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	Tibetan Nun calling for Dalai Lama’s return sets herself on fire to protest Chinese Rule by Edward Wong New York Times, agencies Tibet   11 April, 2015   A nun set herself on fire in the past week in a Tibetan area of western China to protest Chinese rule and to call for the return of the Dalai Lama from exile, according to two pro-Tibet advocacy groups.   The nun, Yeshi Khando, is believed to have died because of the intensity of the fire. The death could not be confirmed because the police took her away after dousing the flames with fire extinguishers, said the groups, which had spoken with people in the area where the self-immolation occurred on Wednesday.   Yeshi Khando, who was in her 40s and was from Nganggang Nunnery, set herself ablaze near a monastery in the Kardze area of Sichuan Province, known in Chinese as Ganzi. She was the second woman to set herself on fire this year and the 138th Tibetan to do so since 2009 in Tibetan regions ruled by China, according to the International Campaign for Tibet, an advocacy group based in Washington.   The protesters acted largely out of anger and frustration at what they call the Chinese occupation of their homeland, according to the groups, which are based outside China.   The group said on Friday that the nun had taken part in many peaceful protests since 2008, when uprisings against Chinese rule took place across the Tibetan plateau. Local and central officials of the Chinese Communist Party then imposed a wide security clampdown across the plateau, and that has continued, especially in parts of Sichuan Province, since the self-immolations began in 2009.   The party chief of the Tibet Autonomous Region, which is what China calls the vast central Tibetan plateau west of the Tibetan areas of Sichuan, said this month that monasteries and nunneries had to teach loyalty to the party.   On Wednesday, People’s Daily, the official party newspaper, published an article by the party chief, Chen Quanguo, saying the party would work to ensure that “model harmonious monasteries” and “patriotic, law-abiding monks and nuns” are the norm in Tibet, according to Agence France-Presse. Mr. Chen wrote that all monasteries and nunneries must display the Chinese flag and have telephone service, newspapers and reading rooms, and that more propaganda activities would be held so that monks and nuns could “educate themselves in patriotism.”   Party officials have been vocal about exerting greater control over the spiritual life of Tibet. Last month, officials at an annual political conclave in Beijing said that the 14th Dalai Lama, who is 79 and lives in exile in India, must reincarnate and that the ultimate authority over the process was in the hands of the party and the central Chinese government. The Dalai Lama, however, has said he may be the last one or his successor may be found outside Chinese-ruled Tibet.   Chinese officials maintain that the Tibetans who have set themselves on fire are mentally unstable or have been manipulated by India’s “Dalai clique.”   Free Tibet, a London-based advocacy group, said the nun walked around Kardze Monastery on Wednesday and set herself on fire at 9 a.m. near the Kardze County police station. The group said that while she was on fire, she shouted the slogan “Let His Holiness return to Tibet” and others.   “While many Tibetans are turning to other forms of protest, Yeshi Khando’s action shows us that some still feel self-immolation is the only way to express the depth of their grievance,” Eleanor Byrne-Rosengren, director of Free Tibet, said in a written statement. “Once again, we hear calls for Tibetan freedom and for the country to be reunited with its spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.”   http://www.savetibet.org/tibets-party-boss-calls-for-all-monasteries-to-fly-the-red-flag/ http://www.hrw.org/features/china-end-involuntary-rehousing-relocation-tibetans http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/01/11/why-are-tibetans-self-immolating/ Visit the related web page
	Hold Bankers Accountable for Their Crimes by Katrina vanden Heuvel, Danny Dorling The Washington Post, agencies   May 2015   Last week, Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch announced that five major banks were pleading guilty to criminal charges for what she described as a “brazen display of collusion” to manipulate the currency markets. The banks — Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, UBS, Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland Group — were hit with $5.6 billion in fines and penalties.   Sensibly, the banks were forced to plead guilty, not simply pay fines in settlements where they neither admitted nor denied the changes. But the charges still were brought against banks, not bankers. No banker was held accountable. The personal fortunes of the bankers who profited were not touched. Shareholders, not bankers, will pay the fines. The Justice Department would have us believe that criminal banks ran profitable criminal conspiracies without involving any bankers.   The unwillingness to hold bankers accountable for their frauds and crimes is a great and continuing failure of our justice system, one that poses a clear danger to this country in the years ahead.   Banks have been on a criminal wilding — allegedly laundering money for drug dealers, systematically defrauding homeowners on their mortgages, routinely committing perjury in courts and much more. They’ve paid more than $60 billion in fines over the past two years. Yet virtually none of the bankers — certainly not one of those who claim to run these behemoths — have been held criminally accountable. They have recovered from the economic crash they helped cause, even if millions of Americans have not. And their criminal environment and culture remains intact, despite scandal and plea agreements and tens of billions in fines.   Yes, the banks are back. As the New York Times’s Neil Irwin reported, employment has returned to 2007 levels; the gap between the pay of Wall Street workers and everyone else is back near record levels, and the profits of the financial sector are soaring.   This is, as Irwin notes, a glaring contrast to what occurred after the crash that led to the Great Depression in the 1930s. Then banks were shackled, tightly regulated and greatly diminished in scope and license. The result was decades without major financial crises, during which the economy boomed and the United States grew together, with inequality decreasing. Now, however, while Dodd-Frank reforms have forced some changes, the big banks are more concentrated than ever. They continue to profit from high leverage, exotic trades and very high risk. They remain too big to fail — and apparently the bankers are too big to jail.   More and more studies, including one by the International Monetary Fund, hardly a radical bastion, suggest that a bloated financial sector is bad for an economy. It generates destructive booms and busts. Its high pay entices the most creative to use their talents on financial schemes rather than in more productive activities. Its culture of greed corrupts not just Wall Street but also our politics and economy more generally.   And these recidivist banks — and the bankers who run them — clearly remain unrepentant. The law firm Labaton Sucharow recently updated its 2012 survey of bank employees and their ethics. It noted that there was a “marked decline in ethics” in the three years since their first survey. More than one-third of those earning $500,000 or more annually reported that they had firsthand knowledge of wrongdoing in the workplace. The percentage of bankers who believed their own colleagues had engaged in illegal or unethical behavior has nearly doubled since 2012.   According to the bank employees, this isn’t an accident. Nearly one in three admits that compensation and bonus plans in their company “could incentivize employees to compromise ethics or violate the law.” The raft of charges, costly settlements and now criminal pleas apparently has had little deterrent effect. The report found that the banks weren’t responding by cracking down on crime; instead, they reported a “proliferation of secrecy policies and agreements that attempt to silence reports of wrongdoing” and discourage workers from reporting lawlessness to government authorities.   The criminal pleas by the five banks will not redress this. In a stinging dissent, Securities and Exchange Commission Commissioner Kara Stein objected to the fact that the SEC granted the guilty banks waivers from the automatic disqualifications that they should have suffered, measures that would have had a dramatic effect on business as usual. She summarized the criminal conspiracy, noting, “The conspirators communicated.. almost daily in an exclusive online chat room that the traders referred to as "The Cartel" or "The Mafia." They "lied to customers in order to collect undisclosed markups.. This criminal behavior went on for years, unchecked and undeterred."   Yet the SEC waived the disqualifications after already having granted more than 20 waivers to the same banks for criminal activities in the past. Stein wrote, “This type of recidivism and repeated criminal misconduct should lead to revocations of prior waivers, not the granting of a whole new set of waivers. We have the tools, and with the tools the responsibility, to empower those at the top of these institutions to create meaningful cultural shifts, yet we refuse to use them.”   The big banks — and the danger they still pose to our economy — should be at the center of the 2016 political debate. Last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, introduced a bill titled “Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Exist,” calling for breaking up the big banks. With bankers lavishing big contributions on political candidates in both parties, citizens and the media should insist that candidates describe how they would deal with banks that are too big to fail and with recidivist banks that seem to operate as continuing criminal conspiracies. We need to know who is prepared to stand up and who is in the banks’ pocket.   Injustice is not inevitable, by Danny Dorling.   As 2014 drew to a close, a protest took place in Mayfair at the London headquarters of the landlord Westbrook Partners. Some 60 tenants of the New Era housing estate took to the streets outside Westbrook’s plush offices to complain that they would soon be evicted because the rents were to be raised. One mother brought her two children, Angel, then aged 10 and Alfie, aged 11. The public mood had changed. There was no way that this eviction was going to be permitted. Within 20 days a deal had been done, and the tenants could stay. The news was announced on 19 December and spread around the world.   You can no longer evict children at Christmas, not in front of the cameras, not if the world is watching, and not when people have stopped being so afraid to act. In Britain, the vast majority think it is obvious that the NHS, state education and benefits matched to needs are good things; that ignorance, want, idleness, squalor and disease are bad things needing to be tackled, not accepted as inevitable. However, there is still a small, but rich and powerful, minority who are appalled at the amount of taxpayers’ money that goes into the National Health Service (NHS) and push for more privatisation in the name of efficiency, the end result of such false efficiency often meaning that they can make a personal profit out of the NHS. They also think that as little as possible should be spent on welfare, state education and social services. They aim to shrink the state, and some of them will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid paying taxes at all.   It is obvious that elitism, exclusion, prejudice, greed, despair and the inequality that binds them all are harmful and need to be tackled. We need to beware the small, but rich and powerful minority who feel that they personally benefit from inequality, and who preposterously try to claim that in the end everyone else benefits, or who say that rising inequality is inevitable because of market forces and globalisation, or that the ‘riff-raff’ do not deserve any more whereas they are so very deserving. We only have to look around the world to see that many other affluent countries are not behaving like Britain and the US are behaving today.   Injustice is not inevitable. What is important is not getting to some arbitrary goal, but the direction in which we are travelling. The current levels of inequality in the US and the UK would have been unimaginable a few decades ago.   We do not know by how much it will be possible to reduce inequality, but we will easily know if we are heading in the right direction, which will be when the share of the richest 1 per cent falls.   When I started to work on this new edition, I was expecting to just update the facts and figures with more recent statistics. What I found in the numbers surprised me. Following the 2008 economic crash, the US Federal Reserve Board was floundering over financial statistics that it had been updating quarterly since 1980, and in retrospect they had to revise their recent statistics substantially. What had been published was fiction. The UK government preferred to avoid producing statistics where possible, even proposing to stop the national census that had been undertaken every 10 years since 1801 (other than in wartime). Statistics from non-government sources showed that the poorest were getting poorer and the richest much richer.   In the US and across Europe, we moved from an atmosphere of ‘the bankers should suffer for this’ to ‘we are all in this together’. We then began to realise that the richest, including the bankers and financial institutions that had created the crash, were actually not in it with us, but were making a bonanza for themselves, and the bottom 99 per cent were paying for it. The poorest were suffering the most gratuitous hardship, gratuitous because the cuts to their standards of living hardly dented the deficit but destroyed so many lives. There was an element of sadism in the new UK government policies. Many of the unemployed accepted zero hours contracts, low wage (below living wage) employment or registered as self-employed, despite little prospect of financial benefit but so as to avoid the ritual humiliations of the ‘job’ centres.   While inequalities have increased within most nations in the last five years, there was some evidence of increasing equality between nations, but between individuals worldwide there was still rapidly increasing inequality. Those in power were being more careful over how they chose their words, but their actions showed no change in their attitudes to the very rich and how many they thought were undeserving.   * Danny Dorling is Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography of the School of Geography and the Environment of the University of Oxford. Mary Evans, a Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics, calls for a rejection of the rhetoric through which austerity is legitimated: http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/mary-evans/long-rocky-ride-of-crisis-and-austerity Visit the related web page
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