Resignation of UK work and pensions secretary divides Conservative government

Robert Stevens

The resignation of Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith has plunged Britain’s ruling Conservatives into a state of civil war.

Duncan Smith resigned over cuts to disability benefits in last week’s budget, but his doing so is a manifestation of deep divisions in the Tory Party—particularly over June’s referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union (EU). This could lead to a leadership contest following the June 23 referendum, or even a possible split in the party.

Around 100 MPs (of 302) and the majority of party members are in favour of leaving the EU and a growing number of MPs favour a leadership election regardless of the result of the referendum. Duncan Smith therefore left the cabinet over an issue he knows will do maximum political damage to both Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne, the favourite to replace Cameron as party leader on the pro-EU wing of the party.

Commenting on the crisis, the Sunday Times said the leadership credentials of Osborne were “shredded” after Duncan Smith “unleashed a bloodbath of mutual recriminations at the top of the Tory party,” while an unnamed MP told the BBC there will be “genocide of the Cameroons and Osbornites.”

When Duncan Smith stood down as Tory leader in 2003 he set up the Centre for Social Justice think-tank to devise reforms aimed at slashing state spending on welfare benefits. This included the universal credit system currently being implemented by the government and rolling out “welfare to work” programmes under which millions are to be forced into low-paid jobs. In charge of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) since the election of the Tory/Liberal Democrat coalition in 2010, he was the minister most closely associated with brutal attacks on the welfare state including the hated “Bedroom Tax.” He has overseen £28.3 billion taken from the disabled over the past five years.

Nevertheless, the manner of Duncan Smith’s resignation cannot be simply dismissed with charges of hypocrisy. Under conditions of escalating economic crisis, the rifts in the Tory party are an expression of political realignments underway within bourgeois politics internationally. A section of the Tory party that is supportive of a Brexit and which utilises certain populist rhetoric, is now openly campaigning alongside UK Independence Party (UKIP) and a small section of the Labour Party.

Duncan Smith is seeking to make an appeal for “equality of national sacrifice” that provides an essential political justification for the right wing forces gathered under the Brexit umbrella. Indeed Peter Bone, a leader of the Grassroots Out organisation, alongside UKIP leader Nigel Farage, said his resignation “illustrates why it is so important for the UK to quit the EU and stop sending our massive membership fee to Brussels, which amounts to over £15 billion a year. Instead of making unnecessary and painful cuts to disability payments we would have more money to spend on our own priorities.”

Duncan Smith quit just two days after Osborne’s March 23 budget, which confirmed further spending cuts even as the richest 10 percent in society and the corporations were handed billions in tax breaks and other giveaways.

The Chancellor said that disability benefits would be further cut, saving the government £4.4 billion by 2020-21. The cuts reduce access to Personal Independence Payments (PIP), which will replace Disability Living Allowance in January 2017, and is expected to save £1.3 billion, with many PIP recipients slated to lose up to £150 a week. PIP is relied on by hundreds of thousands of people who need help with basic tasks such as going to the toilet and dressing.

These cuts were “not defensible,” Duncan Smith said, especially “in the way they were placed within a Budget that benefits higher earning taxpayers.”

Elaborating on his resignation on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show Sunday, he said the budget was “deeply unfair and perceived to be unfair,” with the Tories now widely seen as a party representing only the rich. The government was “in danger of drifting in a direction that divides society rather than unites it.”

Instead, the government had to “widen the scope of where we look to get that deficit down and not just narrow it down on working age benefits... Because otherwise it just looks like we see this as a pot of money—that it doesn’t matter because they [the poorest] don’t vote for us.”

To continue with the attacks outlined would make a mockery of Cameron’s stated claim to representing “one nation” and that in relation to austerity, “we’re all in this together.”

This is a devastating attack on the prime minister, designed to end his premiership.

Beneath the rhetoric, Duncan Smith’s call for “widening the scope” of deficit reduction does not mean any let up in attacks on the working class. Rather, his main counter proposal is that some cuts should instead be directed at pensions, previously ring-fenced and where far greater savings could be made. Pension cuts would in fact see an escalation in the austerity agenda by an order of magnitude, given that the state pension and pension tax credits make up almost £100 billion of the entire £213 billion welfare spending annual budget, compared with spending on disability benefits totalling £36.7 billion.

In addition, among the Centre for Social Justice’s proposals to address “Economic dependency and worklessness” is a clampdown on out-of-work benefits, including the welfare cap Duncan Smith now claims to oppose. It declares that “the UK’s worklessness crisis is not primarily a product of the recession” and urges a “transformation of who is now expected to look for work and what looking for work should actually entail”—including driving people incapacity benefits and encouraging those in council housing to move home in search of work if unemployed for more than a year.

On Saturday, Duncan Smith was replaced by Stephen Crabb, with Downing Street announcing that the proposed changes to PIP were being abandoned “in their current form.” Even so, by Sunday evening the Tory-supporting Telegraph was speculating about the possibility of Cameron being removed as Tory leader, noting that as “many as 30 Tory MPs were ready to support a leadership challenge...”

The crisis escalated Monday when the Tories were forced to accept an “urgent question” from the Labour Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell who called on Osborne to withdraw his budget due to the £10 billion hole left by the retreat on welfare cuts. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn had earlier called for Osborne’s resignation.

Such is the depth of the political crisis and the tensions within governing circles that Osborne did not attend parliament to answer, leaving it to Treasury Minister David Gauke to speak for the government in a fractious parliamentary session.

Afterwards Cameron was forced to defend his record, telling MPs he represented a “modern, compassionate Conservative government.”

He did so after reporting on the deal between the European Union and Turkey to seal borders and expel refugees, framed as an answer to pro-Brexit Tory MPs, and stressing that his government would step up its clampdown on immigration. “We won’t be giving visa free access to Turks coming to the UK” and “won’t be taking more refugees as a result part of this deal,” he said.

In response, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn merely asked Osborne’s whereabouts. He made no reference to Duncan Smith’s resignation, asking only if Cameron could guarantee there would be no further cuts in the DWP’s budget.

The immediate future of the Tory government depends on the ability of Cameron to stem the attacks on his premiership from within his own ranks. But its underlying weakness and the conflicts tearing it apart are becoming ever clearer.

US accelerating military encirclement of China

Peter Symonds

The United States and the Philippines announced last Friday that five of the country’s military bases would be opened up to American forces under the Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement (EDCA). The implementation of the Philippine basing arrangement is just one component of the accelerating US military build-up throughout the Indo-Pacific region as part of the Pentagon’s encirclement and war preparations against China.

The two countries signed EDCA in 2014 but the Philippine Supreme Court only rejected legal challenges to the agreement in January. Last week’s announcement followed two days of high-level discussions in Washington on an offer by the Philippine administration in February to make eight bases available to the US military.

The five “agreed locations” include the Antonio Bautista Air Base on Palawan Island, directly adjacent to the contested Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. Over the past year, Washington has dramatically heightened tensions with Beijing, denouncing its land reclamation activities and “militarisation” of the South China Sea. Last October and again in January, US navy destroyers directly challenged Chinese maritime claims by intruding into the 12-nautical-mile territorial limit around Chinese-administered islets.

The US military will also have access to Basa Air Base north of Manila, Fort Magsaysay (a huge army base), Lumbia Air Base in Cebu and Mactan-Benito Ebuen Air Base in Mindanao. Defence Secretary Ashton Carter is due to visit Manila next month to finalise arrangements. However, Philip Goldberg, US ambassador to the Philippines, told the media he expected the initial movement of supplies and personnel to begin “very soon.” The US Congress has set aside $66 million for the construction of military facilities in the Philippines.

Beijing condemned the new basing deal and warned of the potential for conflict. A comment published on Saturday by the state-owned Xinhua news agency accused Washington of “muddying waters in the South China Sea and making the Asia Pacific a second Middle East.” On Monday, foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying pointed to the hypocrisy of the US accusing China of “militarising” the South China Sea, exclaiming: “Isn’t this kind of continued strengthening of military deployments in the South China Sea and areas surrounding it considered militarisation?”

As the US prepared to move military forces back into its former colony, General Dennis Via, chief of US Army Materiel Command, revealed to the media last week that Washington had secured other basing arrangements in Asia, including Vietnam, Cambodia and other unnamed countries. Under these deals, the US army will be able to stockpile equipment to enable troops to be deployed more rapidly to the region.

Via emphasised that the “activity sets” would be geared to low-intensity operations such as multinational training exercises and relief operations. “We are looking, for example, at in Cambodia placing a combat support hospital,” he said.

Reassurances that the US military presence will be benign are worthless. As in the Philippines, the Pentagon is treading carefully so as not to immediately inflame opposition to a foreign military presence. In the case of Cambodia and Vietnam, the death and destruction wrought in both countries by Washington’s neo-colonial war in the 1960s and 1970s is deeply etched into popular consciousness.

Washington has already forged closer diplomatic, economic and military relations with the Vietnamese regime, including backing its more aggressive stance in its disputes with China in the South China Sea. The US has lifted embargoes on the sale of arms to Vietnam, conducted joint military exercises and is seeking greater access to port facilities. However, the placement of US army supplies inside Vietnam for the first time since American troops were forced to withdraw in 1975 marks a turning point in the regime’s collaboration with US imperialism.

Beijing will be even more concerned about Cambodia’s decision to host US military equipment. The Cambodian regime has close ties with China and has attempted to block US efforts to press the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) to take a more confrontational stand against China over the South China Sea. Nevertheless, the US has been developing defence ties with Cambodia since 2006. These include limited training, port calls and joint exercises. Washington has also been exploiting the Lower Mekong Initiative to drive a wedge between Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos and Thailand, on the one hand, and China which is building dams on the upper Mekong River, on the other.

The latest basing arrangements with the Philippines, Vietnam and Cambodia come on top of the stationing of the US navy’s littoral combat vessels in Singapore and closer military collaboration with Indonesia and Malaysia. The rapid expansion of the US military presence in South East Asia goes hand in hand with the restructuring of permanent American military bases in South Korea, Japan and Guam, the upgrading of the US strategic partnership with India, and preparations to station long-range strategic bombers in northern Australia.

The US build-up is part of the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia,” formally announced in 2011—a comprehensive diplomatic, economic and military strategy aimed at subordinating China to Washington’s interests. The “pivot” has greatly inflamed potential flashpoints for war throughout the region, particularly through its provocative activities in the South China Sea.

Speaking in Canberra last week, Admiral Scott Swift, commander of the US Pacific Fleet, delivered another broadside against China, declaring that “freedom of the seas” was “increasingly vulnerable to a state-led resurgence of the principle of might makes right.” He declared that he was troubled by “the undeniable signs of militarisation in select parts of the region, unprecedented in scope and scale.”

The cynicism of such statements knows no bounds. The US navy has not only carried out two “freedom of navigation” operations within territorial waters claimed by China, but earlier this month dispatched the nuclear aircraft carrier, the USS John C Stennis, along with its associated strike group, to the South China Sea for four days of exercises and patrols. Over the past quarter century, the US has ridden roughshod over international law on the basis of “might makes right” to engage in a continuous succession of wars, military interventions and provocations.

Now Washington is preparing for war on an even more terrible scale with China and pressing countries throughout the region into line. Swift’s visit to Canberra coincides with a concerted campaign to pressure the Australian government to mount its own “freedom of navigation” operation in the South China Sea—a reckless military exercise that always entails the risk of a miscalculation or mistake triggering a broader conflict.

Australian government threatens a “double dissolution” election

Mike Head

Facing intense pressures on his government, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull yesterday triggered a move for a rare “double dissolution” election of all members of both houses of parliament. He called a sudden media conference to declare that such an election would be held on July 2 if the Senate again refused to pass a bill directed against construction workers.

Via a constitutional power not exercised since 1977, Turnbull secured a proclamation by the Governor-General Sir Peter Cosgrove—the formal head of state and the Queen’s representative—to prorogue (terminate) the current session of parliament and recall it on April 18. Turnbull also called forward the date of the annual federal budget from May 10 to May 3.

By these manoeuvres, Turnbull presented an ultimatum to the Senate to pass the draconian Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC) Bill during a three-week parliamentary session before May 11. That is the last date on which Turnbull can constitutionally ask the governor-general to grant a double dissolution election, which can be triggered only if the Senate has twice rejected a bill.

Turnbull’s unannounced visit to Government House early yesterday morning to obtain the governor-general’s approval for parliament’s prorogation was his second such trip in three days. Last Friday, he rushed to secure formal royal assent to the passage of laws changing the system of voting for the Senate, which had been just rammed through a marathon overnight parliament sitting.

The Greens struck a deal with the government to pass these laws, which are designed to clear out of the Senate eight minor party and independent senators who have blocked some of the government’s budget austerity measures. Mostly right-wing populists, these senators have opposed provisions such as upfront fees to see doctors, cuts to welfare benefits and steep rises in university fees, in a bid to secure their own political survival amid widespread popular opposition to the austerity offensive.

The government has seized upon the Senate’s refusal, up until now, to pass the ABCC Bill as a pretext to try to break through a profound political crisis that has increasingly engulfed the government and the parliamentary system itself, and proceed with an agenda that has been largely hidden from public view.

Six months after deposing his predecessor Tony Abbott as the leader of the Liberal-National Coalition government in a party room coup last September, Turnbull has been under mounting fire from the corporate elite for failing, just as Abbott did, to impose deep cuts to social spending, business taxes and workers’ wages and conditions. These demands have escalated amid a worsening deterioration of the economic situation due to the collapse of the 20-year mining boom, the sharp downturn in China and the deepening impact of the global financial breakdown that erupted in 2008.

While serving as a constitutional trigger, the ABCC Bill also provides a warning of the wider big business agenda that is being pursued. While nominally directed against the construction unions, the legislation is targeted against the working class. It would reinstate the ABCC with sweeping coercive powers to jail construction workers for refusing to answer its questions about alleged unlawful industrial action. The bill is aimed at intimidating and suppressing resistance by building workers to an escalating assault on jobs and conditions.

Turnbull has also come under growing pressure from Washington to prove his unconditional commitment to its military “pivot to Asia” to confront China and assert unchallenged US hegemony over the Indo-Pacific. Until now, Turnbull’s government has not dispatched Australian warships and planes to join Washington’s provocative “freedom of navigation” exercises in Chinese-claimed areas of the South China Sea. In recent weeks, both Abbott and the Labor Party have publicly called for such Australian deployments, ratcheting up the pressure on Turnbull.

Turnbull’s government has been under further criticism from the Obama administration for permitting the lease to a Chinese company of the commercial port of Darwin—a strategic location near military bases from which US forces can operate against China. Yesterday, the New York Times highlighted Washington’s discontent. It published a front-page article, headlined, “US Casts Wary Eye on Australian Port Leased by Chinese,” which emphasised the American government’s concern that China’s “port access could facilitate intelligence collection on US and Australian military forces stationed nearby.”

As the New York Times article noted, the conflict over the strategic port embodies a profound dilemma confronting Australia’s ruling elite. It is under escalating demand from Washington—on which it depends militarily—to take a frontline position in a confrontation with China—its largest export market.

The twin pressures on Australia’s political establishment—economic and foreign policy—have produced growing instability since the landslide defeat of the Howard Coalition government in 2007, which saw Prime Minister John Howard lose his own seat in parliament. Since then, not one prime minister has served a full term. Three of them, Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and Abbott, were ousted via backroom plots, carried out behind the backs of the population.

By his double dissolution threat, Turnbull hopes to pave the way for a frontal attack on working-class conditions and to shore up his own position against those in the political and military establishment, including Abbott and his backers, who advocate a more aggressive role in Washington’s confrontations with both China and Russia.

Big business representatives and the corporate media hailed yesterday’s move by Turnbull as a political masterstroke. “Malcolm Turnbull grabs the initiative,” declared today’s Australian Financial Review editorial. It insisted that the “transformation” of Australia’s economy from the resources boom required the slashing of labour costs and “now-unaffordable spending expectations”—that is, basic social services.

Murdoch’s Australian editorial welcomed Turnbull’s “bold plan to give shape to his agenda.” However, it also voiced concerns that both Turnbull and Labor Party leader Bill Shorten had not been “tested in the heat of an election campaign before.” Turnbull’s government still needed to “unveil a plan that is both palatable to the electorate and committed to fiscal repair—twin aims that the Coalition has not been able to satisfy in either of its first two budgets.”

These comments point to the other dilemma confronting the ruling elite: how to impose the program of austerity and war on the population, which is hostile to the intensifying attacks on social conditions, disaffected from the major parliamentary parties and concerned by the increasingly visible threat of a military conflict with China.

Under these conditions, by striking their pact with the government on the Senate voting laws, the Greens sent a wider signal of their readiness to try to stabilise the political establishment by working with the Coalition. At the same time, Turnbull’s involvement of the governor-general, who holds broad anti-democratic powers under the Australian constitution, demonstrates the readiness of the ruling elite to resort to authoritarian measures to impose its agenda on the working class.

Australian nickel refinery workers sacked without entitlements

Terry Cook

Hundreds of workers retrenched at Queensland Nickel’s (QN) Yaulu refinery remain in limbo, without jobs or entitlements, despite schemes being proposed by the owner, mining magnate Clive Palmer, and an investment group to eventually reopen the facility.

More than 200 workers at the Townsville refinery were sacked in January and the remaining 550 were laid off on March 11 without even redundancy payouts being met. Once again, workers are being made to pay for the collapse of the mining boom that enriched tycoons like Palmer for two decades.

The refinery was one of the largest employers in northern Queensland, where official unemployment levels now exceed 10 percent in many areas. In 2009, BHP Billiton, the world’s largest mining company, offloaded the refinery to Palmer, who hoped to reap profits from high nickel prices.

Instead, the price has fallen by more than 80 percent since its 2007 peak. Mining commodity prices have plunged under the weight of the deepening impact of the 2008 global economic breakdown and the slowdown in China.

QN was placed in voluntary administration on February 18 after Palmer declined to provide $35 million to meet immediate cash flow problems following a decision by major banks and the state and federal governments not to lend QN that sum.

According to the administrator, FTI Consulting, QN owed creditors around $110 million. The payout of workers’ accrued entitlements was at the bottom of the long list of creditors. Workers may be able to access payments from a federal government entitlements guarantee fund but only if QN is placed liquidation, an option to be considered at a creditors meeting next month.

Earlier this month, Palmer suddenly took back control of the refinery, via a different company, after claiming he had secured a $23 million bailout loan from an unnamed Sydney financier. He then declared that the facility could not re-open until at least July 31. Interviewed on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Insiders” program on March 13, he made no guarantees about the future of the workers.

Attempting to shift the blame, Palmer has claimed that the administrator “decided to close shop and in doing so froze the bank accounts for the business to make them not available for ongoing operations.” FTI Consulting director John Park, however, accused Palmer of “doing nothing” to keep an undertaking to issue new work contracts.

Palmer also accused the state Labor government of dragging its feet with 18 environmental and safety approvals needed to operate the plant legally. This buck-passing was joined by Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk who said her government was doing everything it could to help Palmer to salvage the jobs.

Palmer founded the right-wing populist Palmer United Party (PUP) just before the 2013 federal election to pose as an alternative to both the Liberal-National Coalition and Labor, which have implemented pro-market agendas and backed an escalating corporate assault on jobs and working conditions. His contemptuous treatment of the refinery workers has shattered his pretensions.

Last week around 300 sacked workers attended a meeting, along with 700 creditors, where they voted to support a “community buy back” bid for the refinery being organised by Sister City Partners (SCP), led by investment banker and former Labor Party staffer Warwick Powell and property investor Mark Dunworth.

On its web site, SCP states it “works with communities to rebuild regional economies” via “a not for profit regional investment banking model.” Under its plan, creditors and workers would supposedly become joint owners of the refinery via a publicly-listed company, CommNickel.

However, workers would have to forgo entitlements and accept lower wages and worse conditions. Powell said the operation would require “some belt-tightening” that could include pay cuts, and an increase in output to reduce unit costs. He claimed the plan would not “cost the individual workers a cent,” but “we have made it very clear from day one that this is a conversion of what they’re owed in terms of entitlements into a value of shares in the future.”

Dunworth said Palmer had agreed to draw up a non-binding document outlining the possible sale of the refinery to CommNickel. Palmer is clearly weighing the option of offloading the refinery.

Dunworth said SCP hoped to secure financing from the federal government’s yet-to-commence Northern Australia Infrastructure Fund. It remains unclear whether the proposal would be eligible for concessional loans, which are intended to finance public infrastructure such as airports, ports, roads, rail, energy and communications projects.

Mine workers in the French Pacific colony of New Caledonia also face the loss of their livelihoods. The refinery took a large portion of the nickel extracted from the island state. A New Caledonian ship carrying $1 million worth of nickel ore was expected to arrive off the Townsville coast last week, but Palmer’s Queensland Nickel Sales, the new refinery manager, refused to buy it.

Even if the refinery were to be reopened by Palmer or CommNickel, its operation would be subject to the same market forces that have brought about QN’s demise and driven mass layoffs and closures throughout mining-related industries. Resources companies internationally are restructuring their operations to drastically slash costs and ramp up output.

In Australia, they are doing so with the complete backing of the federal Liberal-National government and the state governments, including the Labor administration in Queensland.

If workers have been left jobless and stranded, the responsibility lies entirely with the trade unions that cover them, notably the Australian Workers Union (AWU) and the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU).

While denouncing Palmer, the unions have worked to prevent any independent fight to defend jobs, instead appealing to Palmer to honour sacked workers’ entitlements and presenting the job destruction as a fait accompli. AMWU state secretary Rohan Webb last week declared: “It’s game over red rover and they [the workers] are out of a job, unless something spectacular happens.”

Above all, the unions and the Labor Party leaders oppose any struggle that would raise the necessity for a socialist solution: the fight for a workers’ government to take the banks and basic industries, including mining and refining, out of the hands of the capitalist elite, such as Palmer, and place them under social ownership and under the democratic control of the producers.

Spanish youth protest education reforms

James Lerner

Thousands of students in Spain staged a one-day strike last week taking to the streets of Spanish cities in protest against implementation of the current Popular Party (PP) government’s education reforms—a series of pro-business, anti-student, anti-worker measures.

In Barcelona an estimated 3,000 university students marched through the city centre to the building housing the Catalan government. They called for the repeal of the reform, chanting “No to privatization!” and denouncing the placing of “education at the service of the market, not the public” and the imposition of the teaching of Spanish to the detriment of the Catalan language.

Several hundred gathered in Madrid, where authorities refused to allow the demonstration to be held in front of the Ministry of Education. In Valencia, several thousand students also demonstrated.

The protests targeted the “3+2 Decree,” which increases the amount of unpaid, in-company internship time required in university courses of study—providing companies even more cheap labour power.

The protests were also aimed at the continuing effects of the “Wert” reforms, named after José Ignacio Wert, who was appointed Education, Sports and Culture Minister in 2011 and sought to create a generation of youth with basic qualifications entirely geared to the needs of big business.

Since then billions have been cut from the country’s education budgets, with the main assault occurring at the regional level where governments have the primary responsibility for education. Class sizes, university tuition fees and teachers’ hours have increased, compulsory religious instruction was introduced and limits were imposed on the use of the Catalan, Basque and Galician languages in regional schools. Wert stated that he wanted to “Spanishize Catalan schoolchildren.”

The organisers of the actions are student associations linked to either pseudo-left or Stalinist political parties, like the Sindicato de Estudiantes or the Frente de Estudiantes, that seek to channel the protests into the dead end of supporting one or another bourgeois party.

The response to the strike and protests nevertheless expresses to a certain degree the broad social frustration and anger felt by students and young people in Spain.

Some 45,000 students have been forced to give up their studies since the introduction of the reforms due to rising tuition and fees and an absence of financial assistance. One education “reform” after another has sought to reduce access to public universities and provide greater public funding for private educational institutions at all levels, from kindergarten all the way to masters’ studies.

The outlook for young people who do finish university studies is bleak. Particularly since the onset of the economic crisis in 2008, millions of people below the age of 30 have been forced to choose between either staying in Spain and having to work as a super-exploited segment of the workforce in poorly paid temporary and/or part-time jobs, “internships” that pay below the minimum wage, or working in areas that are unrelated to their studies—all while continuing to live at home with their parents—or migrating abroad.

Reports have emerged on the manifold ways that the law either allows or sets up legal loopholes that are used by companies to intensify exploitation of young people as a source of extra-cheap labour.

Companies have taken advantage of a provision in the law on paid internships to avoid having to sign an actual employment contract with a worker. They require that workers enroll in flimsy online courses on, say, cooking or playing the guitar, to maintain their status as a “student” and thus remain eligible for an internship contract, even though they have already graduated from university.

If they stay in Spain, few of the available opportunities allow young people to establish their own household before the age of 30.

For some time now, politicians and the media have trumpeted the economic recovery in Spain and the supposedly fantastic upturn in the job market, but 77.4 percent of the jobs created in 2015 were temporary (up by 15.8 percent on 2014), and one third of the new jobs were part time. Unemployment in Spain is still 22.4 percent, and 55 percent of people below the age of 25 are jobless.

It is no surprise that a very large percentage of young people end up seeking a future in another European country, or even in Latin America. The latest official figures show that more than 750,000 Spaniards have emigrated since 2009, according to the official Spanish Statistical Office (INE). However, the true figure of young Spaniards leaving the country is likely to be significantly higher.

The INE deliberately undercounts the number of migrants, as this figure only includes those who actually go to the Spanish consulate and sign into the official registry of Spaniards living abroad. It does not count Spaniards who register with foreign social security or other authorities, but who fail to register with the Spanish authorities.

The migration of Spaniards abroad also constitutes a “brain drain” for the country, as highly educated young people, including those in the sciences, have seen funding for research grants virtually dry up, forcing them to leave the country if they wish to do research. Engineers can expect to earn perhaps double the going salary in Spain if they choose to work in Berlin, for example, while many nurses have left to help cover staffing shortfalls in the National Health Service in the UK.

Sri Lankan parliament to draft new constitution to shore up capitalist rule

Rohantha De Silva

The Sri Lankan parliament passed a proposal presented by Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe on March 9 to convert itself into a constitutional assembly to and to draft a new constitution. Wickremesinghe painted this proposal as a step towards re-establishing “democratic good governance.” In reality, it is an effort to strengthen the government’s ability to impose austerity measures and deepen its integration into the US “pivot to Asia” against China.

The government boasted that the resolution was passed “unanimously,” but the process dragged out for two months amid infighting within the ruling elites. The proposal was first presented to the parliament on January 9—one year after Maithripala Sirisena ousted Mahinda Rajapakse. About two dozen parliamentarians aligned with Rajapakse opposed the resolution unless it incorporated their demands.

Sirisena split from Rajapakse Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP)-led government to contest the 2015 presidential election in a regime-change operation orchestrated by Washington with the help of former president Chandrika Kumaratunga and Wickremesinghe. The US wanted to scuttle Rajapakse’s close relations with Beijing and line up Sri Lanka with its war preparations against China.

Sirisena with the support of the opposition parties—Wickremesinghe’s United National Party (UNP), the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) and the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) as well as the pseudo-left organisations—exploited the opposition of voters to Rajapakse’s autocratic methods. He and Wickremesinghe promised to abolish the executive presidency, strengthen parliamentary rule, reconciliation with Tamil parties and improved living conditions.

After the election Sirisena took control of the SLFP and appointed Wickremesinghe as prime minister. The pair consolidated the grip on power after the UNP won parliamentary elections last August and formed a national unity government.

Rajapakse’s backers from the SLFP and its allies in the United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA) have formed a “joint opposition” in the parliament. They finally backed the resolution to rewrite the constitution after the government agreed to delete the preamble and wording referring to the abolition of the executive presidency and for a “constitutional resolution of the national issue.”

The “national issue” is a reference to the systematic discrimination and oppression of the island’s Tamil minority, which resulted in a protracted and brutal war that only ended with the crushing of the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The Tamil elites represented by the TNA are seeking a so-called political solution through the devolution of the extra powers over land and the police to provincial governments.

Rajapakse and his allies are bitterly opposed to any concessions to the Tamil minority. At a recent lecture, he explicitly opposed handing the powers of land and police to the provinces. The “joint opposition” is whipping up Sinhala chauvinist sentiment by accusing the government of dividing the country by preparing to boost the powers of provincial councils.

Sirisena and the government agreed to modify the resolution, but are working to undermine and isolate Rajapakse and his supporters. Sirisena has indirectly warned Rajapakse loyalists that they face removal if they oppose the government and its policies. He recently replaced some electoral district organisers including MPs with his own supporters and appointed a loyalist as UPFA general secretary. The government is using a so-called anti-corruption drive to put pressure on Rajapakse and his backers.

The constitutional resolution—even with its deleted preamble—has no concrete proposals. The so-called constitutional assembly will appoint “steering committees” to discuss specific issues which will be incorporated into a new draft constitution. If two thirds of parliamentary members agree to the document then cabinet will approve it and put it to a referendum.

The government’s claim that democracy will be strengthened by shifting to a parliamentary form of rule is completely bogus. For three decades from formal independence in 1948 to the adoption of the executive presidency in 1978, successive UNP and SLFP governments operating through parliament carried out savage attacks on the democratic rights of working people. These included the abolition of the citizenship rights of Tamil plantation workers in 1948, the use of anti-democratic emergency powers, and discrimination against Tamils by making Sinhala the only official language in 1956 and Buddhism a state religion in the 1972 constitution.

The UNP government of President J.R. Jayawardene imposed the 1978 constitution with its autocratic executive presidency in a bid to strengthen the state against the working class and the rural poor. The government had provoked widespread popular opposition by initiating the open market agenda to attract foreign investment. As social tensions rose, Jayawardene resorted to whipping up anti-Tamil chauvinism to divide working people, plunging the island into communal war in 1983.

In their attempts to posture as democrats, Wickremesinghe and Sirisena have criticised the “errors” of past constitutions and governments. However, they have been leaders in successive UNP and SLFP governments that made those “past errors.”

Moreover, for all the talk about resolving the “national issue,” Wickremesinghe pledged in January that the new constitution would not change the unitary character of the state or the constitutional priority given to Buddhism. The government’s determination to maintain Buddhism as the state religion makes clear that whatever concessions are made to the Tamil elites, it has no intention of ending the systematic discrimination against Tamil workers and rural toilers. The military occupation of the North and East of the island continues and the government recently ordered the establishment of police and military check points under the guise of fighting the criminal “under-world.”

The formation of the national unity government last year is a measure of the depth of the country’s economic and social crisis and the fear in ruling circles of a movement of workers, youth and the rural poor against the deepening attacks on living standards. Wickremesinghe and Sirisena are seeking a “political solution” to the island’s protracted war to more closely integrate the TNA and the Tamil elites into the political establishment in preparation for confronting the working class.

The government faces deepening economic turmoil with a balance of payment crisis and massive public debt. It has turned for a new loan to the International Monetary Fund, which is already demanding increased taxes, the privatisation of more state-owned enterprises and slashing the remaining price subsidies.

None of these “democrats” will hesitate in the slightest in using police state measures to suppress the resistance of working people. This government has used the police and military to violently attack protests and strikes by workers, students and peasants.

Washington is backing the Sri Lankan government’s moves for a solution to the “national issue” as a means of ensuring stability on the island and also in India where atrocities among Sri Lankan Tamils have provoked unrest in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. During the first ever Sri Lanka-US partnership dialogue, American officials “expressed support for the government’s plans for constitutional reforms.”

The transformation of the parliament into a constituent assembly—as was done in previous constitutional rewrites in 1972 and 1978—is an anti-democratic charade. The only class that will wage a genuine struggle for democratic rights is the working class by mobilising the urban and rural poor in the fight for a workers’ and peasants’ government. On that basis, a democratically elected constituent assembly should be established to abolish all of the existing anti-democratic laws and guarantee the democratic rights of all.

The struggle for democratic rights is indissolubly bound up with the building of a unified, independent movement of the working class and the fight for socialism. The Socialist Equality Party fights for the Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka and Eelam as part of the struggle for the Union of Socialist Republic of South Asia and internationally.

New study says entire regions of US will remain in slump until the 2020s

Jerry White

A new study by a University of California-Berkeley economist says that at current sluggish levels of job growth, entire regions of the United States, which were hit hardest by the Great Recession will not return to “normal” employment levels until the 2020s. This amounts, to “more than a ‘lost decade’ of depressed employment” for “half of the country,” wrote economist Danny Yagan.

The new study is one of many showing that the fall of the official unemployment rate, touted by the Obama administration and the news media as proof of a robust economic recovery, if not a return to “full employment,” is largely based on the fact that millions of workers fell out of the labor force in the years preceding and following the 2008 financial crash.

The labor-force participation rate fell to a 38-year low of 62.4 percent last fall, and only climbed up to 62.9 percent in February. According to the Economic Policy Institute, February’s official jobless rate of 4.9 percent—the lowest since the pre-recession level of 4.7 percent in November 2007—would really be 6.3 percent if the country’s “missing workers” were included. These include 2.4 million workers who have given up actively looking for work.

Millions of workers have abandoned hope of finding a job.

Yagan based his findings on a detailed study of some 2 million, similarly paid workers in the retail industry in order to calculate employment patterns across different local areas and to account for occupations that might have been particularly hard hit in one region.

He found that the areas hardest hit by the recession, which began in December 2007 and officially ended in June 2009, continued to have high levels of joblessness in 2014. His map of these distressed areas includes all of Florida and parts of Arizona, Nevada, California, Colorado, New Mexico, the Dakotas, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Georgia, Connecticut, New Hampshire and other states.

While different areas of the country are often hit differently by an economic downturn, an article in the Wall Street Journal on Yagan’s study noted, these economically distressed areas generally return to normal levels of employment chiefly because workers move to find work in areas with a higher demand for labor. In the case of the “Great Recession,” however, the mass layoffs resulted in “muted migration,” according to other studies cited by theJournal, and workers simply fell out of the labor market.

“Unlike the aftermath of the 1980s and 1990s recessions,” Yagan wrote, “employment in hard-hit areas remains very depressed relative to the rest of the country.” Living in areas like Phoenix, Arizona, or Las Vegas, Nevada means confronting “enduring joblessness and exacerbated inequality,” Yagan wrote. “If the latest convergence speed continues, employment differences across the United States are estimated to return to normal in the 2020s—more than a decade after the Great Recession.”

The lack of decent job opportunities in large swathes of the country has created a reserve army of unemployed and underemployed workers who are competing for a shrinking number of jobs in areas that are more or less permanently distressed. Last month’s Labor Department employment report noted that the average annual unemployment rate in 36 states, plus Washington, D.C. was higher in 2015 than the average unemployment rate for those states in 2007.

Credit: DANNY YAGAN, Assistant Professor of Economics, University of California, Berkeley

The majority of unemployed people in the US do not receive unemployment insurance benefits, according to the National Employment Law Project, with just over one in four jobless workers (27 percent), a record low, receiving such benefits in 2015.

The details of these studies will come as no surprise for tens of millions of workers across the United States who face unprecedented levels of economic insecurity, ongoing mass layoffs, and more than a decade of stagnating or falling real wages. This has fueled the growth of enormous discontent and the initial stirrings of class struggle by American workers, which the trade unions and both big business parties have sought to channel in the direction of economic nationalism and hostility to workers in China, Mexico and other countries.

In fact, US workers are being subjected to the same attacks as workers around the world. The reports on the employment situation in the US coincide with a continual massacre of jobs in the world’s steel, oil and mining industries, with 1.2 million steel and coal mining jobs targeted for destruction in China alone.

Continual layoffs in the US have been driven by the plunging price of steel, petroleum, coal and other commodities, which has been generated in large measure by the fall in demand from China and other so-called emerging economies. Last week, St. Louis, Missouri-based Peabody Energy, the largest coal mining company in the world, announced it could soon file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, after its share values fell 46 percent over the last six months.

Peabody has already cut 20 percent of its global workforce since 2012, while spinning off large sections of its operations in order to cheat retirees out of their pensions. The company’s announcement follows bankruptcy filings by both Arch Coal and Alpha Natural Resources and a similar threat from coal mining giant Foresight Energy. In its press release, Peabody pointed to the collapse in the coal market, where the price per ton has fallen to $40 from $200 in 2008.

The steel industry continues to wipe out jobs, with 12,000 steelworkers already laid off or facing imminent job cuts. The largest US steelmaker, US Steel, has slashed thousands of jobs in Texas, Illinois, Ohio, Indiana and Pennsylvania. The aluminum giant Alcoa is just weeks away from closing its smelter in Warrick County, Indiana, wiping out another 600 jobs. Meanwhile, the United Steelworkers (USW) union is pushing for protectionist measures against China, Brazil, Russia and other countries, even as it pushes through concession-laden contracts at US Steel, Allegheny Technologies and now ArcelorMittal.

Early last year, the USW betrayed the strike by thousands of oil refinery workers, blocking any struggle against the brutal restructuring of the industry that is now underway. The plunging of oil prices triggered more than 258,000 layoffs in the global energy industry in 2015—with the number of active oil and gas rigs in the US falling 61 percent. Analysts anticipate a new round of job cuts and bankruptcies in early 2016.

Texas has lost 60,000 energy-related jobs alone, or one-fifth of the workforce in that sector in the state, with North Dakota and Pennsylvania also being hard hit. The current US unemployment rate for the oil, gas and mining sector is 8.5 percent, but could top 10 percent by February, double the national jobless rate.

Last month, the air conditioner maker Carrier announced it was eliminating 1,400 jobs at its Indianapolis plant and a nearby facility, and shipping production to Monterrey, Mexico where wages are approximately $6 an hour. A video shot by a worker, capturing the explosive anger at a meeting of plant workers when a manager makes the announcement, has been viewed millions of times.

Far from organizing any resistance to the closure of the factory and destruction of jobs, however, the USW is collaborating with United Technologies Carrier management to carry out an orderly shutdown and the retraining of displaced workers for lower-paying jobs.

The USW is hostile to any fight to unite American workers with their brothers and sisters in Mexico, who have been engaging in growing resistance to the exploitation by the transnational corporations. USW officials are telling workers to rely on the Democratic Party to implement protectionist trade measures to “save jobs” and “take our country back.” Local and regional union officials have had nothing but kind words about Donald Trump’s efforts to swindle workers with economic nationalist appeals.

The unions have long used economic nationalism to undermine the class-consciousness of workers and to promote the corporatist outlook of “labor-management partnership.” In the name of making the corporations “competitive,” the USW and other unions have suppressed every struggle against plant closings, job cuts and the destruction of wages and benefits.

This has coincided with the political subordination of workers to the Democratic Party, which under the Obama administration has spearheaded the attack on workers’ jobs and wages and the historic transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top.

USW Local 1999, which claims to represent Carrier workers, is urging them to support Democrat John Gregg for Indiana governor. A former land agent for Peabody Coal and lobbyist for Amax Coal Company, Gregg served as the honorary chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign in Indiana, and was a proponent of austerity and corporate tax cuts while Speaker of the state Legislature.

Italian Government Scholarships for Foreign Students

Italian Government 
Bachelors/Masters/PhD Degrees

Deadline: 15 April 2016 (annual)
Study in: Italy
Course starts AY 2016/2017

Brief description:

The Italian Government awards scholarships for studying in Italy both to foreign citizens and Italian citizens resident abroad (IRE).  The scholarships are offered for the following type of courses: Undergraduate University courses (renewals only); Postgraduate University courses; Master’s Degree courses (Levels I or II); Ph.D. Courses; Specialisation Schools; Research under academic supervision; Courses of Higher Education in Art, Music and Dance (AFAM); Advanced Courses on Italian language and culture Courses for Teachers of Italian as second language.

Host Institution(s):

Scholarships can be awarded only for study/ research projects at institutions within the Italian public education and research system.

Field(s) of Study:

Eligible field(s) of study offered by participating Italian Universities.

Target Group:

Students from countries included in the Recipient Country List.

Scholarship value/duration:

The scholarship duration can be three, six, or nine months. Only for courses for teachers of Italian language the scholarship duration is one month.

Normally, the scholarship holders are exempt from the payment of the university tuition fees, in accordance with existing regulations. However the Universities, as part of their autonomy, may not allow such exemption. Candidates are therefore recommended to contact the chosen Institution in order to be informed on eventual taxes or tuition fees.

For the sole period of the scholarships granted by the Italian Government, the scholarship-holders are covered by an insurance policy against illness and/or accident. Air tickets are not granted, except for Chilean citizens.

Detailed information regarding the scholarship offer, can be requested to the Italian Embassy or Italian Cultural Institute in the applicant’s country of citizenship.

Eligibility:

A. Educational qualification required by the chosen institution  (See Section III of the call for applications)

B. Knowledge of Italian Language:  candidates must possess a certificate of intermediate level in Italian (e.g. CILS B2, CELI 3, PLIDA B2 or INT.IT Roma Tre) or equivalent linguistic proficiency issued by a local organization or language school (e.g. Italian Cultural Institute, Dante Alighieri Society branch etc.). Applicants for enrolment in Advanced Courses on Italian language and culture must have at least an A2 level proficiency in Italian.

Italian language knowledge is not required for applicants who enroll for university courses held entirely in English.

C. Age limits:  candidates who are younger than 18 y. o. (born not after 15 April 1998) or older than 35 y. o. (born not before 15 April 1981) on the day of the deadline for the submission of the applications, are not eligible. Candidates for Courses for teachers of Italian as second language (see above, section III, letter I) are eligible until they are 45 y. o. (born not before 15 April 1971) on the day of the deadline for the submission of the applications.

D. Restrictions: Students enrolled in a year exceeding the legal duration of the course of study (the so-called “fuori corso”) are not eligible for scholarships.

Application Instructions:

All applicants must fill in the on-line application form at “Borse on Line” by 00:00 am (Italian time) on Friday, 15 April 2016.

Before submitting their applications, prospective applicants must contact the university or institution in Italy where they intend to study. They are advised to be as fully informed as possible about the institution and course of study of their choice.  Applicants are also requested to obtain country-specific information from the Italian diplomatic mission or Italian Cultural Institute of their country of origin, either in person or from the institutional websites.

It is important the read the 2016/2017 Call for Applications and visit the official website to access the online application form and for detailed information on how to apply for this scholarship.

Website/Links:

Official Scholarship Website: http://www.esteri.it/mae/en/ministero/servizi/stranieri/opportunita/borsestudio_stranieri.html?LANG=EN

North Korea Punished For Helping To Liberate Africa

Andre Vltchek

DPRK free public housing - is it what the West hates about DPRK

Soon, most likely, there will be new brutal sanctions imposed against North Korea.And there will be massive provocative military exercises held, involving the US and South Korean (ROK). In brief, it is all ‘business as usual’: the West continues to tortureDPRK; it is provoking it, isolating, demonizing and dehumanizing it, making sure that it wouldn’t function normally, let alone thrive.

The submissive Western public keeps obediently swallowing all the shameless lies it is being served by its mainstream media. It is not really surprising; people of Europe and North America already stopped questioning official dogmas long time ago.

North Korea (DPRK) is depicted as some insane, starving, subnormal and underdeveloped hermit state, whose leaders are constantly boozing and whoring, murdering each other, and building some primitive but lethal nukes, in order to destroy the world.

Those of us who are familiar with DPRK know that all this is one bundle of fat, shameless lies. Pyongyang is an elegant, well functioning city with great public housing, excellent public transportation, public places and recreational facilities, theatres, sport facilities and green areas. And despite those monstrous sanctions, the countryside is much more prosperous than what one sees in the desperate Western ‘client’ states like Indonesia and Philippines.

At least there is something; there have at least been a few decent reportsthat have been written about those grotesque lies and the Western propaganda.

But the essential question remains: ‘Why is the West so obsessed with demonizing North Korea?’

North Korean military traffic controller in Namibia

And the answer is simple: Like Cuba, North Korea dared to step onthe toes of Western colonialism and imperialism. Sacrificing its sons and daughters, it helped to liberate many African countries, and it provided assistance to the most progressive forces on the most plundered and devastated continent.

This is one thing that the West never forgives. It lives offthe unbridled plunder of all continents; it essentially thrives by lootingits colonies. Those countries that assisted the liberation struggles, those nations that fought for freedom of the colonized world – Soviet Union/Russia, China, Cuba and the DPRK – were designated by Western ideologues as the most ‘dangerous’ and ‘evil’ places on Earth.

In Europe and North America,conditioned masses (they have been actually profiting from the colonialism and neo-colonialism for decades and centuries), arestubbornly refusing to comprehend thismain reason why the Empire has made the people of North Korea suffer so terribly for years and decades.

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North Korean country road

My comrade, MwandawiroMghanga, Chairperson of SDP and also a Member of the Executive Committee of Africa Left Networking Forum (ALNEF) based in Dakar Senegal, wrote for this essay:

“The Social Democratic Party of Kenya (SDP) condemns the unjustified sanctions against North Korea (DPRK) instigated by imperialism led by the United States of America. We are aware that imperialism has never stopped its cold and hot war against DPRK that through one of the greatest patriotic, heroic and revolutionary anti-colonial and anti-imperialist national liberation armed struggles succeeded in winning true independence in the northern half of Korea. When it invaded North Korea, US imperialism like Japanese colonialism earlier, suffered one of the most humiliating military defeats it will never forget in its reactionary history. We also know that the US and the West hates DPRK with venom for refusing to be a puppet of imperialism like South Korea. A dirty false propaganda war is waged against DPRK for refusing the capitalist and neo-colonial path of slavery, under-development and exploitation of person by person and instead choosing the path of development for freedom and humanity, socialism.

We in Africa will not accept to be cheated by imperialists who have always been part and parcel of our problems. Imperialism is not and has never been a friend of Africa but its enemy. African patriots and revolutionaries will never allow imperialism to tell us who our friends are. For we know whom our friends are! And North Korea has always been Africa’s true friend. When the whole of the African continent was under Western colonialism, Korea under the revolutionary leadership of comrade Kim Il Sung was fighting Japanese colonialism and showing solidarity with Africa at the same time. After DPRK, in the name of socialist internationalism increased its moral, military and other material support to African countries in their struggle for liberation from colonialism, imperialism and apartheid. Immediately after independence from colonialism in the 1960s, thousands of Africans, including Kenyans, received free higher, technical and specialised education in the DPRK. DPRK not only offered arms, finance and other material solidarity to Namibia, South Africa, Angola and Mozambique in the war against apartheid and imperialism, but it also actually sent internationalist revolutionaries to Africa to fight side by side with Africans for Africa. DPRK fought with Egypt and Africa during the 1967 war against the brutal Zionist regime of Israel supported by the Western countries. Today DPRK is together with African countries in the demand for a new just international order. In this DPRK is blamed by imperialism and imperialist puppet regimes for being in the forefront and showing by its own example that a new just international order cannot be but anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, it must be socialist.”

North Korean internationalism is legendary, just as Cuban internationalism is. And this is the least that we can do right now, when the country is facing new tremendous and brutal challenges – to recall how much it gave to the world; how much it had already sacrificed for the sake of humanity!

I spoke to people in Windhoek, who with tears in their eyes recalled North Korea’s struggleagainst (South African) apartheid-supported regimes in both Namibia and Angola. Naturally, South African apartheid used to enjoy the full support of the West. To repay that favor, South African troops joined the fight against North Korea and China during the Korean War.

As mentioned by MwandawiroMghanga, North Korea fought against Israel,its pilots flew Egyptian fighter planes in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. DPRK took part in the liberation struggle in Angola and it fought in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Lesotho, and Namibia and in the Seychelles. It provided assistance to the African National Congress and its epic struggle to liberate South Africa from apartheid. In the past, it had aidedthe then progressive African nations, including Guinea, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Mali and Tanzania.

Arthur Tewungwa, Ugandan opposition politician from the Uganda People’s Congress Party (UPC) compares the involvement of the DPRK and the West in his country and the African Great Lakes region:

“Uganda benefited from its relationship with North Korea in the 1980s when it helped the government to fight against the Museveni rebels who were supported by the US and UK. Morally, compared to the DPRK, the latter two have no leg to stand on with all the bloodshed they triggered in the Great Lakes Region."

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Border at Panmunjom from DPRK side

Has North Korea been fully abandoned, left to its fate? Has it been ‘betrayed’?

Christopher Black, a prominent international lawyer based in Toronto, Canada:

“...The fact that the US, as part of the SC is imposing sanctions on a country it is threatening is hypocritical and unjust. That the Russians and Chinese have joined the US in this, instead of calling for sanctions against the US for its threats against the DPRK and its new military exercises, which are a clear and present danger to the DPRK, is shameful. If the Russians and Chinese are sincere why don’t they insist that the US draw down its forces there so the DPRK feels less threatened and take steps to guarantee the security of the DPRK? They do not explain their actions but their actions make them collaborators with the USA against the DPRK.”

The situation is bleak, but most likely not fatal; not fatal yet.

Jeff J Brown, a leading China expert based in Beijing, does not hide his optimism when it comes to the Sino-Russian relationship with the DPRK:

“There is not a lot that North Korea does in the international arena, that Baba Beijing does not have its hand in. They are two fraternal communist countries and 65 years ago, the Chinese spilled a lot of blood and treasure to save North Korea from the West. Mao Zedong’s son died on the Korean War battlefield, fighting against Yankee imperialism. There are two million ethnic Koreans living along the border with North Korea and another half a million Northerners living and working in China. Koreans are a recognized minority in China. No other country in the world understands North Korea like China does. This closeness is emblematic of their common border, the Yalu River, which is so shallow, you can wade across it. They also share boundaries with another key ally, Russia. China is North Korea’s very, very big brother and protector. Frankly, vis-à-vis the upcoming UNSC sanctions against North Korea, I think the West is getting played like a drum, and it is the drum that gets the crap pounded out of it.”

Of course both China and Russia have their long land borders with North Korea -roads and railroads inter-connecting all three countries. According to my sources in Moscow and Beijing, it is highly unlikely that the two closest allies of the DPRK would ever go along with the new sanctions, whether they are officially ‘supporting them’, or not.

But the logic used by Christopher Black is absolutely correct: it is the West that should be suffering from the toughest sanctions imaginable, not DPRK.

It is the West, not North Korea, which has murdered one billion human beings, throughout history. It is the West that colonized, plundered, raped and enslaved people in all corners of the planet. What moral mandate does it have to propose and impose sanctions against anyone?

We are living in a twisted, truly perverse world, where mass murderers act as judges, and actually get away with it.

North Korea spilled blood for the liberation of Africa. It showed true solidarity with robbed, tortured people, with those whom Franz Fanon used to call the “Wretched of the Earth”. That is why, according to perverse logic (which has roots in the Western religious and cultural fundamentalism), it has to be punished, humiliated, and even possibly wipe off the face of the earth.

Not because it did something objectively ‘bad’, but because the objectivity lost its meaning. Terms ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are now determined by only one criterion: ‘good’ is all that serves the interests of the Western Empire, ‘bad’ is what challenges its global dictatorship.

If you save the village that had been designated by the Empire as a place to be raped and pillaged, you will be punished in the most sadistic and brutal manner. North Korea did exactly that. Except that it did not save just one village, but it helped to liberateanentire continent!