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    Rotten fruit: has anybody actually read the EU Commission’s Apple decision?

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    By Edmund Honohan   MEDIA ANALYSIS of the EU Commission’s 2016 Apple judgment that Ireland gave the company €13bn in illegal tax aid is half-baked, and the Irish government’s defence even worse. The implications of the judgment are much further-reaching than many realise. The Commission has argued that Apple’s two subsidiary companies in Ireland – ASI and AOE – should have paid Corporation tax here at the full Irish rate of 12.5% on the profits of their businesses between 1991 and 2015. There’s no suggestion from either side in this case that profits on sales of merchandise abroad should be booked abroad and taxed there. In other words, if the EU is right, the entire balance must be paid here and not be subject to some international shareout. The EU Commission’s judgment refers to a 1991 ruling by Ireland’s Revenue Commissioners which fixed AOE’s net profit at 65% of branch operating costs (sic) up to US $50-60m and 20% above that, and ASI’s at 12.5% of branch operating costs. The basis of capital allowances was fixed in the ruling, but not explained. In 2007, for example, ASI’s bill under the 12.5% liability came to $230m; but, in what was described in the accounts as “an adjustment for income taxed at lower rates”, this was then lowered to $8.9m. Ireland doesn’t want any of that money back, but the EU says the adjustments were State Aid to ASI and AOE and, as such, in breach of Article 107 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, one of the two main Treaties that underpin EU law. To be exact, the EU’s argument is that the accepted accountancy approach to the allocation of profits among companies in a group company architecture was neither followed in 1991 nor in the Revenue ruling in 2007, when Apple sought and obtained assurances from the Revenue Commissioners in Dublin as to the basis on which ASI and AOE would be taxed. The Commission says that all of Apple’s retail business outside of the Americas and Singapore was handled in Ireland, and that the respective head offices of ASI and AOE in the USA were brass-plate addresses with no employees. It adds that any functions performed, or “fictitious remuneration for services provided for free” by Apple Inc employees for ASI and AOE would be outside the scope of the assessment of profit allocation as between ASI, AOE and their respective head offices. In its 300,000-word decision issued in late 2016, the Commission was deeply critical of instances of poor professional quality in the Irish submissions. In paragraph 353, it notes: “at least three of the 52 companies chosen by PwC as comparables are in liquidation”. But it is even more critical of the actions of Revenue, who issued the rulings, stating that “none of the documents provided in support of the contested tax rulings contain either a contemporaneous profit allocation study or a transfer pricing report”. It later says that Revenue “should have at the very least analysed how that branch’s access to the Apple IP (intellectual property), which it needed to perform its functions, was ensured and set up within the company. There is no evidence that such an analysis was ever conducted”. The Commission says that in regard to allocation of profits to Irish branches of non-resident companies for the purposes of applying Section 25 of the 1997 Taxes Consolidation Act, “the profit allocation ruling practice of Irish Revenue demonstrates that no consistent criteria are applied”. But the Commission also cites cases of Revenue applying the arm’s length principle, with a Revenue tax advisor in one case confirming the OECD model as “little more than a restatement of the position under domestic law”. There’s no suggestion here that if a Pear or an Apricot were to come knocking, Ireland could still legitimately offer it the same deal it gave Apple in 1991. Nor does Ireland attempt to approach the case on a collaborative basis, to reconcile differing perspectives. Ireland hasn’t even offered a draft formula for a judgment in its favour, except to say that what we know now about fiscal State Aid was not known then, even by the Commission. The Commission was not happy with an after-the-event attempt to represent the profit allocation as a bona fide group company accounting exercise, with justifiable transfer pricing, holding that “the fact that the costs of the CSA (cost sharing agreement) were allocated to AOE’s Irish branch by Apple itself should have made Irish Revenue question the unsubstantiated assumption underlying the profit allocation methods ultimately endorsed by it”. The Commission goes on dramatically: “Even if Irish Revenue had been right to have accepted the unsubstantiated assumption that the Apple IP licences held by ASI and AOE should be allocated outside of Ireland, which the Commission contests, the inappropriate choice of operating expense and the inappropriately low levels of return accepted by Irish Revenue in the application of the one-sided profit allocation methods endorsed by the contested tax rulings result in an annual taxable profit for ASI and AOE in Ireland that, in any event, departs from a reliable approximation of a market based outcome for their respective Irish branches”. And in relation to a possible derogation if justified by the nature or general scheme of the tax system: “Ireland has not put forward any justification at all for the selective treatment”, and ”the argument (is) put forward by Apple that ‘the( tax rulings) derive from the intrinsic principles of Section 25 TCA 97’, without further explaining how this is to be understood or how this could justify the selective treatment in this case”. While it’s an arguable defence that the Commission’s pursuit of fiscal State Aid is in conflict with Member States’ general autonomy in taxation, the last time Ireland intervened in Court to make that point – in a case against Belgium – the Court gave it short shrift. Ireland has also pleaded that even if the accounting was a back-of-an-envelope exercise

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    In a legally questionable  move, on January 3, 2020, the Central Electoral Commission of the Spanish government, an administrative body with no judicial standing, voted to remove Torra from office immediately.

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      Up until two years ago Joaquim ‘Quim’ Torra was a business executive and cultural activist who had never been involved in electoral politics.  However, when the Spanish central government dissolved the Catalan parliament over its late October 2017 vote in favour of seceding from Spain, and subsequently ordered new elections that it clearly presumed would restore a pro-unionist majority in that body. To the surprise of much of the world, and the intense dismay of the Spanish government, exiled President Carles Puigdemont’s Together for Catalonia list won the elections, and hence the right to form a new government. Torra was successful as a parliamentary candidate. But Spain would have none of it. When, on January 30 2018, the Catalan Parliament was about to swear Puigdemont in by video connection from Belgium, the president of that body abruptly stopped the process in reaction to the threat of judicial sanctions – sanctions rooted in highly questionable jurisprudence – he had received from the Spanish courts. Two further candidacies centring on pro-independence figures were similarly scuttled in the succeeding months. Finally, on 17 May 2018 the then still largely unknown Torra was voted head of a pro-independence coalition government. Since assuming office he has repeatedly made clear that he believes that Carles Puigdemont is still the legitimate president of Catalonia and that his prime goal is that of advancing Catalonia toward independence in the most expeditious manner possible. The fact that he is a political newcomer who did not come up through ranks of his own party has led the generally pro-unionist press of both Catalonia and Spain, a press corps that tends to view machine politics as normative and  their continuation as inevitable, to treat this most cultured and literate of public figures  with no small amount of condescension, though Torra does not seem to care. This interview, conducted in Catalan and edited for reasons of space, took place on 30 October in the Palace of the Generalitat (The Catalan Government) in Barcelona, that is, 16 days into the massive and still ongoing acts of civil disobedience unleashed in reaction to the Spanish Supreme Court’s harsh sentencing of the politicians and civil society leaders responsible for promoting the October 1, 2017 independence referendum, 11 days before the fourth Spanish general elections in as many years, and 19 days before Torra’s own trial, at which he defiantly pleaded guilty to disobeying a Spanish government order to remove a banner hanging on the front of the Generalitat  that made reference to Catalan “exiles” and “political prisoners”. TH: How would you explain what is going on in Catalonia today to a reader who has little or no detailed understanding of the country’s history? QT: A quick response would be to compare it to a case with which most English language readers are familiar, and have to a certain extent reflected upon, which is Scotland – and the UK. I would speak of an ancient nation from Southern Europe that has always demonstrated a firm dedication to the pursuit of liberty, and that, after suffering a number of setbacks over the last three hundred years – years during which it worked to fit into the Spanish state and gain its trust – has, over the last decade or so, chosen to initiate a democratic process aimed at gaining independence. This is not about flags and borders. It is about quality of life, better education, better healthcare, an improved infrastructure and, of course, greater protections for the country’s language and culture. But above all, it is about being able to face the challenges of the twenty-first century with all of the tools that any modern country can expect to have at its disposal. TH: Do you think Catalans have a special obsession with freedom? QT: There are historians, such as Rovira i Virgili, who define the history of Catalonia precisely in terms of this special relationship to freedom. Others, such as Vicens Vives, link it more to a “will to exist”. Josep Benet, in turn, has summed it up, in a marvellous phrase, as centring on a “combat in the service of hope”. Others, of perhaps a more fatalistic cast, like Ferrater Mora say that a people cannot live life always on the defensive, that it  must arrive, or seek to arrive, to a state of vital fullness. TH: How did you come to be president of the Generalitat in the Spring of 2018? QT: I spent most of my life as a lawyer in private business, the last two years of that in Switzerland, an experience that allowed me get to know a country, the Helvetian Confederation, that I admire a lot. Returning to Catalonia, I founded a publishing house and got involved in historical research and writing. I’d always had strong cultural, civic and political interests thanks to my work in voluntary organisations of the type that are, in my view, fundamental to gaining an understanding of the country. These entities are the basis of its strongly ‘associative’ social fabric, and what provides it with very strong social cohesion from below. I had the good fortune of working side by side with the late Muriel Casals at Omnium Cultural  [along with the Catalan National Congress, the country’s most important pro-independence civic organization], an experience that allowed me to participate, as it were,  from the “second row”, in the last ten years of the country’s fast-moving history. During the latter part of this time, the country’s government was forcibly dismissed by the Spanish state (on 27 October 2017) while our elected leaders were either imprisoned or forced into exile. In the lead up to the 21 December 2017 elections imposed by Spain, I received a call from President Puigdemont in which he asked me to run as a candidate on his parliamentary list (Together for Catalonia). But owing to a series of events that would take a very long time to explain, and that are rooted in the repression that this country currently suffers

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    Brentrance.

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      By David Langwallner. November 2019.   Of course there is no practical benefit to Brexit.  Indeed our Irish perspective is that the British are jumping off a cliff with no parachute. However, I am a barrister in turbulent London and I also refute caricature portrayal, by the likes of Fintan O’Toole, of Brexiteers as swivel-eyed loons. He says if it was not tragedy Brexit would be comedy; Village has claimed it is comedy not tragedy.  Such deprecations represent patronising failures of imagination: Brexit is a triumph of idealism over pragmatism, of imagination over supineness and of culture over finance. It is not so bad for the nation of shopkeepers to abandon square utility and dour pragmatism.   I have a profound belief in the decency of British people and their institutions which I believe are proving resilient.  Lurches – to the right, to the anti-economic, anti-social, anti-environmental, have been abortive.  The stock markets and currency are stable. The provision-hoarders have now stood down, too.   The UK is in good shape (and not just in sport and culture).  It has a system with solid checks, a vibrant and aggressive press.  Unemployment is 3.8%, employment is 76% (Ireland 69%).  Annual earnings growth is 3.8%.   Ireland need not panic vicariously for its newly excitable neighbour.   Metternich said that Italy was not a country but an idea. This is abundantly true of the UK.  Inconveniently, however, the idea has evolved with modernity and has broken its chains. The UK is taking a stand. That cannot be said of Ireland.   While Ireland has been wrestling with the social and religious conventions that held it back (and arguably finds itself quite comfortable in its new-grown modern skin), we have failed to interrogate our largely neo-liberal economic model. Britain is demonstrably much less happy with the economic model that grounds it.  Britain would not have tolerated the abjection of Ireland’s bailout; nor the dodginess of our prostration before the might of the multinationals on which we have centred our economy. The UK is united in its abhorrence of the legacy of austerity.  Would that Ireland were so progressive. It remains in thrall to the parties of the cuts. Unlike Ireland Britain has long realised that the EU lost its way a generation ago.  Its meting out of doctrinaire and bureaucratic bailout punishments on Ireland and Greece, and of austerity on the already moribund European Economy generally, and its obliviousness to the social side of Economic Union, are inexcusable Britain is challenging globalism and that is not something to disdain, least of all for Village readers.  Its Labour party defies blind globalism, as do the nationalist parties, the Liberal Democrats and most Tories.  The ascendant right-wingers, led by perhaps the most dishonest of them all, Johnson, talk the language of unshackled international trade but they are insincere and will not fight for it. The English want control back.  Brexit is the first adventure in post-globalism and internationally the left and the thoughtful of all political hues should embrace it. Yes the adventure is admittedly inarticulate.  And it is a sad truth that freedom from the EU will in no way constitute freedom from the control and standardisation that underpin Economic Unions. In principle divorcing from multilateral norms and the nasty disciplines of trade is welcome. The deal is a hard Brexit.  The UK will exit the customs union and the single market. It has yet to be seen how free it will be to do trade deals with other countries and whether it will follow EU standards on the customs union and single market, and even more precariously, on social, environmental and consumer standards – which are not strictly required by the customs union and single market.  As an outsider and a remainer, I fear they may rue the hardness, if not the principle. But that is always the danger with taking a stand. But as well as admirable principle  there are some dramatic political benefits. DUP deference to Tories was doing no-one any good and it is good to see its demise. We are to have an ingenious double-border that will serve Northern Ireland – at least economically – very well. As for immiserated Scotland, who in Ireland would not hasten its independence? I do not dispute that the UK has pushed the bounds in dangerous directions. Its indulgence of lies is far greater even than our own.  Its society has even great class fissures and educationally it is a dead end. There is a lugubrious cynicism every bit as corrosive as our own. The UK body politic suffers from the triumph of a culture of comedy evident in news programmes such as “Have I Got News for You” which turned Johnson into a cult and the nation into cynics. Scrutiny of character seems like yesteryear’s imperative. Certainly the gorillas have taken over.  But they do not have a majority and their time is up. So much cannot be said of now-complacent and pliantly unradical Ireland. The UK is on a journey.  It does not need a parachute.    

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    French Toast

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    By Bryan Wall. In a development that shocked very few people Ian Bailey was found guilty of the murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier in a French court in May. After a four-day trial and deliberating for five hours a panel of three judges sentenced Bailey to 25 years in prison. He was also ordered to pay a total of 1225,000 in compensation, 1110,000 of which is to go to Toscan du Plantier’s family. Bailey, who has always denied his involvement in the murder of the French woman, was tried in absentia. A peculiar aspect of French law allows the authorities there to prosecute people suspected of crimes against French citizens that were carried out abroad. The French had therefore tried twice before to have him extradited to stand trial. In both cases the Irish courts ruled against his extradition, with the High Court ruling in 2017 that the demand for extradition was an “abuse of process”. Nonetheless, the French went ahead and held a trial with Bailey’s absence noted. But Bailey was not the only person absent from the trial. Irish witnesses received a letter asking them to appear at the trial only two weeks before it began. In some cases they were given as little as one week’s notice. As a result only three witnesses gave evidence, one of whom, Helan Callanan, had a statement read out on her behalf. Callanan, one-time editor of the Sunday Tribune, wrote in her statement that Bailey had confessed to her that he murdered Toscan du Plantier in order to “to resurrect my career”. At the time he was freelancing for the paper and wrote about the case for the paper. Of the two other witnesses, Amanda Reed gave evidence on behalf of her son Malachi. As a 14-year-old he had received a lift home from Bailey on 4 February 1997, less thantwo months after Toscan du Plantier’s death. He claimed that Bailey said to him “I bashed her f**king brains in”. His mother. related this to the French court. Back on the evening of 4 February 1997 Malachi arrived home, with no apparent concerns, having being dropped off by Bailey. The next day gardaí visited Malachi in school. There they questioned him about his journey with the journalist. And it was after he arrived home from school in an “agitated” state that he informed his mother what Bailey allegedly told him. Bill Fuller, the third witness, told the court that Bailey had confessed to him. Fuller stated that Bailey, speaking in the second person, said “It’s you who killed her”. Bailey denied this conversation ever took place. But these evidential issues with the trial pale in comparison to the French prosecution’s dismissal of the Irish Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) and its opinion of the murder. The DPP file about the case was leaked a number of years ago and makes for astounding reading. It contains a litany of concerns with how the murder was investigated. These embrace wide-ranging issues such as witnesses who lacked both credibility and consistency being taken at face value and members of the gardaí stonewalling the DPP itself. It’s pointed out at the start of the report that there is “No forensic evidence linking Ian Bailey to the scene”. He had volunteered blood, hair, and fingerprint samples to the gardaí. This was in spite of the fact that, as the DPP highlights, in his former profession as a crime reporter in the UK Bailey “was aware of the nature of forensic evidence” and that it could comprehensively incriminate the guilty. The trial in France introduced no new forensic evidence to link him to the scene and the murder. The evidence of Marie Farrell, the witness who initially claimed she saw Bailey walking late from the direction of Toscan du Plantier’s home on the night of her murder, was described by the DPP as being unreliable. Yet these initial statements by Farrell, which she retracted years later, were accepted by the French. As for Bailey’s apparent admissions of guilt, the DPP found that they “appear to be sarcastic responses to questions”. This includes his comments to Callanan about trying to “resurrect” his career. And it includes the apparent conversation between Bailey and Fuller. The DPP noted that Fuller’s statement came at a time when the Garda’s actions were “bound to create a climate in which witnesses became suggestible”. The DPP report also discusses the statement made by Malachi Reed. It noted that it was “abundantly clear that Malachi Reed was not upset by Ian Bailey” after the latter had dropped him home. In fact, the DPP pointed out that it was after a conversation with a garda the following day that “he became upset and turned a conversation which had not apparently up until then alarmed him into something sinister”. And then there’s the Garda’s arrest of Bailey’s partner, Jules Thomas. She was arrested for the Toscan du Plantier murder on 10 February 1997. But the arrest appeared to the DPP to be illegal. This was because it discovered she was asked no questions about her involvement in the murder. The DPP wrote that her “questioning indicates that she was arrested to obtain information which could be used against Bailey”. And given this, “her arrest and detention was unlawful”. The French ignoring of the report means that none of this was taken into consideration. It means that a trial was held using evidence that was roundly dismissed by the DPP; evidence which resulted in the DPP clearly stating in unequivocal terms that “A prosecution against Bailey is not warranted by the evidence”. Frank Buttimer, Bailey’s solicitor, is explicit in his condemnation of the French trial, or “so-called trial” as he refers to it. Although not present in France, based on the information he’s seen he says what took place there “was not in any way a trial that we in a common law jurisdiction would understand a trial to be”. He said that what actually happened

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    Report on NoWar2019 Pathways to Peace Conference, Limerick, 5-6 October 2019.

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    By Caroline Hurley. An anti-war conference called ‘NoWar2019 Pathways to Peace’ took place last weekend at Limerick’s South Court Hotel, organised by WorldBeyondWar.Irish and international concerned parties met to consider the extent of militarism in Ireland and elsewhere, and to work towards preventing the war response everywhere with all its inhumane impacts. Speakers included seasoned Irish and American activists, contributors from Germany, Spain, Afghanistan, journalists and others. A video link enabled MEP Clare Daly to join from Brussels. Presenter and producer of RTÉ Global Affairs series What in the World, Peadar King attended a screening and post-discussion of his 2019 documentary, Palestinian Refugees in The Lebanon: No Direction Home, which features extracts of King’s previous discussion with Robert Fisk on the issues. Panel discussions covered topics such as awareness of army bases, nonviolent protest, the arms trade, Irish neutrality, sanctions, divestment, space militarisation, and refugees. Most of the presentations are now online at WorldBeyondWar.org YouTube channel, while #NoWar2019was the Twitter hashtag used. A highlight was the presence of Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead (Corrigan) Maguire from Belfast, co-founder of The Peace People, who movingly participated on Saturday but delivered the impassioned and erudite speech of the weekend on Sunday, as published by the International Press Agency, Presenza. The conference doubled as the annual gathering of World BEYOND War members. Co-founded by acclaimed journalist, author, activist, Nobel peace prize multi-nominee and radio host, David Swanson in 2014, World Beyond War ‘is a global nonviolent movement to end war and establish a just and sustainable peace’. Under the ‘how’ section of the international organisation’s professional website, instruction is given about taking practical actions. Their award-winning book, A Global Security System: An Alternative to War offers a wealth of innovative and viable material showing means to proceed. The event wrapped up on Sunday afternoon with a rally near Shannon Airport, in objection to the airport’s use by US military in violation of Irish neutrality. Shannon’s exclusive civilian function ended in 2002 with the Irish government’s decision to support US vengeance missions after the 9/11 bombings, as elucidated at the gathering by academic and activist John Lannon. Chairperson and founder of Veterans For Peace Ireland, Edward Horgan,added that in permitting this traffic, the Irish government is facilitating wars in the Middle East. Horgan estimated that since the First Gulf War in 1991, up to a million children have died in the region as a result: “roughly the same number of children who died in the Holocaust”. 100,000 Irish people marched in 2003 against the country’s proposed complicity. Even though America then wavered, protesting citizens were over-ruled and the new military-friendly regimeinstalled at Shannon. Shannonwatchdescribes itself as a group of peace and human rights activists based in the mid-West of Ireland. In the tradition of the Irish anti-war protest that began almost a decade ago, they continue to hold monthly protest vigils at Shannon on the second Sunday of every month. They also do continuous monitoring of all military flights and rendition-linked flights in and out of Shannon and through Irish airspace, details of which are logged online. They dislike what ‘killing in the name of’ is doing to Ireland’s reputation. The Peace and Neutrality Alliance, PANA, promotes neutrality and reform of UN security policy, and is critical of the European Defence Agency’s PESCO programme for a coordinated European military force, to which Ireland is subscribed through the controversial Lisbon Treaty – “PESCO allows thus willing and able member states to jointly plan, develop and invest in shared capability projects, and enhance the operational readiness and contribution of their armed forces. The aim is to jointly develop a coherent full spectrum force package and make the capabilities available to Member States for national and multinational (EU CSDP, NATO, UN, etc.) missions and operations”. Two special guests at the Limerick conference were the American Veterans For Peace Tarak Kauff and Ken Mayers who were not only recently arrested but were also banned from leaving the country. Mr Kauff is 77 years of age, Mr Mayers 82. They were imprisoned for thirteen days and held on remand at Limerick Prison for entering Shannon Airport and causing a ‘security breach’ on St. Patrick’s Day 2019. They were freed on bail paid by Edward Horgan but the revocation of their visas is currently being contested in the Irish courts. They shared experiences and ideas with those present. Such treatment of those caring about vulnerable people by Ireland of the welcomes, with our history of colonial oppression, seems egregiously shameful. Pat Elder addressed the US military’s use of fire-extinguishing foam, which contains long-lived carcinogens, PFAS, dubbed ‘forever’ chemicals. No longer can one source of pollution be isolated for clean-up, however, when the earth is being poisoned by plastics, pesticides, industrial and nuclear waste, and more. And when it comes to war, all these come into play on a massive scale as preparations for war weaken and destroy the ecosystems on which civilization rests. World Beyond War’s manual makes the following claims: Military aircraft consume about one quarter of the world’s jet fuel. The US Department of Defense uses more fuel per day than the country of Sweden. An F-16 fighter bomber consumes almost twice as much fuel in one hour as a high-consuming US motorist burns in a year. The US military uses enough fuel in one year to run the entire mass transit system of the nation for 22 years. One military estimate in 2003 was that two-thirds of the US Army’s fuel consumption occurred in vehicles that were delivering fuel to the battlefield. The US Department of Defense generates more chemical waste than the five largest chemical companies combined. During the 1991 aerial campaign over Iraq, the US.  utilised approximately 340 tons of missiles containing depleted uranium (DU) – there were significantly higher rates of cancer, birth defects and infant mortality in Fallujah, Iraq in early 2010. And so on. Given war’s significant contribution to the degradation of nature and to climate change, peace groups are increasingly linking up with environmental organisations such as Extinction Rebellion (XR) which is running a global fortnight of activities from Monday 7 October

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    The opportunity cost of bloated military expenditure is extraordinary

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      By Greta Zarro In Ireland the total defence sector allocation, including Army pensions, will be €994 million in 2019 (around 0.291% of GDP), an increase of €47.5 million over 2018.  Target strength for the Permanent Defence Force is 9,500. Total world military expenditure rose to $1822 billion in 2018, representing an increase of 2.6 per cent from 2017, according to new data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI); and it will approach $2tr this year. At around 2.3% of GDP most countries spend ten times the percentage Ireland does. It allows Ireland to spend more on other sectors. NATO members including the UK are committed to spending 2% of GDP on defence.  Donald Trump suggests they double that figure to a little less than the percentage he says the US spends.  Nato itself says the US spends 3.5% of GDP on defence.Last year it spent $623bn and other NATO countries spent $312 billion, for a total of nearly a trillion dollars spent on defence by NATO members. China spent  €175bn, Russia $61.4bn.Worldwide there were 20.5 million people — or one out of every 330 — serving in the armed forces, according to an International Institute for Strategic Studies report, ‘The Military Balance 2009’. There were also an estimated 49.8 million reservists and seven million serving in paramilitary units. China has the biggest military with 2 million (US, 1.3 million) and 500,000 reserves (US, 865,000).   The far-reaching social and ecological impacts of war, and ongoing preparations for war, should compel us to work for non-violent conflict resolution. Despite the illusion of safety and comfort that is perpetuated by pro-war politicians selling interventionism and regime change for the sake of ‘national security’, our civil liberties, communities, and the environment are threatened every day that governments facilitate the invasion and bombing of countries abroad. In their wake, war, and preparations for war, such as the network of military bases around the world, leave permanent environmental damage to soil, water, air, and climate. The US Department of ‘Defense’ is the largest institutional consumer of oil($17bn/year) in the world, and the largest global landholder with 800 foreign military bases in 80 countries. The US military is also the third-largest polluter of US waterways, not to mention the waterways of countries it has invaded, such as Kuwait, Iraq, and Vietnam. Wars all over the world wreak havoc on the environment, including those waged by guerrilla forces, whose attempts to stay unseen encourage adversaries to destroy the forests that provide cover. Millions of hectares in Europe, North Africa, and Asia are under interdiction because of tens of millions of landmines and cluster bombs left behind by war. A 1993 US State Department report called landmines “perhaps the most toxic and widespread pollution facing mankind”. Beyond the ecological devastation that war causes, military spending drains our economy, costing the globe trillions of dollars annually that could be better spent on fixing infrastructure, ending world hunger, providing clean drinking water, transitioning to renewable energy, raising minimum wages, and so much more. According to Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-Peltier of the Political Economy Research Institute, investing in peacetime industries produces more jobs, and, in many cases, better-paying jobs, than would spending that money on the military. The National Priorities Project calculates that just 1 year of US military spending could pay for more than 9 million clean energy jobs, or 8 million elementary school teachers. The United Nations’ Office for Disarmament Affairs juxtaposed global military expenditure and the UN budget, for 2010: military spending was 12.7 times higher than the Official UN Development Assistance ($128bn), 604 times higher than the regular UN budgets for Peace and Security, Development, Human Rights, Humanitarian Affairs and International Law ($2.7bn), and 2508 times higher than the combined expenditures of the (UN) International Disarmament and Non-Proliferation Organizations3 ($0.65bn). The opportunity cost of bloated military expenditure is extraordinary.   According to the 2018 Global Peace Index, produced by the Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP), the global economic impact of violence is $14.76tr, 12% of global GDP. The UN estimates that the global food crisis could be solved for a price tag of $30bn a year. That amounts to 1.5% of global annual military spending. The world’s worst humanitarian crisis is currently unfolding in Yemen, which is facing the largest and fastest growing cholera outbreak ever documented, as a result of Saudi-led airstrikes that bombed water, sanitation, and other vital infrastructures. The UK has facilitated this violence by licensing over £4.7bn worth of weapons to Saudi forces. On top of being economically and environmentally disastrous, war is counterproductive; it endangers more than it protects.In early August the UN warned that a recent pause in international terrorist violence may soon end, with a new wave of attacks possible before the end of the year and according to a declassified intelligence report on the war on Iraq, “despite serious damage to the leadership of al-Qaida, the threat from Islamic extremists has spread both in numbers and in geographic reach”. In fact, research from Peace Science Digest shows that the deployment of troops and weapons exports to another country increase the chance of attacks from terrorist organisations from that country. Terrorism actually increased during the ‘war on terror’, according to the Global Terrorism Index. “The past decade has experienced the largest surge in terrorist activity in the past fifty years”. Conversely, a groundbreaking study by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan illustrates that, over the period 1900-2006, non-violent civil resistance has been twice as successful in resisting tyranny and oppression and resolving conflicts as violent intervention. If the reality is that non-violence is a more effective means of achieving security than violence is, why do the countries of the world continue to collectively spend trillions annually on war? Military spending is in fact self-perpetuating, as countries stockpile weapons in an arms race against each other, fearing to be the one left ‘defenceless’. In diverting countless dollars from vital social and ecological needs, military spending exacerbates wealth inequality.  According to IGI Global, “the relationship between military expenditure and the growth rate GDP is nonlinear in the sense that at first with increase in the military expenditure the

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    An interview with exiled Catalan President Carles Puigdemont

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    ON 10 January 2016, Carles Puigdemont, a journalist and the mayor since 2011 of the city of Girona, northeast of Barcelona, was sworn in as the President of Catalonia. In assuming office he made abundantly clear that his foremost priority would be arranging a poll on self-determination, characterising his approach a few months later as “Referendum or Referendum”. That is, while he hoped to be able to arrive at an agreement with the Spanish government on holding a binding vote, he would not allow its veto of the idea to stop the Catalan people from organizing such a poll on their own. In the course of 2016 and the first months of 2017, Puigdemont repeatedly approached the Spanish government about organising a mutually agreed referendum. And the Spanish government repeatedly told him that there was absolutely nothing to discuss. So he readied his government and the Catalan people for a self-administered referendum. Aware that the central government would seek to levy the charge of misuse of public funds against his administration were it to organise the event, Puigdemont left all of the logistics for the vote in the hands of self-funded civil society volunteers. When the scheduled referendum took place on October 1, 2017 it was met by massive police violence from forces under the control of the Spanish state. Despite the violence and the large-scale confiscation of ballots, the pro-independence forces won a convincing victory. While it is true that many stayed away from the polls either out of fear or principled opposition to the entire process, 43% voted, registering a resounding 92% support of independence. In looking at that turnout number it must also be remembered that a very large number of ballots (some estimates run as high as 700,000) were confiscated by police in the course of their armed raids on the polls that day. On Friday October 10, 2017, the Catalan parliament declared its intent to separate from Spain. President Puigdemont, however, immediately suspended the declaration in order to open a period of negotiation with the Spanish state. Over the next two weeks the Spanish government publicly and privately reaffirmed its belief that there was absolutely nothing to talk about and made clear, moreover, that it intended to use Article 155 of the Constitution to suspend the Catalan statute of Autonomy and place the region under full central government control. In the face of this reticence on negotiation and clear threats of further repression the Catalan Parliament met on 27 October, and reaffirmed its earlier Declaration of Independence. Within minutes of this historic event, the Spanish senate voted to impose article 155 upon the Catalan Autonomous region, illegally stretching its mandate to allow the central government to dissolve the Catalan Parliament and set a date (December 21) for new elections. Over the weekend, Puigdemont returned to his home city of Girona and then subsequently slipped over the French border, eventually resurfacing in Brussels on the following Monday evening, accompanied by six members of his cabinet. In early November, the Spanish government issued a European arrest warrant for Puigdemont and the other exiled members of his government for the crimes of rebellion, sedition and misuse of public funds. Over the course of the next several weeks the Belgian authorities reviewed the order in the light of available facts. When, at the beginning of December, word began to leak out of Brussels that they saw no basis for the alleged crimes the Spanish government swiftly retracted the order to save face. In the election, to the surprise of almost everyone, the pro-independence bloc slightly expanded the parliamentary majority that it had earned in the last poll in September 2015. As the head of the independentist list with the largest number of seats, Carles Puigdemont, living in the Brussels suburb of Waterloo, was now the president-elect of Catalonia. The Spanish government, confident its de facto control of the country’s judiciary, now sought to shackle the independentists with highly creative legal manoeuvres. In the days leading to Puigdemont’s scheduled January 30, 2018 swearing-in by teleconference— a practice against which no law exists—the Spanish Constitutional Tribunal nonetheless said publicly that they would recommend against it, and that, moreover, they might very well hold Roger Torrent, the President of the Catalan Parliament, criminally liable if he were to go on with the plan. Frightened by the “advice” provided by the high court, Torrent cancelled the investiture. Two days after the third failed attempt to swear-in the government that the Catalan people had voted for, Puigdemont was arrested while traveling in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein on the basis of a new Spanish extradition request. But just as occurred in Belgium four months earlier, German judges were unable to see any basis for extraditing Puigdemont on the charges of rebellion or sedition. With time running out on the allotted period for forming a government, Quim Torra, a close Puigdemont ally with no formal role in the previous cabinet, was sworn in as president of Catalonia on May 17, 2018. In his initial remarks in office, he made clear that a) he continued to view Carles Puigdemont as the legitimate president of Catalonia and b) that his goal was to make effective the 2017 Declaration of Independence. This interview, which has been edited for length took place in what Puigdemont has christened the “House of the Republic” in Waterloo, Belgium. It was conducted in Catalan and subsequently translated into English TH: In a time of great difficulties and tragedies, why should people in other places, such as my home country of the United States, care about the independence movement in a relatively wealthy part of Spain? CP: What is taking place in Catalonia is, in fact, the direct outgrowth of two important things that have come to us from the US. The first is the Declaration of Independence which has inspired the desire for, and the justification of, freedom in countless nations over the years. The second is the right of self-determination for all

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