US military to expand global operations in 2016

Thomas Gaist

The year 2015 will be remembered as a year of expanding global warfare and militarism. It began with discussions of the possibility of “total war” against Russia over the Ukraine crisis, saw new provocations against China in the South China Sea, and draws to a close amid the escalation of the US and European war in Iraq and Syria and the spread of conflict to Yemen, Libya and other parts of Africa.

The imperialist powers are determined to make 2016 an even bloodier and more dangerous year. Germany and Japan are openly remilitarizing, as their governments seek to whitewash and rationalize the crimes of the World War II era. All of the imperialist powers have seized on the terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino to place their populations and economies on a war footing.

The most dangerous factor is the US drive for global domination. The United States has its hands in virtually every country, employing drone assassinations, Special Forces operations and a network of military bases and agreements aimed at establishing unchallenged military domination over the planet, along with cyberspace and outer space.

More plans are afoot. Washington is preparing to expand its global basing system through the addition of a “larger network envisioned by the Pentagon,” which will include at least four new Special Forces hubs and numerous new “spoke” bases, according to a New York Times article published Monday.

The commando network will be centered on Eurasia and Africa but will be global in scope, according to Pentagon officials. Among the new bases will be a permanent establishment in Afghanistan, which will function as “a hub for Special Operations troops and intelligence operatives throughout Central and South Asia.”

The record of the US special units, which have emerged as the spearhead of the so-called “war on terror” since 2001, makes clear the murderous nature of the escalating commando war. US Special Forces have been granted a general license to carry out violence and mayhem in every part of the world with total disregard for international law. Thousands of US commandos are already operating in between 85 and 130 countries worldwide, according to varying estimates by US media sources.

The enlarged Special Forces network is only one element of a broader strategic escalation by Washington. US weapons manufacturers are collaborating with the government to channel an expanding war chest of arms to allied governments and proxy forces, with American weapons sales surging in recent years. In 2014, total US arms sales jumped by $10 billion to a total of $35 billion, giving US corporations control over 50 percent of the world weapons market, according to a congressional report released last week.

The intensified drive for a redivision affects every region of the world.

Europe

Washington is pre-positioning military equipment and deploying conventional forces and military “advisors” and trainers throughout Europe in preparation for war against Russia.

The US Army plans to double the number of tanks it has deployed to Europe, sending another full armored brigade to the continent, accompanied by infantry fighting vehicles and other heavy weapons as well as an additional full Army division dedicated to joint operations with NATO and European militaries.

In Ukraine, US Army forces are training five battalions of active-duty forces and US Special Forces are partnering with the Ukrainian military to develop Ukraine commando units.

Asia Pacific

South Korea, a country that has been tapped to serve as a staging area for US war preparations against China, was the leading importer of US arms in 2014, purchasing nearly $8 billion worth of American-made weaponry.

In December, the Obama administration approved the sale of $1.8 billion worth of weapons to Taiwan, including warships previously used by the US Navy and several advanced missile systems. The sale was the first weapons transfer to Taiwan in years and was clearly intended as a provocation against Beijing.

In the Pacific, the US Army’s “Pacific Pathways” program is coordinating joint operations with Asia-Pacific militaries. In the course of 2015, the program saw the US conduct joint drills with units from Australia, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Mongolia, South Korea and Thailand.

Middle East

Leading purchasers of US weapons in 2014 included the ultra-reactionary regimes of Saudi Arabia, which purchased $4 billion worth of TOW missiles, and Qatar, which purchased $9.8 billion worth of US arms. Qatar has been a major backer of Islamist forces in Syria in the US-backed civil war against Assad.

The US has spearheaded a new imperialist carve-up of the entire region, with Britain, France and Germany piling into the wars in Iraq and Syria toward the end of 2015 and Saudi Arabia leading a US-backed war in Yemen.

Africa

Total arms sales to Africa—particularly in the oil-rich regions—increased by 50 percent between 2010 and 2014 over the previous five-year period. Cameroon and Nigeria, which are collaborating with the growing US intervention in West Africa in the name of the “fight against Boko Haram,” were among the leading importers of weapons. Preparations are underway to relaunch military operations in Libya, already devastated by the US-NATO war that overthrew and murdered Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

Cyber and outer space

Even cyberspace and outer space are not exempt from the US-led militarization drive. In November, the US was one of only four countries to vote against a United Nations resolution, “No First Placement of Weapons in Outer Space,” which was supported by more than 120 member states. In a presentation earlier this year, US Undersecretary of Defense Robert Work outlined Pentagon plans to deploy a range of space weapons, which Work claimed are necessary to ensure military dominance over Russia.

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The experience of the Obama administration has underscored the impossibility of opposing imperialist war outside of a struggle against the capitalist system and all of its political representatives. Having won office in 2008 as an antiwar candidate, presenting himself as an opponent of the war in Iraq and an antidote to the militarism of the Bush administration, President Obama has presided over an escalation of the war in Afghanistan, wars for regime change in Libya and Syria, and a new war in Iraq.

Obama’s talk about ending the war in Afghanistan has been exposed by his decision to keep thousands of US troops in the country and the plans to establish permanent US bases there. All of his pledges of “no ground troops” or “boots on the ground” in Iraq and Syria have been exposed as lies.

The divisions that exist within the US ruling elite and the state over foreign and military policy concern the focus and methods of US efforts to dominate the territory and resources of the world, with the Obama White House arguing for a concentration on the struggle against China and his opponents demanding a larger commitment of troops and weapons to turn the Middle East into a de facto US colony. But there is no “peace faction” within the corporate and political establishment, or either of the two big-business parties.

One side of the global crisis is the slide toward a new world war. The other is the development of revolutionary struggles by the working class. Vast resources are allocated to destruction and war, while growing sections of the US population are pushed into poverty and forced to struggle for basic necessities such as housing, education, nutrition and health care.

The struggle against war can be conducted only on the basis of the independent mobilization of the working class in the US and internationally against imperialism on the basis of a socialist and internationalist revolutionary program.

UK floods bring further destruction to thousands

Barry Mason

Storms in December have brought floods to large parts of Wales, northern England and the border areas of Scotland.

Storm Desmond, at the beginning of the month, impacted heavily on Cumbria in northwest England with bridges washed away and many streets in urban areas underwater.

Over the Christmas weekend Storm Eva, while again hitting Cumbria and other areas, mainly affected areas of Lancashire, West and North Yorkshire. The latest floods hit highly populated areas including the cities of Leeds, Manchester, Salford and York. Thousands of people were forced to abandon their homes, including 4,000 in York alone.

The storms are estimated to have dropped an average month’s rainfall within a 24-hour period, often falling on already saturated ground, leading to rivers and streams rising rapidly, breaking their banks and flooding houses and businesses.

The cost of damage from Desmond is estimated at around £1 billion, while the cost of Eva’s destruction is likely to be at least £1.5 billion, and with further storms forecast the total cost is likely to rise considerably. Accountancy firm Price Waterhouse Cooper said the total cost of the damage nationally could exceed £15 billion.

The flooding over Christmas was accurately predicted, yet nothing was done by the government to assist those who were to be subjected to its ravages.

The weather forecast service, the Met Office, had issued two red weather warnings indicating a danger to life. The Environment Agency, which has responsibility for flood monitoring and prevention, issued 22 severe flood warnings, again indicating danger to life, in addition to 238 standard flood warnings for the Lancashire and West Yorkshire areas over the holiday period. A standard flood warning indicates people must be prepared to take immediate action to avoid the effects of floodwater.

York regularly suffers flooding, as the river Ouse that flows through the city receives water from the majority of the rain catchment area of North and West Yorkshire. This month water levels reached near record high levels, with the impact heightened by the flooding of the River Foss, which feeds into the Ouse at York. The floodgate that normally prevents the Foss from spilling over had to be left open, after the barrier’s pumping station was itself overwhelmed by floodwater, threatening electrical failure. This meant that water from the Ouse backed up the channel of the Foss.

Around 10,000 homes in the northwest had their electricity supply cut off. In Greater Manchester, the River Irwell, separating Manchester from Salford, burst its banks on December 26. This caused the worst flooding in the area since 1946, when 5,300 homes were deluged.

A number of houses were destroyed in working class districts, with Lower Broughton badly hit. A historic 200-year-old public house built on the Irwell’s banks was almost completely destroyed. In the Radcliffe area of Greater Manchester a gas pipe ruptured, leading to an explosion. On the main M62 motorway which runs across the north of England, a seven metre sinkhole opened up near the Rochdale junction.

Streets in Leeds city centre were inundated by water spilling over from the river Aire. Kirkstall Road, a major transport corridor to the west, running parallel to the river, became impassable.

Areas around the River Calder were severely hit. In East Lancashire, the town of Whalley was completely inundated. Further down the Calder valley, Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire was deluged. Further down the valley, the town centre of Mytholmroyd was completely submerged and Todmorden was cut off.

The Conservative government made the usual perfunctory remarks expressing concern for those hit by the flooding, with statements from Prime Minister David Cameron and his Environment Secretary Liz Truss.

During a photo op visit by Cameron to York Monday to survey the damage and praise exhausted rescue teams, one woman shouted out, “No more cuts to public services.”

Following the floods in Cumbria, the government announced a new flood review to be led by Floods Minister Rory Stewart. It is tasked with developing plans to manage a worst-case flooding event and is to publish recommendations in 2016. None of this will resolve anything, with Stewart saying this week, “The underlying central problem I’m afraid is the weather. We have never had rain like this before.”

The truth is that the flooding disaster is the product of the vast cuts in the flood defence and infrastructure budget, compounded by a failure to maintain the UK’s decaying infrastructure over decades.

A Financial Times article dated December 15 highlighted the overall scale of government budget cuts to flood protection schemes:

“Whitehall budget cuts and a growing risk of serious flooding are set to stretch the environment’s department’s budget thinly, a committee of MPs has warned. George Osborne, chancellor, cut day-to-day funding for the department by 15 percent over the next four years in last month’s Spending Review, to £2bn a year… on top of a budget reduction of about a quarter over the course of the last parliament.”

The government is only committed to a paltry £2.3 billion in flood defence spending, as announced in 2014 by the previous Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition. The programme is to cover the period up to 2021. It is heavily reliant on private sector investment. £600 million is slated to come from outside organisations, but currently there is a £350 million shortfall, with the private sector only having contributed £61 million.

The Guardian on December 29 cited Professor Colin Mellors, head of the Yorkshire regional flood and coastal committee, warning that further government cuts would affect flood preparedness, saying, “With ever tighter budgets, it is clear that there will need to be even firmer prioritisation, especially in relation to maintenance activity.” In the new year, the committee would have to “consider sites where maintenance might be formally discontinued.”

It emerged this week that a proposed £180 million flood defence scheme for Leeds was cancelled last December.

It is estimated that one in six homes nationally are at risk of flooding. Yet the warning last year by the independent advisory body, the Committee on Climate Change, that three-quarters of flood defences were inadequately maintained, was ignored by the government.

With no adequate contingency plans in place, despite knowing the impact of the forecast heavy rain, the governments’ entire response is to rely on the use of volunteers, such as mountain rescue teams, and to send in a few hundred soldiers with sandbags to already submerged areas. The temporary barriers erected by troops were easily overwhelmed. But such are the levels of cuts that there is even a shortage of such temporary barriers, with around 85 percent of the total currently being deployed in Cumbria.

Thousands of people whose homes are inundated by floodwater now face huge costs to rectify the damage. Those without insurance coverage are threatened with financial ruin. Under current legislation, insurance companies are obliged to continue to offer insurance coverage to current policyholders. However, there is no limit on the premiums they can impose and householders and small businesses are often priced out.

Seven confirmed dead in industrial landslide in Shenzhen, China

Will Morrow

At least seven people have died and more than 70 are still missing presumed dead in the industrial landslide which engulfed a manufacturing area of the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen on December 20. As a 90-metre-high pile of industrial waste gave way, 33 buildings were destroyed in a wave of rock, construction debris and mud that buried over 300,000 square metres of land.

The death toll is likely to rise in coming days as the chance of finding survivors becomes ever slimmer. Lui Guonan, a geological expert at the China Academy of Railway Sciences, described the difficulty confronting the 5,000 rescuers operating 700 excavators and bulldozers. “This rescue effort will be much harder than for earthquakes or other disasters. When buildings collapse, there’s always some space created by the frames. But after a landslide, the mud will fill up that space like toothpaste.”

While the full human toll of the disaster emerges, it has become increasingly clear that the landslide was the inevitable and foreseeable result of the criminal indifference of government administrators and the landfill’s private operators.

It had already been reported that the Hong’ao Construction Waste Dump, where the landslide originated, was operating illegally without a permit for 10 months. The dump opened in February 2014, with a 12-month period of approval. According to the South China Morning Post, records show that the local government supervisor, the Urban Management Bureau in Shenzhen’s Guangming New District, had issued an order for the site to close in July due to safety concerns. The landfill continued to operate and no actions were taken to shut it down.

In a December 23 article, the Wall Street Journal revealed that reports on the Hong’ao landfill by a government-appointed monitor from September to December had documented numerous safety violations and warned that the pile was unstable. The monitor called for the site to suspend operations just four days before it collapsed. All of these warnings, available to both the company and government officials, were simply ignored.

In a document dated September 21-October 21, the environmental monitoring firm, Shenzhen J-Star Project Management, reported “severe” erosion on some slopes of the landpile. It also noted that workers did not wear reflective vests and that safety hazards were not clearly marked.

On October 20, J-Star issued a notice to Shenzhen Yixianglong Investment Development Co., the company which had been subcontracted out by the landfill’s operator, Shenzhen Luwei Property Management Co., to manage the landfill’s day-to-day operations. The notice “requested remedies for problems at the landfill, including insufficient monitoring of work quality and a poor safety culture,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

In a second report dated October 21-November 21, J-Star detailed “slight natural sinking” in part of the landfill, “subpar” safety measures, damaged drains and a shortage of machinery. The report requested that the landfill soil be compressed in order to stabilise it .

Finally, on December 16, J-Star issued a “work suspension order” to Yixianglong, effective immediately, which was ignored.

The central Chinese Communist Party (CCP) government in Beijing has swung into overdrive with the by-now familiar actions that characterise its response to all industrial disasters. The criminal negligence of the private operators and local government administrators is denounced, and a handful of scapegoats arrested, in order to present the disaster as an isolated event and deflect any scrutiny of its broader social implications.

The state-owned Xinhua news agency announced on Monday that Shenzhen police had arrested 12 individuals, including executives of Yixianglong. On Sunday, news outlets reported that Xu Yuan’an, the director of the local Urban Management Bureau which is responsible for overseeing the landpile, had committed suicide by jumping off a building in a residential area of Shenzhen’s Nanshan district.

His death came just two days after central government investigators declared that the disaster was man-made, and warned that “culpability will be sternly pursued according to the law,” according to Xinhua. The same day, Shenzhen’s local CCP secretary declared in a televised news conference that the party leadership “will assume whatever responsibility should be assumed, accept whatever punishment is due, and punish whoever should be punished.”

At the same time, reports indicate that the government is preventing the victims’ loved ones from speaking publicly. The South China Morning Post reported that 76 teams of five government officials had been allocated to “take care of the relatives” of those missing, and that reporters had not been able to contact them since.

All of these measures are aimed at covering over the social reality: that the Shenzhen disaster is the inevitable consequence of the unbridled capitalist exploitation overseen by the CCP regime over the last thirty years, as it has presided over capitalist restoration and ruthlessly repressed any resistance by the working class to the country’s transformation into a sweat-shop for global capital.

There is particular nervousness in ruling circles that the disaster took place in Shenzhen, which has been a model for pro-market reforms that Beijing claimed would lift the living standards of working people. The Beijing News, a widely-read tabloid, commented with evident trepidation, “What is troubling about this accident is that it occurred in a first-tier city, Shenzhen. It is at the forefront of Chinese citizens in its level of modernization.”

A small fishing village in the 1970s located just north of Hong Kong, Shenzhen was transformed into one of China’s first Special Economic Zones. It was one of four cities visited by Deng Xiaoping in 1992 as part of the “Southern Tour” aimed at accelerating the opening up of China to foreign capital and capitalist exploitation. The city is home to some of China’s and the world’s largest technological manufacturing companies, including Foxconn, which operates a mega industrial complex in the city.

Shenzhen now has a population of over 10 million people. While it has the fourth-highest GDP in the country, and is one of China’s wealthiest cities per capita, the levels of inequality are staggering. A tiny layer of a Chinese capitalist class and upper-middle class are concentrated in the city’s wealthy central skyline district, surrounded by a vast mass of impoverished labourers.

Some 60 to 80 percent of the local population are “internal migrants” who have travelled from other regions hoping for work. These workers are not entitled to even the limited social services for healthcare and children’s public education provided to the locally registered population. Shenzhen is the only Chinese city in which the local language, Cantonese, is not the most widely spoken one. The average age in the city is less than 30. The local monthly minimum wage is 2,030 yuan ($US310).

The disaster occurs amid growing signs of restiveness of the Chinese working class as the Chinese economy continues to slow. In the latest reported incident, hundreds of workers from the Shenzhen Zhongtian Xin Electronics mobile phone assembly plant rallied outside local government offices yesterday after the company closed its doors, leaving 2,000 workers unemployed, according to Hong Kong Free Press. The workers are demanding their unpaid wages, after the company began delaying salary payments in 2014. The newsagency reported that at least 76 companies had closed in the area this year.

Japan and South Korea reach agreement over comfort women

Ben McGrath

The foreign ministers of Japan and South Korea met Monday in Seoul to formalise a deal over the long-running dispute regarding “comfort women.” The decision will undoubtedly be welcomed in Washington which has been pressuring its two allies to mend their rift so as to collaborate more closely in the US “pivot to Asia” against China.

Japanese foreign minister Fumio Kishida offered a limited apology over the treatment of South Korean “comfort women” who were forced to act as sex slaves for the Japanese army during the 1930s and 1940s. He promised a one-time payment of 1 billion yen ($8.3 million) to a fund to be established by Seoul for the 46 surviving victims.

“The issue of comfort women, with an involvement of the Japanese military authorities at that time, was a grave affront to the honor and dignity of large numbers of women, and the government of Japan is painfully aware of responsibilities from this perspective,” Kishida said following his meeting with his South Korean counterpart Yun Byeong-se.

“Prime Minister of Japan, Prime Minister [Shinzo] Abe expresses anew his most sincere apologies and remorse to all the women who underwent immeasurable and painful experiences and suffered incurable physical and psychological wounds as comfort women,” Kishida added.

In response, Yun declared that the issue was “finally and irreversibly” resolved, provided “the government of Japan will steadily implement the measures specified.” He also agreed to discuss moving a “comfort woman” statue of a young girl erected in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul in 2011 by the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan.

“Comfort women” is the Japanese euphemism for women who were forced to work in brothels for the Japanese military during World War II. While estimates vary, approximately 200,000 women from throughout Asia, including Korea, China, and the Philippines, were recruited, coerced, and at times physically forced into becoming comfort women.

The joint statement stopped short of saying that the Japanese military had established the comfort women system or that women were forced into serving at the brothels. This is an obvious concession to the Abe government which has been seeking to whitewash the past crimes of the Japanese military, by claiming that the army did not organize the sex slavery and that the women were not coerced.

However, historians like Yoshiaki Yoshimi have demonstrated using documents from before and after the war that the military established and ran the “comfort women” system. The women were often deceived with the help of middlemen using promises of phony jobs or outright forced into sexual slavery.

South Korean President Park Geun-hye also met with Kishida and reportedly called Abe on Monday. The two leaders held their first bilateral summit in November where they agreed to resolve the comfort women issue, which Park described as “the biggest obstacle to efforts to improve bilateral relations.”

Surviving women in South Korea were critical of the agreement. “It seems neither government cares about the victims,” said Lee Yong-su. Another woman, Gang Il-chul stated: “This is not different from the Asian Women's Fund. Only the Japanese government's legal compensation and official apology will be the answer for us.”

The South Korean government will likely have a difficult time selling the agreement. Both major establishment parties regularly whip up anti-Japanese chauvinism to distract the working class from domestic social conditions. In fact, Seoul’s inability to push through a military intelligence sharing agreement—encouraged by the United States—with Japan in June 2012 led to the recent downturn in relations with Tokyo.

The government of President Lee Myung-bak faced public uproar over the agreement. Hoping to save face, Lee provocatively made a trip in August 2012 to the disputed Dokdo/Takeshima islets in the Sea of Japan, becoming the first South Korean president to do so. Nationalistic recriminations followed, including over comfort women, which did not end when Park came to power in February 2013.

Prime Minister Abe worsened relations with a visit to the controversial Yasukuni war shrine in December 2013, angering Washington in the process. The Obama administration has been pressing South Korea and Japan to collaborate more closely so as to facilitate the US military build-up in North East Asia directed against China. The US has military bases in both countries.

President Obama pressured Park and Abe to take part in a trilateral summit in March 2014. Following the meeting, Obama took Abe aside for a private discussion on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and other issues. Obama also began applying pressure specifically over the comfort women issue, describing it as an “egregious human rights violation” during a visit to Seoul in April 2014.

Abe started to temper his stance. Despite having promised to do so, Abe stopped short last year of completely revising the 1993 Kono Statement, a limited formal apology for the abuse of comfort women. However, his government did issue a report that called into question the legitimacy of existing evidence used to write the statement. The Kono Statement, named after Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono, followed the first public revelations in the early 1990s of the abuses suffered by comfort women.

For all of Seoul’s talk about restoring the honor and dignity of the women, it is highly unlikely that the South Korean establishment was unaware of what happened during the war. Many politicians and military figures in the post-liberation period had served as Japanese collaborators in the colonial government or in the army, including President Park’s father, the post-war dictator Park Chung-hee, who was a lieutenant in Japan’s Kwantung Army.

A New Year’s sense of foreboding over the global economy

Nick Beams

Since the eruption of the global financial crisis seven years ago, it has been commonplace for bourgeois commentators to end each year with predictions of better economic times ahead. Not so this time.

Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman summed up the prevailing mood in a comment this week. “In 2015,” he wrote, “a sense of unease and foreboding seemed to settle on all the world’s major power centres. From Beijing to Washington, Berlin to Brasilia, Moscow to Tokyo—governments, media and citizens were jumpy and embattled.”

On the economic front there are two sources of this mounting disquiet: First, the fact that despite the pouring of trillions of dollars into the global financial system by the world’s major central banks, recessionary tendencies are gathering momentum. Second, that, in Rachman’s words, “there is… a widespread fear that, after years of unorthodox monetary policy, another financial or economic crisis might be building.”

The predominant economic development in 2015 has been the deepening trend towards global recession. At its meeting in October, the International Monetary Fund forecast the lowest rate of global economic growth since the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis and warned that it could further downwardly revise its estimates.

The myth, assiduously promoted for a number of years, that China and the emerging market economies would provide a new foundation for global capitalism was finally buried this year, as China experienced its lowest growth levels since the early 1990s. Rather than provide a new base for expansion, the mounting problems in the Chinese economy, exemplified by the Chinese stock market crash over the summer and the devaluation of the renminbi, are negatively impacting the rest of the world, with major economic and political consequences.

The “left” turn in Latin American politics has come to an end as the boom fuelled by exports to Chinese markets has given way to recession. Brazil, once seen as a source of economic expansion, along with the other members of the BRICS group of countries, has been plunged into recession. Its economy contracted 4.5 percent in the last quarter in the biggest downturn since the 1930s Depression. This contraction has intensified its financial problems. November’s figures for the increase in Brazil’s public debt were the third highest on record.

The effects of slower growth in China are extending to the advanced capitalist economies. Canada, which is highly dependent on exports to China, has, with the announcement that the economy contracted in October, experienced negative or stagnant growth in seven of the first ten months of the year.

Falling iron ore export revenue, the result of the Chinese slowdown, is causing major fiscal problems for the Australian federal government as well as the states. In its latest budget update, the Turnbull government announced that it expected to lose another $7 billion in revenue over the next four years as compared to estimates made just last May, largely as a result of falling ore prices. These are now below $40 per tonne, compared to $180 per tonne four years ago. The once boom state of Western Australia has announced its biggest income fall since the Great Depression due to lost revenue from the mining industry.

For some time the US was touted as a bright spot in the world economy. To the extent that this is still the case, it only underscores the dismal situation everywhere else. US wages remain stagnant, economic growth remains well below levels achieved in all previous post-war recoveries, and industrial output is falling, with warnings that the sector has entered a recession.

The euro zone has yet to recover the levels of output reached before the beginning of the financial crisis, with no signs of any revival of investment.

One of the most prominent indicators of the onset of global recession is the precipitous fall in the prices of all industrial commodities. The Bloomberg Commodity index of 22 raw materials has fallen to its lowest level since the financial crisis.

While the plunge in the price of oil—down from its levels of around $100 per barrel in the middle of last year to just $36—has attracted the most attention, it is only the most prominent expression of a general tendency. Iron prices continue to fall, accompanied by precipitous declines in other metals associated with basic industry.

At the beginning of this year, the price of nickel, which is used in the manufacture of stainless steel, was expected to rise by 22 percent. It has fallen by more than 40 percent, a bigger decline than the collapse suffered by oil. Likewise, the price of zinc, which was predicted to rise by 16 percent, has dropped by 28 percent.

When the oil price began to fall, the view was advanced that this could be beneficial to the world economy by reducing energy costs. But any positive effects have been completely outweighed by the deepening slump. In an indication of future trends, the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries lowered its long-term estimates for global oil demand and said oil prices would not return to the level of $100 per barrel until 2040 at the earliest.

The falling oil price has sent a shock wave through financial markets, hitting high-yield or so-called “junk” bonds as well as mutual funds that have invested in energy-related projects. With money available at ultra-low interest rates and oil fetching more than $100 per barrel, there was money aplenty for speculation. But with oil at below $40, many of these projects are unviable.

Mutual funds that invested in pipelines and other infrastructure projects have also been adversely affected. According to one analyst cited by the Financial Times: “These funds have never gone through the kind of energy price crash that we have had this year.”

The problems could extend more broadly to US banks. Wells Fargo, one of America’s largest banks, has already warned that low oil prices mean exploration companies and oil producers may not be able to repay their loans. It has been estimated by US regulators that there are five times as many oil and gas loans in danger of default than there were a year ago.

When the financial crisis broke in 2008-2009, the air was filled with talk of coordination and cooperation among the major capitalist powers. That has already gone by the board and the past year has seen growing divergences.

There is a rift in the policies of the world’s central banks, with the US Fed starting to lift rates while the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan hold rates near zero and continue to pump money into the financial system.

While a façade of unity is maintained, divisions are deepening, especially as regards China. In March, there was a conflict between the US and Britain when the Cameron government, acting on behalf of British financial interests, defied US opposition and announced it was signing on to the Chinese-backed Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, opening the way for other European powers to join.

A new conflict has now opened up, with the US reported to be lobbying to prevent the European powers, with Britain and Germany playing a key role, granting China market economy status under the World Trade Organisation (WTO). If China were so designated, it would further open up the world market to its exports. US officials have denounced the move as an attempt by European powers to win the support of Beijing as they seek profitable outlets for euro investments.

Widening rifts were also in evidence with the effective burial of the Doha Round of trade negotiations at the WTO talks in Nairobi earlier this month. This was chiefly at the instigation of the US, which is abandoning the pursuit of multilateral trade deals in favour of exclusive agreements, such as the Trans Pacific Partnership covering Asia and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership covering Europe, in which trade concessions are not extended to all but only to those countries agreeing to Washington’s demands.

The implications for the international working class of the deepening crisis are further austerity coupled with intensifying attacks on jobs, wages and working conditions.

Euro zone economists polled by the Financial Times this week set out the agenda with a call for a renewed push on so-called “structural reforms” of the labour market—the scrapping of remaining regulations governing wages and working conditions—aimed at nothing less than the creation of an impoverished cheap labour force.

Economic developments in 2015 have again underscored the fact that the crisis of 2008 signified a breakdown of the global capitalist system, not a downturn from which there would be a “recovery.” The coming year will bring a stepping up of the assault carried out over the past seven years. It can be met only through a political movement of the working class based on an international socialist program.

Merry Christmas: Hundreds of Millions Crushed by the Cross

Andre Vltchek

White foam, kitschy lights and embarrassing computer generated melodies. Year after year, the same crap. Not tired yet?

Christian families gather; they perform rituals, exchange gifts. All this is taking place under the crucifixion, which has been elevated to the reason, justification and excuse for the most intense, long-lasting and on-going slaughter of human beings in the history of mankind.

Hundreds of millions, all over the world, have died so that “the message of Jesus” could live. Millions are still dying now, so that Christian fundamentalists can manipulate, rule and plunder the world, unopposed.

Those neocons, the neo-colonialists, and Western exceptionalists/supremacists – are all comfortably seated in their saddles, as in the days of the Spanish Inquisition, or the insane reign of Calvin.

Aren’t all the mountain ranges of corpses and vast oceans of blood really enough?

The snow, real and chemical, is soaked in red – a deep-red color.

***

Year after year, I monitor the crimes against humanity committed by these Christian “warriors”. I monitor and report. For many years I have observed and written down my findings.

2015 has been full of “great Christian deeds” – again!

Throughout this year, the Christian fundamentalist West continued derailing what was left of socialist Islam, manufacturing, funding and arming various grotesque factions and armies, including ISIS. During the conference I attended in Teheran this year, I was told by two Muslim scholars and philosophers, that Washington, London and Paris have managed to “create a totally new religion” that has nothing to do with the original and socially-oriented Islam. As a result, in 2015 alone millions have been displaced and tens of thousands are dying.

As in the middle ages, attacked and destabilized Muslim countries are collapsing, sending millions of refugees to all corners of the globe. Further millions are internally displaced.

Tiny Lebanon has now over 2 million refugees from both Syria and Iraq, and Russia has over one million people fleeing both Ukraine and the Middle East.

After bloodsucking all over the world, particularly the Middle East and Africa, the West “just cannot take more refugees”. This is what it says! The entire West cannot accommodate one million people, after robbing and raping all the continents of our Planet.

Oh that poor, stressed and overwhelmed Christian West! It is so, so charitable, so kind, so bloody civilized, but it just cannot do anything to help those hordes flooding into its castle from the east and the south! We should all understand and sympathize!

Of course, its theaters, parks, train stations, schools, social systems are all built on the corpses of hundreds of millions, scattered across all continents. Its “culture” is constructed on what was directly robbed from the Arab world, Persia, China and those great American civilizations before they were ruined by the Western holocausts. The only reason why the Christian West prospered and won countless colonialist battles is because it behaved like a beast, a true animal, in short: like the most brutal and barbarous thug on the face of the Earth. Progress? What progress? “Progress” towards what? It was all just pure Christian fundamentalist degeneracy. And it still is. Even the so-called ‘secular’ and ‘non-religious’ West is essentially resting on the pillars of Christian dogma, expansionism and deep-rooted complexes of superiority.

“Stop the refugees!” voices are heard. “Stop the Muslims!” And loudest of all come the shouts: “Stop the terrorists!”

Twisted Christian dogma helps with the best propaganda on earth: that of the West. Their bottom line reads like this: “We kill millions of your people, bomb your cities to the ground, but if some other guys blow a few bombs and kill a few hundred people annually, that justifies our war on terror.”

You see, a Westerner, or a Christian, can never be a terrorist. Even such a thought is forbidden.

Yes, rob and kill and rule, but all that has to be done remotely, long-distance. That is the Christian way. And remember: you slap our face and we will… offer you another cheek? Get real! In your dream, dude! We will nuke your cities!

After destabilizing dozens of countries, so that the bloody mess could further serve its neo-colonialist designs, the Christian West is now sending armies to push those debilitated millions of poor, starving people escaping Libya, Syria and other countries, far away from the proximity of its refined churches, perfumed department stores and glowing Christmas markets.

What a spectacle of that fabled Christian charity! What humility and kindness!

You loot, rape and torture, and then you throw a few crumbs across the barbed wire, at those whose natural resources made your social systems and obnoxious subsidies so lavish.

If someone protests, you shoot. If some government resists, you overthrow it. And then you yell: stay away, you rugged hordes!

Your people elect near fascist governments, just in order to prevent some pseudo-leftist politician from applying at least a bit of internationalist policies.

Oh, what a ride it was, this year, for true Christianity!

***

I witnessed the entire Central Asia going up in flames, after thousands of Western-backed NGOs began spreading nationalist, racist and divisive ideologies. A man from Kyrgyzstan, a moderate Muslim scholar whom I was supposed to meet, was stabbed countless times by ISIL, just a few days before I landed in Bishkek.

As in Oceania, Africa, Latin America and Asia, the Christian preachers were injected (by the West) into the complex Central Asian cultural fabric, in order to destroy peace and understanding between the various ethnic and religious groups.

From where the hell is the West managing to get so many of those militant, aggressive, thoroughly degenerate preachers, priests and clerics? They seem to be growing on some ancient colonial plantations before being transplanted into all the continents of the Earth!

Primitive, constantly at war with the poor are these hateful, Economist-reading, Voice of America-listening clerics.

How to neutralize them? How to get rid of them? During and after their revolutions, the French and then the Russians used to hang them on streetlamps. It is not done like this, anymore. The Empire reserves the right for itself and for its lackeys to lie, agitate, brainwash and poison. As long as these treasonous preachers are defending Western Christian doctrine, colonialism and capitalism, they are extremely well protected!

***

In 2015, the Christian right wing deeply damaged our revolutions all over Latin America.

It continues to batter China, through the religious implants sent to it from all over East Asia and elsewhere.

Extreme right-wing preachers and agents from the United States, Europe, Australia and Canada keep invading countries like Indonesia, as well as virtually all the nations of Africa and Oceania.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, true beasts, warlords/Christian fundamentalist preachers, are exterminating their own citizens on behalf of Western multi-national companies and governments. Since 1995, the DRC has lost around 10 million people.

***

Lately, one “Christian episode” from my youth keeps coming to my mind.

Just a few weeks after arriving in the US, I took a train from New York City to Washington D.C., to see the Capital. I spent several hours hanging around the place, terrified by the open, unconcealed misery so clearly visible only a few minutes from the landmark government buildings and monuments.

On the way back, it was almost dark in the Amtrak carriage, as the train was slowly making its way back to New York.

Next to me sat a Polish priest. “I am a visiting priest”, he told me at the beginning of the journey. “And I am an anti-Communist.”

A few minutes after the Baltimore stop, he began molesting me.

His insane face was twisted by lust. He was breathing heavily. His hands kept grabbing me, searching for the zipper of my fly.

I pushed him away, but he kept whispering vile stuff in Polish.

I stood up and did the only sensible thing: I punched him straight in his face, with all my strength.

His nose began to bleed.

When the conductor passed through the car, the priest ran to him and complained that I had attacked him.

That’s how they used to run their “anti-Communist struggle back home”, I thought. Molest and then run to the West, complaining and whining.

The conductor was a reasonable, good-humored African-American man. I explained to him what had in fact happened. He trusted me, and he seated me somewhere else. “I was molested in my church on several occasions”, he uttered, patting my shoulder.

A few minutes later, the priest approached my seat. A maniacal expression on his face, he grabbed my arm and whispered: “Pray! Pray with me!”

He knelt between the seats and began praying.

I almost hit him again, but I didn’t. I would, if something like this happened now.

Because now, I clearly understand that this is exactly how they run the world: they molest and rape, they rob and when caught, they lie, pretending that they committed no crime. And they force people they harmed to succumb to their vision of the world, to their religion. Their criminal dogma is supposed to be utilized for healing and “redemption” purposes.

What a sick world they have been creating!

“Our dogmas, our religion, raped you. Pray to it for your salvation!” Bastards!

***

Among other reasons, this year of 2015 was significant because I accepted the invitation to speak at the philosophical Whitehead conference in Southern California, where I met, once again, my friend and perhaps the greatest living Christian theologian John Cobb.

I challenged him and he accepted. For several hours we debated Christianity, and the reasons why this religion is so closely linked with imperialism, colonialism, capitalism and all forms of manipulation, extermination and torture of human beings.

The results of our discussion will be converted into a slim book that will be published in 2016 by Badak Merah.

***

If the discussion about all the horrors committed by Christianity could ever reach some rational or even philosophical level, the main argument of the apologists would always be the same: “It is not really the Bible, or Jesus, or Christianity itself that should be blamed for those hundreds of millions of lost lives, for the entire continents consumed by flames, for the theft and rape of entire great civilizations. Oh no, not Christianity! It is those “bad Christians” who should be held liable.”

Such arguments are thoroughly banal, as they are insulting. Logically, responsible are both people and the dogma!

All religions are man-made, including Christianity. Christianity is, of course, a result of imperfect and archaic human thinking.

It is clear that there is plenty encoded in Christianity that has been able to trigger the greatest crimes against humanity, committed, again and again, until this very moment.

Had Christianity not been a religion but a political movement, it would have been banned a long time ago, simply due to its reoccurring genocidal behavior.

If for another few decades we just study and analyze and look for theoretical and philosophical answers, without stopping this monstrous dogma, Christianity could easily devour another 10 or 20 million human lives! Based on its track record, it easily could. It could continue to swallow entire nations, while yelling, lying and pointing fingers at all directions, calling the poor, the Muslims and the Communists, the true dangers and menaces to the world!

Then, each year, each hypocritical “Merry Christmas”, we will be counting victims and measuring cubic liters of blood, spilled on that real and chemical “virgin” snow!

Idaho food service worker fired for giving hungry student free food worth $1.70

George Gallanis

In cruel bureaucratic fashion, Dalene Bowden was fired from her job last week as a food service worker at Irving Middle School in Pocatello, Idaho just ahead of the Christmas holiday after she gave a hungry student with no money a free lunch. The total cost of the food was $1.70.

Following the incident, Bowden was placed on unpaid leave and then received a letter days later issuing the termination of her position. In the letter, signed by Susan Petit, Director of Human Resources of Pocatello School District 25, it stated: “The reason of your termination is due to your theft-stealing [sic] school district or another’s property and inaccurate transactions when ordering, receiving, and serving food.”

Dalene Bowden’s termination letter

According to Bowden, for the three years she has worked for the school she has never once been written up or reprimanded for her job performance. She did, however, receive a verbal warning for giving a student a free cookie. Bowden offered to pay for the $1.70 lunch but was rejected by her supervisor.

Bowden has since launched an online funding campaign through gofundme.com to raise money for an attorney to change the law around the school’s ability to fire workers for unlawful accusations of theft.

“I admits [sic] I broke the rules, but I’m not apologizing and I would do exactly the same thing again regardless of the consequences. I was a lunch lady at Irving Middle School. I was placed on unpaid leave Tuesday after I gave a free lunch to a 12-year-old student who didn’t have money to pay for her hot lunch,” Bowden said on her fundraising page. “I love my job, I really do, This [sic] just breaks my heart, and I was in the wrong, but what do you do when the kid tells you that they’re hungry, and they don’t have any money? I handed her the tray.”

Many children throughout the US are not able to afford their school lunch. Poverty amongst children in Idaho is widespread.

In 2013, the National Center for Children in Poverty estimated 22 percent, or more than 30,000 of Idaho’s young children, below the age of 6, lived with poor families, while overall 80,467, amounting to 19 percent, of Idaho’s children lived with poor families. The federal poverty threshold for a family of four with two children in 2013 was a paltry $23,624.

The social crisis of poverty amongst children is endemic to the entire United States. Citing a study by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the WSWS wrote in February, 2015, “child poverty in America is more widespread than at any time in the last 50 years. For all the claims of economic ‘recovery’ in the United States, the reality for the new generation of the working class is one of ever-deeper social deprivation.”

Amidst ongoing cuts to social services like Food Stamps, Bowden’s firing is the ruthless expression of the state’s role in this era of social deprivation: to assure that the working class does not receive a penny more than it is allotted.

Western Australia suffers “greatest revenue shock since Great Depression”

Mike Head

Three announcements this week in Western Australia—once known as the country’s greatest resources “boom state”—underscore the extent to which the fallout from the 2008 financial breakdown is now hitting Australia with increasing severity.

Until 2013, Australian capitalism avoided the worst immediate effects of the 2008 crash, but only because of inflated demand for mining and energy commodities, mainly driven by massive stimulus measures by the Beijing regime. Since then, export prices have plunged as China’s economic growth has slowed dramatically because of the ongoing and deepening world slump.

The first announcement was the state government’s mid-year budget update, which forecast a record $3.1 billion budget deficit this year—up from the $2.7 billion predicted in its May Budget. This was primarily due to the continuing collapse of global prices for iron ore—the royalties from which account for no less than 20 percent of the state’s income.

The state Treasury revised down its iron ore price forecast for this year from $US47.50 a tonne to $46 a tonne. Just last year, the Treasury’s prediction was $120 a tonne. According to the mid-year review, there will be another deficit of $A3 billion in 2016-17 and of $820 million in 2017-18.

Treasurer Mike Nahan said the revenue forecasts had been revised down by a total of $17 billion over the forward estimates since May 2014. “That is the biggest revenue shock a government—state or federal—has experienced in Australia since the Great Depression of 1930,” he said.

Over the next three years, the state debt is predicted to spiral to $39 billion, adding a substantial interest payment burden, and threatening the state’s AA+ credit rating—already downgraded by the world financial markets from AAA.

As measured by State Final Demand, Western Australia’s once booming growth rate has gone into reverse, with the mid-year review again revising it down to -2.25 percent (compared to the May budget estimate of -1.25 percent). Business investment is now estimated to have fallen 12.3 percent in 2014-15, one of the sharpest expressions of the plunge in investment across Australia.

The slump in demand for iron ore has been compounded by stepped-up output by BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and other giant ore producers, all desperately trying to shore up their profit margins. Goldman Sachs last week predicted that iron ore will average only $35 a tonne in both 2017 and 2018, citing “overcapacity in China’s steel industry.”

Yesterday, there was another indicator of declining iron ore prospects. Aurizon, an Australian coal and rail freight company, shelved its planned $4.5 billion West Pilbara project in Western Australia’s north. Its partners, Chinese steel maker Baosteel, South Korea’s Posco and Hong Kong mining investor AMCI, indicated a lack of global demand. Aurizon, which was spun out of a privatised Queensland state rail corporation in 2010, suffered its biggest one-day share price drop as a result.

The third announcement was that more than 1,200 jobs have been axed from Chevron’s $US54 billion Gorgon liquefied natural gas (LNG) project off the state’s northwest coast in the lead-up to Christmas. Last Thursday and Friday, 530 electrical workers were laid off, in addition to about 700 others over the past two weeks, including boilermakers, pipe fitters, welders and trades assistants.

Many of these workers were sacked, without notice, by SMSs, phone calls or notes slipped under the doors of their accommodation. Such methods have increasingly become the norm to terminate the services of the tens of thousands of “fly-in, fly-out” workers nationally who once relied on these projects for their livelihoods.

Not only is Chevron’s contraction a particularly harsh pre-Christmas blow to thousands of workers and their families, who had been led to believe that the jobs would last until at least March. It points to the likely acceleration—driven by falling world oil and gas prices—of job losses on the seven large LNG projects that have been under construction in Australia for the past several years.

These developments further expose the long-cultivated myth of Australian exceptionalism, which depicted a “lucky country” that was somehow shielded from the crises of global capitalism. In 2010, The Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party, the SEP’s founding document, emphasised:

“Throughout the history of the Australian workers’ movement, the Labor and trade union bureaucracies, together with the various ex-radical organisations, have promoted the myth of Australian exceptionalism as a counter to the development of socialist consciousness. In the latter part of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th, they characterised Australia as the ‘workingman’s paradise,’ where the laws of the class struggle did not apply.

“Today, in the midst of the greatest economic and financial crisis in three-quarters of a century, the illusion is once again being promoted that Australia is ‘exceptional’ and has ‘weathered’ the storm. While the first phase of the global financial crisis that began in 2007–2008 has passed, neither the world economy nor Australian capitalism can return to the past. A vast ‘restructuring’ of economic and class relations is underway on a global scale that will propel the working class into political struggle.”

The sharp reversal that has confronted Australian capitalism over the past two years has already brought forward a deepening assault on workers’ jobs and living standards. This has been spearheaded by mass retrenchments and closures in the mining, auto and steel industries, together with major budget cutbacks to health and welfare provisions, widespread privatisations and cuts to the public sector, and a drive to slash wage levels, including the abolition of after-hours penalty rates.

In Western Australia, the Liberal Party government previously reacted to the initial signs of revenue collapse by eliminating thousands of public servants’ jobs in its 2014 and 2015 budgets. Now, it will freeze public sector recruitment, impose a clamp on public servants’ wage rises, and sell off an array of public assets, starting with Fremantle Ports, the Perth Market Authority, the Utah Point iron ore berth in the Pilbara. These measures will further push up the state’s unemployment rate, already officially at 6.6 percent—representing nearly 100,000 jobless workers.

Having enjoyed super-profits for two decades, the major mining-related companies and their political servants are ruthlessly imposing the burden of the economic breakdown on the back of the working class.

The only response of the opposition Labor Party has been to criticise the Liberals for “over-spending.” Shadow state Treasurer Ben Wyatt called the mid-year review a “train wreck” produced by seven years of “shocking” financial management. Wyatt refused to specify the cuts a Labor government would make, clearly anxious to keep Labor’s plans hidden from the view of the working class.

Labor, which was in office in Western Australia from 1983 to 1993 and 2001 to 2008, has long sought the backing of the corporate elite for the return to government by pledging to be more “fiscally responsible” than the Liberals. This means intensifying the dismantling of working class living conditions.