By Norman Solomon
SAN FRANCISCO, USA, Jan 15 2024 – Have you heard the one about the U.S. government wanting a “rules-based international order”?

It’s grimly laughable, but the nation’s media outlets routinely take such claims seriously and credulously. Overall, the default assumption is that top officials in Washington are reluctant to go to war, and do so only as a last resort.

The framing was typical when the New York Times just printed this sentence at the top of the front page: “The United States and a handful of its allies on Thursday carried out military strikes against more than a dozen targets in Yemen controlled by the Iranian-backed Houthi militia, U.S. officials said, in an expansion of the war in the Middle East that the Biden administration had sought to avoid for three months.”

So, from the outset, the coverage portrayed the U.S.-led attack as a reluctant action — taken after exploring all peaceful options had failed — rather than an aggressive act in violation of international law.

On Thursday, President Biden issued a statement that sounded righteous enough, saying “these strikes are in direct response to unprecedented Houthi attacks against international maritime vessels in the Red Sea.”

He did not mention that the Houthi attacks have been in response to Israel’s murderous siege of Gaza. In the words of CNN, they “could be intended to inflict economic pain on Israel’s allies in the hope they will pressure it to cease its bombardment of the enclave.”

In fact, as Common Dreams reported, Houthi forces “began launching missiles and drones toward Israel and attacking shipping traffic in the Red Sea in response to Israel’s Gaza onslaught.” And as Trita Parsi at the Quincy Institute pointed out, “the Houthis have declared that they will stop” attacking ships in the Red Sea “if Israel stops” its mass killing in Gaza.

But that would require genuine diplomacy — not the kind of solution that appeals to President Biden or Secretary of State Antony Blinken. The duo has been enmeshed for decades, with lofty rhetoric masking the tacit precept that might makes right. (The approach was implicit midway through 2002, when then-Senator Biden chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s hearings that promoted support for the U.S. to invade Iraq; at the time, Blinken was the committee’s chief of staff.)

Now, in charge of the State Department, Blinken is fond of touting the need for a “rules-based international order.” During a 2022 speech in Washington, he proclaimed the necessity “to manage relations between states, to prevent conflict, to uphold the rights of all people.” Two months ago, he declared that G7 nations were united for “a rules-based international order.”

But for more than three months, Blinken has provided a continuous stream of facile rhetoric to support the ongoing methodical killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Days ago, behind a podium at the U.S. Embassy in Israel, he defended that country despite abundant evidence of genocidal warfare, claiming that “the charge of genocide is meritless.”

The Houthis are avowedly in solidarity with Palestinian people, while the U.S. government continues to massively arm the Israeli military that is massacring civilians and systematically destroying Gaza.

Blinken is so immersed in Orwellian messaging that — several weeks into the slaughter — he tweeted that the United States and its G7 partners “stand united in our condemnation of Russia’s war in Ukraine, in support of Israel’s right to defend itself in accordance with international law, and in maintaining a rules-based international order.”

There’s nothing unusual about extreme doublethink being foisted on the public by the people running U.S. foreign policy. What they perpetrate is a good fit for the description of doublethink in George Orwell’s novel 1984: “To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it . . .”

After news broke about the attack on Yemen, a number of Democrats and Republicans in the House quickly spoke up against Biden’s end-run around Congress, flagrantly violating the Constitution by going to war on his own say-so.

Some of the comments were laudably clear, but perhaps none more so than a statement by candidate Joe Biden on Jan. 6, 2020: “A president should never take this nation to war without the informed consent of the American people.”

Like that disposable platitude, all the Orwellian nonsense coming from the top of the U.S. government about seeking a “rules-based international order” is nothing more than a brazen PR scam.

The vast quantity of official smoke-blowing now underway cannot hide the reality that the United States government is the most powerful and dangerous outlaw nation in the world.

Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including War Made Easy. His latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, was published in 2023 by The New Press.

IPS UN Bureau

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By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 15 2024 – The world’s rich are getting progressively richer while the world’s poor continue to be increasingly poorer.

In a new report released January 15, Oxfam says the wealth of the world’s five richest men has doubled since 2020 –even as five billion people were made poorer in a “decade of division.”

The study, published to coincide with the World Economic Forum in Davos, an annual gathering of mostly the world’s wealthiest and business elites, lists the top five billionaires: Elon Musk $245.5 billion, Bernard Arnault and family $191.3 billion, Jeff Bezos $167.4 billion, Larry Ellison $145.5 billion and Warren Buffett $119.2 billion— totaling about $869 billion in assets.

The fortunes of the five richest men have shot up by 114 percent since 2020 while the world’s poorest will not be eradicated for another 229 years, said Oxfam, a global organization that fights inequality to end poverty and injustice.

Oxfam predicts the world could have its first-ever trillionaire in just a decade while it would take more than two centuries to end poverty.

Asked about the status of women in a world of rising economic inequalities, Rebecca Riddell, policy lead for economic and racial justice at Oxfam America, told IPS: “Women pay the highest price for a broken global economy”.

Globally, she pointed out, men own US$105 trillion more wealth than women—equivalent to more than four times the size of the US economy—and women earn just 51 cents for every $1 made by men.

“Women are also especially harmed by the policies that fuel our inequality crisis, like tax breaks for the rich and cuts to public services,” said Riddell, one of the authors of the Oxfam report on inequality and global corporate power.

They carry out the vast majority of unpaid care work, which is vital to keeping our communities and economies afloat, and their labor is constantly undervalued in the workplace, she noted.

“We found it would take 1,200 years for women working in the health and social sector to earn what the average CEO at the biggest Fortune 100 companies makes in just one year,” declared Riddell.

Oxfam urges a new era of public action, including public services, corporate regulation, breaking up monopolies and enacting permanent wealth and excess profit taxes.

The study reveals that seven out of ten of the world’s biggest corporations have a billionaire as CEO or principal shareholder. These corporations are worth $10.2 trillion, equivalent to more than the combined GDPs of all countries in Africa and Latin America.

“We’re witnessing the beginnings of a decade of division, with billions of people shouldering the economic shockwaves of pandemic, inflation and war, while billionaires’ fortunes boom. This inequality is no accident; the billionaire class is ensuring corporations deliver more wealth to them at the expense of everyone else,” said Oxfam International interim Executive Director Amitabh Behar.

“Runaway corporate and monopoly power is an inequality-generating machine: through squeezing workers, dodging tax, privatizing the state, and spurring climate breakdown, corporations are funneling endless wealth to their ultra-rich owners. But they’re also funneling power, undermining our democracies and our rights. No corporation or individual should have this much power over our economies and our lives —to be clear, nobody should have a billion dollars,” he noted.

The study also singles out the following:

– Despite representing just 21 percent of the global population, rich countries in the Global North own 69 percent of global wealth and are home to 74 percent of the world’s billionaire wealth.
– Share ownership overwhelmingly benefits the richest. The top 1 percent own 43 percent of all global financial assets. They hold 48 percent of financial wealth in the Middle East, 50 percent in Asia and 47 percent in Europe.

Mirroring the fortunes of the super-rich, large firms are set to smash their annual profit records in 2023. 148 of the world’s biggest corporations together raked in $1.8 trillion in total net profits in the year to June 2023, a 52 percent jump compared to average net profits in 2018-2021.

Their windfall profits surged to nearly $700 billion. The report finds that for every $100 of profit made by 96 major corporations between July 2022 and June 2023, $82 was paid out to rich shareholders.

Bernard Arnault, the world’s second richest man who presides over luxury goods empire LVMH, has been fined by France‘s anti-trust body. He also owns France’s biggest media outlet, Les Échos, as well as Le Parisien.

Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest person, holds a “near-monopoly” on cement in Nigeria. His empire’s expansion into oil has raised concerns about a new private monopoly.

Jeff Bezos’s fortune of $167.4 billion increased by $32.7 billion since the beginning of the decade. The US government has sued Amazon, the source of Bezos’ fortune, for wielding its “monopoly power” to hike prices, degrade service for shoppers and stifle competition.

“Monopolies harm innovation and crush workers and smaller businesses. The world hasn’t forgotten how pharma monopolies deprived millions of people of COVID-19 vaccines, creating a racist vaccine apartheid, while minting a new club of billionaires,” said Behar.

People worldwide are working harder and longer hours, often for poverty wages in precarious and unsafe jobs. The wages of nearly 800 million workers have failed to keep up with inflation and they have lost $1.5 trillion over the last two years, equivalent to nearly a month (25 days) of lost wages for each worker, according to Oxfam.

The report also shows how a “war on taxation” by corporations has seen the effective corporate tax rate fall by roughly a third in recent decades, while corporations have relentlessly privatized the public sector and segregated services like education and water.

“We have the evidence. We know the history. Public power can rein in runaway corporate power and inequality —shaping the market to be fairer and free from billionaire control. Governments must intervene to break up monopolies, empower workers, tax these massive corporate profits and, crucially, invest in a new era of public goods and services,” said Behar.

“Every corporation has a responsibility to act but very few are. Governments must step up. There is action that lawmakers can learn from, from US anti-monopoly government enforcers suing Amazon in a landmark case, to the European Commission wanting Google to break up its online advertising business, and Africa’s historic fight to reshape international tax rules.”

Oxfam is calling on governments to rapidly and radically reduce the gap between the super-rich and the rest of society by:

– Revitalizing the state. A dynamic and effective state is the best bulwark against extreme corporate power. Governments should ensure universal provision of healthcare and education, and explore publicly-delivered goods and public options in sectors from energy to transportation.
– Reining in corporate power, including by breaking up monopolies and democratizing patent rules. This also means legislating for living wages, capping CEO pay, and new taxes on the super-rich and corporations, including permanent wealth and excess profit taxes. Oxfam estimates that a wealth tax on the world’s millionaires and billionaires could generate $1.8 trillion a year.
– Reinventing business. Competitive and profitable businesses don’t have to be shackled by shareholder greed. Democratically-owned businesses better equalize the proceeds of business. If just 10 percent of US businesses were employee-owned, this could double the wealth share of the poorest half of the US population, including doubling the average wealth of Black households.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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By Quratulain Fatima
ISLAMABAD, Jan 15 2024 – The World Economic Forum is hosting world leaders in Davos from January 15-19 2024. One of the key themes for the forum this year is “Creating Growth and Jobs for a New Era” with a focus on creating economic gender parity.

The World Economic Forum states that “The potential gains from closing economic gender gaps could unlock a “gender dividend” of $172 trillion for the global economy while closing the gender investment gap could add $3 trillion to assets under management in the US alone.”  World Trade Organization (WTO) estimates that eliminating gender discrimination would lead to a 40% increase in productivity.

The potential gains from closing economic gender gaps could unlock a “gender dividend” of $172 trillion for the global economy while closing the gender investment gap could add $3 trillion to assets under management in the US alone.”  The World Trade Organization estimates that eliminating gender discrimination would lead to a 40% increase in productivity

Trade has remained a significant contributor towards increasing the economic stature of countries. Historically the trade has been observed through the gender neutral lens by practitioners and researchers.

However, in recent times, trade and gender links have been explored and efforts have been made to strengthen by international organizations including the World Economic Forum, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development,  International Labor Organization (ILO), International Finance Corporation, and World Bank among others.

Trade openness has been shown to have a positive impact on employment, wages, and very importantly the overall export performance of the country. Several studies have shown that both technological and non-technological innovations improve a country’s export performance. Gender inclusion remains an important non-technological innovative measure enhancing export performance.

Women in developing countries such as Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka have long been involved in the agriculture and textile sector.

Recently women’s participation in the ICT and service industry has also gained momentum in developing countries. It is, however, important to note that South Asia remains second lowest at 63.4% out of eight regions at the gender parity index 2023. Although its position improved by 1.1 percent from the year 2022 attributed to rising scores in countries like Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh; there is much to be done.

Women entrepreneurs are a very small portion of the export profile for developing countries. In a country like the United States that remains Pakistan’s biggest trade partner in textiles and related goods share of women exporters from Pakistan is minimal.

Trade development authority in Pakistan and Trade promotion bodies in developing countries have focused on improving women entrepreneurs’ participation in international trade through training and resources.

However, women’s participation in the trade shows even in the traditionally established Textile and Apparel sector that provide major access to industry buyers in the USA remains negligible for countries like Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh; all of which are very well established and reputed in the USA market hence lowered entry barriers for women.

Less visibility of women entrepreneurs in the export sectors especially for developing countries tied to the fact that women and men have unequal access to education, productive resources, transport, networks, and other resources that impact economic activity.

This in turn affects women’s ability to capture trade-related opportunities. General trade barriers such as deficient infrastructure and tiresome regulatory and documentation requirements also impact women more than men.

Evidence also suggests that women entrepreneurs are concentrated in relatively less profitable sectors and even in profitable sectors they lag behind men-owned businesses.

Women-led businesses also lack resources to expand into international markets and when they do they have relatively smaller trade volumes and higher trade costs making businesses less able to sustain losses in the short term. This chain translates into limited mobility to trade and has been one of the reasons that woman-led businesses got impacted worse during post COVID-19 crisis.

Several steps can be taken at the domestic and international markets to help women entrepreneurs reach their maximum potential in exportable sectors in trade.

Gender provisions in the trade policy and trade agreements are one of the most important steps. The WTO Declaration on Trade and Women’s Economic 2017 endorsed by 127 countries is seen as important towards women’s economic participation in the economies and international trade.

Some regional and bilateral trade agreements like the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), and USMCA (United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement) are now actively adding gender language and provisions. Canada has been a pioneer in including gender chapters in its trade agreements, such as the one with the European Union (CETA) and the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP).

These chapters typically address topics like equal access to economic opportunities, fair treatment in the workplace, and support for women entrepreneurs. These examples can be emulated widely in bilateral and multilateral trade agreements further translating into gender provisions in the trade policy at the local level.

Enhancing the role of women in export sectors where women’s presence is already established can be very helpful. In the case of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India, women are involved in farming and livestock management.

Facilitations for easy access to training, credit, and improved participation opportunities in agricultural extension services can encourage women’s participation in international trade. Both financial institutions and the private sector should be engaged in this agenda. Private –Public partnerships to ensure investment in export-oriented sectors to strengthen women-led small and medium-sized businesses need prioritization.

Women who have access to technology are more likely to participate in international trade. Access to technology gives women the opportunity to sidestep issues of restriction of mobility and overcome cultural barriers while providing equal opportunities to connect with consumers and buyers of their businesses. Studies have shown that access to phones and the Internet has improved incomes and economic opportunities for women in Pakistan, India, Bolivia, Egypt, and Kenya among others.

Country trade missions at embassies and consulates abroad must ensure that women are included in awareness webinars/ seminars conducted by trade offices of their countries abroad. These trade offices are also central facilitation centers for connecting exporters with buyers and managing Trade show participation. Increasing participation in trade shows, trade delegations and awareness of the importing country regulations/requirements will enhance women exporters’ opportunities to find business abroad.

The world needs to pay more attention to women’s inclusion in trade. Trade has been shown not only to reduce the economy but also the gender gap. The world needs equitable and inclusive prosperity through gender-inclusive steps on the economic and social front alike.

Flight Lieutenant Quratulain Fatima is a policy practitioner currently working as a Trade Diplomat for Pakistan on the West Coast USA. She has extensively worked in rural and conflict-ridden areas of Pakistan with a focus on gender-inclusive development and conflict prevention. She is a 2018 Aspen New Voices Fellow. Follow her on Twitter, @moodee_q.