When Trump met Putin, and how the Russian won the day

The much-anticipated meeting between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump finally took place at the G20 summit in Hamburg.
Reuters/Carlos Barria

It was the meeting we’ve all been waiting for. US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin met on Friday during the G20 meeting in Hamburg, Germany.

The key question was whether Trump or Putin would emerge as the stronger leader, with most backing Putin’s ability to manipulate and control the exchange. Trump’s lack of diplomatic or political experience, and his unwillingness to prepare for the encounter, inspired very little confidence that he would walk away with any serious concessions from Putin.

The meeting was scheduled to take half-an-hour. In fact it lasted more than two hours, and an indication the two leaders found a significant amount to talk about. The only other people present were US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and two interpreters. The little we know of what was actually discussed has come from statements Lavrov and Tillerson gave to the press following the meeting.

Russian interference in the US election

Tillerson said Trump pressed Putin over Russian interference in the 2016 election, but seemed to accept his denial that Russia did any such thing.

President Putin denied such involvement, as I think he has in the past.

Tillerson said the White House was not “dismissing the issue” but wanted to focus on “how do we secure a commitment” that there will not be interference in the future.

The big question going in to the meeting was whether or not Trump would raise the accusation with Putin. While he clearly did, the ease with which he appears to have accepted Putin’s protestations of innocence, and his reassurance that it won’t happen again, is remarkable.

According to journalists’ reports on Twitter, Lavrov had a slightly different spin on Trump’s reaction to the issue. He said:

In light of Trump’s remarks in Poland the day before, when he called into doubt the reliability of US intelligence on the issue, this has further undermined the credibility of the US intelligence community. That Trump did this during a face-to-face meeting with Putin can only deepen the mistrust between the CIA and FBI have for the White House, and further damage morale.

It can also be read as a clear victory for Putin, who came away from the meeting without having to seriously address charges that Russia systematically engaged in what is a gross violation of the democratic integrity and sovereignty of another country.

Syria

There was a clear opportunity for Trump to use the meeting to pressure Putin over his continuing support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

While any significant agreements over how to resolve one of the most complex conflicts in the region were highly unlikely, the two leaders did agree to support a ceasefire in an area of southwestern Syria. There were no other details, and Tillerson himself admitted that ceasefires in Syria have tended to fall apart very quickly.

While Russia and the US have a shared interest in fighting Islamic State in Syria, they disagree over the almost every other aspect of the conflict, particularly the future of Assad and the role of Iran.

Trump has recently ratcheted up to anti-Iranian rhetoric and it seems the Russian relationship with Iran could become a significant point of conflict between the US and Russia in the future.

No transcript of the meeting is available so it’s impossible to know exactly what was discussed here. But if Putin was not pressed on these points, it is certainly a missed opportunity.

Shared interests

While both Lavrov and Tillerson highlighted the shared interests the two countries have, neither Ukraine nor the ongoing nuclear crisis in North Korea could be counted among them.

North Korea’s testing of an intercontinental ballistic missile guaranteed that it would be high on the list of issues that would be discussed. Russia has contradicted the consensus among the other G20 leaders over the missile’s range, and blocked a resolution by the UN Security Council calling for “significant measures” in response to the test.

So, what do we make of this highly anticipated meeting?

With very little detail about what was actually discussed, and with the narrative firmly controlled by Lavrov, Trump would seem to have gained very little while conceding much.

Putin has come away with an implicit agreement to move on from the question of election meddling, without promising more than “dialgue” on Ukraine, no agreement on how to deal with North Korea, and no real movement on the horrific human tragedy in Syria.

Along with Tillerson’s affirmation that the two leaders shared “a clear positive chemistry”, it’s hard not to recall George W. Bush’s claim to have seen into Putin’s soul, and conclude that Putin has once again expertly played a US president.

Kumuda Simpson, Lecturer in International Relations, La Trobe University

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

How the Nazis destroyed the first gay rights movement

‘Damenkneipe,’ or ‘Ladies’ Saloon,’ painted by Rudolf Schlichter in 1923. In 1937, many of his paintings were destroyed by the Nazis as ‘degenerate art.’

Very recently, Germany’s Cabinet approved a bill that will expunge the convictions of tens of thousands of German men for “homosexual acts” under that country’s anti-gay law known as “Paragraph 175.” That law dates back to 1871, when modern Germany’s first legal code was created.

It was repealed in 1994. But there was a serious movement to repeal the law in 1929 as part of a wider LGBTQ rights movement. That was just before the Nazis came to power, magnified the anti-gay law, then sought to annihilate gay and transgender Europeans.

The story of how close Germany – and much of Europe – came to liberating its LGBTQ people before violently reversing that trend under new authoritarian regimes is an object lesson showing that the history of LGBTQ rights is not a record of constant progress.

The first LGBTQ liberation movement

In the 1920s, Berlin had nearly 100 gay and lesbian bars or cafes. Vienna had about a dozen gay cafes, clubs and bookstores. In Paris, certain quarters were renowned for open displays of gay and trans nightlife. Even Florence, Italy, had its own gay district, as did many smaller European cities.

Films began depicting sympathetic gay characters. Protests were organized against offensive depictions of LGBTQ people in print or on stage. And media entrepreneurs realized there was a middle-class gay and trans readership to whom they could cater.

Partly driving this new era of tolerance were the doctors and scientists who started looking at homosexuality and “transvestism” (a word of that era that encompassed transgender people) as a natural characteristic with which some were born, and not a “derangement.” The story of Lili Elbe and the first modern sex change, made famous in the recent film “The Danish Girl,” reflected these trends.

For example, Berlin opened its Institute for Sexual Research in 1919, the place where the word “transsexual” was coined, and where people could receive counseling and other services. Its lead doctor, Magnus Hirschfeld, also consulted on the Lili Elbe sex change.

Connected to this institute was an organization called the “Scientific-Humanitarian Committee.” With the motto “justice through science,” this group of scientists and LGBTQ people promoted equal rights, arguing that LGBTQ people were not aberrations of nature.

Most European capitals hosted a branch of the group, which sponsored talks and sought the repeal of Germany’s “Paragraph 175.” Combining with other liberal groups and politicians, it succeeded in influencing a German parliamentary committee to recommend the repeal to the wider government in 1929.

The backlash

While these developments didn’t mean the end of centuries of intolerance, the 1920s and early ‘30s certainly looked like the beginning of the end. On the other hand, the greater “out-ness” of gay and trans people provoked their opponents.

A French reporter, bemoaning the sight of uncloseted LGBTQ people in public, complained, “the contagion … is corrupting every milieu.” The Berlin police grumbled that magazines aimed at gay men – which they called “obscene press materials” – were proliferating. In Vienna, lectures of the “Scientific Humanitarian Committee” might be packed with supporters, but one was attacked by young men hurling stink bombs. A Parisian town councilor in 1933 called it “a moral crisis” that gay people, known as “inverts” at that time, could be seen in public.

“Far be it from me to want to turn to fascism,” the councilor said, “but all the same, we have to agree that in some things those regimes have sometimes done good… One day Hitler and Mussolini woke up and said, ‘Honestly, the scandal has gone on long enough’ … And … the inverts … were chased out of Germany and Italy the very next day.”

The ascent of Fascism

It’s this willingness to make a blood sacrifice of minorities in exchange for “normalcy” or prosperity that has observers drawing uncomfortable comparisons between then and now.

In the 1930s, the Depression spread economic anxiety, while political fights in European parliaments tended to spill outside into actual street fights between Left and Right. Fascist parties offered Europeans a choice of stability at the price of democracy. Tolerance of minorities was destabilizing, they said. Expanding liberties gave “undesirable” people the liberty to undermine security and threaten traditional “moral” culture. Gay and trans people were an obvious target.

What happened next shows the whiplash speed with which the progress of a generation can be thrown into reverse.

The nightmare

One day in May 1933, pristine white-shirted students marched in front of Berlin’s Institute for Sexual Research – that safe haven for LGBTQ people – calling it “Un-German.” Later, a mob hauled out its library to be burned. Later still, its acting head was arrested.

When Nazi leader Adolph Hitler needed to justify arresting and murdering former political allies in 1934, he said they were gay. This fanned anti-gay zealotry by the Gestapo, which opened a special anti-gay branch. During the following year alone, the Gestapo arrested more than 8,500 gay men, quite possibly using a list of names and addresses seized at the Institute for Sexual Research. Not only was Paragraph 175 not erased, as a parliamentary committee had recommended just a few years before, it was amended to be more expansive and punitive.

As the Gestapo spread throughout Europe, it expanded the hunt. In Vienna, it hauled in every gay man on police lists and questioned them, trying to get them to name others. The fortunate ones went to jail. The less fortunate went to Buchenwald and Dachau. In conquered France, Alsace police worked with the Gestapo to arrest at least 200 men and send them to concentration camps. Italy, with a fascist regime obsessed with virility, sent at least 300 gay men to brutal camps during the war period, declaring them “dangerous for the integrity of the race.”

The total number of Europeans arrested for being LGBTQ under fascism is impossible to know because of the lack of reliable records. But a conservative estimate is that there were many tens of thousands to one hundred thousand arrests during the war period alone.

Under these nightmare conditions, far more LGBTQ people in Europe painstakingly hid their genuine sexuality to avoid suspicion, marrying members of the opposite sex, for example. Still, if they had been prominent members of the gay and trans community before the fascists came to power, as Berlin lesbian club owner Lotte Hahm was, it was too late to hide. She was sent to a concentration camp.

In those camps, gay men were marked with a pink triangle. In these places of horror, men with pink triangles were singled out for particular abuse. They were mechanically raped, castrated, favored for medical experiments and murdered for guards’ sadistic pleasure even when they were not sentenced for “liquidation.” One gay man attributed his survival to swapping his pink triangle for a red one – indicating he was merely a Communist. They were ostracized and tormented by their fellow inmates, too.

The looming danger of a backslide

This isn’t 1930s Europe. And making superficial comparisons between then and now can only yield superficial conclusions.

But with new forms of authoritarianism entrenched and seeking to expand in Europe and beyond, it’s worth thinking about the fate of Europe’s LGBTQ community in the 1930s and ‘40s – a timely note from history as Germany approves same-sex marriage and on this first anniversary of Obergefell v. Hodges.

In 1929, Germany came close to erasing its anti-gay law, only to see it strengthened soon thereafter. Only now, after a gap of 88 years, are convictions under that law being annulled.



John Broich, Associate Professor, Case Western Reserve University

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Climate and the G20 summit: some progress in greening economies, but more needs to be done

Protests at the Brandenburg Gate, in Berlin, against the US withdrawal from the Paris climate change deal. Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters

On July 7, G20 leaders will gather in Hamburg for their annual meeting. One likely outcome: another clash over climate change between the host government, Germany, and United States president Donald Trump.

As the Chinese did last year, German Prime Minister Angela Merkel has prioritised climate on the G20 agenda, just when the US administration is rolling back many environmental policies.
President Trump has announced that he wants his country to leave the Paris agreement, saying that the international accord is unfair to the US.

A report to evaluate progress

The question of what is fair in climate politics is hugely important.

Trump’s definition of fairness – “America First” – is probably not mutually acceptable to most other nations. But countries will hesitate to scale up their ambitions unless they are convinced that others are doing their fair share.

To address this question, we have put together our third annual stocktake on their progress in a report – coordinated by the global consortium Climate Transparency – that determines how far the G20 has come in shifting from fossil fuels to a low-carbon economy.

The report, compiled with 13 partners from 11 countries, draws on a wide spectrum of published information in four main areas (emissions, policy performance, finance and decarbonisation) and presents it concisely, enabling comparison between these 20 countries as they shift from dirty “brown” economies to clean “green” ones.

The G20 is crucial to international action on climate change. Together, member states account for 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions and, in 2014, accounted for about 82% of global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions.

All member countries signed on to the 2015 Paris agreement, with its long-term temperature goals of keeping global warming to below 2˚C, ideally limiting it 1.5˚C..

The G20 have also proven to be a nimble policy forum, where soft policy making can happen. And there is less concern than in the past that the group would seek to replace the multilateral process.
This means these governments must lead the way in decarbonising their economies and building a low-carbon future.

The beginning of a transition

According to the Climate Transparency report, the G20 countries are using their energy more efficiently, and using cleaner energy sources. Their economies have also grown, proving that economic growth can be decoupled from greenhouse gas emissions.

So we are beginning to see a transition from brown to green. But the report also reveals that the transition is too slow; it does not go deep enough to meet the Paris Agreement’s goals.
In half of the G20 countries, greenhouse gas emissions per capita are no longer rising. A notable exception is Japan, where emissions per person are ticking upward.

Canada has the highest energy use per capita, followed by Saudi Arabia, Australia and the US.
India, Indonesia and South Africa all have low energy use per capita (India’s per capita rate is one-eighth that of Canada). Poverty in these countries can only be addressed if people have access to more energy.

Today, renewable energy is increasingly the cheapest option. Still, we found that many G20 countries are meeting their increasing energy needs with coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels.

According to the Climate Action Tracker, which monitors progress toward the Paris agreement’s temperature goals, coal should be phased out globally by 2050 at the latest.

Between 2013 and 2014, the G20 countries’ public finance institutions - including national and international development banks, majority state-owned banks and export credit agencies - spent an average of almost US$88 billion a year on coal, oil and gas.

Yet many of the G20 countries are now looking at phasing out coal, including Canada, France and the UK, which have all established a plan to do so.

Coal power remains an important source of energy in some G20 countries. Author provided

Germany, Italy and Mexico, too, are considering reducing their use of coal or have taken significant action to do so. India and China continue to be highly dependent on coal but have recently closed and scaled back plans for a number of coal plants.

Countries at the bottom of the rankings are Japan, Indonesia and Turkey, all of which have substantial coal-plant construction plans, and Australia.

Subsidies

Despite their repeated commitment to phasing out fossil fuel subsidies, the G20 countries are still heavily subsidising fossil fuels. In 2014, together, the G20 provided a total of over US$230 billion in subsidies to coal, oil and gas.

Japan and China provided, respectively, about $US19 billion and $US17 billion a year in public finance for fossil fuels between 2013 and 2014.

There is good news, though: renewable energy is on the rise. The G20 countries are already home to 98% of all installed wind power capacity in the world, 97% of solar power and 93% of electric vehicles.

In most G20 countries, renewables are a growing segment of the electricity supply, except in Russia, where absolute renewable energy consumption has decreased by 20% since 2009. China, the Republic of Korea and the UK have all seen strong growth.

Generally, the G20 countries are attractive for renewable energy investment, especially China, France, Germany and the UK – although the UK has now abandoned its policy support for renewables.

National experts asked by Germanwatch, a Climate Transparency partner, generally agree that their respective G20 country is doing quite well on the international stage (with the exception of the US) but lack progress in ambitious targets and policy implementation.
China, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Mexico and South Africa are ranked the highest for climate action. Countries with the lowest climate policy performance are the US, Australia, Japan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

Dealing with global data

Putting together this G20 stocktake has had its challenges. The choice of indicators involves value judgements, which often become only apparent once national experts begin discussing them.

Enabling the international comparisons necessary to measure progress on climate requires information that is accurate, verifiable and comparable. The underlying data comes from very diverse economies with different legal systems, different regulations and reporting methods.

International organisations, such as the International Energy Agency, have often done extensive and very careful work to develop comparable data sets but these may not always be consistent with data from in-country sources. Exploring these differences helps us to improve our understanding of the data and the underlying developments.

The existing reporting and review system of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is the source of much of the data that makes these comparisons possible.

The real challenge the UNFCCC process faces in the next few years as it finalises the “rule book” for the Paris agreement is how to develop an enhanced transparency system that will be robust and detailed enough to provide the relevant information for its five-yearly assessment of global progress on addressing climate.

Even so, the UNFCCC is constrained by the extent to which countries are able to see beyond their narrow interests.

Independent assessments such as Climate Transparency’s, which remains mindful of different perspectives but is not limited by national interests, can play a vital role in helping to increase the political pressure for effective climate action.

Niklas Höhne, Professor of Mitigation of Greenhouse Gases, Wageningen University; Andrew Marquard, Senior Researcher on energy and climate change, University of Cape Town, and William Wills, Research Coordinator, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Bell Pottinger says “Sorry”

Image credit - Die Vryburger/South Africa Today

So, Bell Pottinger has apologized, well if can you call it an apology because it is certainly half-hearted and only come because the people of South Africa has hit back with a social media campaign of our own. We gave them their own medicine, they felt the pressure, and they relented. We did our own Bell Pottinger on Bell Pottinger.

Yet, Bell Pottinger is keeping the 100 000 pounds per month.  

Their contract with the Guptas lasted almost a year and a half, you can do the sums.
Now they have said “sorry.”

Racial harmony destroyed because of their social media infiltration, hate against whites stoked because so-called white monopoly capital was made the bogeyman. They let that campaign run together with the “whites stole the land “campaign championed by another Gupta goon squad named Black First Land First.

All coordinated to achieve the objective to reroute attention away from the Gupta state capture, which is actually massive state criminality.

It’s not a little innocent thing. Bell Pottinger knew exactly what they are doing.
Bell Pottinger, with their lead account managers for the Guptas –

Victoria Geoghegan, whose father Christopher Geoghegan is a former BAE bigwig, and Nick Lambert acted as mere guns for hire, mercenary spin-doctors. These people are unscrupulous, with corrupted souls. They are in it for the money, and if the devil pays enough, they will design a slick media strategy to promote hell as an attractive destination.

They knew very well what they were doing. They wrote speeches for people on the Gupta payroll, people like Oros Maine.

What they did is script a narrative, and that narrative had one goal in mind, distract attention away from the Guptas.

They gave advice like the opinion that certain key phrases should be used repetitively. They followed the old fascist trick that if you repeat a lie long enough, hopefully, people will start to believe it.
They gave the advice to Gupta companies to respond to all media inquiries with a fixed and predetermined response.

The Bell Pottinger team mainly used the old Nazi trick called “setting up the strawman .” The strawman that they set up is the so-called white monopoly capital. Attention is then transferred to the strawman so the Gupta looting can proceed unhindered in the background.

In the meantime blood was spilled, especially on farms, racial hate stoked.

However, Bell Pottinger has said “sorry.” Also, they are keeping the money.

We, the people, who are standing for truth, had no budget like you did Bell Pottinger. We had no technical knowledge about twitter bots. We did not set up thousands of fake profiles on Facebook and Twitter.

We, the people, had only one thing.
We had the truth.
Moreover, we, the people, won.

Nevertheless, you, Bell Pottinger, has full bank accounts. You were paid with money stolen from the people of South Africa.

We have a broken and bankrupt country.
We are battered, many of us broken.
But we are unbowed.
Je Suis Uncaptured.

Opinion by Daniel Sutherland
South Africa Today – South Africa News

Petition launched after damning report on Eastern Cape schools

“This looks like a place for cows, but we are humans studying under these conditions”

By Nombulelo Damba-Hendrik
6 July 2017

In January, GroundUp reported on Imiqhayi Secondary School . The roof had blown off in 2014 and it had still not been repaired two and half years later. Photo: Manqulo Nyakombi

There are schools in the Eastern Cape that still have no access to water, electricity or sanitation. Sometimes classes are held outside because classrooms are not adequately maintained by the department. There are places where children get mugged on their way to school because there is no school transport.

These were some of the findings revealed in the Equal Education (EE) 2015/2016 annual report released this week. EE deputy head Amanda Rinquest said the organisation is now asking the public to sign a petition to put pressure on the department to fix its schools.
Rinquest said EE had visited 60 schools in the Eastern Cape and found 17 of them in clear violation of the Minimum Norms and Standards for School Infrastructure. Some of them were schools built with mud and zinc sheets.

The Department of Basic Education has already missed the first deadline of 29 November 2016 for upholding the Minimum Norms and Standards.

Equal Education cites Vukile Tshwete High School in Keiskammahoek outside King William’s Town which GroundUp reported on over a year ago. Snakes hide in the broken ceilings say students and teachers. Photo: Manqulo Nyakombi

On 27 April, Equal Education marched to the department offices in Zwelitsha, King William’s Town, with a list of demands. One demand was for the Head of the Eastern Cape Department of Education Themba Kojana to visit at least some of the schools EE had visited.

“When we had a meeting in May this year, he agreed to visit the schools, but since then, he’s been quiet. We have sent a number of emails with no response,” said Rinquest.

EE is demanding that renovations be prioritised at Mjaliswa Junior Secondary School, Tolikana Primary School, Lower Ntlaza Primary School in Libode and Mjanyelwa Junior Secondary School in Mbizana.

EE also wants there to be a blacklist of Implementing Agents that are lagging behind with school construction and for the department to penalise them.

Spokesperson for the Eastern Cape Department of Education Malibongwe Mtima said the department has a plan for all the schools mentioned by Equal Education. He said most of the schools were built by parents and the department is busy fixing them, however they are working according to a budget.
“Almost every week we are handing over new schools in the Eastern Cape. Some are built from scratch, others are renovated, but we cannot build them all at once due to the budget,” he said.
He said that in this financial year the department is planning to build 30 schools.

In the EE report, Eastern Cape learners from various schools share their experiences.

Silindokuhle January from Dimbaza Central Classrooms said, “I am ashamed to call that place my school. Students are tired of studying in dusty and wet classrooms. But, what can I say? I don’t have a choice. It is my school. My school does not have textbooks, so teachers have to make photocopies every day. Sometimes, in this environment we are studying in, the loose papers get lost. This looks like a place for cows, but we are humans studying under these conditions.”

Ziphozothando Mgweje of Forbes Grant Senior Secondary in King William’s Town said her science classroom burned down and it had still not been fixed after two years.

Ziyanda Gaxa of Qonce High School, who is an active member of EE, said, “The fact that the resources that we have are in conditions like this doesn’t stop them [the learners]. They know that their futures are in their hands. They keep coming to school, hoping that one day everything will be very much better and just like the former Model C Schools.”

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Published originally on GroundUp .

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