Indian ruling elite in economic bind

Kranti Kumara & Keith Jones

In the run-up to next Monday’s budget speech, longstanding tensions between India’s hard-right Bharatiya Janata Party-led government and the country’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), over how to revive India’s flagging economy have intensified.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi routinely boasts that India’s 7 percent-plus annual growth rate is the highest of any of the world’s large economies. But his claims that India is on a high-growth trajectory are belied by numerous key economic indicators, causing many economists and even RBI head Rahuram Rajan to question the veracity of the growth numbers.

Figures relating to capital investment, exports, industrial production, agricultural output, and bank profits all paint a picture of an economy that is severely stagnating or in decline.

India’s merchandise exports have, for example, fallen for 14 months in a row. During the first 10 months of the current 2015-16 financial year, which commenced April 1, 2015, India’s total exports suffered a precipitous decline, falling to $218 billion from $264 billion for the same period in 2014-15.

That the real situation differs sharply from the government hype about a resurgent India is also demonstrated by the clamour from big business, especially manufacturers, for both monetary and fiscal stimulus.

The BJP government has itself been pressing for the RBI to lower interest rates to stimulate growth. Moreover, in recent weeks, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has strongly hinted that the government will exceed its deficit target of 3.5 percent of GDP for the 2016-17 fiscal year, so as to boost public sector investment in transport, power generation, and other infrastructure projects. “When you fight a global slowdown, public investment has to lead the way,” declared Jaitley last month.

This has further strained relations with Rajan, a former senior IMF official, and the RBI.

Rajan’s fear is that a low interest rate policy and/or a “pause” in the government’s “fiscal consolidation” program could provoke capital flight, causing the rupee to tank. This would in turn drive up the real interest rates on Indian corporations’ large dollar-denominated debt, threatening the viability of many of India’s major business houses, and thereby further imperilling India’s troubled banking system. The possibility that such a scenario could become reality was demonstrated in 2013, when the rupee rapidly depreciated in response to signals from the US Federal Reserve Board that it might soon end quantitative easing and raise interest rates.

The rupee has already come under heavy pressure in recent months, due to major capital outflows and heavy domestic demand for dollars from banks and businesses. It is currently trading at more than 68 rupees to the dollar, very close to the all-time low of 68.85 set in August 2013.

India’s business houses are, for their part, desperate for quick growth so that they can reduce debt and shore up their balance sheets. So severe is their debt load, many are already technically in default. As a result, 14 percent of the assets of India’s public banks were deemed “stressed” in September, up from 6 percent in 2011.

According to press reports, Rajan has sent a “clear-message” to the BJP government that it shouldn’t look to the RBI to provide economic stimulus through lower interest rates. Rather, it should concentrate on getting its “math right” in the upcoming budget, i.e., on meeting or at least not deviating significantly from its original deficit target of 3.5 percent of GDP.

After its first bimonthly monetary policy meeting of the year in early February, the RBI released a statement that tied any further cuts in interest rates to a budget that delivered further pro-investor reforms, while continuing to cut social spending. “Structural reforms in the forthcoming union budget that boost growth while controlling spending,” declared the RBI, “will create more space for monetary policy to support growth.”

The RBI did not stipulate the requisite “structural reforms.” But domestic and international capital have formulated a long list of “big bang” neo-liberal measures, including the shifting of more of the tax burden onto working people through a regressive national goods and services tax, further privatizations, the gutting of labour law restrictions on plant closures and mass layoffs, and pro-business amendments to the 2013 Land Acquisition Act.

Rajan has previously urged the dismantling of regulatory and policy barriers to the entry of speculative capital, including eventually opening up the government bond market. Prior to becoming RBI governor, he also urged the removal of all interest-rate ceilings, claiming that this would make bank lending “more efficient.”

The RBI’s early February statement also noted that despite it having reduced its base lending rate, the “RBI repo-rate,” by 1.25 percent over the past 13 months, the banks have refused to pass the reductions on to borrowers. This is because the banks, already heavily burdened by bad loans, are anxious to increase their profit margins on new loans so as to make up for the losses from the non-performing loans already on their books.

Shortly before the RBI’s early February meeting, Rajan delivered a lecture in New Delhi where he warned the government against taking on more debt to kick-start growth through increased government investment in infrastructure. He cited the example of Brazil, which is mired in economic slump, after artificially boosting its growth through massive debt-financing over the past decade.

“Brazil’s experience suggests,” said Rajan, “the enormous costs of becoming an unstable country far outweigh any small growth benefits that can be obtained through aggressive policies. We should be very careful about jeopardizing our single most important strength during this period of global turmoil, macroeconomic stability.”

International capital is largely supportive of Rajan’s stance. Moody’s, in a statement issued this week, said that even if the government sticks to its deficit reduction plan, “India’s fiscal metrics will remain weaker than rating peers in the near term, because of the relatively high level of India’s state and Central government deficits and debt.”

While the RBI and international capital are pressuring the government not to go deeper into debt to boost capital spending, the major domestic business lobby groups, including the Confederation of Indian Industries or CII are.

Said CII Director General Chandrajit Banerjee, “Considering that broad-based revival of private investment is being constrained on account of a weak order book situation, resulting in capacity overhang, there are hopes and expectations that the budget (will) increase spending by the government, public sector and by quasi-government bodies.”

Capital investments by Indian businesses, including government-owned Public Sector Units, have declined precipitously since the 2011-12 financial year, and are now some 60 percent below the level of five years ago; falling from US$73 billion (Rs. 3.7 trillion) in 2011-12 to US$58.7 billion (Rs. 3.1 trillion) in 2012-13, US$45.7 billion (Rs. 2.7 trillion) in 2013-14 and just $30 billion (Rs 1.9 trillion billion) in the 2014-15 financial year. According to all projections, the fiscal year ending this April 1 will see yet another capital spending decline.

T here are also mounting political pressures on Modi and his BJP, which won election 21 months ago by promising to deliver high growth and jobs to India’s tens of millions of unemployed and underemployed, to t a ke measures to stimulate the economy.

The government’s room to do so, however, is constrained by a multiplicity of other factors. These include: the need to inject money into India’s banks to shore up their balance sheets; the government’s commitment to vast new military expenditures, in keeping with the Indian bourgeoisie’s ambition to be a major player in world geopolitics, especially in the Indian Ocean; and the recent recommendation of the decennial Pay Commission to raise central government workers’ wages and allowances (benefits) by more than 20 percent.

Assocham, one of the country’s major business lobby groups, has already urged the government to take the virtually unprecedented step of trashing the recommendations of its own Pay Commission, so as to funnel money via infrastructure projects to corporate India. Denouncing the Pay Commission report as economically unsupportable and a trigger for a private sector “wage spiral,” Assocham Secretary-General D.S. Rawat echoed the aforementioned plea of the CII director for the government to bail out big business. “Economic revival,” said Rawat, is contingent upon (capital) investment which should be spearheaded by the public finance given the fact that the private sector is reeling under a heavy leverage (i.e. large debts and poor balance sheets).”

Strike at 200 Further Education colleges in England

Margot Miller

Thousands of lecturers, librarians and cleaners at 200 FE (Further Education) colleges in England took strike action Wednesday to protest a freeze in their pay. Some FE staff have suffered a reduction in pay by as much as 17 percent after years on lower than inflation pay rises.

This is the second joint walkout of Unison and University and College Union(UCU) members over pay, following a 24-hour strike in November.

The strength of feeling was evident in the ballots, which recorded 68 percent of Unison members in favour of strikes, while for the UCU it was 74 percent. In both cases, this was more in favour than the previous ballot. The vote took place after most of the more than 200 FE colleges refused a pay increase of £1 per hour for all staff.

FE colleges, as distinct from universities, offer intermediate qualifications necessary for university entrance, as well as a whole range of high-quality technical vocational courses geared toward a specific career path. Courses are open to anyone over 16 and can give working class students, who are more likely to fail first high school qualifications, a second chance.

These colleges also teach students with learning difficulties as well as ESOL students (English for speakers of other languages).

Last year’s Tory budget cuts saw a 4 percent reduction in ESOL spending, which has a national waiting list of 3,000, while spending for adult education was slashed by 25 percent. Over the last five years, FE adult education has been cut by close to 50 percent, which according to the UCU could lead to the loss of 400,000 college places.

While some colleges are hiring new employees on inferior contracts, in effect creating a two-tier system, teaching vacancies have increased from 70 percent in 2010 to over 82 percent in 2014.

Not all who work in FE have experienced erosion in their pay, however. There has been a threefold rise in the number of college principals earning an annual income of over £200,000.

As part of the continually revised target of eliminating the budget deficit by 2018, to cut costs in education the Cameron government is planning area reviews with the aim of merging FE and Sixth Form Colleges (which cater for 16- to 18-year-olds). The government admits this will lead to a “rationalised curriculum,” and in place of funded ESOL, Access and Adult Education will be courses for only those who can afford to pay. The focus will be more on apprenticeships and the needs of business. Thousands of teaching jobs could go as well as access to a broad curriculum in these new so-called super colleges.

A similar review of colleges in Scotland resulted in the number of colleges reduced from 43 to 26, with thousands of jobs and student places cut.

The FE employees join a growing number of workers, including junior doctors, who are determined to oppose the worsening austerity being imposed by the Conservative government. While workers have shown their willingness to fight, their struggles have been repeatedly sabotaged by the trade unions.

Addressing UCU and Unison members during the strike in London, UCU leader Sally Hunt said, “This is not the end. If we have to do this again, then we do this again”. She added, “The UCU [striking] on its own, or Unison on its own, isn’t going to make a difference. What is going to make a difference is if we start building an alliance with public sector unions, education unions, and others in our sector that are willing to say that the funding situation in further education is beyond what is reasonable.”

The record of the trade unions since the Tories came to power in 2010 is one of dividing workers and opposing any joint offensive of their members to defeat the governments’ offensive.

In 2011, FE staff were among 2 million public sector workers who took strike action against attacks on their pensions. After this enormous turnout, the unions, including Unison and UCU, called only single days of action on a regional basis, eventually making separate deals on a union-by-union basis. Workers in the public sector now have to pay in more and work longer to get a reduced pension. It is these bosses’ organisations that pseudo-left groups, including the Socialist Workers Party and Socialist Party, insist workers should turn to defend their living standards.

The leaders of the FE unions openly admit that the purpose of the day of strike action is to pressure the Association of Colleges (AoC) employers’ organisation to include them in talks. Unison Head of Education Jon Richards said the strike was held “to get the Association of Colleges back around the table and in meaningful negotiations.”

The role of the unions is to provide a safety valve for dissipating the anger of their members in limited single days of action, to isolate groups of workers and facilitate the government and employers in imposing their attacks.

A strike scheduled for February 2 by staff at the Open University (OU) was recently suspended by the UCU. OU bosses want to close seven regional centres and cut 500 jobs. The Open University, a distance learning institution, is the biggest university in the world in terms of student numbers.

The Labour Party’s primary fear, as with the trade unions, is the development of an independent movement of workers and youth, in opposition to the escalating destruction of their working conditions and living standards.

During the November strike rally, FE workers were addressed by Labour Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell. Labour under new leader Jeremy Corbyn remains as committed to defending capitalism and imposing cuts as the Tories and the 1997-2010 Labour government under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Last year McDonnell said regarding Labour’s economic policies, “Labour is committed to eliminating the deficit and creating an economy in which we live within our means.”

Prior to the latest FE strike, on February 6, Corbyn addressed a UCU conference and pleaded with the employers to settle the dispute in talks with the unions. “It’s up to colleges to recognise the insecurity of employment in FE, recognise the very hard work that [their staff] do and recognise the long-term cut in pay compared to other sectors, and to come up with a reasonable offer on this,” he said. He warned, “I understand the unions’ position on this…And my message to the government and the colleges is: get around the table now to avoid the strike” (emphasis added).

Just days later Corbyn said of the junior doctors’ dispute, as the government stated it would impose an inferior contract on them, “More strikes now look likely. If that happens, it will be clear that the blame lies with the government, not the doctors. Even at this late stage, I appeal to Jeremy Hunt to go back and negotiate with the BMA.”

Strike at Chinese steel plant points to impact of global slump

John Ward

A week-long strike by several hundred workers at a stainless steel factory in Guangzhou, southern China, ended on Wednesday after riot police were called and the workers were threatened with arrest. The strike, which closed the factory of 2,000 workers, highlights the growing resistance of Chinese workers to attacks on jobs, wages and conditions.

The industrial action broke out at Ansteel Lianzhong Stainless Steel, which is one of the top three suppliers of stainless steel in China, with a capacity of two million tonnes per year. The workers demanded redundancy payments and a new contract after the company announced on February 15 it would institute a “performance-based pay system” that would have significantly reduced workers’ pay.

The union covering the factory, part of the state-run All China Trade Union Federation, agreed to the deal without the consent of workers. As the strike developed, a large number of police wearing riot gear arrived with buses for mass arrests and blocked the factory gates.

On the third day of the stoppage, the strikers rejected a union offer to return to the previous wage system. One worker told the Chinese Labour Bulletin: “How can we trust the company now? How do we know they won’t do these things again?”

On Tuesday this week, the police issued a notice declaring the strike illegal and warning of arrests, saying the workers had been “incited and seduced.” The company gave written warnings to 100 workers. At the same time, the management agreed to abandon the new pay system and offered a temporary bonus of 100 yuan ($US15) per day for those who resumed work. Workers returned to their jobs the following day.

The factory opened in 2006 with, according to the company’s web site, “the world’s most advanced cutting edge technology.” It is the only integrated stainless steel facility in southern China. The plant, however, has failed to make sufficient profits and last year its owner, the Taiwan-based E United Group, sold a controlling stake to China’s state-owned Ansteel Group.

The new owner started with layoffs and enforced annual leave, paid at 80 percent of the statutory minimum wage of 1,895 yuan ($295) per month. A worker, quoted in the Washington Post, said: “You just can’t live in Guangzhou on the money they are paying… if you were to get a bowl and beg under the overpass, you would earn more.”

The strike at Lianzhong is part of a rising tide of industrial disputes across China. The China Labour Bulletin, which tracks the limited publicly-available information, reported 503 strikes in January. That was a sharp increase from 421 strikes last December, which was itself part of a rising trend. There were 2,774 strikes and protests during 2015, compared with 567 for all of 2011 and 2012 combined. Most conflicts are over non-payment of wages, a practice now spreading from the construction industry to manufacturing, mining and services.

Mass layoffs throughout the steel and coal industries are now government policy. The State Council, China’s equivalent of a government cabinet, announced a plan in January to shed a million jobs over three years. Before the announcement, Ernan Cui, a Beijing-based researcher at Gavekal Dragonomics, suggested: “[I]t is not implausible that these two sectors [coal and steel] could lay off one million workers in 2016.”

These job cuts come on top of an estimated 1.44 million jobs lost in those industries since 2013, eliminating many of the jobs created in the Beijing government’s stimulus-driven boom following the 2008 global financial breakdown.

To deal with the proposed layoffs, the government has announced it will set aside 30 billion yuan ($US4.6 billion) for “training and job seeking” over the next two years. Beijing fears a mass movement of the working class in reaction to its program of austerity and further pro-market restructuring.

The cuts in steel and coal are part of a government move against so-called state-owned zombie companies, which have millions of employees but are not generating profits. Yang Weimin, deputy director of the Office of the Central Leading Group on Financial and Economic Affairs, told a forum in Beijing last year: “The pain is inevitable, but it is a necessary part of the leadership’s shift to supply-side reform next year.”

“Supply-side reform” is the term used for attempts to reduce overcapacity in key industries which is driving down prices and profits. In the case of steel, China produces over 800 million tonnes per year, or almost 50 percent of world output. Prices for steel products have halved since 2013 on the back of a world glut, with global production running at only 69.7 percent of capacity. Last year, Chinese steel companies lost 64.5 billion yuan, more than double the 22.6 billion yuan in profits they had made in 2014.

The situation is similar in coal mining. World prices have dropped by half from their peak in 2011. The China Coal Industry Association estimates that more than 90 percent of Chinese operators are running at a loss. China has 11,000 coal mines, capable of producing 5.2 billon tonnes per year, according to the Xinhua news agency, but produced only 3.2 billion tonnes last year.

One of the Ansteel Lianzhong Stainless Steel strikers, quoted by the Washington Post, summed up the prospects confronting Chinese workers. “I thought if I could keep working hard, I could get a decent job and have my kid with me. My dream is just to be together with my family. But now even that dream is clouded with uncertainty.”

While the riot police ultimately were not used in this strike, the Beijing regime is on a collision course with the working class as it seeks to impose the burden of the global slump on workers, pay off mounting debts and maintain profitable returns for investors.

More mass shootings in the US

Niles Williamson

Since Jason Dalton, a 45-year-old insurance adjuster and Uber cab driver, randomly opened fire on eight people, killing six, in multiple locations in Kalamazoo, Michigan last weekend, at least three additional mass killings have occurred in the US. Shootings in Kansas, Washington state and Arizona have resulted in the deaths of 14 people.

On Thursday evening, Cedric Larry Ford, 38, went on a shooting spree, killing three people and injuring fourteen others in an area approximately 35 miles north of Wichita, Kansas. The attack ended when Ford was killed by police after he opened fire inside the Excel Industries lawn equipment factory in Hesston, where he was employed in the paint shop.

According to the official police account, the shooting spree began around 5 p.m. when Ford fired on two vehicles at an intersection in the city of Newton, injuring one of the drivers. He then drove towards Hesston, opening fire on oncoming vehicles until he and another motorist crashed in a ditch. Ford proceeded to shoot the other driver in the leg and drove his vehicle to the Excel factory, where he carried out the assault on fellow employees.

Workers described a scene of confusion as Ford, armed with an AK-47 assault rifle and a hand gun, first shot an employee in the Excel parking lot and then entered the factory. He fired on those in the front office area of the facility, killing three people and wounding 12 others.

“I heard some popping noises, but I thought it was just a drill,” Tim Kasper, a laser operator, told the Wichita Eagle. “Then I heard a three-round burst and I knew it was something real. I got out of there quick. People were running and panicking. It was chaos.”

Kasper reported that his friend and coworker, with whom he had just been chatting, was killed after being shot in the head by Ford. “It’s pretty unnerving,” Kasper stated. “Things can change fast. It was just a normal day before that.”

Jason Hershberger, a worker on the plant’s mower assembly line, recounted to the Wichita Eagle how he and other workers placed a fellow worker who had been shot in the back by Ford onto a wooden pallet and drove the worker out of the factory on a motorized cart.

The attack ended approximately half an hour after it began when a Hesston police officer opened fire on Ford, killing him inside the factory.

According to police, Ford’s rampage began after he had been served with a protection of abuse order requiring him to stay away from his girlfriend, who had accused him of assault. In a petition for the restraining order filed in Sedgwick County court on February 5, a woman who described herself as Ford’s live-in girlfriend, described how Ford had placed her in a chokehold after an argument. “He is an alcoholic, violent, depressed,” she wrote. “It’s my belief he is in desperate need of medical & psychological help!”

Photos apparently posted by Ford on Facebook show him posing with a handgun and an AK-47. A video posted on social media shows Ford firing dozens of rounds from an AK-47 into an empty cornfield.

Ford, originally from Miami, Florida, had a long history of encounters with the police and criminal convictions dating from the time he was a teenager. When he was 18 years old, Ford was charged with carrying a concealed firearm.

Over the next several years of his life Ford was convicted on charges of battery, drug possession, grand theft and multiple parole violations. He received a misdemeanor conviction for engaging in a brawl in 2008.

Mass shootings happen with such regularity that the horror in Kansas was met by a perfunctory statement from President Barack Obama warning that Americans “cannot become numb” to such violence.

On Friday, police in Belfair, Washington responded to a 911 emergency call from a man who reported that he had killed his family. According to the police, the man shot and killed himself after hours of negotiations. When police entered the home, they found the man and four of his victims. A twelve-year-old girl survived the attack and was taken to a local hospital.

A neighbor told the Associated Press that he heard gunshots the previous night. He also told the press that his neighbor had operated a heating and air conditioning contractor business.

Earlier in the week, on Tuesday, 26-year-old Alex Buckner was shot and killed by police in Phoenix, Arizona after shooting and killing his father, mother and two sisters and setting their home on fire. Buckner had previously been arrested for public intoxication and shoplifting sleeping pills. A family member told the Arizona Republic that he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia.

According to the Gun Violence Archive, so far this year there have been 34 mass shootings, defined as incidents in which more than four people have either been killed or injured by a person with a firearm. At least 51 people have been killed and a further 135 injured in such incidents.

Another count by the Gun Violence Archive found at least 191 incidents in which at least one person was injured or killed by gunfire so far this year.

That such mass shootings and killings take place with such regularity in the United States is a reflection of a society riven by economic inequality and mired in a deepening social crisis, compounded by endless cuts in welfare programs and mental health services. The mounting social contradictions of American society, amplified by a sclerotic, right-wing and antidemocratic political system and the absence of any mass organizations that speak for working and oppressed people, leads highly vulnerable and psychologically damaged individuals to crack and resort to irrational individual violence directed against themselves as well as others.

The Republican debate and the degradation of US politics

Patrick Martin

The appearance of the Republican presidential candidates Thursday night in Houston, Texas was described by CNN as a debate. But there was no actual debating, in the sense of a discussion of issues or the offering of contrasting political programs. Instead, viewers were confronted with a repulsive display of the degraded state of official politics in the United States.

The three leading candidates—billionaire demagogue Donald Trump, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas—engaged in a barrage of name-calling, mudslinging, insinuation and insult that marked a new low in an already dismal series of such political freak shows.

Rubio set the tone with a series of prepared attacks on Trump’s business career, baiting him as an employer who hired illegal immigrants despite the real estate mogul’s current posture as the arch-hater of immigrants. (Trump advocates deporting 11 million undocumented immigrants). None of the candidates criticized Trump’s fascistic proposals to bar Muslims from entering the US or his support for waterboarding and other forms of torture.

Trump responded in kind, insult for insult, and generally fell back on boasting of his personal wealth as the ultimate answer to all criticism. From there, the “debate” descended even further into the realm of reality television, with simulated rage, threats and bombast pitched to the most backward and demoralized elements in American society.

Not only the candidates, but the CNN moderator, the reactionary pro-war hack Wolf Blitzer, and the audience, which responded to the verbal brawl with shrieks and catcalls, contributed to the demeaning spectacle.

American bourgeois politics has never been particularly edifying. However, Thursday’s spectacle marked a new low, a fact that was acknowledged even by some veteran media commentators. Bob Schieffer of CBS observed, “I thought things couldn’t get lower than they’d already reached in this campaign. I mean, the political discourse, but last night it went even below where I thought it could possibly go. I mean, no discussion of the issues, but people arguing, screaming, hollering. It was like kids out behind the barn rather than a political debate.”

The degraded character of Thursday’s event did not stop the media from treating it seriously afterwards, hailing Rubio’s performance as a stunning political comeback. This was a prearranged narrative. The Republican Party establishment is belatedly trying to check Trump’s momentum after his surge to frontrunner status, winning three of the first four contests and leading in most polls for 15 more statewide primaries and caucuses in the coming week.

Senator Lindsey Graham, who pulled out of the presidential race in the fall after failing to attract support in the polls, told a charity fundraising event in Washington Thursday night that Trump’s lead in the primaries and polling meant, “My party has gone batshit crazy.”

But the endorsement of Trump Friday by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who dropped out of the presidential campaign just over two weeks ago, is a signal that the “Stop Trump” movement is getting little traction. Trump is expected to sweep the Super Tuesday contests and is now favored to clinch the nomination before the end of March.

The level of discourse continued downwards in the 24 hours after the debate. Rubio accused Trump of being a “con artist” and suggested that he had wet his pants during the debate. Trump called Rubio a “nervous Nellie,” a “lightweight” and a “choker.”

Trump also threatened the media at a press conference, declaring that if he became president, “I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money… So that when the New York Times writes a hit piece, which is a total disgrace, or when the Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money…”

One of the three, Trump, Rubio or Cruz, will likely become the Republican presidential nominee and potentially the next US president. The background of each of these individuals testifies to the decline in the caliber, even by American political standards, of the personnel advanced by the US corporate-financial elite to fill its most important government position.

Trump is, as he endlessly proclaims, a billionaire, who made his fortune servicing the personal needs of the wealthy through hotels, luxury apartments, resorts and casinos. After a series of financial near-disasters, including four corporate bankruptcies, he cemented his position, both monetarily and as a celebrity, through “The Apprentice” and “Celebrity Apprentice” reality TV programs, in which Trump as CEO hired high-level assistants from a list of applicants. It was there that he perfected the bullying, blowhard persona that is currently on display at campaign rallies and debates.

Cruz and Rubio are both first-generation Cuban-Americans who took slightly different paths. Rubio graduated from the University of Miami law school and went straight into local Republican politics, dominated by the fascistic anti-Castro exile milieu. He moved up from city commissioner to state representative before being chosen as House Speaker under then-Governor Jeb Bush.

Cruz came from a Texas milieu of ultra-right Christian fundamentalism and went straight to the highest levels of the Republican Party in Washington. After graduating from Harvard Law School, he clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist before working on the House Republican effort to impeach President Bill Clinton. Soon after, he participated in the Bush campaign’s efforts to halt vote-counting in Florida in the 2000 elections, which led to the Supreme Court’s notorious Bush v. Gore decision handing the White House to the loser of the popular vote. Denied a leading position in the Bush administration, he moved back to Texas to become solicitor general.

Both Rubio in 2010 and Cruz in 2012 were elected to the US Senate as challengers to the candidates favored by the Republican Party establishment. Both had the backing of the ultra-right Tea Party faction. The two first-term senators began planning presidential bids almost as soon as they arrived in Washington DC. They have each raised tens of millions in campaign funds from hedge fund investors and other billionaires.

Even by the meager standards of American two-party politics, the 2016 presidential campaign has been a demonstration of the staggering decay in the intellectual and moral level of the political representatives of the American ruling elite. This is true of the Democrats as well as the Republicans, although it takes somewhat different forms given the different roles the rival parties play in manipulating popular sentiments and allowing a narrow financial aristocracy to rule over a complex mass society of more than 330 million people.

The process has gone furthest in the Republican Party, which over the past four decades has become the main repository for what is most foul, bigoted and backward in American life. This was acknowledged in a remarkable column published in the Washington Post Friday by Robert Kagan, the neoconservative who was one of the leading apologists for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the war crimes committed by the Bush administration. Kagan now declares that “the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton.”

“Trump is no fluke,” Kagan writes. “Nor is he hijacking the Republican Party or the conservative movement, if there is such a thing. He is, rather, the party’s creation, its Frankenstein’s monster, brought to life by the party, fed by the party and now made strong enough to destroy its maker.” He described Trump as “tapping the well-primed gusher of popular anger, xenophobia and, yes, bigotry that the party had already unleashed.”

Kagan voices the mounting concern in ruling circles, Republican and Democratic alike, that the two-party system is fracturing and the reactionary, militaristic and authoritarian views advanced by Trump, all too openly and crudely, will provoke popular revulsion and completely discredit the entire political structure.

Kagan is wrong is stating that Trump is simply the Frankenstein creation of the Republican Party. He is, rather, a particularly naked expression of the criminality, parasitism, backwardness and moral degradation of the financial aristocracy that presides over American society and runs the political system and media.

Alternative approach to nuclear fusion energy at German lab takes important first step

Gregory McAvoy

On December 10, 2015, an experimental device 14 years in the making, called Wendelstein 7-X, achieved an important first milestone in its mission to prove that fusion, the process that powers the sun, can be harnessed by mankind for power generation. The device produced its first helium plasma—more on what this actually means later.

The Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) in Greifswald. Credit: Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics

Wendelstein 7-X, known more technically as a stellerator, is located at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) in Greifswald, Germany and is the result of an international collaboration, with funding coming predominantly from the German government and the European Union (EU). To commemorate its “maiden voyage,” the event was streamed live to fusion laboratories across Europe. It received widespread media coverage in Germany and abroad.

The source of the excitement surrounding the operation of the device derives from what it hopes to achieve. The scientists and engineers who designed and built the stellerator are attempting to show that a new type of reactor design could provide a more attainable path to the coveted prize of commercial fusion power. Fusion could be the silver bullet for humanity’s energy woes; it is carbon-neutral, and its source of fuel is cheap and practically limitless. Moreover, fusion reactors would produce far less troublesome radioactive waste than nuclear fission and there is no risk of chain reactions like the one that caused the Chernobyl disaster.

However, it has been notoriously difficult to prove that a viable fusion reactor can be created: the physical conditions necessary for fusion to occur are extreme. An individual fusion reaction requires two small, positively charged atomic nuclei, composed of protons and neutrons, to “fuse” together. The result is a comparatively large amount of energy, in accordance with Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc2, but since the nuclei are both positively charged and so repel each other, they need to be travelling at high speeds to overcome this barrier.

The last of the five field-period modules of the stellarator experiment Wendelstein 7-X was installed at the end of 2011. Credit: Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics

Correspondingly, the fusion fuel must attain temperatures about ten times hotter than the centre of the Sun. At these temperatures, the fuel enters the fourth state of matter, known as plasma: the electrons and nuclei that are typically bonded in atoms become partially or completely disassociated (or ionized). Evidently, there are no materials capable of containing such energetic charged particles without themselves disintegrating, and one scheme to confine the fuel plasma is to use magnetic fields of extraordinarily high magnitude.

As a stellerator, Wendelstein 7-X uses numerous, strangely shaped electromagnetic coils in a “toroidal” or donut arrangement to create a correspondingly bizarre magnetic cage.

This complex design required over ten years of planning and theoretical calculations conducted on incredibly powerful supercomputers to produce what the physicists hope will be an optimal result. The 70 coils, each about 3.5 metres tall and weighing a few tons, are made of expensive superconducting material and needed to be placed with millimetre precision. In all, the magnets and supports weigh 425 tons and must be enclosed in a cryogenic vacuum vessel, all cooled to a few degrees above absolute zero.

This wide-angle view inside the W7-X stellarator (April 2013) shows the stainless cover plates and the water-cooled copper backing plates (which will eventually be covered by graphite tiles) that are being installed as armour to protect against plasma/wall interactions. Credit: Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics

It is hoped that this arrangement will optimally confine the fusion plasma, avoiding the instabilities and particle losses endemic to other strategies. The December 10 event marked the first plasma produced in Wendelstein 7-X using helium atoms as fuel. A further step was taken on February 3, 2016 using a different fuel, hydrogen. This is important because the ideal fusion reaction is between isotopes (i.e., heavier forms) of hydrogen.

Of course, to reach this impressive achievement and conquer the numerous complexities, many man-hours and extensive funding were necessary. In total, over one million assembly hours and €370 million for components, rising to €1.03 billion if operating costs are included, were required. Such logistics are not uncharacteristic of large-scale, international scientific endeavours. A related project to build the world’s largest fusion reactor, called ITER, has a current estimated cost of between €13 and €15 billion, earning the title of humanity’s most expensive experiment, and construction will not likely be completed until the early 2020s.

Cutting-edge science is necessarily costly in every sense of the word, but some context is required to evaluate whether enough resources are being directed towards fusion research. An apt comparison is with the fossil fuel industry, since fusion will one day enter the energy market. Minimal new research funding has been directed to fossil fuel extraction because it is a fairly mature industry, but in 2013 alone, it is estimated by the IEA (International Energy Agency) that global government subsidies for the fossil fuel industry totalled $530 billion.

Scheme of coil system (blue) and plasma (yellow) of the nuclear fusion plasma experiment Wendelstein 7-X under construction at the Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik, Greifswald, Germany. For example a magnetic field line is highlighted in green on the plasma surface shown in yellow. Credit: Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics

This is staggering to contemplate. Even if the costs for the most expensive science experiment in the world, viz. ITER, were condensed into one year, this would still only account for about 3 percent of the amount governments spend in supporting the consumption and production of fossil fuels. Even more perplexing is the fact that the scientific community widely accepts that fossil fuels are the main contributing factor to anthropogenic climate change.

In this light, it would seem foolish to quibble over the comparatively minor budgets of scientific research projects that could directly assist in providing clean, abundant energy. Yet the exact opposite is the case. For instance, NCSX, a similar device to Wendelstein 7-X, which was being built at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) in the United States, was cancelled by the Department of Energy due to cost overruns. Similarly, the ITER project is at risk because of its budgetary woes, construction delays, and the looming threat that the US government may pull its support.

Such a contrast in funding and neglect of foresight can only be explained by a global political and economic system that is completely subservient to short-term profits and capital accumulation. It is solely through a mass movement of the working class that this system can be overturned, so that science is at liberty to solve humanity’s problems and fully conquer nature.

Hundreds of Australian climate-change science jobs to be axed

Perla Astudillo & Richard Philips

The announcement earlier this month that the federally-funded Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) plans to sack up to 350 climate scientists has been condemned by scientists in Australia and internationally. The decision is a major blow to scientific research into ocean temperatures, greenhouse gas levels and other indices that provide a deeper understanding of climate change.

Almost 200 positions will be cut from the Oceans and Atmosphere (O&A) division, with the remaining jobs eliminated from the Land and Water division. The O&A monitors atmospheric and ocean carbon dioxide levels from Cape Grim, a rocky outpost on the northwestern tip of Tasmania.

An O&A scientist told the science journal Nature: “More than 80 percent of our climate scientists will be cut. This is not about myself, it’s about my people and the capability we spent 40 years to build. It will be going overnight.”

CSIRO chief Larry Marshall informed staff about the cuts via email. There was no longer any need to “prove” that climate change was real, he wrote. “[T]hat question has been answered” and so it was now necessary to move from research on climate change to the sort of products that could supposedly cope with the environmental consequences.

Marshall—a former Silicon Valley venture capitalist—was appointed by the Liberal-National Coalition government in late 2014 as part of a deliberate strategy to transform the CSIRO into a profit-driven enterprise. This month Marshall told the Australian Financial Review that the “CSIRO is too often ‘science push’ than ‘market pull.’”

This short-sighted, profit-driven approach ignores the fact that the changes to climate are ongoing, complex and have far-reaching consequences for humanity as a whole. The planned sacking of the CSIRO scientists will have ramifications for climate research around the world.

Australian climate research programs have provided a quarter of the world’s ocean observing capacity in the Southern Hemisphere. Data on the temperature and salinity of the upper 2,000 metres of the ocean is collected by 3,000 drifting floats.

A protest letter signed by 3,000 scientists from nearly 60 nations declared: “The decision to decimate a vibrant and world-leading research program shows a lack of insight, and a misunderstanding of the importance of the depth and significance of Australian contributions to global and regional climate research.”

The World Climate Research Program issued a statement warning that the proposed cuts risked severing “vital linkages with Australian colleagues and to essential southern hemisphere data sources, linkages that connect Australia to Britain, the US, New Zealand, Japan, China and beyond.”

On Monday, the Climate Council of Australia issued a 22-page report entitled Flying Blind: Navigating Climate Change without the CSIRO. It pointed out that research and data collected by CSIRO was vital to “predict changes in the climate and building preparedness for our worsening extreme weather events. Further cuts to model development will leave us dangerously exposed to the escalating risks of climate change.”

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull claimed to have been ‘blindsided’ by the CSIRO’s announcement about the job destruction. A spokesman for Science Minister Christopher Pyne told the media that the cuts were not the responsibility of the Turnbull government but “an operational decision of the CSIRO.”

These claims are a fraud. Last year the federal government slashed $115 million or 16 percent of CSIRO’s annual funding, which led to the elimination of over 1,000 jobs. Successive Coalition and Labor governments have systematically reduced CSIRO’s budget over the past two decades, resulting in the agency losing some 30 percent of its staff.

Climate-change science and research has been particularly targeted by the Coalition government, previously headed by Tony Abbott, whose backers downplayed or outright denied climate change. Turnbull deposed Abbott last September, but the government as a whole has close connections to the coal and other fossil fuel industries. Turnbull has also made clear that climate-change funding must be tied to “innovation”—that is, it must have commercial value.

The overall funding for the CSIRO’s climate-monitoring sites are miniscule compared to other areas of government spending. This year’s funding for Cape Grim would be $226,246, with the Bureau of Meteorology contributing another $458,500. The overall government budget for CSIRO for 2015 was $181 million, a small fraction of the $31.8 billion spent on the military.

The importance of the work of climate scientists is underscored by the fact that eight of the ten warmest years recorded since 1860, when instrumental records began, have been in the past decade. The causes of such developments are due to a complex interaction of long-term changes to the atmosphere and oceans.

Climate models are carefully developed from the years of information gathered by scientists such as those being cut at the CSIRO. Future modelling is vital, not only to predict major changes in weather patterns but to assist work in the field of natural disasters and how to possibly prevent them.

The CSIRO cuts are another indication of the inability of the capitalist profit system to address, let alone avert, a looming ecological disaster. The technical means to halt climate change exist, but can be implemented only on a rational basis under a globally planned socialist economy.

UK government proposes to set up Muslim-only jail

Barry Mason

The UK government is considering setting up a secure prison unit solely to house convicted Islamist terrorists. The UK has 130 such prisoners, who all face being moved into the proposed secure prison.

If the proposal were implemented, it would overturn the standard practice in place since the 1960s of housing convicted terrorists in the general prison population. Currently, convicted terrorists are held in one of six maximum-security jails, Frankland near Durham, Full Sutton near York, Long Lartin in Worcestershire, Wakefield, Whitemoor in Cambridgeshire and Belmarsh in south London.

Convicted terrorists held within these prisons are regularly transferred to different locations. A single unit for Islamist terrorists has been dubbed by the media a “British Alcatraz,” a reference to the US prison built on an island off San Francisco to contain dangerous prisoners. A more apt analogy would be the “British Guantanamo,” in reference to the United States military prison camp in Cuba, where prisoners deemed “unlawful combatants” are held by the US authorities in order to deny them official prisoner-of-war status and the most rudimentary human rights.

The new secure unit could be contained within one of the six maximum-security prisons—a “prison within a prison”—or could be established as a new separate entity.

The proposal for a separate unit comes from a review of how to deal with prisoners convicted of terrorist offences, set up by the Justice Secretary Michael Gove. The review, led by former prison governor and senior Home Office official Ian Acheson, is to be published in March.

The last occasion in the UK when prisoners were held together based on sharing an ideological belief was the infamous “H block” cells in the Maze prison in Northern Ireland in the 1980s. In the H blocks, the inmates were deemed to be political prisoners and were classed as either loyalists or nationalists, and duly segregated.

In a recent speech, Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron all but signed up to setting up a separate unit for Muslims convicted of terrorist offences. He said, “I am prepared to consider major changes: from the imams we allow to preach in prison to changing the locations and methods for dealing with prisoners convicted of terrorism offences, if that is what is required.”

The proposals to isolate Muslim prisoners in British prisons is part of the demonization of Muslims, who are constantly associated with “terrorism” and “extremism” in the press.

Prior to Cameron’s speech, Home Secretary Theresa May called for an “extremism officer” to be sited in prisons to deal with “radicalisation.”

What is defined as “extremism” by the government is now so broad, it could include virtually any form of opposition to the British ruling elite. In December 2013, the then Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition published a report entitled “Prime Minister’s Task Force on Tackling Radicalisation and Extremism.” It defined “extremism” as “vocal or active opposition tofundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs. We also include in our definition of extremism calls for the death of members of our armed forces, whether in this country or overseas. There is a range of extremist individuals and organisations, including Islamists, the far right and others.” [emphasis added]

There are now more than 85,600 people in UK prisons. While five percent of the general population is Muslim, in prisons the figure is one in seven (roughly 15 percent) and in high-security prisons the figure is nearer 20 percent. The number of Muslims in jail has roughly doubled over the decade from 2004 to 2014, with their numbers going up from around 6,500 to over 12,000.

A Muslim Council of Britain report published last year, based on the latest census data, showed the unemployment rate among Muslims to be higher than the average. It found that around half of the British Muslim population lives in the bottom 10 percent of local authority districts rated by deprivation.

Cameron and May are following the example of the escalating assault on the social and democratic rights of Muslims being enforced in France. The French government trialled a separate secure unit for convicted Islamist terrorists at Fresnes prison, near Paris. This has now been extended to five other prisons throughout France, with the prospect of eventually setting up such units in 26 prisons nationwide.

Each of these units holds between 20 and 25 prisoners. Their access to social and recreational activities is severely restricted, as is their access to the Internet and phone communication. They are held under close surveillance. This level of isolation and surveillance is comparable to that imposed at Guantanamo Bay.

A February 12 Guardian article on the secure units in France noted: “Inmates are selected based on the supposed radicalization threat they represent using a ‘detection grid’ assessing personality, background and observed religious behaviour. France has also recruited nearly 400 extra wardens, social workers, psychologists and surveillance specialists for its larger prisons, as well as more Muslim chaplains.”

The over representation of Muslims in French prisons is even more stark than in British prisons. The Guardian noted a 2004 survey by Farhad Khosrokhavar, an Iranian-born Professor of Sociology at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. He estimated that around 50 percent of the French prison population are Muslims. This figure rose to 70 percent for those short-term prisoners held in jails on the outskirts of large cities.

As in Britain, many French Muslims, mainly of Algerian origin, live in conditions of deprivation and wretched poverty in areas of high unemployment, such as in the banlieues (housing estates) around Paris. Many of the Muslims held in French prisons come from such run-down estates.

The assault on the democratic rights of Muslims is far advanced in France. As far back as September 2010, the French Senate voted into law a bill banning the wearing in all public places of full-face veils, such as the burqa or niqab, worn by some Islamic women. Following the terrorist attacks in Paris in November last year, a state of emergency was declared. Recently, the lower house of the French parliament voted for the state of emergency to be incorporated into the French constitution, making it a permanent feature.

A report issued at the beginning of February by Human Rights Watch noted how the state of emergency was being used to target Muslims and create an atmosphere of fear and panic. It noted, “France has carried out abusive and discriminatory raids and house arrests against Muslims under its sweeping new state of emergency law. The measures have created economic hardship, stigmatized those targeted, and have traumatized children.”

The Cameron government’s pursuit of anti-Muslim policies à la française is ominous. The ongoing scapegoating of Muslims is being consciously utilised in order to shift politics further to the right.

The demonization of Muslims in France has only benefited far right and fascistic forces. Although it eventually came third, the far-right Front National emerged strengthened from the December regional elections, after winning the first round amid a poisonous atmosphere of police repression and anti-Muslim hysteria.

Downsizing begins as Fiat Chrysler seeks merger partner

Shannon Jones

The recent announcement by Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne that the company will stop production of small and midsize vehicles throws into question the status of thousands of jobs at the automaker’s US operations.

The change is part of continuing plans by Marchionne to seek a merger partner for the auto company. The Fiat Chrysler CEO said he plans to eliminate small car production in order to focus on larger, more profitable vehicles such as the Jeep Grand Cherokee and Dodge Ram truck.

Meanwhile, some 3,000 autoworkers are continuing on a six-week layoff at FCA’s Sterling Heights Assembly Plant outside Detroit. The facility, originally set for shutdown in 2009, was retooled to build the Chrysler 200, one of the vehicles the company now says it wants to phase out.

Workers began the layoff February 1 and are scheduled to return on March 14. The plant is scheduled for another temporary shutdown in April.

As the World Socialist Web Site and the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter warned at the time of the 2015 auto contract negotiations, Fiat Chrysler and the UAW were concealing the implications of a potential merger from rank-and-file autoworkers. In fact, the 2015 agreement contained no job guarantees.

A second tier worker at the Sterling Heights Stamping plant, where 150 workers are on voluntary layoff due to the shutdown of the nearby Sterling Heights assembly plant, spoke to the WSWS. Under the two-tier wage system second tier workers receive significantly lower pay and inferior benefits to tier one workers. “The shutdown is not being discussed in union meetings. I don’t think it is right. If Marchionne was planning on selling the company, he was planning during the contract time. I don’t understand a lot of things that go on. They are a corporation, so they can do what they like.”

She said that she had been very critical of the sellout agreement rammed through by the UAW during the 2015 contract negotiations. “I couldn’t see voting for something without a pension, especially with me being older.”

“There will still be tier one and tier two with the new contract. They got rid of the cap (on the percentage of tier two workers.) It is just amazing to me how they could let that happen.”

Workers at the Sterling Heights Assembly Plant have faced delays in receiving their unemployment benefits from the state of Michigan. What the company calls issues in timing caused some hourly workers to receive only one week’s unemployment pay instead of two.

Workers seeking to collect unemployment benefits must navigate the state’s automated response line or website. Mistakes in the filing process can result in workers not receiving their benefits. Job cuts to state employees often make it difficult for those applying for benefits to reach a live representative in case problems arise in the course of filing.

In the past workers got up to 95 percent of their regular pay when they are laid off under terms of the national agreement. Part of that money comes from the company—in the form of Supplemental Unemployment Benefits (SUB)—and part comes from state jobless benefits. But, any delays in getting money from the state cause a hold up in pay from the company as well.

A veteran worker at the Sterling Heights Assembly told the WSWS, “The state is only paying you when they are ready. It is not easy being on unemployment. I would rather be working.”

Under the terms of the new UAW labor deals the companies are not making any additional SUB payments. In a conference call with investors late last year, a Ford executive boasted that freezing SUB pay would “allow us to adjust our workforce in a fairly cost effective way because our newer employees have lower seniority and they would be the first to be impacted in the event of a downturn.” SUB pay for so-called in-progression workers “maxes out at 26 weeks and is roughly 74 percent of their pay,” he said.

Fiat Chrysler is now planning to end production of the Dodge Dart, which is built in Belvidere, Illinois, in addition to the Chrysler 200. The plant currently employs 4,000 hourly employees and there is no estimate of the impact on jobs.

The Dundee, Michigan engine plant south of Detroit could also be impacted by these moves, since the facility currently produces engines for the Dart and Chrysler 200. That facility employs 570 hourly workers.

In preparation for the shutdown of production of the Chrysler 200 the company plans to cut production from 189,000 vehicles last year to 120,000 this year. This likely means that Sterling Heights Assembly workers will be dealing with continued layoffs as the company ramps down production.

Earlier, the Detroit Free Press reported that Fiat Chrysler plans to shift production of the Ram 1500 pickup from the Warren Truck Assembly Plant in suburban Detroit to Sterling Heights. That would likely not happen before 2018, but the Chrysler 200 could be completely phased out in the meantime.

Meanwhile, there have been reports that Warren Truck would build the Jeep Grand Wagoneer in place of the Ram. But the Wagoneer is a slow selling vehicle, so it is not clear how many workers would need to be retained at the facility, one of Fiat Chrysler’s oldest assembly plants and a worksite long rumored to be on the list for closure.

The Sterling Heights Assembly worker explained, “You know how many times Chrysler has been married and divorced. All we know is what we hear on the news. The union isn’t saying anything. They lied all the way around. The (2015) contract was a joke. I spent the signing bonus money in one day.

“Now we are laid off and they are sending the second tier workers to Jefferson North Assembly and Warren Truck. You ask the union any questions about it and they mark you as a troublemaker. They do what they want to do.”

Fiat Chrysler is reportedly looking at a number of different companies as possible merger partners. While General Motors has repeatedly turned down overtures from Marchionne, a number of other companies are cited as merger candidates by the Free Press. These include PSA Peugot Citroen, the French automaker; Hyundai-Kia of Korea; Japanese-based Honda and Mahindra, the Indian conglomerate.

The plans to shut down small car production and focus on larger, higher fuel consumption vehicles are based on the gamble that low fuel prices will continue into the indefinite future. Further, a deepening economic slump could quickly make a shambles of all these calculations.

For its part the Free Press warned that a botched merger could “devastate FCA and lead to job losses and plant closures.”

Fiat Chrysler’s latest moves underscore the degree to which the jobs and livelihoods of autoworkers are dependent on the whims of management and the vagaries of the capitalist market. It underscores the irrational and chaotic character of private ownership and production for profit.

The United Auto Workers has been largely silent on the implications of continued talks of a merger. It responded to Marchionne’s announcement of the phasing out of production of the Dodge Dart and Chrysler 200 by asking for a meeting. The UAW defended Marchionne’s plan to focus on high fuel consumption vehicles, discounting the possible impact of a rise in gas prices on sales. “I see that trend going for a long, long time,” UAW President Dennis Williams told Reuters of current sales patterns. “In part because of improving fuel economy of larger vehicles.”

As an organization based on American nationalism and defense of the capitalist profit system, the UAW has no answer to the threat of layoffs and plant closings. Its only “solution” to the threat of job cuts is to join with management to extort more concessions from workers and aid company efforts to squeeze out greater productivity to make the company more “competitive” with its US and overseas rivals.

The working class must advance its own solution to the chaos of capitalist production by fighting for a program based on the public ownership of the auto companies under the democratic control of the working class. Only in that way can the resources of society be allocated in a rational and planned matter to meet both the needs of the public to safe and high quality vehicles and for workers to have secure and decent paying jobs.

Hillary Clinton's Global-Burning Record

Eric Zuesse

On 17 July 2015, Paul Blumenthal and Kate Sheppard at Huffington Post bannered, “Hillary Clinton's Biggest Campaign Bundlers Are Fossil Fuel Lobbyists”  and the sub-head was "Clinton's top campaign financiers are linked to Big Oil, natural gas and the Keystone pipeline.” This description of her fits for a politician who does the lobbyists' bidding while she provides liberal rhetoric that denies she will, and so who burns-up not only the planet but the trust of the liberals who have voted for her in the mistaken belief that because her label is “Democrat” and because she makes her appeals to women, Blacks, Hispanics, and other disenfranchised groups, she's not actually representing (just like the Republicans do) their common-enemies, which go beyond such ethnic or other groups and constitute the top-0.0001%-economic-class that's exploiting almost the entire public — including  women, Blacks, Hispanics, etc.

Her record does show that she represents those lobbyists, not the public. As I had reported previously, the Hillary Clinton State Department's two environmental impact statements on the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline were triple-hoaxes that totally and scandalously ignored the proposed pipeline's impact on climate-change but that did discuss the impact of climate-change on the proposed pipeline (as if anybody even cared about that); neither of the two studies had even one climatologist on the team that prepared the report; and the State Department didn't do either of the reports themselves, but instead hired two oil-industry contractors that were proposed to the State Department by TransCanada Corporation, which is the company that was proposing to build and own the pipeline. So: those ‘studies' were rigged to enable the President to approve the Pipeline — which he ultimately decided not  to do.

Furthermore, on 2 May 2013, Steve Horn headlined, "Digging Into TransCanada's Lobbying History,” and he found that, indeed, Hillary Clinton was surrounded by TransCanada lobbyists while the reports were being prepared by TransCanada's chosen oil-industry contractors. On 12 March 2014, I headlined "Keystone XL Pipeline Corruption With State Department Should Not Be Legal,”  and reported that, "The Office of Inspector General (IG) of the U.S. State Department has determined that all of the corruption that was entailed in the preparation of the Hillary Clinton State Department's two Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) on the TransCanada corporation's proposed Keystone XL Pipeline, and that is still present in the John Kerry State Department's final EIS, was legal.” This didn't mean that it was at all ethical. It was disgustingly corrupt, regardless of whether it was legal. But, he found: it was legal.

Hillary Clinton is also a big champion of fracking. In September 2014, Mariah Blake bannered "How Hillary Clinton's State Department Sold Fracking to the World,” and reported that, "As part of its expanded energy mandate, the State Department hosted conferences on fracking from Thailand to Botswana. It sent US experts to work alongside foreign officials as they developed shale gas programs.” The energy-companies didn't pay for those sales-calls by the U.S. Secretary of State; taxpayers did.

On 10 April 2015, New Yorkers Against Fracking sent a letter to Clinton, opening, "We, the undersigned citizens groups from across the United States, write to urge you to join the growing majority of Americans against fracking.” Probably, she will, verbally, ‘join' them, but her record shows that she often doesn't follow her word, but that she does reliably follow her money: where that points, she goes (but as much in the dark as she possibly can — ergo, her private email server being used for government-business).

She earns her keep, for the lobbyists, and for her financial backers.