is not very effec­tive.

I doubt that the CHP plans to have a for­eign guar­an­tor coun­try for the new city. How­ev­er, I think it would be equal­ly dif­fi­cult to estab­lish this good gov­er­nance island by uti­liz­ing the inter­nal dynam­ics of the coun­try. If our local dynam­ics were enough to estab­lish and main­tain good gov­er­nance struc­ture, we would already have it at the nation­al lev­el. The best we can achieve is to pro­vide finan­cial con­ces­sions to for­eign and local investors. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, I seri­ous­ly doubt these con­ces­sions have ben­e­fits in the long run for Turkey.

Hav­ing said that, I believe the CHP’s mega project is less crazy than the Jus­tice and Devel­op­ment Par­ty’s (AKP) crazy projects such as Canal Istan­bul.

“Hav­ing said that, I believe the CHP’s mega project is less crazy than the Jus­tice and Devel­op­ment Par­ty’s (AKP) crazy projects such as Canal Istan­bul.”

That must be one crazy canal.

Egypt­ian bil­lion­aire Naguib Sawiris has an idea for how to deal for the grow­ing human­i­tar­i­an refugee cri­sis fac­ing now just Europe but the world: Have Greece or Italy sell him an island that he can turn into a pri­vate nation, and then send all the refugees there were they would be employed in build­ing their new nation:

The Dai­ly Beast
Bil­lion­aire Wants to Build Refugee Island
Just the lat­est amaz­ing and insane idea for hous­ing Syria’s refugees.

Nina Strochlic
09.05.15 12:03 AM ET

Ear­li­er this week, Egypt­ian bil­lion­aire Naguib Sawiris tweet­ed out an idea he called “crazy.”

He would buy an island, fill it with refugees, and then pro­vide jobs and hous­ing until they could return to their homeland—if they so chose.

“Greece or Italy sell me an island, ill call its inde­pen­dence and host the migrants and pro­vide jobs for them build­ing their new coun­try,” he wrote on Twit­ter. Then, added: “Crazy idea .. Maybe but at least tem­po­rary until they can return to their coun­tries ?? !!”

When the skep­ti­cism began, he remained stead­fast. “There is noth­ing to joke about !” he wrote. “I don’t joke on the mis­ery of peo­ple.”

As live feeds of Syr­i­an refugees walk­ing out of Hun­gary have flood­ed the air­waves and pic­tures of drowned refugee chil­dren plas­ter social media, the response has been dra­mat­ic. In Ice­land, 10,000 peo­ple offered to house Syr­i­an fam­i­lies. Singer Bob Geld­of announced he would let four fam­i­lies live in his homes. U.S. Sen­a­tors called on Con­gress to take in at least five times more refugees than the coun­try cur­rent­ly allows.

Sawiris isn’t the first to pro­pose such a seem­ing­ly out­landish idea, but his is the most sin­gu­lar­ly gen­er­ous and bold so far. The telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions mogul is worth around $3 bil­lion. In an inter­view with AFP, Sawiris esti­mat­ed the cost of pur­chas­ing the island—$10 mil­lion to $100 mil­lion, he said—wouldn’t be a deter­rent. The issue also isn’t sup­ply, as there are numer­ous unin­hab­it­ed islands in the Mediter­ranean. The main prob­lem would be per­suad­ing the cur­rent own­ers to sell off a plot of land. Then he would tar­get the bulk of need­ed invest­ment into infra­struc­ture, like “tem­po­rary shel­ters to house the peo­ple, then you start employ­ing the peo­ple to build hous­ing, schools, uni­ver­si­ties, hos­pi­tals,” he said..

Mean­while, in June, a Cal­i­for­nia real estate mil­lion­aire named Jason Buzi launched a plan for a “Refugee Nation.” He out­lined (PDF) four options for reset­tle­ment: one involved pur­chas­ing an island and anoth­er involved build­ing a new island. “The solu­tion is sim­ple: for the mil­lions of state­less peo­ple around the world—a state of their own!” it said.

His idea received mixed reac­tions. In The Guardian, Alexan­der Betts, with Oxford’s Refugee Stud­ies Cen­ter, warned not to dis­miss the inno­va­tion, but wor­ried it could iso­late refugees like a lep­rosy colony.

“You end up with refugees trapped for­ev­er in what is effec­tive­ly large-scale prison camps,” James Hath­away, the direc­tor of Uni­ver­si­ty of Michigan’s Pro­gram in Refugee and Asy­lum, told The Wash­ing­ton Post, refer­ring to Australia’s prac­tice of hold­ing refugees on the Pacif­ic Islands.

“This pro­pos­al may be ridiculed or attacked by some, but hope­ful­ly is not ignored,” Buzi wrote. “It should be vig­or­ous­ly debat­ed, because the world needs a solu­tion to this stag­ger­ing human­i­tar­i­an cri­sis... But we can no longer sit idly by as mil­lions of our fel­low human beings suf­fer due to human-cre­at­ed con­flicts.”

Greece is strug­gling to assist the influx of needy refugees stream­ing across its bor­ders by the thou­sands, exac­er­bat­ed by its cur­rent finan­cial cri­sis.

...

“[T]he sit­u­a­tion has become unman­age­able,” he told reporters.

In his inter­view with AFP, Naguib Sawiris, the Egypt­ian mag­nate who has the funds, imag­ined a place where the refugees would be treat­ed once more as human beings.

“The way they are being treat­ed now, they are being treat­ed like cat­tle,” he said.

Are refugee island nations going to become a tool in the glob­al com­mu­ni­ty cri­sis response tool­box? As a solu­tion, it does have the advan­tage of allow­ing the wealthy nations of world to pre­tend like they’re actu­al­ly help­ing peo­ple with­out actu­al­ly hav­ing to help them very much and out­sourc­ing the solu­tion to bil­lion­aires, so there might be some sig­nif­i­cant appeal to the idea for many nations.

And as the arti­cle also point­ed out, Sawiris isn’t the only bil­lion­aire to pro­pose such an idea:

...
Mean­while, in June, a Cal­i­for­nia real estate mil­lion­aire named Jason Buzi launched a plan for a “Refugee Nation.” He out­lined (PDF) four options for reset­tle­ment: one involved pur­chas­ing an island and anoth­er involved build­ing a new island. “The solu­tion is sim­ple: for the mil­lions of state­less peo­ple around the world—a state of their own!” it said.
...

So who knows, maybe refugee island nations are going to become the next new hot mag­ic-bul­let idea that pol­i­cy-mak­ers can get all excit­ed about. Like a Char­ter City for refugees, although it sound­ed like Jason Buz­i’s “Refugee Nation” idea would­n’t exact­ly be a Char­ter City if his “Refugee Nation” real­ly was self-gov­erned by the refugees them­selves.

And that brings us to a rather crit­i­cal aspect of this whole “refugee island” pro­pos­al: Are the new refugee nations actu­al­ly going to be demo­c­ra­t­ic nations, or will they oper­ate under one of the many non-demo­c­ra­t­ic mod­els of gov­er­nance that we find across the globe? Or might they use a non-demo­c­ra­t­ic mod­el? Per­haps a non-demo­c­ra­t­ic mod­el that has lots of pow­er­ful back­ers but few actu­al real world exam­ples. Mod­els like, of course, Char­ter Cities:

The Guardian
Is cre­at­ing a new nation for the world’s refugees a good idea?

A prop­er­ty bil­lion­aire is propos­ing to buy land to house the world’s refugees. Migra­tion aca­d­e­m­ic Alexan­der Betts says it’s not as out­landish as it sounds

Alexan­der Betts

Tues­day 4 August 2015 07.33 EDT

Two weeks ago real estate mil­lion­aire Jason Buzi launched his idea for a “Refuge Nation” in the glob­al media. The basic premise is not new: to buy an under-pop­u­lat­ed area of land some­where in the world and turn it into a ter­ri­to­ry for the world’s refugees to begin a new life. It com­bines the his­toric prece­dent of the ori­gins of Buzi’s native Israel cou­pled with the vision­ary ide­al­ism of his Sil­i­con Val­ley her­itage. He argues that in a time of increas­ing need for refugee pro­tec­tion but declin­ing polit­i­cal tol­er­ance of refugees, rad­i­cal solu­tions are need­ed.

What’s right with the idea?

First, Buzi’s iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of the prob­lem is spot on. We cur­rent­ly face a glob­al dis­place­ment cri­sis. More peo­ple are dis­placed than at any time since the sec­ond world war. Of the 60 mil­lion dis­placed, near­ly 20 mil­lion are refugees who have crossed an inter­na­tion­al bor­der. Well over half of those are in so-called pro­tract­ed refugee sit­u­a­tions, hav­ing been in exile and often depen­dent on inter­na­tion­al assis­tance for more than five years. Long-term refugee encamp­ment rep­re­sents a trag­ic and unac­cept­able waste of human­i­ty. Fur­ther­more, with new crises like the Syr­ia con­flict, from which four mil­lion peo­ple have left the coun­try as refugees, host coun­tries like Turkey, Lebanon, and Jor­dan lack the capac­i­ty to con­tin­ue to host so many indef­i­nite­ly. Mean­while, the polit­i­cal will­ing­ness to con­tin­ue to sup­port grow­ing num­bers is declin­ing from Aus­tralia to the Mediter­ranean to the Mid­dle East.

Sec­ond, we need inno­v­a­tive and cre­ative solu­tions. At the heart of this must be a rethink­ing of the polit­i­cal geog­ra­phy of asy­lum. As Buzi implies, we have enough land and under­de­vel­oped regions of the world. We need to be cre­ative about how we think about ter­ri­to­ry; in a world of over sev­en bil­lion, 20 mil­lion refugees is not that many.

Third, a key ele­ment of solu­tions to the cri­sis should be self-gov­er­nance. Implic­it in Buzi’s Refugee Nation idea is the notion that refugees could gov­ern their own affairs. This recog­ni­tion of the auton­o­my of refugee com­mu­ni­ties and their capac­i­ty to be eco­nom­i­cal­ly and polit­i­cal­ly self-suf­fi­cient is long over­due. Too often, it has been assumed that refugees are depen­dent upon human­i­tar­i­an assis­tance beyond the emer­gency phase of a cri­sis, when in prac­tice they can exer­cise polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic agency. Around the world, research has shown that under the right con­di­tions, refugees are capa­ble of build­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tive polit­i­cal struc­tures as well as mean­ing­ful­ly engag­ing with mar­kets.

What’s wrong with the idea?

There are a host of issues relat­ing to iden­ti­fy­ing an appro­pri­ate ter­ri­to­ry and build­ing a new multi­na­tion­al polit­i­cal com­mu­ni­ty from scratch. The inter­na­tion­al community’s track record of arti­fi­cial nation-build­ing is not strong. How­ev­er, set­ting aside the prac­ti­cal chal­lenges, there are three major con­cep­tu­al issues.

First, the pro­pos­al risks con­flat­ing refugees and state­less per­sons. Refugees are not state­less; they still have cit­i­zen­ship of their coun­try of ori­gin. The pre­ferred solu­tion for most is to return home when the sit­u­a­tion changes. Of course, repa­tri­a­tion is a remote hope for many refugees but for some asy­lum is def­i­nite­ly tem­po­rary.

Sec­ond, the idea is premised upon exclu­sion rather than inclu­sion. It implies that refugees should not be inte­grat­ed with­in exist­ing polit­i­cal com­mu­ni­ties but con­fined to sep­a­rate com­mu­ni­ties. In dis­cus­sion on social media this has been likened to a lep­er colony. One of them most impor­tant chal­lenges we face is to encour­age states to tem­porar­i­ly inte­grate refugees, so send­ing a mes­sage of exclu­sion is poten­tial­ly dan­ger­ous. Refugees have much to con­tribute eco­nom­i­cal­ly, social­ly and cul­tur­al­ly to host states, and the log­ic of exclu­sion risks rein­forc­ing the idea of refugees as a bur­den. In our own research we have been able to high­light how giv­en the right poli­cies, refugees can make a pos­i­tive eco­nom­ic con­tri­bu­tion to host soci­eties if the right poli­cies are adopt­ed.

Third, there is an impor­tant ques­tion about whether the Refugee Nation would be formed on the basis of coer­cion or con­sent. In a glob­alised world, giv­en free­dom of choice, peo­ple ulti­mate­ly want to choose where they live, and are like­ly to seek to move to where their friends, fam­i­ly and great­est oppor­tu­ni­ties lie. It seems like­ly that in order to group peo­ple onto an arti­fi­cial­ly cre­at­ed ter­ri­to­ry one would either have to make it utopi­an to be attrac­tive or risk encour­ag­ing oth­er states to coerce refugees to go there. Exam­ples of islands used to host refugees – Australia’s use of Nau­ru or the US’s pre­vi­ous use of Guan­tanamo for Hait­ian asy­lum seek­ers – are not aus­pi­cious, hav­ing led to sig­nif­i­cant human rights vio­la­tions. To be work­able, a Refugee Nation idea would need to be based on free­dom of choice and the lure of oppor­tu­ni­ty. In con­trast to past prece­dents such as the cre­ation of Israel or Liberia, it is not obvi­ous that “refugee” would be a suf­fi­cient­ly strong uni­fy­ing iden­ti­ty to encour­age dis­parate pop­u­la­tions to live togeth­er.

What’s next?

The pro­pos­al for a Refugee Nation should not be total­ly dis­missed. The idea is most use­ful­ly deployed as a metaphor for cre­ative think­ing about the polit­i­cal geog­ra­phy of asy­lum. Rather than actu­al­ly seek­ing one sin­gle ter­ri­to­ry in the world to house the world’s refugees, Refugee Nation should offer a source of inspi­ra­tion for ways in which we can col­lec­tive­ly reimag­ine and rein­vig­o­rate asy­lum. These should work to offer auton­o­my and oppor­tu­ni­ty for refugees, based on inno­v­a­tive and non-tra­di­tion­al con­cep­tions of ter­ri­to­ry. A range of mod­els could sup­port this.

First, trustee­ship offers a his­tor­i­cal prece­dent. As Robin Cohen has high­light­ed, dur­ing the inter-war peri­od the League of Nations man­aged ter­ri­to­ries in the col­lec­tive inter­est, and such an idea might be used today to host and pro­tect refugees. Cohen is right to sug­gest that inter­na­tion­al­ly man­aged ter­ri­to­ries might offer cre­ative ways to lib­er­ate refugee gov­er­nance from restric­tive host states.

Sec­ond, zon­al devel­op­ment pro­vides a neglect­ed and poten­tial­ly inter­est­ing solu­tion. There are his­tor­i­cal prece­dents of refugees being locat­ed to under­de­vel­oped bor­der regions, often mak­ing a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence to long-term devel­op­ment. Such ideas could be revived. In Jor­dan, for instance, the King Hus­sein bin Talal Devel­op­ment Zone is a spe­cial eco­nom­ic zone just 15 min­utes dri­ve from the Za’atari refugee camp. It cur­rent­ly lacks two things: labour and invest­ment. Yet, recon­ceived, it might offer an oppor­tu­ni­ty for refugees to have greater auton­o­my while con­tribut­ing to the host economy’s nation­al devel­op­ment strat­e­gy.

Third, Paul Romer’s idea of char­ter cities offers a way of cre­at­ing designed urban areas in which a par­tic­u­lar community’s needs could be met. If refugee camps could be rethought with the oppor­tu­ni­ties of, say, a uni­ver­si­ty cam­pus or a func­tion­ing city, they might offer oppor­tu­ni­ties for human flour­ish­ing, built upon rep­re­sen­ta­tion and self-gov­er­nance, even on a tem­po­rary basis. Urban plan­ning offers many insights into how to build vibrant, cos­mopoli­tan cities, and yet too rarely are these lessons and insights applied to refugees set­tle­ments.

...

As we saw, Jason Buzi has been explic­it about self-gov­er­nance being a key ele­ment to his ‘Refugee Nation’ idea. But as we also saw, set­ting up these Refugee Nations as spe­cial eco­nom­ic zones (a key sell­ing point for the Char­ter City mod­el) is also some­thing being talked about. And the more rapid­ly these sud­den ‘refugee nations’ are expect­ed to become eco­nom­i­cal­ly self-suf­fi­cient, the greater the pres­sure will be to turn them­selves into de fac­to pro-cor­po­rate Char­ter Cities. So while it’s sort of nice to see grand ges­tures from bil­lion­aires for address­ing urgent human­i­tar­i­an needs (needs that they world could eas­i­ly address if the world real­ly cared), it’s prob­a­bly going to be rather crit­i­cal to ensure that any sort of bil­lion­aire-cre­at­ed ‘refugee nation’ scheme does­n’t end up turn­ing into a pri­vate­ly-owned and oper­at­ed ‘spe­cial eco­nom­ic zone’ instead.

It’s also worth keep­ing in mind that, should the world go down the ‘refugee nation’ path towards help­ing those that can’t real­is­ti­cal­ly return home any time soon or ever, we’re prob­a­bly going to need a lot more ‘refugee nations’ in the future than you might sus­pect. A whole lot more.

As the 2018 Win­ter Olympics comes to close, per­haps this a good point to acknowl­edge the fact that Win­ter Olympics are going to a lot hard­er for cities to host in the future as a result of cli­mate change. In fact, a recent study found that only 8 of the pre­vi­ous 21 Win­ter Olympic host cities will still be able to host the games by 2100 unless human­i­ty takes urgent action soon. That’s right, over 60 per­cent of the cities that once host­ed the win­ter Olympics won’t be reli­ably win­tery dur­ing win­ter by the end of this cen­tu­ry. And that pre­sum­ably means win­ter sports won’t even be option at all for some of those coun­tries. At least out­door win­ter sports.

As far as research find­ings goes, it’s a pret­ty big deal for the win­ter Olympics. Per­haps even ‘exis­ten­tial cri­sis’ lev­el news. Because don’t for­get that we might have run­away warm­ing that’s worse than pre­dict­ed. There might not be enough snow. In oth­er words, the win­ter Olympics might have to be entire­ly indoors next cen­tu­ry.

But when it comes to all the dif­fer­ent kinds of ‘exis­ten­tial cri­sis news’ a city might receive as cli­mate change plays out, the news that a city might not be able to host the Win­ter Olympics is pret­ty low on the dev­as­tat­ing news index. It could obvi­ous­ly get a lot worse.

For exam­ple, that city might be in a coun­try that’s going to dis­ap­pear as a result of cli­mate change. And that’s why we a group of Pacif­ic Island nations — Fiji, Kiri­bati, Tuvalu and Toke­lau — peti­tioned the wealthy nations of the world back in 2015 to make plans for what is increas­ing­ly becom­ing an even­tu­al­i­ty: the com­plete destruc­tion of their nation lead­ing to total migra­tion of every­one in the coun­try:

The Guardian

Pacif­ic nations beg for help for islanders when ‘calami­ty’ of cli­mate change hits

Coali­tion of Fiji, Kiri­bati, Tuvalu and Toke­lau ask wealthy nations to help their peo­ple migrate and find work if they have to flee because of ris­ing sea lev­els

Oliv­er Mil­man

Tue 13 Oct 2015 17.45 EDT
Last mod­i­fied on Wed 14 Feb 2018 12.28 EST

Pacif­ic island nations have plead­ed with wealthy coun­tries to help their peo­ple migrate and find work if they are forced to flee their home­lands because of the con­se­quences of cli­mate change.

A coali­tion of low-lying island nations said mov­ing peo­ple because of ris­ing sea lev­els, storms and ruined agri­cul­ture was a last resort, but the “calami­ty” of cli­mate change required indus­tri­alised coun­tries to devise a plan.

In a joint state­ment after a sum­mit in Kiri­bati the Pacif­ic nations – Fiji, Kiri­bati, Tuvalu and Toke­lau – said they were “grave­ly con­cerned over the lack of effec­tive inter­na­tion­al response to cli­mate change” that posed “major exis­ten­tial chal­lenges” to their pop­u­la­tions and cul­tures.

They repeat­ed calls for an inter­na­tion­al body to be set up to coor­di­nate pop­u­la­tion move­ment caused by cli­mate change. The cre­ation of such a body was includ­ed in an ear­ly draft of a UN agree­ment to be nego­ti­at­ed at cli­mate talks in Paris in Decem­ber but the idea was dropped last week. Aus­tralia opposed it, although coun­tries includ­ing Britain, the US and France were open to the con­cept.

The coun­tries called for fund­ing for health and edu­ca­tion pro­grams, and aid to raise build­ings above pre­dict­ed sea lev­el increas­es and safe­guard water sup­plies from salt­wa­ter intru­sion.

Wealthy nations should “pre­pare our peo­ple for ‘migra­tion with dig­ni­ty’, capa­ble of con­tribut­ing to oth­er nations’ economies and devel­op­ment process­es as skilled migrant work­ers”, the Pacif­ic lead­ers said.

Devel­op­ing nations have access to the UN-admin­is­tered green cli­mate fund to help adapt to or mit­i­gate cli­mate change. In 2009 nations agreed at Copen­hagen to pro­vide $100bn in “cli­mate finance” although this tar­get has not been met and will be debat­ed again at the Paris talks.

There is no body that over­sees the order­ly move­ment of peo­ple because of cli­mate change impacts. The UN refugee con­ven­tion applies only to those flee­ing per­se­cu­tion, with lit­tle appetite among the rich­est nations to expand its def­i­n­i­tion to include “cli­mate refugees” – amid pre­dic­tions that up to 250 mil­lion peo­ple may be dis­placed world­wide by 2050.

Peo­ple liv­ing on coral atolls in the Pacif­ic are con­sid­ered par­tic­u­lar­ly vul­ner­a­ble to a sea lev­el that is ris­ing by 1.2cm a year, four times faster than the glob­al aver­age. Coastal ero­sion, taint­ed water sup­plies and fail­ing crops have prompt­ed com­mu­ni­ties to move inland or to oth­er islands.

Pacif­ic lead­ers have tak­en an increas­ing­ly stri­dent tone in call­ing for action, with Anote Tong, the pres­i­dent of Kiri­bati, recent­ly call­ing Aus­tralia “very self­ish” for its con­tin­ued com­mit­ment to coalmin­ing.

Peter Chris­t­ian, the pres­i­dent of Microne­sia, told a UN gath­er­ing in New York ear­li­er this month: “I speak as an islander who has walked the shores of many atoll islands, where there was once sandy beach­es and coconut trees.

“Now there are none. I am told this will con­tin­ue. We must become more cohe­sive in our actions to bring a use­ful con­clu­sion to help mit­i­gate the threat of sink­ing islands and pre­vent the poten­tial geno­cide of Ocean­ic peo­ples and cul­tures.”

...

“At the moment, if you are forced out of your home due to inun­da­tion you sim­ply become state­less. There’s no mech­a­nism to ensure that these peo­ple won’t fall through the cracks. When you go to Kiri­bati and see peo­ple try­ing to repair sand­bagged sea­walls, you can see why this is a live issue for them.”

———-

“Pacif­ic nations beg for help for islanders when ‘calami­ty’ of cli­mate change hits” by Oliv­er Mil­man; The Guardian; 10/13/2015

““At the moment, if you are forced out of your home due to inun­da­tion you sim­ply become state­less. There’s no mech­a­nism to ensure that these peo­ple won’t fall through the cracks. When you go to Kiri­bati and see peo­ple try­ing to repair sand­bagged sea­walls, you can see why this is a live issue for them.””

As these Pacif­ic Island nations were emphat­i­cal­ly point­ing out to the world in 2015, if you are forced out of your home due to inun­da­tion you sim­ply become state­less. That’s it. There’s no glob­al sys­tem in place for deal­ing with the dis­ap­pear­ance of entire nations despite the fact that the dis­ap­pear­ance of entire nations is basi­cal­ly an inevitabil­i­ty at this point. Nor is there any mean­ing­ful prepa­ra­tion for putting such a sys­tem in place:

...
In a joint state­ment after a sum­mit in Kiri­bati the Pacif­ic nations – Fiji, Kiri­bati, Tuvalu and Toke­lau – said they were “grave­ly con­cerned over the lack of effec­tive inter­na­tion­al response to cli­mate change” that posed “major exis­ten­tial chal­lenges” to their pop­u­la­tions and cul­tures.

They repeat­ed calls for an inter­na­tion­al body to be set up to coor­di­nate pop­u­la­tion move­ment caused by cli­mate change. The cre­ation of such a body was includ­ed in an ear­ly draft of a UN agree­ment to be nego­ti­at­ed at cli­mate talks in Paris in Decem­ber but the idea was dropped last week. Aus­tralia opposed it, although coun­tries includ­ing Britain, the US and France were open to the con­cept.

The coun­tries called for fund­ing for health and edu­ca­tion pro­grams, and aid to raise build­ings above pre­dict­ed sea lev­el increas­es and safe­guard water sup­plies from salt­wa­ter intru­sion.

Wealthy nations should “pre­pare our peo­ple for ‘migra­tion with dig­ni­ty’, capa­ble of con­tribut­ing to oth­er nations’ economies and devel­op­ment process­es as skilled migrant work­ers”, the Pacif­ic lead­ers said.
...

The UN refugee con­ven­tion applies only to those flee­ing per­se­cu­tion, but not peo­ple flee­ing due to cli­mate change. Will that change? Only time will tell, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that the wealth­i­est nations of the world have shown lit­tle inter­est so far:

...
There is no body that over­sees the order­ly move­ment of peo­ple because of cli­mate change impacts. The UN refugee con­ven­tion applies only to those flee­ing per­se­cu­tion, with lit­tle appetite among the rich­est nations to expand its def­i­n­i­tion to include “cli­mate refugees” – amid pre­dic­tions that up to 250 mil­lion peo­ple may be dis­placed world­wide by 2050.
...

It’s some­thing to keep in mind as the immi­gra­tion pol­i­cy debate plays out in the US. Don­ald Trump and the Repub­li­cans have made oppo­si­tion to refugees and a mas­sive shift in US immi­gra­tion pol­i­cy towards a pure­ly ‘mer­it-based’ sys­tem key demands in exchange for allow­ing the young ‘Dream­ers’ to stay. That’s a sys­tem pret­ty much designed to keep cli­mate change refugees out of the US. So will the US refuse to help the peo­ple in the future flee­ing from nations that are lit­er­al­ly being swal­lowed by the oceans? And what about the rest of the world? Will cli­mate change refugees become a new source of per­ma­nent­ly state­less peo­ple? Scat­tered around the world with min­i­mal to no rights because the coun­tries that guar­an­teed their rights are gone? We’ll see.

But it’s not just nations at risk of get­ting sub­merged by ris­ing oceans that are going to be sources of cli­mate change refugees. As the fol­low­ing arti­cle about the warn­ings Sher­ri Good­man, a for­mer US deputy under­sec­re­tary of defense, makes clear, there are going to be plen­ty of coun­tries that don’t dis­ap­pear under water that are still going to be gen­er­at­ing large num­bers of refugees. Bangladesh, for instance, isn’t going to dis­ap­pear. But it is going to expe­ri­ence mas­sive flood­ing that will dri­ve peo­ple out and into neigh­bor­ing coun­tries. And Syr­ia, which expe­ri­enced an intense drought in the lead up to its civ­il war, makes it clear that ter­ror groups and war­fare are going to thrive in coun­tries impact­ed by cli­mate change, result­ing in poten­tial­ly mas­sive num­bers of refugees.

So while the call by the Pacif­ic Island nations to set up a glob­al sys­tem for deal­ing with cli­mate change refugees is clear­ly a call to pro­tect their own peo­ple from a fore­see­able future exis­ten­tial threat, it’s not like island nations are the only places that will be gen­er­at­ing cli­mate change refugees. This is going to be a glob­al phe­nom­e­na:

The Guardian

‘Dis­as­ter alley’: Aus­tralia could be set to receive new wave of cli­mate refugees

US defence expert warns peo­ple flee­ing low-lying Pacif­ic islands a pre­cur­sor to ‘cli­mate-exac­er­bat­ed water inse­cu­ri­ties’ that could trig­ger wider con­flict

Ben Doher­ty

Tue 4 Apr 2017 16.00 EDT

Aus­tralia could be on the front­line of a new wave of “cli­mate refugees” dis­placed by extreme weath­er events, droughts and ris­ing seas, a US expert on the nation­al secu­ri­ty impacts of cli­mate change has warned.

Sher­ri Good­man, a for­mer US deputy under­sec­re­tary of defence, argues the impact of cli­mate change – ris­ing seas, extreme weath­er, pro­longed droughts – will be a “threat mul­ti­pli­er” for secu­ri­ty chal­lenges, and could be the spark that ignites con­flict and dri­ves new waves of mass forced migra­tion.

The Asia-Pacif­ic region was acute­ly vul­ner­a­ble, she said.

“You may be on the front­lines here in Aus­tralia for cli­mate refugees,” she told the Guardian in Syd­ney. “The first wave will be those who have to flee the low-lying Pacif­ic islands, because many of them will be unin­hab­it­able, even in our life­times.”

“But you’re also in ‘dis­as­ter alley’ here in the Asia-Pacif­ic region and while there have begun to be efforts to reduce risks of dis­as­ters, I’m con­cerned that we’re not act­ing as quick­ly as we should to pro­tect our soci­eties from those risks, which is going to mean more migra­tion.”

Good­man cit­ed the exam­ple of the ongo­ing civ­il war in Syr­ia, which has pro­duced more than five mil­lion refugees over six years of fight­ing.

But the polit­i­cal con­flict in Syr­ia was exac­er­bat­ed by a long-run­ning drought which drove peo­ple into food inse­cu­ri­ty, pover­ty and rapid, unsus­tain­able urban­i­sa­tion.

“From 2006 to 2010, 60% of Syr­ia had its worst long-term drought and crop fail­ures since civil­i­sa­tion began,” Good­man says. “About 800,000 peo­ple in rur­al areas lost their liveli­hood by 2009. Three mil­lion peo­ple were dri­ven into extreme pover­ty, and 1.5 mil­lion migrat­ed to cities.”

“Those con­di­tions enable ter­ror­ists like the Islam­ic State of Boko Haram in parts of Nige­ria or al-Qai­da in Iraq to rise and take advan­tage of des­per­ate peo­ple in des­per­ate cir­cum­stances.”

Good­man is care­ful not to posit cli­mate change as the sole cause of future con­flicts, but argues it will be a con­trib­u­to­ry, com­pound­ing fac­tor.

“Cli­mate is a threat mul­ti­pli­er because it aggra­vates oth­ers ten­sions and con­flicts that already exist.

“Cli­mate-exac­er­bat­ed water inse­cu­ri­ties could even­tu­al­ly become a tip­ping [point] to wider con­flict or insta­bil­i­ty in the region. We see this now play­ing out in var­i­ous ways around the world, but par­tic­u­lar­ly here in the Asia-Pacif­ic region.”

Region­al­ly, Good­man sees the exam­ple of Pak­istan and India, where his­tor­i­cal enmi­ty, long-run­ning reli­gious, polit­i­cal and cul­tur­al frac­tures, and ter­ri­to­r­i­al dis­putes over Kash­mir, could be reignit­ed by con­flict over water or oth­er resources.

Low-lying Bangladesh, the eighth-most pop­u­lous coun­try in the world with more than 160 mil­lion peo­ple, has been iden­ti­fied as being extreme­ly vul­ner­a­ble to cli­mate change, on some mea­sures the most vul­ner­a­ble coun­try in the world.

“Anoth­er extreme weath­er event, com­bined with sea-lev­el rise and storm surge, could send upwards up 10 mil­lion peo­ple or more along that low-lying coast­line in Bangladesh flee­ing towards high­er ground, which is towards India, which is build­ing a mas­sive wall to keep Bangladeshis out.

“I think that could cre­ate con­se­quences for which we’re cur­rent­ly unpre­pared. India shows no signs of want­i­ng or being able to absorb those num­bers of refugees. And then where do they flee? These are most­ly peo­ple who can’t afford to get on a cruise ship and leave. And if they can’t flee by land into India does that mean they, there’s either a mas­sive loss of life or head off in rick­ety boats, where they might lose their lives at sea.”

In 2008, the then pres­i­dent of the Mal­dives, Mohamed Nasheed, spec­u­lat­ed about buy­ing land in Aus­tralia in order to house his country’s pop­u­la­tion when the arch­i­pel­ago nation was con­sumed by the ris­ing Indi­an Ocean.

Under the glob­al stan­dard for refugee pro­tec­tion, the 1951 refugee con­ven­tion, there is no such thing as a “cli­mate change refugee”.

The refugee con­ven­tion, writ­ten in the after­math of the mas­sive dis­place­ment caused by the sec­ond world war, only recog­nis­es refugees dis­placed from their home coun­tries, and suf­fer­ing a “well-found­ed fear of per­se­cu­tion” on the grounds of race, reli­gion, nation­al­i­ty, mem­ber­ship of a par­tic­u­lar social group, or polit­i­cal opin­ion.

Some region­al treaties – such as Latin America’s Carta­ge­na dec­la­ra­tion – have a broad­er def­i­n­i­tion, recog­nis­ing as refugees peo­ple dis­placed by “cir­cum­stances which have seri­ous­ly dis­turbed pub­lic order”, which is tak­en to include nat­ur­al dis­as­ters and food inse­cu­ri­ty.

Good­man argues nation­al gov­ern­ments, and supra­na­tion­al organ­i­sa­tions, will need to redraw, or add to, the cur­rent glob­al pro­tec­tion frame­work.

“We do need to rethink the gov­er­nance for refugees bet­ter to reflect the types of refugees we face today. Cur­rent gov­er­nance struc­tures are just inad­e­quate for the mod­ern era.”

Gov­ern­ments and mil­i­taries around the world are becom­ing increas­ing­ly cog­nisant of the nation­al secu­ri­ty threat posed by cli­mate change.

In his con­fir­ma­tion hear­ing in Jan­u­ary, the US’s new sec­re­tary of defence, James Mat­tis, said cli­mate change posed a cur­rent secu­ri­ty threat to Amer­i­ca.

“Cli­mate change is impact­ing sta­bil­i­ty in areas of the world where our troops are oper­at­ing today. It is appro­pri­ate for the com­bat­ant com­mands to incor­po­rate dri­vers of insta­bil­i­ty that impact the secu­ri­ty envi­ron­ment in their areas into their plan­ning.”

In 2015, Australia’s Cli­mate Coun­cil released a report, co-authored by the for­mer chief of the Aus­tralian defence force, Chris Bar­rie, that argued cli­mate change “pos­es a sig­nif­i­cant and grow­ing threat to human and soci­etal well­be­ing, threat­en­ing food, water, health and nation­al secu­ri­ty”.

In 2016, the army chief, Angus Camp­bell, made cli­mate secu­ri­ty a focus of the annu­al chief of army’s exer­cise. He said cli­mate change was “imme­di­ate­ly rel­e­vant” for mil­i­taries and “the scale of cli­mate change prob­lems, their unpre­dictabil­i­ty, and the lev­el of sup­port required from land forces are key issues for us to bet­ter under­stand”.

The Cen­tre for Pol­i­cy Devel­op­ment pol­i­cy direc­tor, Rob Stur­rock, co-authored a report in 2015 argu­ing that Australia’s strug­gle to deal with cli­mate vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties domes­ti­cal­ly and across the region was the country’s “longest con­flict”.

The report rec­om­mend­ed the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment appoint a cli­mate secu­ri­ty advi­so­ry coun­cil, con­nect­ing the defence, envi­ron­ment and for­eign affairs depart­ments to devel­op a nation­al cli­mate secu­ri­ty strat­e­gy.

...

———–

“‘Dis­as­ter alley’: Aus­tralia could be set to receive new wave of cli­mate refugees” by Ben Doher­ty; The Guardian; 04/04/2017

“Sher­ri Good­man, a for­mer US deputy under­sec­re­tary of defence, argues the impact of cli­mate change – ris­ing seas, extreme weath­er, pro­longed droughts – will be a “threat mul­ti­pli­er” for secu­ri­ty chal­lenges, and could be the spark that ignites con­flict and dri­ves new waves of mass forced migra­tion.”

Yep, cli­mate change isn’t just about ris­ing oceans, big­ger floods, and longer droughts. It’s a gen­er­al threat mul­ti­pli­er that’s going to be mak­ing all sorts of crises more fre­quent and more intense. And for a coun­try like Aus­tralia, which is in a region of world with a huge pop­u­la­tion liv­ing along coast lines, cli­mate change is going to turn their neigh­bor­hood into ‘dis­as­ter alley’:

...
The Asia-Pacif­ic region was acute­ly vul­ner­a­ble, she said.

“You may be on the front­lines here in Aus­tralia for cli­mate refugees,” she told the Guardian in Syd­ney. “The first wave will be those who have to flee the low-lying Pacif­ic islands, because many of them will be unin­hab­it­able, even in our life­times.”

“But you’re also in ‘dis­as­ter alley’ here in the Asia-Pacif­ic region and while there have begun to be efforts to reduce risks of dis­as­ters, I’m con­cerned that we’re not act­ing as quick­ly as we should to pro­tect our soci­eties from those risks, which is going to mean more migra­tion.”
...

And as the exam­ple of Syr­ia makes clear, there’s going to be a lot of ‘dis­as­ter alleys’ all over the world. Wher­ev­er you find a bad sit­u­a­tion where extrem­ist groups might gain a foot hold today, it’s going to get worse in the future as the cli­mate sit­u­a­tion gets worse:

...
Good­man cit­ed the exam­ple of the ongo­ing civ­il war in Syr­ia, which has pro­duced more than five mil­lion refugees over six years of fight­ing.

But the polit­i­cal con­flict in Syr­ia was exac­er­bat­ed by a long-run­ning drought which drove peo­ple into food inse­cu­ri­ty, pover­ty and rapid, unsus­tain­able urban­i­sa­tion.

“From 2006 to 2010, 60% of Syr­ia had its worst long-term drought and crop fail­ures since civil­i­sa­tion began,” Good­man says. “About 800,000 peo­ple in rur­al areas lost their liveli­hood by 2009. Three mil­lion peo­ple were dri­ven into extreme pover­ty, and 1.5 mil­lion migrat­ed to cities.”

“Those con­di­tions enable ter­ror­ists like the Islam­ic State of Boko Haram in parts of Nige­ria or al-Qai­da in Iraq to rise and take advan­tage of des­per­ate peo­ple in des­per­ate cir­cum­stances.”
...

And as Good­man points out with Bangladesh, if the neigh­bor­ing coun­tries of a cli­mate change impact­ed nation are will­ing to take those refugees in, it’s very unclear what’s going to hap­pen to them if they aren’t allowed to flee by land oth­er than mass migra­tion by boats to whichev­er nation might take them:

...
Low-lying Bangladesh, the eighth-most pop­u­lous coun­try in the world with more than 160 mil­lion peo­ple, has been iden­ti­fied as being extreme­ly vul­ner­a­ble to cli­mate change, on some mea­sures the most vul­ner­a­ble coun­try in the world.

“Anoth­er extreme weath­er event, com­bined with sea-lev­el rise and storm surge, could send upwards up 10 mil­lion peo­ple or more along that low-lying coast­line in Bangladesh flee­ing towards high­er ground, which is towards India, which is build­ing a mas­sive wall to keep Bangladeshis out.

“I think that could cre­ate con­se­quences for which we’re cur­rent­ly unpre­pared. India shows no signs of want­i­ng or being able to absorb those num­bers of refugees. And then where do they flee? These are most­ly peo­ple who can’t afford to get on a cruise ship and leave. And if they can’t flee by land into India does that mean they, there’s either a mas­sive loss of life or head off in rick­ety boats, where they might lose their lives at sea.”
...

And this is all why some sort of update to the glob­al social con­tract is going to be required to take into account this loom­ing cri­sis of a steadi­ly-grow­ing pop­u­la­tion of state­less peo­ple:

...
The refugee con­ven­tion, writ­ten in the after­math of the mas­sive dis­place­ment caused by the sec­ond world war, only recog­nis­es refugees dis­placed from their home coun­tries, and suf­fer­ing a “well-found­ed fear of per­se­cu­tion” on the grounds of race, reli­gion, nation­al­i­ty, mem­ber­ship of a par­tic­u­lar social group, or polit­i­cal opin­ion.

Some region­al treaties – such as Latin America’s Carta­ge­na dec­la­ra­tion – have a broad­er def­i­n­i­tion, recog­nis­ing as refugees peo­ple dis­placed by “cir­cum­stances which have seri­ous­ly dis­turbed pub­lic order”, which is tak­en to include nat­ur­al dis­as­ters and food inse­cu­ri­ty.

Good­man argues nation­al gov­ern­ments, and supra­na­tion­al organ­i­sa­tions, will need to redraw, or add to, the cur­rent glob­al pro­tec­tion frame­work.
...

So how might the world respond to this future need to deal with mas­sive num­bers of refugees who can’t return home either because their home coun­try is unsafe or no longer above water? Well, as the fol­low­ing arti­cle describes, there are already all sorts of exper­i­ments under­way that could be seen as tem­plates for how the world deals with state­less peo­ple. But as the arti­cle also notes, those tem­plates can be pret­ty prob­lem­at­ic, either because they’re tai­lor-made to ser­vice the wealthy along, or tai­lor-made to ser­vice the poor in a way that ben­e­fits the wealthy. And some of those tem­plate look an awful lot of like the ‘char­ter city’ solu­tion. Char­ter cities specif­i­cal­ly set up to put refugees to work. For cheap:

The Atlantic

The Rise of Vir­tu­al Cit­i­zen­ship

In Cyprus, Esto­nia, the Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates, and else­where, pass­ports can now be bought and sold.

James Bri­dle
Feb 21, 2018

“If you believe you are a cit­i­zen of the world, you are a cit­i­zen of nowhere. You don’t under­stand what cit­i­zen­ship means,” the British prime min­is­ter, There­sa May, declared in Octo­ber 2016. Not long after, at his first post­elec­tion ral­ly, Don­ald Trump assert­ed, “There is no glob­al anthem. No glob­al cur­ren­cy. No cer­tifi­cate of glob­al cit­i­zen­ship. We pledge alle­giance to one flag and that flag is the Amer­i­can flag.” And in Hun­gary, Prime Min­is­ter Vik­tor Orbán has increased his nation­al-con­ser­v­a­tive party’s pop­u­lar­i­ty with state­ments like “all the ter­ror­ists are basi­cal­ly migrants” and “the best migrant is the migrant who does not come.”

Cit­i­zen­ship and its vary­ing legal def­i­n­i­tion has become one of the key bat­tle­grounds of the 21st cen­tu­ry, as nations attempt to stake out their pow­er in a G‑Zero, glob­al­ized world, one increas­ing­ly defined by transna­tion­al, bor­der­less trade and liq­uid, vir­tu­al finance. In a cli­mate of per­va­sive nation­al­ism, jin­go­ism, xeno­pho­bia, and ever-build­ing resent­ment toward those who move, it’s tempt­ing to think that doing so would become more dif­fi­cult. But along­side the rise of pop­ulist, iden­ti­tar­i­an move­ments across the globe, iden­ti­ty itself is being vir­tu­al­ized, too. It no longer needs to be tied to place or nation to func­tion in the glob­al mar­ket­place.

Han­nah Arendt called cit­i­zen­ship “the right to have rights.” Like any oth­er right, it can be bestowed and with­held by those in pow­er, but in its new­er forms it can also be bought, trad­ed, and rewrit­ten. Vir­tu­al cit­i­zen­ship is a com­mod­i­ty that can be acquired through the pur­chase of real estate or finan­cial invest­ments, sub­scribed to via an online ser­vice, or assem­bled by peer-to-peer dig­i­tal net­works. And as these options become avail­able, they’re also used, like so many tech­nolo­gies, to exclude those who don’t fit in.

***

In a world that increas­ing­ly oper­ates online, geog­ra­phy and phys­i­cal infra­struc­ture still remain cru­cial to con­trol and man­age­ment. Under­sea fiber-optic cables trace the lega­cy of impe­r­i­al trad­ing routes. Google and Face­book erect data cen­ters in Scan­di­navia and the Pacif­ic North­west, close to cheap hydro­elec­tric pow­er and nat­ur­al cool­ing. The trade in cit­i­zen­ship itself often man­i­fests local­ly as archi­tec­ture. From lux­u­ry apart­ments in the Caribbean and the Mediter­ranean to data cen­ters in Europe and refugee set­tle­ments in the Mid­dle East, a scat­tered geog­ra­phy of build­ings brings a dif­fer­ent real­i­ty into focus: one in which polit­i­cal deci­sions and nation­al laws trans­form phys­i­cal space into vir­tu­al ter­ri­to­ry.

The sparkling seafront of Limas­sol, the sec­ond-largest city in Cyprus, stretch­es for sev­er­al miles along the south­west­ern coast of the island. In recent years it has become par­tic­u­lar­ly pop­u­lar among Russ­ian tourists and emi­grants, who have set­tled in the area. Almost 20 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion is now Russ­ian-speak­ing. Along 28 Octo­ber Avenue, which bor­ders the seafront, new tow­ers have sprung up, as well as a mari­na and hous­ing com­plex, filled with inter­na­tion­al cof­fee and restau­rant chains. The 19-floor Olympic Res­i­dence tow­ers are the tallest res­i­den­tial build­ings on the island, along with the Oval build­ing, a 16-floor struc­ture shaped like its name. Soon a crop of new sky­scrap­ers will join them, includ­ing three 37- to 39-sto­ry tow­ers called Tril­o­gy and the 170-meter One build­ing. Each building’s web­site fea­tures text in Eng­lish, Russ­ian, and in sev­er­al cas­es, Chi­nese. China’s Juwai prop­er­ty por­tal lists oth­er, cheap­er options, from hill­side hol­i­day apart­ments to sprawl­ing vil­las. Many are illus­trat­ed with com­put­er renderings—they haven’t actu­al­ly been built yet.

The appeal of Limas­sol isn’t lim­it­ed to its excel­lent cli­mate and prox­im­i­ty to the ocean. The real attrac­tion, as many of the adver­tise­ments make clear, is cit­i­zen­ship. The prop­er­ties are prox­ies for a far more valu­able prize: a gold­en visa.

Visas are noth­ing new; they allow for­eign­ers to trav­el and work with­in a host nation’s bor­ders for vary­ing lengths of time. But the gold­en visa is a rel­a­tive­ly recent inno­va­tion. Pio­neered in the Caribbean, gold­en visas trade cit­i­zen­ship for cash by set­ting a price on pass­ports. If for­eign nation­als invest in prop­er­ty above a cer­tain price thresh­old, they can buy their way into a country—and beyond, once they hold a cit­i­zen­ship and pass­port.

A lux­u­ry hol­i­day home on Saint Kitts and Nevis or Grena­da in the West Indies might be use­ful for those look­ing to take advan­tage of those islands’ lib­er­al tax regimes. But a pass­port acquired through Cyprus’s gold­en-visa scheme makes the bear­er a cit­i­zen of the Euro­pean Union, with all the ben­e­fits that accrue there­with. More­over, there’s no require­ment to reside in or even to vis­it Cyprus. The whole busi­ness, includ­ing acqui­si­tion of suit­ably priced real estate, can be car­ried out with­out ever set­ting foot on the island. The real estate doesn’t even have to exist yet—it can be com­plete­ly vir­tu­al, just a com­put­er ren­der­ing on a web­site. All for just 2 mil­lion euros, the min­i­mum spend for the cit­i­zen­ship by invest­ment.

As a result, Cypri­ot real-estate web­sites are filled with invest­ment guides and details on how to apply for a new pass­port. This is the new era of vir­tu­al cit­i­zen­ship, where your papers and your identity—and all the rights that flow from them—owe more to legal frame­works and invest­ment vehi­cles than any par­tic­u­lar patch of ground where you might live.

Cyprus is a com­pelling loca­tion for such inter­na­tion­al games. Strate­gi­cal­ly anchored in the east­ern Mediter­ranean, the island has long been a cov­et­ed and con­test­ed ter­ri­to­ry. Through the cen­turies, it has been occu­pied by Frank­ish cru­saders, Venet­ian mer­chants, and Ottoman raiders. Since the Turk­ish inva­sion of 1974, Cyprus has been divid­ed into two ter­ri­to­ries: the strong­ly Greek-iden­ti­fied but inde­pen­dent Repub­lic of Cyprus in the south and west, and the dis­put­ed Turk­ish Repub­lic of North­ern Cyprus to the east. Anoth­er for­mer colo­nial pow­er, Britain, main­tains its own legal and inde­pen­dent ter­ri­to­ries on the island, the Sov­er­eign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dheke­lia.

Pow­er has often roost­ed here, poised to prey upon near­by ter­ri­to­ries. At one end of the island, fields of satel­lite dish­es at NSA/GCHQ’s Ayios Niko­laos Sta­tion keep a close watch on the Mid­dle East; at the oth­er end, across the bay from Limas­sol, U‑2 spy planes and RAF Tor­na­does bound for Syr­ia and North Africa roar out over the sea. In the case of the Limas­sol tow­ers, that pow­er is wealthy Russ­ian and Chi­nese investors with an eye on access­ing the Euro­pean Union. Mean­while, old­er res­i­dents of the city find them­selves cut off from the sea, their homes over­shad­owed, and most of the prof­its from the gold­en-visa scheme dis­ap­pear­ing into the pock­ets of law firms, devel­op­ers, and politi­cians.

Juwai, the Chi­nese por­tal, casts a wider eye than just Cyprus. Its web­site hosts a side-by-side com­par­i­son of var­i­ous gold­en-visa schemes, lay­ing out the costs and ben­e­fits of each, from the price of the invest­ment to how long buy­ers must wait for a new pass­port to come through. Not all the schemes are cre­at­ed equal­ly. Cyprus’s neigh­bor Greece has one of the cheap­est schemes going, with res­i­den­cy avail­able for just 250,000 euros. But that’s only residency—the right to stay in the country—not local, let alone EU, cit­i­zen­ship, which can take years to obtain and might nev­er be grant­ed. Some­times the schemes have gone awry, too. Some 400,000 for­eign investors in Portugal’s 500,000-euro gold­en-visa scheme have been left in lim­bo by bureau­crat­ic col­lapse, wait­ing years for a pass­port which was promised with­in months. Chi­nese home­own­ers have been forced to fly in and out of the coun­try every cou­ple of months in order to main­tain short-term visas, despite hav­ing paid thou­sands for prop­er­ty.

***

Oth­er real-estate schemes have fall­en into dis­re­pute thanks to even murki­er polit­i­cal arrange­ments. A decade ago, a Kuwait-backed com­pa­ny set out its stall on the tiny Indi­an Ocean arch­i­pel­ago of Comoros. As Atossa Arax­ia Abra­hami­an explains in her recent book, The Cos­mopo­lites, Comoro Gulf Hold­ings erect­ed bill­boards along the seafront of Grande Comore fea­tur­ing com­put­er ren­der­ings of busi­ness parks and lux­u­ry apart­ment com­plex­es designed to appeal to wealthy for­eign­ers in search of pass­ports. But the build­ings nev­er got off the draw­ing board. Instead, Comoros found itself entan­gled in a much shadier deal with the Gulf states. Hav­ing agreed to open up its cit­i­zen­ship to investors, the islands—or at least cer­tain mem­bers of their government—received huge pay­ments, most­ly from the Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates. But the pass­ports, sent over in bulk and fre­quent­ly sur­fac­ing on the black mar­ket, weren’t for Emi­ratis. Rather, they were for the Bidoon: the more than 100,000 peo­ple across the Gulf nations who, despite resid­ing in the region for gen­er­a­tions, have nev­er been includ­ed as cit­i­zens, and are effec­tive­ly state­less.

For years, the Gulf states have come under inter­na­tion­al pres­sure to address the issue of their state­less pop­u­la­tions. The Unit­ed Nations has declared that it wants to end state­less­ness by 2024. The mar­ket in cit­i­zen­ship pro­vid­ed a tempt­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty to resolve the prob­lem. Once again, peo­ple were giv­en the chance to acquire the pass­port and asso­ci­at­ed rights of a place they’d nev­er seen and where they prob­a­bly nev­er intend­ed to live. In this case, how­ev­er, they were more coerced than will­ing: Few Kuwaiti and Emi­rati Bidoon had ever heard of, let alone vis­it­ed, Comoros. Many were tricked into accept­ing when renew­ing oth­er doc­u­ments, or had trav­el per­mits and dri­ving licens­es held ran­som until they signed. While most have been allowed to remain in the Gulf, the acqui­si­tion of a pass­port means that trou­ble­some Bidoon—particularly those agi­tat­ing for bet­ter conditions—can be qui­et­ly shipped out of the coun­try.

The legal frame­works of vir­tu­al cit­i­zen­ship invert and glob­al­ize the log­ic of the spe­cial eco­nom­ic zone—a geo­graph­i­cal space of excep­tion, where the usu­al rules of state and finance don’t apply. Spe­cial eco­nom­ic zones are one of the key inno­va­tions of glob­al cap­i­tal­ism, stretch­ing back to the British Empire’s treaty ports in Chi­na and Japan in the 19th cen­tu­ry, and under­pin­ning the hyper-accel­er­at­ed growth of Shen­zhen and Dubai in the 21st. His­tor­i­cal­ly, they’ve been used to pro­tect com­mer­cial inter­ests and allow for wild exper­i­ments in indus­try and real estate, but increas­ing­ly they are being tout­ed as a solu­tion to issues of migra­tion and cit­i­zen­ship.

In Jor­dan, where most of the 650,000 Syr­i­an refugees are barred from jobs, the King Hus­sein Bin Talal Devel­op­ment Area has been set up on the out­skirts of the sprawl­ing Zaatari refugee camp. It is man­dat­ed to employ the refugees as a per­cent­age of its work­force. The zone is the result of the Jor­dan Com­pact: an agree­ment between the Hashemite King­dom and the Euro­pean Union to pro­vide jobs for refugees in return for spe­cial trade rules and access for Euro­pean com­pa­nies. Among the pro­posed launch part­ners are Ikea and the super­mar­ket giant Asda, who will get access to cheap labor, and whose pro­duced goods can be import­ed tax-free into Europe. The refugees, mean­while, are required to stay where they are. Their posi­tion is akin to the pass­port-trad­ing cos­mopo­lites in one respect: They are sub­jects of the glob­al­ized eco­nom­ic sys­tem more than cit­i­zens of a nation.

Oth­er states are explor­ing ways in which they can adjust their own cit­i­zen­ship laws to ben­e­fit from shift­ing pop­u­la­tions. The small Baltic nation of Esto­nia prides itself as the most wired nation on Earth, hav­ing spent decades invest­ing in new tech­nolo­gies and struc­tur­ing gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy to reward inno­va­tion and Sil­i­con Valley–style dis­rup­tion.

In 2014, the coun­try start­ed offer­ing a slice of its cit­i­zen­ship as a dig­i­tal ser­vice. Since then, it has reg­is­tered more than 30,000 e‑residents, who are per­mit­ted to open bank accounts, start com­pa­nies, sign doc­u­ments, and pay tax under Eston­ian juris­dic­tion and law. In 2017, a sec­tion of a data cen­ter in Lux­em­bourg was declared sov­er­eign Eston­ian ter­ri­to­ry to facil­i­tate the country’s first dig­i­tal embassy, which also func­tions as a secure, remote back­up for all of the country’s dig­i­tal records. The arrange­ment for e‑residents them­selves remains non-ter­ri­to­r­i­al: They gain no rights to live in Esto­nia, nor do they accrue any oth­er kind of phys­i­cal ben­e­fit. In the spir­it of inno­va­tion, the Eston­ian gov­ern­ment has unbun­dled the ser­vices expect­ed of such an arrange­ment. It amounts to a vir­tu­al mid­dle ground between cit­i­zen­ship and glob­al res­i­den­cy.

***

The world is in the midst of the great­est move­ment of peo­ple since the end of the World War II, and the com­bi­na­tion of increas­ing glob­al inequal­i­ty and cli­mate change will only increase its pace. Two hun­dred mil­lion peo­ple are on the move now, and as many as a bil­lion might become migra­to­ry by 2050. Cit­i­zen­ship, the only tool we have for guar­an­tee­ing rights and respon­si­bil­i­ties in a world of nation-states, is sub­ject to increas­ing pres­sure to adapt. Today’s vir­tu­al cit­i­zen­ship caters most­ly to the wealthy, or the poor. Could tomor­row pro­vide new oppor­tu­ni­ties for every­one? And if pos­si­ble, will the results look more like what’s been done for the glob­al elite or for the most dis­ad­van­taged?

For now, the weird enclaves of vir­tu­al­ized cit­i­zen­ship amount to an inter­na­tion­al, dis­trib­uted ver­sion of gentrification—the urban sce­nario in which those with resources dra­mat­i­cal­ly alter the social con­di­tions in a city, with lit­tle ben­e­fit accru­ing to those who were there already, or can­not enter. The vir­tu­al­iza­tion of cit­i­zen­ship most­ly ben­e­fits those whose indi­vid­ual, state-spon­sored sov­er­eign­ty doesn’t match their per­son­al wealth. At the same time, the same mech­a­nisms that allow Chi­nese cit­i­zens to estab­lish busi­ness­es in Esto­nia and legal res­i­den­cy in Cyprus, and thus the EU, also dis­em­pow­er and mar­gin­al­ize the state­less pop­u­la­tions of Emi­rati Bidoon and Syr­i­an refugees.

In prin­ci­ple, noth­ing would pre­vent the Eston­ian mod­el from being gen­er­al­ized to oth­er guar­an­tors of state pro­tec­tion, includ­ing wider legal rights and health care, which are of more con­cern to the less for­tu­nate. Esto­nia already runs its cit­i­zens’ health-care reg­istry on the blockchain—the cryp­to­graph­ic record that under­lies Bit­coin, but that can be applied beyond cur­ren­cy trans­ac­tions to ver­i­fy the authen­tic­i­ty of a record via com­pu­ta­tion­al “proof of work.” Blockchain health records allow both patients and med­ical prac­ti­tion­ers to access and review their data, while secure­ly track­ing who has access to it. Inde­pen­dent groups are fol­low­ing suit, with start-ups such as Bit­na­tion propos­ing a “peer-to-peer vol­un­tary gov­er­nance sys­tem” to replace the arbi­trari­ness of birth as the decider of one’s cit­i­zen­ship. Blockchain gov­er­nance could allow for the cre­ation of vir­tu­al cit­i­zen­ship and autonomous com­mu­ni­ties dis­tinct from ter­ri­to­r­i­al nation-states.

...

———-

“The Rise of Vir­tu­al Cit­i­zen­ship” by James Bri­dle; The Atlantic; 02/21/2018

“Cit­i­zen­ship and its vary­ing legal def­i­n­i­tion has become one of the key bat­tle­grounds of the 21st cen­tu­ry, as nations attempt to stake out their pow­er in a G‑Zero, glob­al­ized world, one increas­ing­ly defined by transna­tion­al, bor­der­less trade and liq­uid, vir­tu­al finance. In a cli­mate of per­va­sive nation­al­ism, jin­go­ism, xeno­pho­bia, and ever-build­ing resent­ment toward those who move, it’s tempt­ing to think that doing so would become more dif­fi­cult. But along­side the rise of pop­ulist, iden­ti­tar­i­an move­ments across the globe, iden­ti­ty itself is being vir­tu­al­ized, too. It no longer needs to be tied to place or nation to func­tion in the glob­al mar­ket­place.”

And that right there cap­tures an key ele­ment of what’s dri­ve the world today: in the mid­dle of a grow­ing glob­al cli­mate of the nativist side of right-wing thought — per­va­sive nation­al­ism, jin­go­ism, xeno­pho­bia, and ever-build­ing resent­ment toward those who move — we find a num­ber of nations play­ing around with rede­f­i­n­i­tions of cit­i­zen­ship that are much clos­er to the libertarian/open bor­ders side of right-wing thought. Either through schemes to sell cit­i­zen­ship to wealthy indi­vid­u­als on one end to set­ting up char­ter-cities that turn refugees into peo­ple ‘free’ to work in a spe­cial eco­nom­ic zone on the oth­er end. It’s a mul­ti-faceted glob­al rethink of cit­i­zen­ship. A mul­ti-faceted large­ly right-wing rethink of cit­i­zen­ship where it can also be bought, trad­ed, and rewrit­ten. Cit­i­zen­ship as a com­mod­i­ty. And, not sur­pris­ing­ly, blockchain tech­nol­o­gy is at the cen­ter of many of these schemes, tak­ing the con­cept of ‘vir­tu­al cit­i­zen­ship’ to the dig­i­tal realm:

...
Han­nah Arendt called cit­i­zen­ship “the right to have rights.” Like any oth­er right, it can be bestowed and with­held by those in pow­er, but in its new­er forms it can also be bought, trad­ed, and rewrit­ten. Vir­tu­al cit­i­zen­ship is a com­mod­i­ty that can be acquired through the pur­chase of real estate or finan­cial invest­ments, sub­scribed to via an online ser­vice, or assem­bled by peer-to-peer dig­i­tal net­works. And as these options become avail­able, they’re also used, like so many tech­nolo­gies, to exclude those who don’t fit in.
...

And it is per­haps some­what iron­ic that the inno­va­tion of ‘gold­en visas’, where cit­i­zen­ship can be out­right pur­chased by wealthy peo­ple, was pio­neered by island nations most at risk of ris­ing oceans. And for a coun­try like Cyprus, this ‘gold­en visa’ scheme does­n’t just buy a wealthy indi­vid­ual cit­i­zen­ship to Cyprus. It’s a gold­en visa for the Euro­pean Union. At the price of 2 mil­lion euros:

...
Visas are noth­ing new; they allow for­eign­ers to trav­el and work with­in a host nation’s bor­ders for vary­ing lengths of time. But the gold­en visa is a rel­a­tive­ly recent inno­va­tion. Pio­neered in the Caribbean, gold­en visas trade cit­i­zen­ship for cash by set­ting a price on pass­ports. If for­eign nation­als invest in prop­er­ty above a cer­tain price thresh­old, they can buy their way into a country—and beyond, once they hold a cit­i­zen­ship and pass­port.

A lux­u­ry hol­i­day home on Saint Kitts and Nevis or Grena­da in the West Indies might be use­ful for those look­ing to take advan­tage of those islands’ lib­er­al tax regimes. But a pass­port acquired through Cyprus’s gold­en-visa scheme makes the bear­er a cit­i­zen of the Euro­pean Union, with all the ben­e­fits that accrue there­with. More­over, there’s no require­ment to reside in or even to vis­it Cyprus. The whole busi­ness, includ­ing acqui­si­tion of suit­ably priced real estate, can be car­ried out with­out ever set­ting foot on the island. The real estate doesn’t even have to exist yet—it can be com­plete­ly vir­tu­al, just a com­put­er ren­der­ing on a web­site. All for just 2 mil­lion euros, the min­i­mum spend for the cit­i­zen­ship by invest­ment.
...

So that’s one rede­f­i­n­i­tion of cit­i­zen­ship that will have clear applic­a­bil­i­ty for cli­mate change refugees. Specif­i­cal­ly, very wealthy peo­ple.

But what about the non-wealthy? Well, there’s sort of a mid­dle-class ver­sion offered by Greece: for 250,000 euros you can pur­chase a right to res­i­den­cy. Not actu­al cit­i­zen­ship, but you can live there:

...
Juwai, the Chi­nese por­tal, casts a wider eye than just Cyprus. Its web­site hosts a side-by-side com­par­i­son of var­i­ous gold­en-visa schemes, lay­ing out the costs and ben­e­fits of each, from the price of the invest­ment to how long buy­ers must wait for a new pass­port to come through. Not all the schemes are cre­at­ed equal­ly. Cyprus’s neigh­bor Greece has one of the cheap­est schemes going, with res­i­den­cy avail­able for just 250,000 euros. But that’s only residency—the right to stay in the country—not local, let alone EU, cit­i­zen­ship, which can take years to obtain and might nev­er be grant­ed. Some­times the schemes have gone awry, too. Some 400,000 for­eign investors in Portugal’s 500,000-euro gold­en-visa scheme have been left in lim­bo by bureau­crat­ic col­lapse, wait­ing years for a pass­port which was promised with­in months. Chi­nese home­own­ers have been forced to fly in and out of the coun­try every cou­ple of months in order to main­tain short-term visas, despite hav­ing paid thou­sands for prop­er­ty.
...

And that gives us an idea of what sort of ‘mid­dle-class’ options might pop up as the num­ber of cli­mate refugees grows: coun­tries will start offer­ing ‘cit­i­zen­ship-lite’ or ‘non-cit­i­zen­ship rights to res­i­den­cy’. For a price that’s more in reach for the non-super-rich.

But 250,000 euros is still wild­ly out of reach for the vast major­i­ty of peo­ple in the world. So what about peo­ple with no chance of pay­ing sub­stan­tial fees? Well, as the sto­ry of the Kuwait-based scheme to get the island of Comoros to open its cit­i­zen­ship up for sale demon­strat­ed, it’s pos­si­ble that gov­ern­ments will pay the fee...possibly to get rid of peo­ple they’d rather see go. And in this case it was the already-state­less Bidoon: the more than 100,000 peo­ple across the Gulf nations who, despite resid­ing in the region for gen­er­a­tions, have nev­er been includ­ed as cit­i­zens, and are effec­tive­ly state­less. When the island of Comoros opened up is cit­i­zen­ship for sale, the UAE paid the island to take its state­less Bidoon:

...
Oth­er real-estate schemes have fall­en into dis­re­pute thanks to even murki­er polit­i­cal arrange­ments. A decade ago, a Kuwait-backed com­pa­ny set out its stall on the tiny Indi­an Ocean arch­i­pel­ago of Comoros. As Atossa Arax­ia Abra­hami­an explains in her recent book, The Cos­mopo­lites, Comoro Gulf Hold­ings erect­ed bill­boards along the seafront of Grande Comore fea­tur­ing com­put­er ren­der­ings of busi­ness parks and lux­u­ry apart­ment com­plex­es designed to appeal to wealthy for­eign­ers in search of pass­ports. But the build­ings nev­er got off the draw­ing board. Instead, Comoros found itself entan­gled in a much shadier deal with the Gulf states. Hav­ing agreed to open up its cit­i­zen­ship to investors, the islands—or at least cer­tain mem­bers of their government—received huge pay­ments, most­ly from the Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates. But the pass­ports, sent over in bulk and fre­quent­ly sur­fac­ing on the black mar­ket, weren’t for Emi­ratis. Rather, they were for the Bidoon: the more than 100,000 peo­ple across the Gulf nations who, despite resid­ing in the region for gen­er­a­tions, have nev­er been includ­ed as cit­i­zens, and are effec­tive­ly state­less.

For years, the Gulf states have come under inter­na­tion­al pres­sure to address the issue of their state­less pop­u­la­tions. The Unit­ed Nations has declared that it wants to end state­less­ness by 2024. The mar­ket in cit­i­zen­ship pro­vid­ed a tempt­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty to resolve the prob­lem. Once again, peo­ple were giv­en the chance to acquire the pass­port and asso­ci­at­ed rights of a place they’d nev­er seen and where they prob­a­bly nev­er intend­ed to live. In this case, how­ev­er, they were more coerced than will­ing: Few Kuwaiti and Emi­rati Bidoon had ever heard of, let alone vis­it­ed, Comoros. Many were tricked into accept­ing when renew­ing oth­er doc­u­ments, or had trav­el per­mits and dri­ving licens­es held ran­som until they signed. While most have been allowed to remain in the Gulf, the acqui­si­tion of a pass­port means that trou­ble­some Bidoon—particularly those agi­tat­ing for bet­ter conditions—can be qui­et­ly shipped out of the coun­try.

The legal frame­works of vir­tu­al cit­i­zen­ship invert and glob­al­ize the log­ic of the spe­cial eco­nom­ic zone—a geo­graph­i­cal space of excep­tion, where the usu­al rules of state and finance don’t apply. Spe­cial eco­nom­ic zones are one of the key inno­va­tions of glob­al cap­i­tal­ism, stretch­ing back to the British Empire’s treaty ports in Chi­na and Japan in the 19th cen­tu­ry, and under­pin­ning the hyper-accel­er­at­ed growth of Shen­zhen and Dubai in the 21st. His­tor­i­cal­ly, they’ve been used to pro­tect com­mer­cial inter­ests and allow for wild exper­i­ments in indus­try and real estate, but increas­ing­ly they are being tout­ed as a solu­tion to issues of migra­tion and cit­i­zen­ship.
...

And then there’s the tem­plate Syr­i­a’s refugees are fac­ing in Jor­dan, where 650,00 refugees are barred from jobs. Instead, refugees can find work in the King Hus­sein Bin Talal Devel­op­ment Area set up on the out­skirts of the Zaatari refugee camp where refugees can work under spe­cial trade rules for Euro­pean com­pa­nies:

...
In Jor­dan, where most of the 650,000 Syr­i­an refugees are barred from jobs, the King Hus­sein Bin Talal Devel­op­ment Area has been set up on the out­skirts of the sprawl­ing Zaatari refugee camp. It is man­dat­ed to employ the refugees as a per­cent­age of its work­force. The zone is the result of the Jor­dan Com­pact: an agree­ment between the Hashemite King­dom and the Euro­pean Union to pro­vide jobs for refugees in return for spe­cial trade rules and access for Euro­pean com­pa­nies. Among the pro­posed launch part­ners are Ikea and the super­mar­ket giant Asda, who will get access to cheap labor, and whose pro­duced goods can be import­ed tax-free into Europe. The refugees, mean­while, are required to stay where they are. Their posi­tion is akin to the pass­port-trad­ing cos­mopo­lites in one respect: They are sub­jects of the glob­al­ized eco­nom­ic sys­tem more than cit­i­zens of a nation.
...

Recall that Egypt­ian bil­lion­aire Naguib Sawiris pro­posed exact­ly this mod­el to deal with even more Syr­i­an refugees when he looked into buy­ing a Greek island so he could turn it into a spe­cial refugee work zone.

So that’s clear­ly going to be a very pop­u­lar approach to deal­ing with cli­mate refugees: spe­cial cheap labor work zones. They won’t get the full rights of cit­i­zen­ship. But they’ll get the right to be cheap labor in a spe­cial work zone. In oth­er words, they’ll get the right to live in a spe­cial cli­mate-change ‘char­ter city’.

And then there’s the dig­i­tal cit­i­zen­ship mod­el. A mod­el where those ele­ments of cit­i­zen­ship that can be han­dled entire­ly in the dig­i­tal domain — like the right to open bank accounts, start com­pa­nies, sign doc­u­ments, and pay tax under a nation’s juris­dic­tion — are avail­able for any­one in the world as a dig­i­tal ser­vice. It’s a mod­el cur­rent­ly being pushed by Esto­nia, but by no means lim­it­ed to Esto­nia. Because it’s a mod­el for soci­ety lib­er­tar­i­an anar­chists have long been pin­ing for: gov­ern­ment-for-hire, where you sign up for par­tic­u­lar gov­ern­ment ser­vices in a glob­al mar­ket­place of gov­ern­ment ser­vices:

...
Oth­er states are explor­ing ways in which they can adjust their own cit­i­zen­ship laws to ben­e­fit from shift­ing pop­u­la­tions. The small Baltic nation of Esto­nia prides itself as the most wired nation on Earth, hav­ing spent decades invest­ing in new tech­nolo­gies and struc­tur­ing gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy to reward inno­va­tion and Sil­i­con Valley–style dis­rup­tion.

In 2014, the coun­try start­ed offer­ing a slice of its cit­i­zen­ship as a dig­i­tal ser­vice. Since then, it has reg­is­tered more than 30,000 e‑residents, who are per­mit­ted to open bank accounts, start com­pa­nies, sign doc­u­ments, and pay tax under Eston­ian juris­dic­tion and law. In 2017, a sec­tion of a data cen­ter in Lux­em­bourg was declared sov­er­eign Eston­ian ter­ri­to­ry to facil­i­tate the country’s first dig­i­tal embassy, which also func­tions as a secure, remote back­up for all of the country’s dig­i­tal records. The arrange­ment for e‑residents them­selves remains non-ter­ri­to­r­i­al: They gain no rights to live in Esto­nia, nor do they accrue any oth­er kind of phys­i­cal ben­e­fit. In the spir­it of inno­va­tion, the Eston­ian gov­ern­ment has unbun­dled the ser­vices expect­ed of such an arrange­ment. It amounts to a vir­tu­al mid­dle ground between cit­i­zen­ship and glob­al res­i­den­cy.

In prin­ci­ple, noth­ing would pre­vent the Eston­ian mod­el from being gen­er­al­ized to oth­er guar­an­tors of state pro­tec­tion, includ­ing wider legal rights and health care, which are of more con­cern to the less for­tu­nate. Esto­nia already runs its cit­i­zens’ health-care reg­istry on the blockchain—the cryp­to­graph­ic record that under­lies Bit­coin, but that can be applied beyond cur­ren­cy trans­ac­tions to ver­i­fy the authen­tic­i­ty of a record via com­pu­ta­tion­al “proof of work.” Blockchain health records allow both patients and med­ical prac­ti­tion­ers to access and review their data, while secure­ly track­ing who has access to it. Inde­pen­dent groups are fol­low­ing suit, with start-ups such as Bit­na­tion propos­ing a “peer-to-peer vol­un­tary gov­er­nance sys­tem” to replace the arbi­trari­ness of birth as the decider of one’s cit­i­zen­ship. Blockchain gov­er­nance could allow for the cre­ation of vir­tu­al cit­i­zen­ship and autonomous com­mu­ni­ties dis­tinct from ter­ri­to­r­i­al nation-states.
...

Yep, the Eston­ian ‘vir­tu­al cit­i­zen­ship’ mod­el is basi­cal­ly a nation­al show­case for the anar­cho-cap­i­tal­ist mod­el for soci­ety. A mod­el that the peo­ple behind Bit­na­tion are very open about, where var­i­ous author­i­ties will basi­cal­ly sell ser­vice, like cer­ti­fy­ing mar­riage cer­tifi­cates, or stor­ing your dig­i­tal prop­er­ty in a dig­i­tal juris­dic­tion where you have extreme­ly strong pri­va­cy rights (‘Swiss banks’ for dig­i­tal infor­ma­tion). And a mod­el that, obvi­ous­ly, will have lim­it­ed appeal to des­per­ate refugees sim­ply look­ing for a place to live. Such peo­ple need the abil­i­ty to actu­al­ly live some­where, not piece­meal cit­i­zen­ship in a ‘dig­i­tal char­ter cities’.

So, as can see, there is indeed a rethink­ing of cit­i­zen­ship hap­pen­ing around the globe at the same that that cli­mate change is threat­en­ing to force human­i­ty to respond to grow­ing waves of essen­tial­ly state­less peo­ple. But that rethink­ing appears to be lim­it­ed things like sell­ing ‘gold­en visas’ to the wealthy, to sell­ing dig­i­tal cit­i­zen­ship ser­vices to the mass­es, to set­ting up spe­cial eco­nom­ic zones that turn refugees into cheap labor for inter­na­tion­al cor­po­ra­tions. In oth­er words, a for-prof­it rethink­ing of cit­i­zen­ship and rights.

It’s a reminder that soci­ety’s slav­ish ded­i­ca­tion to prof­it above all is one of the biggest areas of soci­ety that’s going to require a rethink­ing in order to deal with the tumult of cli­mate change. So if future win­ter Olympics could include a ‘rethink­ing soci­ety around non-prof­it-max­i­miz­ing mod­els’ com­pe­ti­tion that would be real­ly great new sport to watch. A sport ded­i­cat­ed to con­vinc­ing soci­eties to take cli­mate change seri­ous­ly before the full cat­a­stroph­ic effects are felt would also be a real­ly cap­ti­vat­ing.

It was just a mat­ter of time: Check out the lat­est GOP to address pover­ty in Amer­i­ca. Yep, char­ter cities. Although in this case they’ll be called ‘microc­i­ties’. But the idea is basi­cal­ly the same. And that idea was at the core of what Naved Jafry, who was con­tract­ed by the Depart­ment of Hous­ing and Urban devel­op­ment to pro­mote this ‘microc­i­ties’ idea as a way of address­ing pover­ty in Amer­i­c­as cities. Pri­va­tiz­ing poor areas. That appears to be the plan.

But the plan ran into a prob­lem. It turns out Jafry is a fraud (sur­prise!):

The Guardian

US hous­ing depart­ment advis­er quits amid ques­tions of fraud and inflat­ed biog­ra­phy

Naved Jafry, who called for rad­i­cal pri­va­ti­za­tion to fix America’s cities, steps down fol­low­ing inquiry from the Guardian about his record

Jon Swaine in New York

Thu 15 Mar 2018 13.39 EDT
Last mod­i­fied on Thu 15 Mar 2018 16.34 EDT

He said he was a mul­ti­mil­lion­aire – an inter­na­tion­al prop­er­ty devel­op­er with a plan to fix America’s cities through rad­i­cal pri­va­ti­za­tion. He felt that Don­ald Trump’s admin­is­tra­tion was where he was meant to work.

“It was a nat­ur­al fit,” Naved Jafry said in an inter­view. Cit­ing con­nec­tions across the mil­i­tary, busi­ness and acad­e­mia, he said: “I bring, and draw on, expe­ri­ences from dif­fer­ent areas of knowl­edge, like a poly­math.”

Jafry was con­tract­ed to work for Trump’s hous­ing and urban devel­op­ment depart­ment (Hud). His gov­ern­ment email sig­na­ture said his title was senior advis­er. Jafry said he used his role to advo­cate for “microc­i­ties”, where man­agers pri­vate­ly set their own laws and tax­es away from cen­tral gov­ern­ment con­trol.

But those plans are now stalled. Jafry, 38, said he had resigned from his posi­tion with Hud after the Guardian asked him to explain mul­ti­ple alle­ga­tions of fraud as well as exag­ger­a­tions in his biog­ra­phy.

Jafry, who has also been known by Jafari and Jafri, apol­o­gised for inflat­ing his mil­i­tary record but denied mak­ing oth­er false claims. He said he resigned because the Guardian’s ques­tions tar­nished his rep­u­ta­tion inside Hud.

...

Hud declined to dis­cuss Jafry. The find­ing may present a new prob­lem for Hud sec­re­tary Ben Car­son. On Thurs­day, Sarah Sanders, Trump’s press sec­re­tary, said the White House was “look­ing into” a con­tro­ver­sy around a $31,000 fur­ni­ture set ordered for Carson’s office. After Car­son claimed he had no involve­ment, emails releasedon Wednes­day said he and his wife actu­al­ly “picked out” the set.

Styling him­self as an “entre­pre­neur and phil­an­thropist”, Jafry said he con­trolled a mul­ti­mil­lion-dol­lar trust fund built since 1885 by rel­a­tives in India. Accord­ing to court records, how­ev­er, he strug­gled to pay rent and bills while engag­ing in a series of failed takeovers of gas sta­tions and oth­er ven­tures in Texas over the past decade.

In Novem­ber 2013, a judge ordered Jafry and a fuel com­pa­ny he chaired to repay more than $800,000 to the fam­i­ly of Alfred Ogles­by, a for­mer NFL play­er and investor in the fuel firm, who died in 2009. Oglesby’s wid­ow accused Jafry of fraud. Jafry has not paid the mon­ey. Debt col­lec­tors said they had been try­ing to locate him for years.

David Freed­man, an attor­ney for Oglesby’s fam­i­ly, said he was sur­prised Jafry had resur­faced in an influ­en­tial role in the gov­ern­ment. “If he is advis­ing Don­ald Trump we’re screwed – we should just sur­ren­der to North Korea right now,” said Freed­man.

Jafry denied the lawsuit’s alle­ga­tions. He said he nev­er received Oglesby’s invest­ment, so he didn’t owe Oglesby’s fam­i­ly mon­ey.

Hav­ing arrived in the US in about 2005, Jafry was the sub­ject of sev­er­al oth­er legal actions in Texas. Own­ers of gas sta­tions that Jafry tried to buy sued him and his busi­ness asso­ciates, repeat­ed­ly accus­ing Jafry of fraud and breach­ing con­tracts.

Jafry denied wrong­do­ing. Two law­suits were set­tled; a third was dis­missed after Jafry did not respond and the plain­tiffs failed to locate him. He said the deals col­lapsed because one own­er made false claims about his prop­er­ty, while anoth­er failed to dis­close that near­by con­struc­tion work would harm trade.

In Feb­ru­ary 2008, Jafry drew up a list of his hold­ings that said his per­son­al wealth totalled $18.3m. The doc­u­ment, which was lat­er filed to court, attrib­uted most of his wealth to 164 acres of res­i­den­tial land in Mum­bai, where he was raised.

Yet after the fil­ing of an evic­tion law­suit in Sep­tem­ber 2010, Jafry was ordered by a Texas court to leave his four-bed­room home in Rich­mond and give the land­lord $10,000, after fail­ing to pay rent for sev­en months. He was also sued by the local pow­er com­pa­ny after fail­ing to pay his $4,300 bill.

Jafry said the 2008 doc­u­ment was accu­rate at the time, but that his wealth had since evap­o­rat­ed because his claim to the Mum­bai land was revoked by rel­a­tives unhap­py with his trou­bled US ven­tures. He said he had already left the rent­ed house when the evic­tion law­suit was filed after being unsat­is­fied with the prop­er­ty.

Ini­tial­ly, Jafry told the Guardian he had been hired to work on Hud’s envi­sion cen­ters, which work to reduce the num­ber of peo­ple depen­dent on pub­lic hous­ing. He lat­er said he had not worked there after all, but declined to explain. Hud declined repeat­ed requests to clar­i­fy what Jafry worked on.

Asked in the ear­li­er inter­view whether he had dis­cussed microc­i­ties with Car­son, Jafry said: “We are work­ing on a polit­i­cal solu­tion on this.” Jafry said he had met Don­ald Trump before the 2016 elec­tion in “a gen­er­al set­ting”, but declined to elab­o­rate.

In addi­tion to Jafry’s finan­cial issues, a series of mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tions or exag­ger­a­tions were found in a review of his per­son­al web­site, oth­er online sources and bio­graph­i­cal infor­ma­tion he pro­vid­ed.

Dur­ing an inter­view, Jafry described him­self as a vet­er­an of the US army and said he was deployed to Koso­vo. When con­front­ed with his ser­vice record, though, he said he in fact served as a reservist in the army nation­al guard, and remained in Cal­i­for­nia while giv­ing logis­tics sup­port to col­leagues in Koso­vo.

A ver­sion of Jafry’s biog­ra­phy on his web­site said he held a degree in law and alter­na­tive dis­pute res­o­lu­tion from Nation­al Uni­ver­si­ty in La Jol­la, Cal­i­for­nia. Prof Jack Ham­lin, chair­man of National’s depart­ment of pro­fes­sion­al stud­ies, said: “We do not offer a ‘law degree’.” He declined to dis­cuss Jafry’s case. Jafry lat­er said he received a BA in pre-law stud­ies.

Jafry has said that before arriv­ing in the US, he made mil­lions in the hos­pi­tal­i­ty indus­try in Africa. An SEC fil­ing from Octo­ber 2007 said Jafry was a “found­ing part­ner” of the Marakane­lo Hotel Group in Botswana. His for­mer web­site biog­ra­phy said he had owned a group of safari resorts and hotels in Africa which had “merged with Marakane­lo Hotels”, secur­ing him a $7.5m wind­fall.

But Sibo Gumpo, the group com­mer­cial man­ag­er of Crest Hotels, which oper­ates the Marakane­lo sites, said in a series of emails that this was not the case. “We do not have a record of the trans­ac­tion,” said Gumpo.

Jafry has over recent years led a series of small ener­gy-relat­ed com­pa­nies oper­at­ing under vari­ants of the name Zeons.

Among the projects list­ed on the Zeons web­site under Jafry’s “microc­i­ties” brand­ing is a res­i­den­tial prop­er­ty devel­op­ment in Chester coun­ty, Penn­syl­va­nia, named the Sus­sex Estates. But this is not a microc­i­ty. Accord­ing to pub­lic records, it is owned by Ram Naidu, a retired doc­tor.

“Naved does not have any finan­cial inter­est in the Sus­sex devel­op­ment,” Sukhi Singh, who assist­ed Naidu, said in an email. Singh said Naidu was a friend of Jafry’s moth­er. Jafry said he had a ver­bal agree­ment to pro­mote the devel­op­ment.

Raf­fi Williams, a Hud spokesman, said in an email that Jafry was hired through Accel Cor­po­ra­tion, a con­trac­tor. When this was put to Sta­cye Loman, the own­er of Accel Cor­po­ra­tion, she said in an email: “That is an incor­rect state­ment.” Loman then gave the names of two dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies that she said had hired Jafry. She did not answer when asked if these had been sub­con­tract­ed by her com­pa­ny.

Williams stressed that Hud’s con­tract with Accel “was pro­cured in 2015”. While Accel did begin pro­vid­ing ser­vices to Hud under the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion in 2015, pub­lic records said Hud signed con­tracts for $2.1m worth of ser­vices from Accel in 2017 under Trump and Car­son.

One record said Accel signed an $800,000 deal with Hud on 26 Sep­tem­ber 2017 to “pro­vide expert guid­ance” in help­ing senior Hud offi­cials “to embrace change and pro­vide dynam­ic lead­er­ship”. Jafry said he began work for Hud in Octo­ber 2017.

———-

“US hous­ing depart­ment advis­er quits amid ques­tions of fraud and inflat­ed biog­ra­phy” by Jon Swaine; The Guardian; 03/15/2018

“David Freed­man, an attor­ney for Oglesby’s fam­i­ly, said he was sur­prised Jafry had resur­faced in an influ­en­tial role in the gov­ern­ment. “If he is advis­ing Don­ald Trump we’re screwed – we should just sur­ren­der to North Korea right now,” said Freed­man.”

“If he is advis­ing Don­ald Trump we’re screwed – we should just sur­ren­der to North Korea right now.” And that’s the kind of impres­sion Naved Jafry appears to leave peo­ple with. He’s so rot­ten it’s a sign of doom if he’s advis­ing the Trump admin­is­tra­tion. And yet he is indeed doing so. Or at least was until all these ques­tions were raised and he resigned.

And that sense of civic doom appears to be war­rant­ed when you look at the kind of advice Jafry was giv­ing HUD: “microc­i­ties” (Char­ter Cities) for Amer­i­ca’s poor. That lit­er­al­ly appears to be his role at HUD: advo­cat­ing for microc­i­ties:

...
Jafry was con­tract­ed to work for Trump’s hous­ing and urban devel­op­ment depart­ment (Hud). His gov­ern­ment email sig­na­ture said his title was senior advis­er. Jafry said he used his role to advo­cate for “microc­i­ties”, where man­agers pri­vate­ly set their own laws and tax­es away from cen­tral gov­ern­ment con­trol.

But those plans are now stalled. Jafry, 38, said he had resigned from his posi­tion with Hud after the Guardian asked him to explain mul­ti­ple alle­ga­tions of fraud as well as exag­ger­a­tions in his biog­ra­phy.
...

“Jafry said he used his role to advo­cate for “microc­i­ties”, where man­agers pri­vate­ly set their own laws and tax­es away from cen­tral gov­ern­ment con­trol.”

And when asked whether or not he actu­al­ly dis­cussed this with HUD direc­tor Ben Car­son, Jafry indi­cat­ed that, yes, he had and they were work­ing on “a polit­i­cal solu­tion on this.” In oth­er words, they were try­ing to fig­ure out how to sell the Amer­i­can pub­lic on the idea of pri­va­tiz­ing their own gov­ern­ment:

...
Ini­tial­ly, Jafry told the Guardian he had been hired to work on Hud’s envi­sion cen­ters, which work to reduce the num­ber of peo­ple depen­dent on pub­lic hous­ing. He lat­er said he had not worked there after all, but declined to explain. Hud declined repeat­ed requests to clar­i­fy what Jafry worked on.

Asked in the ear­li­er inter­view whether he had dis­cussed microc­i­ties with Car­son, Jafry said: “We are work­ing on a polit­i­cal solu­tion on this.” Jafry said he had met Don­ald Trump before the 2016 elec­tion in “a gen­er­al set­ting”, but declined to elab­o­rate.
...

And don’t for­get that, while such a plan would be ped­dled to the pub­lic as a plan for ‘help­ing’ Amer­i­ca’s poor, it’s not like you could lim­it the ‘microc­i­ty’ rules to just include the poor. It would have to include every­one liv­ing in that geo­graph­ic area that gets des­ig­nat­ed a ‘microc­i­ty.’ So despite the fact that Amer­i­cans love ‘kick­ing the poor’, this would be a plan that involves pri­va­tiz­ing gov­ern­ment for a lot more peo­ple than just the poor so the pol­i­tics could be extra tricky. Amer­i­ca’s inner cities would become pri­vate cor­po­rate fief­doms. That could be a tough sale.

So did Jafry actu­al­ly have any expe­ri­ence with char­ter cities/microcities? Uh, no, but that did­n’t stop him from claim­ing he did:

...
Jafry has over recent years led a series of small ener­gy-relat­ed com­pa­nies oper­at­ing under vari­ants of the name Zeons.

Among the projects list­ed on the Zeons web­site under Jafry’s “microc­i­ties” brand­ing is a res­i­den­tial prop­er­ty devel­op­ment in Chester coun­ty, Penn­syl­va­nia, named the Sus­sex Estates. But this is not a microc­i­ty. Accord­ing to pub­lic records, it is owned by Ram Naidu, a retired doc­tor.

“Naved does not have any finan­cial inter­est in the Sus­sex devel­op­ment,” Sukhi Singh, who assist­ed Naidu, said in an email. Singh said Naidu was a friend of Jafry’s moth­er. Jafry said he had a ver­bal agree­ment to pro­mote the devel­op­ment.
...

And how did he end up at HUD in the first place? Well, that’s not entire­ly clear. Because the rel­e­vant par­ties don’t real­ly want to talk about it:

...
Raf­fi Williams, a Hud spokesman, said in an email that Jafry was hired through Accel Cor­po­ra­tion, a con­trac­tor. When this was put to Sta­cye Loman, the own­er of Accel Cor­po­ra­tion, she said in an email: “That is an incor­rect state­ment.” Loman then gave the names of two dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies that she said had hired Jafry. She did not answer when asked if these had been sub­con­tract­ed by her com­pa­ny.

Williams stressed that Hud’s con­tract with Accel “was pro­cured in 2015”. While Accel did begin pro­vid­ing ser­vices to Hud under the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion in 2015, pub­lic records said Hud signed con­tracts for $2.1m worth of ser­vices from Accel in 2017 under Trump and Car­son.

One record said Accel signed an $800,000 deal with Hud on 26 Sep­tem­ber 2017 to “pro­vide expert guid­ance” in help­ing senior Hud offi­cials “to embrace change and pro­vide dynam­ic lead­er­ship”. Jafry said he began work for Hud in Octo­ber 2017.

So it looks like Amer­i­ca’s cities dodged a bul­let. But giv­en that this idea was even under con­sid­er­a­tion, and giv­en how much this aligns with the GOP’s long-stand­ing dri­ve to pri­va­tize as much as pos­si­ble, it’s hard to imag­ine that this isn’t going to come up again. Over and over. After all, it’s a poten­tial­ly great (hor­ri­ble) sales pitch for the far right dream of pri­vate­ly owned soci­eties if they can some­how pull off an appar­ent ‘suc­cess’ sto­ry.

And what will Amer­i­cans con­sid­er a ‘suc­cess’ when it comes to out­sourc­ing the gov­ern­ment in poor areas? We’ll find out, but we’ve prob­a­bly seen this movie before.