The Future History Of Political Economy – Part 1

Eric Zencey

Ecological Economics and its corollary, Steady State Economic thinking, represent a step forward for the discipline of economics and also a return to how it was practiced in the past. In the nineteenth century, economics was a part of a larger enterprise: political economy, the integrated treatment of morals and economics, ultimate ends and efficient means. Late in that century economics calved off from political economy, leaving behind political science and political philosophy as the residuum. It did this in service to the ideal of becoming rigorously scientific.

It’s odd, then, that alone among disciplines with any pretense to analytic rigor, economics has steadfastly resisted the thermodynamic revolution that swept physical and life sciences in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Physics, biology, chemistry, geology, even the study of history were transformed, but not economics.

I think we can blame this on bad timing, willful ignorance, and oil.

Bad timing

In the late nineteenth century the archetypal science was physics and physics was Newtonian mechanism. Ignorant of what a young thermodynamic theorist named Albert Einstein would soon do to the Newtonian paradigm they emulated, Stanley Jevons and other economic “scientists” set about mathematically modeling the economy as sets and subsets of self-contained, equal-and-opposite actions and reactions, happily (and explicitly) assuming that all economic activity consists of ahistorical, which is to say completely reversible, processes. No one who has a nodding acquaintance with the law of entropy could have countenanced this. Entropy is Time’s Arrow, the law of irreversibility; it describes the one-way flow of energy use. A purely mechanical process can be run forward or backwards, but we’ll never invent a machine that can suck in exhaust gases, heat and motion and transform them into gasoline. The entropy law can tell you why. Newton couldn’t.

Just as a consumer might choose to keep a recently purchased appliance even though a newer, better model has been brought onto the market, neoclassical economists weren’t about to re-tool their brand-new thinking to reflect changes in the underlying metaphysics they had been so keen to adopt. It didn’t seem to them that there was any reason to.

“Seem” is the operative word here. Because the entropy process is time’s arrow, and because Ecological Economics places the entropy process at the center of its analysis, it’s entirely appropriate for Ecological Economics to understand its subject matter and itself as a discipline in historical terms. Like other paradigm-defining insights, this one seems obvious once it has been stated: elements of the neoclassical model that could pass for true on a large and forgiving planet a hundred years ago are obviously not true today, when the planet’s source-and-sink services are severely taxed, when natural capital is the limiting factor in production, when there are seven billion of us and our economic wants, capacities and expectations have been amplified by our access to the ancient sunshine of fossil fuels.

Willful ignorance

By modeling the economy as a closed and circular system, neoclassical economists have encouraged themselves to operate in a methodologically enforced state of denial about the physical roots and ecological consequences of our wealth-creating activities. And yet economics has experienced no paradigm-shaking crisis as a result. Neither climate change nor any of the other source-and-sink catastrophes facing civilization have been laid at the feet of bad economic theory. One reason: Neoclassical economists succeed in treating environmental costs as “externalities.” How could environmental degradation be the result of economic activity if it’s external to the economy?

In its self-confirming isolation of the economy from nature and theory from reality, neoclassical economics amounts to a highly principled practice of solipsism. When this pathology is manifest in an individual it produces unpleasant consequences that might eventually prompt some reflection and personal growth. Not so with the collective delusion of mainstream economists. Evidence of our ongoing ecological catastrophe falls far from their purview—not just disciplinarily but geographically, as the wealthier nations (wherein the vast majority of economists reside) export their ecological footprint to the impoverished nations of the world. And for several generations (at least since Reagan defeated Carter, removed Carter’s solar panels from the White House and ushered in an era of GDP growth through de-regulation of the social and ecological consequences of economic activity), there has been a strong self-selection among students of economics. Undergraduates with any kind of deep personal connection to natural systems tend to find the study of standard economics unattractive, displeasing, even soul-deadening. This leaves the field to those most willing to bracket off as irrelevant to their professional purpose any question about the moral and ethical consequences of economic activity, any question about the health and maintenance of nature, any question about the economy’s relation to the larger social and natural systems within which it operates.

Oil

Even so, you might expect that a discipline with such a demonstrably deficient view of its subject matter would fail of its object—would fail to offer wise counsel about the collective project of augmenting the stock of wealth that humans can enjoy. But economics has had much apparent success. Despite regular downturns and financial crises, the wealth produced by our economies has grown and grown and grown. I think there’s a ready explanation that becomes visible through the conceptual lens of Ecological Economics, which tells us that energy isn’t a commodity like any other but a fundamental factor of production (part of a trio: matter, energy and human design intelligence). When your economy operates on an energy source that cranks out wealth-making value in a ratio of 100 to 1 or better—the estimated Energy Return on Energy Invested that petroleum offered us in the early 20th Century—you can believe any damn thing you want about how economies operate and your economy will still generate a great deal of wealth.

Which is to say, high-EROI oil granted the new science of economics immunity from being proven false by events. But falsifiability of principles and propositions is one solid measure of a science. (Non-falsifiable beliefs are called faiths.)

In effect the discipline of economics has a free rider problem—it’s been given a free pass by the enormous power of oil to misunderstand itself and its subject matter. You could also call it a Midas Problem, after the legendary king whose touch turned everything he touched into gold, including his dinner and his daughter. The power of wealth-generation that oil granted to our economy made it impossible for the discipline of economics to connect in any fundamental way with otherness, including the otherness of the planet and its role in the very processes that economics presumes to model.

More labs received live anthrax from US military

Patrick Martin

At least 51 labs in 17 states received shipments of live anthrax spores from military facilities, the Pentagon acknowledged Wednesday. The anthrax was also shipped to labs in three foreign countries, South Korea, Australia and Canada.

Some 31 people, both military and civilian, are taking the antibiotic Cipro as a precautionary measure after exposure to the anthrax, although none has yet tested positive for the deadly toxin.

The Pentagon added five states—Arizona, Florida, Illinois, North Carolina and Ohio, as well as the District of Columbia—to the 12 states where labs have been identified as receiving the live anthrax shipments form the Dugway Proving Ground and three other military germ warfare centers. The 12 states previously named are California, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

At the first formal Pentagon briefing on the subject, officials declined to name any of the 51 labs that received the deadly spores, except those run by the US government. Among those was the Pentagon’s own internal police lab, run by the Pentagon Force Protection Agency. The military continues to claim that the public was never in any danger, despite the shipment of live anthrax through ordinary commercial distribution, mainly via Fedex.

Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work said that anthrax was distributed as live spores rather than dead, as intended, because of the apparent failure of both systems in place to ensure the safety of shipments to research facilities.

Live anthrax is irradiated to kill the live spores, and the irradiated spores are then tested to make sure none are still alive and capable of reproduction. Both the irradiation and the testing had to fail in order to send out live anthrax samples labeled as dead. “Why didn’t we kill the spores when we put them through what we considered to be a protocol that would?” he asked rhetorically.

A total of four batches of anthrax from Dugway have been identified by the Pentagon and CDC as having live spores when all the spores should have been dead. Another 400 batches of anthrax are being tested at four specialized labs, according to Frank Kendall, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics. As a result of this testing, the number of labs found to have received live anthrax samples could rise considerably beyond the 51 already identified.

Whatever the cause of the distribution of live anthrax samples—and Pentagon officials have been adamant that neither deliberate policy nor terrorism were involved, only human error of some kind—this incident sheds light on the vast scale of the germ warfare research being conducted in the United States.

Officials said that nine Defense Department labs conduct anthrax research, along with more than 300 commercial and academic labs. The four main germ warfare facilities that were the sources of the anthrax shipments are Dugway, in Utah, and three in Maryland: Fort Detrick, the Naval Medical Research Center, and Edgewood Chemical Biological Center.

All told, a staggering 1,500 US laboratories work on some form of biological weapons agent, fueled by $9 billion in spending by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Pentagon since 2001, when anthrax mailings to congressional and media offices killed five people and infected another seventeen.

A lengthy report by USA Today, published last week under the headline “Inside America’s secret biolabs,” found that “hundreds of lab mistakes, safety violations and near-miss incidents have occurred in biological laboratories coast to coast in recent years, putting scientists, their colleagues and sometimes even the public at risk.”

The account is worth careful reading. It demonstrates that the biggest danger of biological attack on the American population comes, not from terrorists like Al Qaeda or ISIS, but from the enormous germ warfare apparatus built up over many decades, with facilities located in some cases in the heart of major cities like New York City and Seattle.

Media hypocrisy over fate of migrant labour in Qatar

Mark Blackwood

The intense campaign to overturn FIFA’s decisions in December 2010 to hold the World Cup in Russia in 2018 and Qatar in 2022 has spawned a slew of articles expressing outrage over the atrocious conditions facing migrant workers building the World Cup site in Qatar face.

Coming as many such statements do from representatives of US and British imperialism and a compliant corporate media, the denunciations are entirely self-serving.

The fate of migrant workers in Qatar, the other Gulf petro-monarchies and throughout the Middle East is horrendous and has long been documented. They all rely on migrant workers from South Asia, employed on low pay and in slave-labour conditions, to maintain their wealth and power, and keep their own restive populations at bay.

Insofar as conditions in Qatar depart from the Gulf norms, it is because of the vast scale of the $260 billion infrastructure and stadiums required for the World Cup, and the time scale in which it must be completed. The number of workers involved is expected to rise to at least a million in a few years’ time, when work starts on the 12 Stadiums.

As numerous reports have revealed, the move by South Asian workers to Qatar in search of money to send back to their families has brought untold suffering and death, as they are forced to toil in temperatures that regularly exceed 50 degrees centigrade for as little as 87 cents an hour.

The most frequently cited statistic is that 1,200 migrant workers, or roughly one a day, have died since Qatar won the bid at the end of 2010 to host the 2022 World Cup—although not all on the World Cup sites. If correct—Qatar rejects the figure and the methodology used to estimate it—then the 2022 World Cup has already claimed more lives than that of the 2013 Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh. The Rana Plaza garment factory collapsed in the Bangladesh capital, Dhaka in 2013, killing more than 1,130 workers who were crushed under eight stories of concrete.

By far the greatest number of victims are Indian and Nepalese workers. According to government statistics in India and Nepal, some 279 Indians and 162 Nepalese died in Qatar from cardiac arrest due to mandatory long shifts in searing temperatures, and unsafe working conditions in 2014 alone.

A report by the International Trade Union Confederation published in March 2014 estimated that at this rate 4,000 workers could die in the run up to the World Cup.

Last month, Amnesty International published a briefing entitled Promising Little, Delivering Less: Qatar and Migrant Abuse ahead of the 2022 Football World Cup that said that more than a year after the government promised reforms to improve migrant labour rights, little had been done. An earlier report had identified nine fundamental migrant labour rights issues, but there had been only limited progress on five of these. In four other areas—exit permits, the restriction on changing employers under Qatar’s kafala system, the protection of domestic workers, and the freedom to form or join trade unions—authorities had made no improvements at all.

Amnesty highlighted the case of Ranjith, a Sri Lankan national who had been working in Qatar for five months. Ranjith explained, “ I was promised 1600 Qatari Riyals ($US370), but when I arrived my boss said I would only get paid 800. Until now, though, I have not been paid anything.

“I haven’t been given an ID or any contract. I wake up at 4am every morning, have my shower and small breakfast then leave my home in the Industrial Area for work at 5am and arrive an hour later at 6am.

“To come to Qatar, I had to take a loan of 130,000 Sri Lankan Rupees [approximately $1,000] at an interest rate of 36 percent. I just want to work and earn some money for my wife and children, but because of my sponsor I cannot change jobs. If I go to the police they will arrest and deport me because I do not have an ID.”

Gana Prasad said , “My Company has never given me my ID so at any time the police can arrest me and I will be stuck in jail. Because of this I rarely leave my camp. My life is just the construction site and this dirty room. If I could I would change jobs, but I can’t because my sponsor has my passport and won’t let me work for another company.”

In order to work in Qatar legally, each migrant worker must pay up to $1,570 and work under the kafala (sponsorship) system that ties workers to their employers, who take complete control of their legal and employment status while in the country. In many cases employers withhold passports and even wages to prevent workers leaving or quitting their jobs. The kafala system is nothing short of a modern day form of slavery imposed on hundreds of thousands of workers.

As a result of the kafala system, employers refused to allow Nepalese workers compassionate leave to return home after the April 25 earthquake. Speaking on the issue to the Guardian, Tek Bahadur Gurung, Nepal’s labour minister, explained, “They have lost relatives and their homes and are enduring very difficult conditions in Qatar. This is adding to their suffering.”

Gurung added, “We are a small, poor country and these powerful organisations are not interested in listening to us.”

This is in fact a lie, as most of the South Asian governments have given the nod to the Gulf States’ atrocious treatment of migrant workers because their remittances provide a crucial safety net for the impoverished masses, thereby deflecting popular anger.

Several undercover investigations have revealed countless human rights abuses inflicted upon Qatar’s migrant work force. For example, one Nepalese carpenter, speaking under conditions of anonymity, told The Mirror newspaper last year, “We’re treated like slaves. They don’t see us as human and our deaths are cheap. They have our passports so we cannot go home. We are trapped.” The Mirror ’ s 2014 investigation went on to uncover evidence of workers who had been beaten by gang masters after their passports were confiscated.

Just last week, the BBC reported that its reporters, invited to Qatar as part of an international delegation, had been detained for several days as a matter of “national security” and interrogated for attempting to gather material on migrants’ housing and working conditions.

Qatar is a key ally of the US, Britain and the other imperialist powers in their endless wars for domination of the region’s energy resources and the suppression of the working class. Despite some tactical differences with the US and its regional allies over its support for the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas in Gaza, Qatar has played a crucial role in the US-led wars on Libya and Syria. It has sponsored and financed right-wing Islamist militias whom the pseudo left parties have called “revolutionaries,” evidently impervious to the fact that Qatar, which imposes a slavocracy at home, is not supporting democracy or progress abroad.

The media are now wringing their hands over the fate of migrant workers in Qatar, citing it as a potential reason for reconsidering the location of the 2022 World Cup. But this will not change these relations fundamentally. Rather, such mock outrage provides a useful stick to beat FIFA into submission, after the US bid for the 2022 World Cup was turned down, while helping to discredit the awarding of the 2018 cup to Russia.

Guantanamo detainee details CIA sexual abuse and torture

Thomas Gaist

Newly-released testimony from Guantanamo Bay prisoner Majid Khan has shown that the CIA used torture practices that were “far more brutal and sadistic” than even those revealed by the Senate report on torture released last year.

In interviews with his attorneys first publicized in a Reuters report Tuesday, Khan described being hung from rafters for days at a time, submerged in ice water, and sexually abused by his guards and interrogators, who were frequently intoxicated with alcohol during the torture sessions.

Khan’s experiences were detailed in 27 pages of notes taken by a team of attorneys from the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), with whom he was able to meet only after protracted efforts by the White House to block his access to legal counsel.

“The CIA has repeatedly and continuously lied about the torture program,” CCR attorney Wells Dixon noted in response to the publication of portions of the notes.

“As layers of secrecy have been peeled away throughout the Obama administration, we see more and more evidence of CIA savagery,” Dixon said.

When the torture programs were launched, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) maintained publicly that its agents used “enhanced interrogation techniques,” i.e., scientifically designed forms of torture “lite,” designed to inflict mere moderate levels of suffering short of full-blown torture.

During the rollout of “enhanced interrogation” by the Bush administration, the corporate media treated the American people to slick computer-generated demonstrations of the various “stress positions,” “waterboarding,” etc, which presented the interrogation programs as precise methods, applied in a limited fashion for the purpose of stopping terror attacks against the US.

The latest revelations from Khan make clear that at the main US prison camp, Guantanamo Bay, the reality was far closer to the scenes of medieval dungeons traditionally associated with torture in the public imagination.

There is little doubt about the credibility of Khan’s testimony, given that it fully corroborates the claims made last September by a CIA inside source to The Telegraph .

“They got medieval on his ass, and far more so than people realize,” the CIA source told the British paper last year. “They weren’t just pouring water over their heads or over a cloth. They were holding them under water until the point of death, with a doctor present to make sure they did not go too far. This was real torture.”

In his extensive testimony, Khan paints a picture of Guantanamo as a depraved environment in which the US government’s professional interrogators were given free rein to abuse and terrorize prisoners at will.

Khan’s description of being pulled from his cell late at night for impromptu torture sessions by guards reeking of alcohol suggests that conditions at Guantanamo have degenerated to the point that torture is being carried as a form of entertainment.

The CIA maintained since 2004 that its practice of “waterboarding” detainees consisted of pouring water over the faces of subjects for “no more than 20 seconds.”

Substantiating the claims of the CIA source cited by The Telegraph last September, Khan describes “waterboarding” incidents from May and July 2003 that amounted to near drowning in ice water, providing grisly new details about what “waterboarding” has actually looked like in practice.

According to his account, Khan was slowly submerged feet first in a tub of ice water, while shackled and hooded, and held underwater until the verge of drowning.

“Khan was forced into the tub and held down on his back, his hands were shackled underneath him and the arch of his back forced his head to tilt backwards into the water at an angle. A cloth hood remained on his face as the guards forced his body down into the tub. One of the interrogators held a bucket filled with water and large chunks of ice over his head. The interrogator poured the water and ice into Khan’s mouth and nose as well as on his genitals from a high distance. As the interrogator poured the tub began to fill up. Khan could not breathe and water went into his lungs,” the notes compiled by Khan’s lawyers read.

Such water torture sessions punctuated the several years Khan spent in solitary confinement, including being held in complete darkness continuously for much of 2003 while caged in a bare cell with an uncovered bucket for a toilet, no toilet paper, a sleeping mat and no light.

“It is clear that the CIA interrogators were completely out of control,” Khan’s lawyer said in comments to the Telegraph this week.

“What happened to men like Majid Khan is far more brutal and sadistic than has been revealed in the Senate report or any of the other prior public disclosures,” he said. The torture report published by the US Senate last year only covered “the tip of the iceberg.”

Apparently following the advice of US government psychologists specializing in torture, interrogators issued threats against Khan’s family, including his young sister, throughout his detention.

Prior to his capture and rendition to a CIA black site torture camp in Afghanistan during a March 2003 visit with his wife in Pakistan, Khan was a legal US resident who attended high school and lived with family near Baltimore, Maryland, working for his father.

Khan was moved to the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in 2006, where he has been held since, prevented from meeting his young daughter.

Khan’s testimony to the CCR legal team represents a major deepening of the growing body of evidence implicating the entire US ruling class in unpardonable crimes. Major abuses reported by CCR include:

* “As described in the Senate Intelligence Committee Report, Khan was raped while in CIA custody (‘rectal feeding’). He was sexually assaulted in other ways as well, including by having his ‘private parts’ touched while he was hung naked from the ceiling.”

* “They would come in with a bag of tools and set them down next to Majid. They would pull out a hammer and show it to Majid. One of them threatened to hammer Majid’s head. They sometimes smelled like alcohol.”

* “Interrogators and guards at a black site hung Khan by his hands from a wooden beam for three days. He was naked and shackled. He was provided with water but no food.”

* “When a physician came to examine him, Khan begged for help. In response, the physician instructed the guards to take Khan back into the interrogation room with the metal bar and hang him. Khan remained hanging there for another 24 hours before being interrogated again and forced to write his own ‘confession’ while being filmed naked.”

The Senate report acknowledged that Khan was raped and sexually abused by his captors, including through insertion of tubes into his anus as part of the practice referred to by CIA interrogators as “rectal feeding,” and subjected to blows against his genitals while hanging from the ceiling of an interrogation chamber.

For all this, the US Senate torture report released last year acknowledged that Khan’s torture never produced any intelligence of value.

Khan’s account represents yet another blow against protracted efforts of the US government to conceal the unbridled savagery that reigns inside its torture facilities.

The Senate’s torture report, for all its limited exposures, was quickly buried by the media. Despite containing significant revelations, the Senate report itself was extensively redacted under the oversight of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, undoubtedly to remove accounts of the types of brutality related by Khan.

The suppression of the Senate report is the culmination of years of deception by the CIA and the executive branch to cover up the true nature and scale of the US government’s torture program.

In 2005, the CIA destroyed at least 90 video recordings of CIA torture sessions conducted in recent years. Jose Rodriguez, head of the CIA’s covert wing, the National Clandestine Service, has since received effective legal immunity from the Obama administration. In 2010 the White House announced that the US government would not prosecute him for overseeing destruction of evidence.

Barack Obama finally acknowledged that the US government organized torture on a mass scale in remarks last year. “We tortured some folks,” the president said, referring to the grave violation of US and international law and crimes against humanity.

Obama then proceeded to express his “full confidence” in CIA Director John Brennan, a central player in the erection of the torture apparatus and in the Obama administration’s drone wars. Far from being held accountable, those most directly involved in establishing the American gulag have been protected and elevated to the highest levels of the state during the Obama years.

Philippine Maoists support US war drive against China

Joseph Santolan

On Thursday, Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (BAYAN), the legal umbrella front organization of the Maoist Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), staged a protest outside the Chinese consulate in the Manila business district of Makati. The protests, timed to coincide with the 26th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, denounced China’s “aggression” in the South China Sea.

The CPP and its front organizations, including BAYAN, are playing a vital role in the service of US imperialism. They have staged similar anti-China protests over the past two years.

BAYAN secretary general Renato Reyes denounced China’s land reclamation activity in the disputed Spratly Islands as an act of “robbery” and “an affront to our sovereignty.” He said: “Filipinos have the patriotic duty to oppose these aggressive actions as well as to call on our own government to defend our territorial integrity.”

Reyes called on Philippine President Benigno Aquino to nationalize Chinese-owned businesses in the Philippines, saying “Kailangan mapa-aray natin ang China dito/We need to hurt China here.”

BAYAN and the CPP have worked over the past year to whip up furious anti-Chinese nationalism. They have denounced China as a “brute” and an “imperialist” power that is poised to invade the Philippines. Both Reyes and Joma Sison, founder of the CPP, have repeatedly compared Beijing’s leaders to Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist dictator.

Mong Palatino, chair of BAYAN Metro Manila, issued a statement last year that concluded: “Hate China? Then join the people’s army, strengthen the people’s movement, and be prepared to fight for the motherland.”

BAYAN and the CPP claim to oppose US intervention in the South China Sea and in the Philippines, but their war-mongering against China objectively serves the interest of US imperialism.

What is more, the CPP’s “opposition” to the United States intervention is premised on the false claim that Washington is not serious about its war-drive against China.

Reyes told the demonstrators: “It is not true that the US is out to protect us against China’s incursions and reclamation projects in the West Philippine Sea. The US has repeatedly said that it that does not take sides in the maritime dispute.

“The US is a huge debtor to China, to the tune of $US1.3 trillion. The US will not engage China in a shooting war. Our national leaders are only being made to believe that the US is there to support us.”

The CPP has repeatedly claimed that Washington is avoiding antagonizing China, and that Beijing and Washington are “covertly working hand-in-hand” to oppress the Philippines. These political contortions are designed to obscure the fact that the CPP, having denounced US imperialism for decades, is now in Washington’s camp.

It is not Beijing but Washington that has deliberately inflamed tensions over the South China Sea and is preparing for war with China, in order to ensure its continued dominance in Asia. To tell the working class that there is no threat of war between Washington and Beijing, while the United States is rapidly marshaling its forces to conduct just such a catastrophic conflict, is a political crime of the highest order.

On this basis, BAYAN filed an appeal against the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) basing agreement before the Philippine Supreme Court last year. BAYAN opposed the basing deal because, it claimed, the United States was not committed to war with China. The logic that follows from this is that BAYAN would publicly support the basing deal if Washington announced its commitment to go to war against China over Philippine territorial claims.

BAYAN and the CPP have given full-throated support to the case filed by Manila before the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), urging President Aquino to press forward the Philippines dispute with China. The ITLOS case was drawn up by Washington and is instrumental to its propaganda that China is flouting international norms. CPP founder Sison wrote that the ITLOS case would help assure “free and safe navigation,” the mantra of the US State Department. In the South China Sea, Sison and the CPP are reading off Washington’s crib sheet.

At every turn, BAYAN and the CPP have served the political interests of US imperialism in its drive against China. This role is the necessary outcome of the CPP’s Stalinist political program in new historical circumstances.

The Maoist CPP was founded in 1968 out of a split in the Philippine Communist Party (PKP) during the 1960s. This split was a direct product of the conflict between the Chinese and Soviet regimes. Rooted in the bankrupt Stalinist program of “Socialism in One Country,” Moscow and Beijing fought for their rival national interests, competing for influence in, and then splitting, communist parties throughout the world.

The CPP did not make any fundamental change to the anti-Marxist program of the Moscow-oriented PKP. Both were founded on the Stalinist doctrines of “two-stage” revolution and a “bloc of four classes.” The CPP pursued a strategy of guerrilla warfare and supported Beijing’s foreign policy interests. To this end, it entered into intimate alliances with bourgeois Filipino politicians who supported the opening of trade and political relations with China.

When Mao and the Communist Party leadership in Beijing opened political ties with Washington in 1972, the CPP was isolated. The Chinese Communist Party’s last attempt to smuggle arms to the CPP in 1974 failed and all ties were effectively severed.

With the end of the Marcos dictatorship in 1986, the CPP floundered, looking to restore international political ties. Not receiving support from China, which had openly initiated the restoration of capitalism in 1978, Sison offered to drop the party’s opposition to Moscow and instead to oppose Beijing. In return, he looked for support from the Soviet Union. His overtures went unanswered.

In 1991 the CPP fragmented. A portion of the party retained the name and remained under Sison’s leadership. Through its front organizations, the CPP threw itself into mainstream politics, running candidates for office and forming alliances with leading bourgeois parties. It increasingly became part of the political establishment in Manila, tasked with preventing the independent struggle of the working class for socialism.

In the face of worsening economic crises and mounting geo-political tensions, the dominant sections of the Philippine ruling class have turned to their old colonial master—US imperialism—as the means for defending their interests. The Aquino government has played a leading role in provoking and escalating conflict with China on Washington’s behalf. And the CPP, in line with the shift in ruling circles, has joined the clamor for war.

The political trajectory of the Philippine Maoists strongly parallels that of the pseudo-left in the United States, Australia and Europe, who are all pushing ahead with the agenda of imperialism. This is a reflection of the petty-bourgeois and nationalist basis of these organizations. Their interests lie not with the working class, but with their country’s bourgeoisie.

To the deepening economic crisis and the looming threat of war, there is only one alternative: socialist revolution. The Maoists in the Philippines, and the pseudo-left groupings throughout the world, are hostile to the working class and to socialism.

The nationalism of BAYAN and the CPP will lead only to war. The only way forward for the working masses of the Philippines is to break with these groups, and to organize independently in defense of their own class interests. To do this they must join with their class brothers and sisters around the world in the struggle for socialism by building a section of the world party of socialist revolution, the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI).

OECD cuts global growth forecast amid growing financial turbulence

Nick Beams

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development has issued a downbeat assessment on the state of the world economy as it cut its forecast for global growth this year from 3.7 percent to 3.1 percent in its semi-annual report issued Wednesday.

The 34-member organisation, which covers the world’s major economies, said that with big companies reluctant to spend money on new investment—plant, equipment and new technology—as they had in past periods of “recovery,” the lack of demand was holding back employment, wages and consumption spending.

The OECD assessment is in line with statements from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and major economic think tanks, all of which point to the perilous state of investment spending.

In an editorial comment accompanying the report, OECD chief economist Catherine Mann noted that recovery from the financial crisis of 2008 had been unusually weak and the starting point for its latest assessment was “inauspicious.”

“The first quarter of 2015 was the weakest global growth since the crisis. The United States experienced a particularly sharp dip [contracting by 0.7 percent in the first quarter this year], but a number of other advanced economies shrank during the quarter, and growth in China slowed down more than expected,” she wrote.

Mann tried to put an optimistic gloss on the situation, saying the OECD saw the poor figures as largely the result of temporary factors.

“But even if we are right about the transitory nature of the latest bout of weak growth, the outlook is not satisfactory. Despite tailwinds and policy actions, real investment has been tepid and productivity growth disappointing,” she added.

The slower rate of investment was explained by a lack of expected demand both at home and globally, with the consequent lack of investment spending in turn holding back employment, wages and consumption. “The world economy remains stuck in a low-level supply-demand equilibrium environment.”

A jump was needed to achieve a high-level equilibrium but she was not able to point to any clear sign of that taking place. Even if investment picked up in line with the OECD’s prediction of a 4 percent rise next year “this would still be insufficient to deliver the strong global growth in the near term needed to increase employment and reduce inequality.”

The stagnation in the world economy and the persistence of contractionary trends is being accompanied by growing signs that conditions in financial markets are building toward another crisis.

This week has seen further turbulence on European bond markets. On Wednesday the yield on German 10-year bonds—Bunds—hit 0.897 percent, the highest since October last year, indicating a major fall in their price (yields move in inverse relation to prices) as speculators sold off their holdings. The turmoil was accompanied by a statement from European Central Bank president Mario Draghi, following a meeting of the ECB that markets had to “get used” to volatility in the era of ultra-low interest rates.

Yesterday the sell-off continued, with the yield on Bunds rising to close to 1 percent before finishing down 5 basis points for the day.

These sharp movements, coming in the wake of a series of financial storms—the sudden spike in yields last October and the rapid movement of the Bund last month among others—have given rise to concerns that with a sustained “rush for the exits” there will be insufficient liquidity in financial markets to accommodate all those who want to get out.

In a comment published this week, well-known New York-based global economist Nouriel Roubini pointed to a “liquidity time bomb” in financial markets. The longer central banks supply money at ultra-cheap rates the more they feed bubbles in equity, bonds and other asset markets. “As more investors pile into overvalued, increasingly illiquid assets such as bonds, the risk of a longer-term crash increases,” he wrote.

Yesterday the International Monetary Fund added to concerns over the stability of financial markets when it issued advice to the US Federal Reserve not to begin lifting interest rates until some way into next year.

There are fears that a normalised interest rate policy would have major global consequences as investors pull money from so-called emerging markets in Latin America and Asia and return it to the US where it could bring a higher yield.

A preview of what could take place occurred in the middle of 2013 after hints by former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke that US central bank would start to ease off its purchases on financial assets gave rise to the so-called “taper tantrum.”

The consequences of any decision to begin raising official rates from their present levels of between zero and 0.25 percent could have even more serious consequences, under conditions where European bond markets are looking increasingly unstable.

Speaking to reporters, IMF managing director Christine Lagarde said the conditions were not yet right for the Fed to begin to lift rates. She said that the Fed’s expected move had been “carefully prepared and telegraphed” to financial markets but then added: “Nonetheless, regardless of the timing, higher US policy rates could still result in significant market volatility with financial stability consequences that go well beyond the US borders.”

In other words, global markets are so addicted to the supply of ultra-cheap money by the world’s central banks that even though they have been warned it could start to be turned off, they will go into an uncontrollable spasm when the decision is actually taken.

The authors of the report, upon which Lagarde based her remarks, warned that there were still “significant uncertainties as to the future resilience of economic growth” in the U.S.. “Raising rates too soon could trigger a greater-than-expected tightening of financial conditions or a bout of financial instability, causing the economy to stall,” they said.

This would mean that the Fed would have to reverse its decision and move rates back down to zero with “potential costs to its credibility.” Given the likelihood and severity of risks there was a strong case for delaying any decision to lift rates.

Another indication that the world’s central bankers have no coherent set of policies and no idea as to how a more “normal” regime might be introduced, nor what its consequences might be, was revealed in extraordinary remarks delivered by the governor of Japan’s central bank, Haruhiko Kuroda, Thursday.

Opening a two-day conference on monetary policy, he drew a parallel between the bank’s program of quantitative easing and the story of Peter Pan. “I trust that many of you are familiar with the story of Peter Pan, in which it says, ‘the moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forever to be able to do it’,” he said.

Kuroda said what was needed was a “positive attitude and conviction” and every time central banks had been confronted with problems, “they have overcome the problems by conceiving new solutions.”

In fact, as events in the US and Europe this week show, the central bankers’ “fairy dust” solutions have only created the conditions for another global financial crisis, with potentially even more devastating consequences than that of 2008 for billions of working people the world over.

US officials consider nuclear strikes against Russia

Niles Williamson

US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter is meeting today at the headquarters of the US European Command in Stuttgart, Germany with two dozen US military commanders and European diplomats to discuss how to escalate their economic and military campaign against Russia. They will assess the impact of current economic sanctions, as well as NATO’s strategy of exploiting the crisis in eastern Ukraine to deploy ever-greater numbers of troops and military equipment to Eastern Europe, threatening Russia with war.

A US defense official told Reuters that the main purpose of the meeting was to “assess and strategize on how the United States and key allies should think about heightened tensions with Russia over the past year.” The official also said Carter was open to providing the Ukrainian regime with lethal weapons, a proposal which had been put forward earlier in the year.

Most provocatively, a report published by the Associated Press yesterday reports that the Pentagon has been actively considering the use of nuclear missiles against military targets inside Russia, in response to what it alleges are violations of the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty. Russia denies US claims that it has violated the INF by flight-testing ground-launched cruise missiles with a prohibited range.

Three options being considered by the Pentagon are the placement of anti-missile defenses in Europe aimed at shooting Russian missiles out of the sky; a “counterforce” option that would involve pre-emptive non-nuclear strikes on Russia military sites; and finally, “countervailing strike capabilities,” involving the pre-emptive deployment of nuclear missiles against targets inside Russia.

The AP states: “The options go so far as one implied—but not stated explicitly—that would improve the ability of US nuclear weapons to destroy military targets on Russian territory.” In other words, the US is actively preparing nuclear war against Russia.

Robert Scher, one of Carter’s nuclear policy aides, told Congress in April that the deployment of “counterforce” measures would mean “we could go about and actually attack that missile where it is in Russia.”

According to other Pentagon officials, this option would entail the deployment of ground-launched cruise missiles throughout Europe.

Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Joe Skewers told AP, “All the options under consideration are designed to ensure that Russia gains no significant military advantage from their violation.”

The criminality and recklessness of the foreign policy of Washington and its NATO allies is staggering. A pre-emptive nuclear strike against Russian forces, many of them near populated areas, could claim millions of lives in seconds and lead to a nuclear war that would obliterate humanity. Even assuming that the US officials threatening Russia do not actually want such an outcome, however, and that they are only trying to intimidate Moscow, there is a sinister objective logic to such threats.

Nuclear warmongering by US officials immensely heightens the danger of all-out war erupting accidentally, amid escalating military tensions and strategic uncertainty. NATO forces are deploying for military exercises all around Russia, from the Arctic and Baltic Seas to Eastern Europe and the Black and Mediterranean Seas. Regional militaries are all on hair-trigger alerts.

US officials threatening Russia cannot know how the Kremlin will react to such threats. With Moscow concerned about the danger of a sudden NATO strike, Russia is ever more likely to respond to perceived signs of NATO military action by launching its missiles, fearing that otherwise the missiles will be destroyed on the ground. The danger of miscalculations and miscommunications leading to all-out war is immensely heightened.

The statements of Scher and Carter confirm warnings made last year by the WSWS, that NATO’s decision to back a fascist-led putsch in Kiev in February, and to blame Russia without any evidence for shooting down flight MH17, posed the risk of war. “Are you ready for war—including possibly nuclear war—between the United States, Europe, and Russia? That is the question that everyone should be asking him- or herself in light of the developments since the destruction of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17,” the WSWS wrote .

In March, Putin stated that he had placed Russian forces, including its nuclear forces, on alert in the aftermath of the Kiev putsch, fearing a NATO attack on Russia. Now the threat of war arising from US policy has been confirmed directly by statements of the US military.

These threats have developed largely behind the backs of the world working class. Workers in the United States, Europe and worldwide have time and again shown their hostility to US wars in Iraq or in Afghanistan. Yet nearly 15 years after these wars began, the world stands on the brink of an even bloodier and more devastating conflict, and the media and ruling elites the world over are hiding the risk of nuclear war.

US President Barack Obama is expected to escalate pressure on Russia at the G7 summit this weekend, pressing European leaders to maintain economic sanctions put in place in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea last year. The latest outbreak in violence in Ukraine this week, which the US blames on Russia, is to serve as a pretext for continuing the sanctions.

Speaking to Parliament on Thursday, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko warned of a “colossal threat of the resumption of large-scale hostilities by Russian and terrorist forces.” He claimed without proof that 9,000 Russian soldiers are deployed in rebel-held areas of Donetsk and Luhansk, in eastern Ukraine.

“Ukraine’s military should be ready for a new offensive by the enemy, as well as a full-scale invasion along the entire border with the Russian Federation,” Poroshenko said. “We must be really prepared for this.” He said the Ukrainian army had at least 50,000 soldiers stationed in the east, prepared to defend the country.

Poroshenko’s remarks came a day after renewed fighting in eastern Ukraine between Kiev forces and Russian-backed separatists resulted in dozens of casualties. This week’s fighting marked the largest breach to date of the cease-fire signed in February.

Kremlin spokesman Dimitry Peskov told reporters on Thursday that Russia believed the previous day’s hostilities had been provoked by Kiev to influence upcoming discussions at the G7 summit this weekend and the EU summit in Brussels at the end of the month. “These provocative actions are organized by Ukraine’s military forces, and we are concerned with that,” he stated.

Each side blamed the other for initiating fighting in Marinka, approximately nine miles west of the rebel stronghold of Donetsk. Yuriy Biryukov, an adviser to Poroshenko, reported on Thursday that five Ukrainian soldiers had been killed in the fighting, and another 39 wounded. Eduard Basurin, deputy defense minister and spokesman for the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), told Interfax that 16 rebel fighters and five civilians had been killed.

Ukrainian forces also fired artillery at the rebel-held city of Donetsk on Wednesday. Shells landed in the southwest districts of Kirovsky and Petrovsky, killing 6 people and wounding at least 90 others. The city’s Sokol market was severely damaged, with several rows of shops burned to the ground.

Responding to Wednesday’s developments, members of the fascistic Right Sector militia have been called to mobilize for battle. Andrey Stempitsky, commander of the militia’s paramilitary battalion, posted a message on Facebook calling on those who went home during the cease-fire to “return to their combat units.” He warned that the Right Sector would “wage war, ignoring the truce devotees.”

New hominin discovery suggests multiple human ancestors lived side-by-side

Matthew MacEgan

On May 27, the magazine Nature published an article providing details on the discovery of a new hominin fossil in Ethiopia, Australopithecus deyiremeda. This new discovery is significant because it provides evidence that there were at least two contemporary hominin species living in the Afar region approximately 3.5 million years ago. It also confirms that certain dental features traditionally associated with later Paranthropus and Homo genera appear earlier in the fossil record than previously thought, altering our classification methods moving forward.

The upper and lower jaw of Australopithecus deyiremeda: photo courtesy of Laura Dempsey.

The first Australopithecine fossil—a child’s skull found in a lime quarry by workers in Taung, South Africa—was discovered in 1924 and namedAustralopithecus africanus (Australopithecus translates as “southern ape”).Australopithecus lived between approximately 4 million and 2 million years ago throughout Eastern, Central, and Southern Africa. The genus is believed to be a link between the modern human genus Homo and our last common hominid ancestor with the great apes.

Their brains were approximately 35 percent the size of modern human brains, and adults stood roughly 1.2 meters tall. Significantly, they had longer arms in proportion to the rest of their bodies and less of an upright bipedal frame than Homo, allowing some anthropologists to suggest that Australopithecines lived in a period when humans were transitioning from arboreal (tree) dwelling to more terrestrial lifestyles. Many Australopithecusspecies have been discovered since 1924, including A. afarensis, A. anamensis, A. garhi, and A. sediba.

There has been some debate among scientists about whether Australopithecines should be split into two separate genera—Australopithecus for the more “gracile” types mentioned above andParanthropus for what have been deemed “robust” Australopithecines. Examples of the robust Australopithecines, a characterization which is generally based on dentition and other skull features, are A. aethiopicus (P. aethiopicus), A. boisei (P. boisei), and A. robustus (P. robustus). Scientists in favor of the separation argue that these morphological differences may have accompanied a different set of behaviors among these robust groups.

Our current Homo genus probably developed out of one of the Australopithecus or Paranthropus species between 2 and 3 million years ago.

The etymology of A. deyiremeda comes from the local Afar language wheredeyi means “close” and remeda means “relative,” which the authors use to suggest that this species is a close relative of all later hominins. The fossil remains include two specimens, an upper and lower jaw, which the authors claim belong to the same individual. They were found within a three-square-mile area south of the Mille River, weathered out of sandstone and siltstone. Radiometric, palaeomagnetic, and depositional rate analyses show that the remains are between 3.5 and 3.3 million years old.

The authors spend much of the paper defending their decision to classify their discovery as a new species by comparing its dentition to other hominin skeletons; however, this is not the first study that has suggested more diversity among Middle Pliocene hominins—other recent discoveries have indicated that there existed multiple “locomotive” adaptations in addition to other elements that suggest taxonomic diversity. Most notably,Kenyanthropus platyops from Kenya and Australopithecus bahrelghazali from Chad have been argued to be morphologically distinct from contemporaneous Australopithecus afarensis. This is significant because all three of these species and the new A. deyirameda lived during the same time period.

The main difference that the A. deyiremeda fossil has with A. afarensis, which lived not only during the same time period but also in the same geographical location, is in the shape and size of its teeth. The new fossil has teeth that are more thickly enameled and a more robust jaw structure. The incisors in the front are also smaller than those typically found in A. afarensis. Additionally, the researchers report evidence of tooth and jaw traits that were thought to have evolved in a much later period.

They conclude that “the taxonomy and phylogenetic relationships among early hominins are becoming more complicated as new taxa are added to the Pliocene fossil record, and the temporal range and systematics of early Homo are reconsidered...”

The authors then address homoplacy—the idea certain organs or parts were acquired as the result of the parallel evolution of two species. They write that the place of A. deyiremeda outside of Paranthropus and Homo “implies that some features associated with one or both of these taxa are homoplastic.”

Additionally, the authors state that the discovery of A. deyiremeda is “incontrovertible” evidence that multiple hominins existed contemporaneously in eastern Africa during the Middle Pliocene. This is exciting because the location where these remains were found is only 35 kilometers south of Hadar, where A. afarensis has already been well documented. This suggests that multiple hominin species overlapped temporally and lived in close geographic proximity.

This debunks the limited view that our human lineage comes down through one direct line from our last common ancestor with the great apes to modernHomo sapiens. The earliest humans not only evolved in different ways in different parts of Africa, but they still lived and worked side-by-side. It is important to remember that the evidence we have of prehistoric human life is extremely limited. We are able to infer a lot of information from just a small number of hominin fossils. It is possible that far more interactions and changes were happening than we will ever be able to document scientifically.

The lead author, Dr. Haile-Selassie, has stated, “Some of our colleagues are going to be skeptical about this new species, which is not unusual. However, I think it is time that we look into the earlier phases of our evolution with an open mind and carefully examine the currently available fossil evidence rather than immediately dismissing the fossils that do not fit our long-held hypotheses.”

The authors suggest that future researchers should more closely examine (1) how these different taxa are related to each other and to later hominins and (2) what environmental and ecological factors triggered such diversity. They claim that these things “can only be understood with the recovery and analysis of more hominin fossils and their associated fauna.”

South Korean teachers union faces ban

Ben McGrath

South Korea’s Constitutional Court last week upheld the legality of a law used by President Park Geun-hye’s administration to ban the Korea Teachers and Education Workers Union (KTU) in October 2013. The decision is part of an aggressive assault on democratic rights by the government and the ruling establishment.

The court ruled 8-1 in favor of the government. The KTU challenged Article 2 of the Teachers’ Union Law, which states that the trade unions must not have any non-teachers, including those who have been fired, as members.

The court stated: “If one takes into account teachers’ duties and the particularity of their working relationships, in which they are guaranteed special treatment by education-related laws, the concern is that allowing dismissed teachers to join a teacher’s union could harm its autonomy.”

This ruling is entirely anti-democratic. The Teachers’ Union Law and similar legislation is designed to prevent teachers and other public employees from voicing their political opinions. In fact, this was the basis for the lone dissenting opinion. Judge Kim I-su argued that since the union was already barred from taking part in political activities, whether fired teachers remained in the union or not was of little consequence.

KTU head Byeon Seong-ho described the ruling as regrettable. “The [Constitutional] court has been accused of causing a regression of democracy,” he said. “It is regretful that today’s ruling has done nothing to disprove that opinion. Outlawing a trade union of 60,000 members just because it has nine dismissed workers is unheard of.”

The Constitutional Court also ruled last December to disband the Unified Progressive Party (UPP). The now defunct party and the KTU, along with the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) have long operated on the periphery of the bourgeois opposition, the New Politics Alliance for Democracy (NPAD) and its predecessors.

The dispute goes back to 2009 when 22 teachers were sacked for signing statements critical of the government of President Lee Myung-bak, the predecessor of Park Geun-hye, who replaced Lee as leader of the ruling Saenuri Party. The KTU allowed only nine of those fired to remain as members but, despite government orders to expel them from its ranks, the union refused to do so.

After Park Geun-hye’s government declared the KTU illegal in 2013, the union held on to its status by taking the issue to court. However, the Seoul Administrative Court upheld the government’s ban in June 2014. While the KTU has appealed to the Seoul High Court, with a ruling expected in September, the Constitutional Court’s decision means it is unlikely that the ban will be reversed.

The KTU is the second largest teachers’ union in South Korea, claiming 60,000 members. Its anti-government rhetoric has attracted a large number of teachers opposed to the country’s strict, ultra-competitive educational system. If the ban is upheld, the KTU will lose all government subsidies and the right to collectively bargain.

The KTU’s primary concern is not to defend the interests of teachers but to ensure a place at the bargaining table with the government and protect the union bureaucracy’s privileged position. Despite its rhetoric, the KTU is completely willing to work with the government to impose the latter’s anti-democratic agenda on teachers, workers and students.

In 2011, for example, then-union head Jang Seok-ung declared, “We want to mend ties with the [Lee Myung-bak] administration once more. I am planning to visit Lee soon.” Jang denounced Seoul superintendent Gwak No-hyeon for banning corporal punishment in schools, siding with conservative organizations.

In 2013, the KTU demonized temporary English instructors seeking to become full-time teachers. These instructors were hired under a four-year government plan that called for their termination at the end of that period. Like other irregular workers, these teachers endured lower working conditions than their regular counterparts. Not only did the KTU refuse to defend their jobs, but it sought to drive a wedge between irregular and regular teachers, legitimatizing the government’s firings by claiming the temporary workers received “preferential treatment.”

The assault on the KTU, however, is a warning to the working class. The government’s campaign is directed at silencing any and all political opposition, particularly as social conditions in South Korea continue to deteriorate. Unions like the KTU direct workers’ anger back behind the NPAD. However, the government fears that the rhetoric used by these unions could spark wider opposition that could spiral out of their control.

Park, as well as previous administrations—conservative and liberal alike—is making use of the framework of the dictatorship erected by her father, President Park Chung-hee, who took power via a 1961 military coup. The National Intelligence Service (NIS) has targeted political opponents, including the KTU, by falsely accusing them of pro-North Korean sympathies, in order to justify their disbandment. The NIS, then known as the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, was founded at the beginning of Park Chung-hee’s regime to suppress political opposition.

The Hankyoreh newspaper reported on May 27 that the NIS has been actively working to punish teachers with alleged left-wing leanings and to ban the union entirely.

According to the newspaper, NIS director Won Sei-hoon said on February 18, 2011: “Branch directors should work with the superintendents of schools, or the vice superintendents if the superintendents seem to be left leaning … to make sure that disciplinary measures are taken against teachers who are members of the Democratic Labor Party (DLP) in line with the previous ruling. It looks like we’re going to have to turn the Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union into an illegal union.”

Won was referring to a January 2011 court decision that fined teachers who had paid dues to the DLP (forerunner of the UPP) in violation of the Political Funds Act, banning teachers from political involvement. In February, Won was sentenced to three years in prison for his role in influencing the outcome of the 2012 presidential election, which Park won.

Won claimed that the KTU had “masterminded” pro-North Korean political activities. So ridiculous were these statements that the Seoul Central District Court found Won guilty of defamation on April 22 and ordered him to pay 10 million won ($9,200) to the KTU. Similarly absurd accusations were used to disband the UPP in December.