Boeing to slash 4,000-8,000 jobs

Barry Grey

Citing an internal company document, the Seattle Times reported Wednesday that Boeing, the giant commercial and military airplane manufacturer, plans to slash 4,000 jobs at its Washington state-based commercial division by June, with an additional 4,000 job cuts likely to come by the end of 2016.

Boeing responded to the news report by acknowledging that it planned to slash about 4,000 jobs in its commercial airlines division by mid-year, and an additional 550 jobs in a unit that conducts flight and lab testing. However, it refused to confirm press reports that these cuts were only part of a planned 10 percent reduction at the division by year-end, which would bring the job reduction to 8,000 positions.

“There is no employment reduction target,” company spokesman Doug Alder said. “The more we can control costs as a whole, the less impact there will be to employment,” he added. The latter statement is intended to put pressure on workers to accept new concessions in the name of “saving jobs,” and provide the International Association of Machinists union (IAM) with ammunition to press its members for further give-backs.

The report sent shockwaves throughout the state, and particularly the Seattle region, where the bulk of the company’s commercial aircraft production is located. More than 9,000 Boeing jobs have been eliminated since 2012, after the IAM agreed to an extension of a sellout contract it imposed following a seven-week strike in 2008.

Boeing announced last month that it would begin trimming its work force, starting with executives and managers. Even so, the scale of the cuts announced Wednesday appeared to come as a surprise to the media, not to mention the public.

The job cuts at Boeing will impact hundreds of supplier firms and ripple through the economy of the state and the rest of the country. In Wichita, Kansas, one Boeing supply firm, Spirit AeroSystems, laid off 42 workers earlier this month after 265 IAM workers accepted voluntary retirement packages.

At the end of 2013 and beginning of 2014, the IAM responded to threats by Boeing to move production of its 777X commercial plane to a low-wage state unless it received sweeping labor concessions and huge tax cuts from the state government by ramming through an additional, eight-year contract extension. That agreement eliminated pensions for current employees, imposed higher health care costs, and slashed wage increases. It also extended a no-strike provision to 2022.

The extension was initially rejected by IAM District 751 members by a 2-to-1 margin. It was only narrowly passed in a revote ordered by the International union leadership and conducted over the Christmas vacation period.

In late 2013, the state government, headed by Democratic Governor Jay Inslee, approved an $8.7 billion tax break for the airplane manufacturer, the largest corporate tax abatement in US history. The legislation imposed no requirement on Boeing to maintain its current level of employment in the state.

Boeing is in the midst of its biggest peacetime boom in its 100-year history. In 2015, the company set records for both commercial deliveries, 762, and revenues, $96.1 billion. With the assistance of the IAM, it has dramatically increased the ratio of planes produced to the number of workers employed in their production.

It is now insisting, however, that new and even more sweeping cost-cutting measures are required to make it competitive with its main rival, European-based Airbus. The Seattle Times said it had obtained the transcript of an internal webcast from February in which Boeing Commercial Airlines CEO Ray Conner first informed workers that job cuts were coming.

Conner said the cuts were needed to “win the market, fund our growth and operate as a healthy business.” He focused on the struggle with Airbus for commercial airplane orders, arguing that labor costs had to be slashed in order to lower Boeing’s prices. “We’re being pushed to the wall,” he declared.

The company had said the cost-saving push “involves taking out billions of dollars in cost by the end of 2016.”

Boeing spokesman Adler said the 4,000 job cuts by June will include some 1,600 “voluntary layoffs” and 2,400 job losses through attrition. However, Boeing has broadly hinted that further job cuts this year would include involuntary layoffs.

The IAM has played a critical role in helping the company pit Boeing workers against their fellow workers at Airbus. The logic of its economic nationalist and corporatist policies is a race to the bottom, in which one section of workers competes with another for a dwindling pool of jobs by working harder and longer for lower wages and benefits.

Both the IAM and the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA), the union for Boeing engineers and technical workers, reacted to the announcement of the job cuts with impotent appeals to the state legislature to bar the company from slashing jobs as part of its tax windfall.

IAM District 751 posted a statement on its Facebook page from the district president, Jon Holden, which merely said: “We have not been notified of these types of workforce reduction numbers. We continue to have concerns about work that has been moved outside of Washington state, which is why we focused so much energy on trying to get job number guarantees for the $8.7 billion in aerospace tax incentives that our citizens are paying.”

A spokesperson at the district office told the World Socialist Web Site that the union did not have any information about the job cuts, including whether they would impact its members. “We would hope that the company would inform us sooner rather than later,” she said.

The job cut announcement by Boeing is one of several major layoffs and closures that have been reported in recent days. The Boston Globe reported Tuesday that the Boston-based financial firm State Street Corp. plans to shrink its workforce by up to 7,000 workers by 2020. And Alcoa permanently closed a 56-year-old aluminum smelter in Warrick, Indiana on March 24, eliminating 325 jobs.

Layoffs are also taking place in the steel industry, and since January of last year, over 25,000 jobs in oil, gas and supporting industries have been wiped out as a result of the collapse in oil and commodity prices.

Forty thousand jobs threatened as Tata Steel announces end of UK operations

Robert Stevens

The plans of steel conglomerate Tata to sell their loss-making UK steel business threaten the jobs of 15,000 steel workers along with another 25,000 jobs in the company’s supply chain. Were the jobs to go, it would mean the end of steel production in the UK.

Tata took over its UK steel plants in 2007 after acquiring Corus Group for £6.7 billion. Its largest plant is at Port Talbot in South Wales. In an area of high deprivation, whose population has relied on steel production for decades, 4,000 jobs and a further 6,600 jobs in the supply chain are under threat.

Tata’s other main plants are in Scunthorpe in North Lincolnshire, Rotherham in South Yorkshire, Llanwern in South Wales, Shotton in north Wales, and Corby in Northamptonshire.

The decision to sell its UK business has prompted a governmental crisis for the ruling Conservatives, currently campaigning for the UK to remain in the European Union in the upcoming June 23 referendum. Tata’s announcement will inevitably be used by supporters of the Leave campaign.

As criticism of the government mounted Wednesday, Prime Minister David Cameron returned from holiday in Lanzarote, while Business Secretary Sajid Javid was forced to return from Australia.

Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, returning from a holiday in the South of England, wrote to Cameron, calling for the recall of Parliament. Downing Street refused the request. Cameron is to chair a meeting of “key ministers” today to discuss the crisis.

Tata announced its plans in a review of its European steel portfolio, citing among the factors involved the “global oversupply of steel, significant increase in third-country exports into Europe, high manufacturing costs, continued weakness in domestic market demand in steel and a volatile currency.”

The company’s UK steel operations are losing more than £1 million a day, and the firm claims it has “suffered asset impairment of more than £2 billion in the last five years.” According to a source close to the company cited by the Guardian, “Tata is ready to ‘give it away for nothing.’”

Tata is hiving off its UK operation as the result of a deepening trade war in the world steel industry. Amid a deepening economic slowdown globally, restructuring has led to massive job losses in North America, Europe and Asia. The vast majority of job losses, 400,000, are slated for China, which produces half of the world’s steel and which has already cut production by 90 million tons. It plans to slash production further by between 100 million and 150 million tons (a 20 percent reduction.)

The response of ruling elites the world over has been to unleash protectionist measures, many targeting China, which is accused of “dumping” cheap steel onto the global market. According to the Guardian, Tata “worked closely with the government over the last few months but decided to pull out of the UK after the government refused to back calls in Europe for higher tariffs against Chinese steel imports.” A Tata source told the newspaper this was the “last straw.”

The trade unions and the Labour Party are the main advocates of this nationalist demand. Shortly after being elected as party leader, Corbyn insisted on meeting China’s President Xi Jinping during his state visit to the UK in October, at which time he gave him a private letter citing his concerns over UK steel job losses. A few days later, speaking to steelworkers in Scunthorpe, Corbyn declared that “If necessary,” he would “go to Beijing” in defence of the UK steel industry.

In his letter to Cameron, Corbyn stated, “If necessary, ministers must be prepared to use their powers to take a public stake in steel-making to protect the industry and British manufacturing. The Government must do whatever it takes to save this strategic industry.” He called for the convening of “a meeting of all relevant parties—government ministers, trade union and employee representatives, and industry groups—to discuss all options, including a public stake, available to the Government to ensure the security of the industry in the future.”

Speaking at the Part Talbot plant Wednesday, Corbyn stepped up his nationalist agitation, calling for an “immediate government intervention to protect our steel industry.” He insisted that “strategic procurement of steel from steelworks in Britain” was required for all UK infrastructure projects.

These calls were echoed by Unite General Secretary Len McCluskey, who stated, “The unity of voices—from business to government—to say that temporary nationalisation is the way forward must not be ignored. … Every single one of these plants and its workers should be regarded as a national asset and, as such, it is government’s duty to safeguard them for the nation.”

Trades Union Congress leader Frances O’Grady said, “The government should directly intervene to save the UK steel industry … to secure the future of this vital industry.”

These are not calls for the nationalisation of the industry as previously carried out by Labour in 1967. What is being proposed is that the government take a temporary stake in the steel plants, pending their eventual sale to another private entity. Shadow Business Secretary Angela Eagle has called on the government to consider part-nationalising the steelworks to “shelter the assets until the storm has passed.”

This would be an operation to fleece the taxpayer, as was the case with the £45 billion bailout of the RBS Bank after the 2008 financial crash, which is why Javid and Business Minister Anna Soubry both hinted that it might be considered by the government.

Neither Corbyn nor the trade union bureaucracy proposes any struggle by steel workers in defence of their jobs. Instead, they propose to deepen the collusion with the employers that has already led to thousands of job losses, speed-up and wage cuts based on a heightened programme of national protectionism—including seeking subsidies and tax breaks from the Tories.

Steel industry workers must oppose this call for an alliance with big business and appeals to the very government that is imposing devastating austerity measures.

Protectionism is not an answer to the untrammelled exploitation by the transnational corporations facilitated by successive Labour and Tory governments since the 1980s. It is a mechanism through which these same corporations will be given additional funds, paid for by the working class, to prosecute an accelerated trade war against their global rivals. Such a trade war, whether framed within demands to save UK steel or for the EU to “get tough” with China, will mean for workers only a race to the bottom, in the name of securing global competitiveness. The only possible outcome will be further job losses in Britain, Europe and internationally.

In reality, whereas Chinese steel imports to the UK have doubled to 687,000 tonnes due to low prices, the EU accounts for fully 4.7 million tonnes and global markets are saturated. Protectionism directed against China will therefore only be the first step taken.

Tata is a prime example of the reality of globalised production and the international character of the working class. It employs 600,000 workers in many industries in 80 countries. The Tata Steel Group manufactures steel in 26 countries, with a commercial presence in over 50 countries, integrating the labour of 80,000 employees across five continents.

The only progressive and viable perspective on which to defend jobs is a unified struggle by steel workers in Britain with their fellow workers throughout Europe, America, India, China and the world over, in opposition to the steel corporations, the reactionary and moribund trade unions, and all wings of the capitalist class.

War: The great unmentionable in the 2016 US elections

Joseph Kishore

The most striking feature of the 2016 US election campaign is the virtual absence of discussion of what is by far the most serious issue facing the people of the United States and the world, looming over everything else: the escalating military conflict that threatens to plunge the entire planet into a new world war.

While it is not a topic of significant debate among the various candidates contending for the presidential nomination of the Democratic and Republican parties, hardly a day goes by without a new provocation that raises the prospect of a military confrontation involving the US, China, Russia and the European powers.

Yesterday was no exception. US Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work announced that the Obama administration would not recognize any air defense identification zone (ADIZ) that China might proclaim in the South China Sea in response to an upcoming international court ruling on territorial disputes in the region.

Earlier this month, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, referring to a future conflict over an ADIZ, wrote that “the US is heading toward a dangerous showdown in China.” Ignatius quoted Kurt Campbell, former assistant secretary of state for Asia, who said: “This isn’t Pearl Harbor, but if people on all sides aren’t careful, it could be ‘The Guns of August.’” Campbell was referring to the book by Barbara Tuchman on the events that led up to World War I, which led to the deaths of 17 million people.

Also on Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Pentagon has “drawn up plans to position American troops, tanks and other armored vehicles full time along NATO’s eastern borders… in what would be the first such deployment since the end of the Cold War.”

Work, who last month declared that a test of intercontinental ballistic missiles was designed to show “that we are prepared to use nuclear weapons in defense of our country,” told the Journal that with the additional forces “there will be a division’s worth of stuff to fight [Russia] if something happens.”

As far as the media and the candidates of the Democratic and Republican parties are concerned, all of this falls under the category of the “great unmentionable.” Indeed, the Obama administration is attempting to temporarily postpone a full conflict with Russia or China, following a well-established pattern in which major military operations are launched after presidential elections. The aim is to prevent the question of war and the war plans of the ruling class from becoming a topic of political discussion among broader sections of the population.

Particularly since the launching of the “war on terror,” and then following the mass protests in 2003 against the impending invasion of Iraq, the American ruling class has worked systematically to exclude any expression of anti-war sentiment from the political process. In 2002, the Democrats kept the issue of the looming invasion of Iraq out of the mid-term elections, after Democrats in Congress agreed to give Bush a blank check to use military force.

In 2004, opposition to war was so intense that it threatened to overwhelm the election cycle. That was the year that Howard Dean, the governor of Vermont, won widespread support due largely to his stated opposition to the Iraq war, and appeared to be on the path to winning the Democratic nomination. His campaign was then derailed through a carefully coordinated operation by the Democratic Party leadership and the media, which proclaimed him “unelectable.” Senator John Kerry, who had voted for the Iraq war, was brought forward, the “antiwar” Democrats mobilized behind him, and the issue of war was removed from an election that culminated in the victory of George W. Bush for a second term.

Two years later, despite the efforts of the Democratic Party to keep the mid-term elections from becoming a referendum on war, opposition to the Iraq invasion led to a massive defeat for the Republicans and gave control of both houses of Congress to the Democrats for the first time since 1994. The Democrats responded by rejecting any move to force a change of course, let alone bring charges against Bush administration officials. They funded all of the Bush administration’s military appropriation bills, including for the 2007 Iraq “surge.”

The channeling of anti-war sentiment behind the Democratic Party was carried out with the critical assistance of the organizations of the middle class that had led the anti-war protests in 2003. This culminated in the campaign of Illinois Senator Barack Obama in 2008. Obama was presented as the “transformational candidate” who would reverse the eight years of war and social reaction under Bush. During the primaries, Obama’s political trump card was the fact that he had opposed the invasion of Iraq while his principal opponent, Hillary Clinton, had voted for it in the Senate.

In fact, the Obama administration became the vehicle for the middle class organizations surrounding the Democratic Party to fully and openly embrace imperialism. After more than seven years of Obama as “commander-in-chief,” the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue. The Obama administration has led a war to overthrow the government in Libya, stoked a civil war in Syria through the promotion of Islamic fundamentalist militias, launched drone strikes on Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, supported the Israeli assault on Gaza, backed a brutal Saudi bombardment of Yemen, and overseen the militarization of the South China Sea and Eastern Europe.

All indications are that within a year, if not earlier, the extent of US military operations will be far greater. Despite the looming danger of a global conflict involving nuclear-armed powers, the media and the various candidates are keeping the ongoing military operations off the agenda. When war is discussed, it is from the standpoint of general agreement among Republicans and Democrats on the need to “destroy ISIS” and confront Chinese and Russian “aggression.”

In the Democratic Party campaign, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has emerged as the preferred candidate of the military and intelligence apparatus. She is personally responsible for launching the war in Libya and the CIA-backed destabilization operation in Syria. On her campaign web page, Clinton boasts of having “called out China’s aggressive actions” in Asia. The Clinton campaign web site adds, “Hillary will confine, contain, and deter Russian aggressions in Europe and beyond, and increase the costs to Putin for his actions.”

As for Bernie Sanders, he has said virtually nothing about war or foreign policy, aside from criticizing Clinton for supporting the 2003 invasion of Iraq. On his campaign web site, “war and peace” is relegated to the 25th of 28 issues in the election. He calls the 2003 invasion “the worst foreign policy blunder in modern US history.” The invasion of Iraq was, according to Sanders, not a crime, but a strategic mistake from the standpoint of the interests of the American ruling class.

He proclaims that “as President and Commander-in-Chief, I will defend this nation, its people, and America’s vital strategic interests, but I will do it responsibly.” He boasts of having voted for war in the Balkans in 1999 and in Afghanistan in 2001. He has supported the Obama administration’s drone strikes, denounced Russia, and insisted that the US maintain the largest military in the world.

For all his rhetorical criticisms of the “billionaire class” and its influence over American politics, Sanders never suggests that foreign policy is dictated by this same “billionaire class.” Nor does he propose any cuts to the gargantuan military budget. Sanders too would defend “America’s vital strategic interests”—code words for the drive by the American corporate and financial elite to control the world and its key sources of raw materials, cheap labor and trade routes. Nothing could more fully expose the fraud of Sanders’ “socialism.”

There remains deep and broad-based anti-war sentiment among American workers and youth. Large sections of the voting population have lived their politically conscious lives under conditions of permanent war. There is no mass support for war against China or Russia, or for the measures including a further destruction of democratic rights at home and the introduction of the military draft—that would inevitably accompany such a war.

There remains, however, a huge danger. As a consequence of the conspiracy of silence by the media and the political establishment, the population as a whole is largely unaware of what is currently taking place and what is being planned in the aftermath of the elections. It is a life-and-death question that the attention of the working class be focused on the war plans of the ruling class and that the political foundations be laid for a new mass-anti war movement.

The fight against imperialist war requires the building of an independent political movement of the working class, based on an internationalist and socialist program. Workers must not allow themselves to remain trapped within the pro-imperialist confines of bourgeois politics and the Democratic Party. The working class must intervene with its own program and perspective, connecting the fight against war with the fight against inequality, dictatorship and the capitalist system.

Is This Class Warfare?

Mike Whitney

Is there a conspiracy to keep wages from rising or is it just plain-old class warfare?

Check out these charts from a recent report by Deutsche Bank and see what you think:

(Feeling Underpaid, Zero Hedge)

Well, what do you know? Everywhere the global bank cartel has its tentacles, wages are either flatlining or drifting lower.

“Coincidence”, you say?

Not bloody likely, I say. There’s either policy coordination between the various heads of state and their central banks or wealthy elites have secretly seized the levers of power and imposed their neoliberal dogma when no one was looking. Either way, it’s pretty easy to see the effects of “extraordinary monetary accommodation” on wages. It’s done absolutely nothing, which is why inflation has stayed in check. Because if wages aren’t rising, then inflation remains subdued which gives central bankers an excuse for launching another one of their trillion dollar QE programs that further enriches their crooked friends on Wall Street.

Yipee! More free money for Wall Street and the investor class!

See how it works?

And what about productivity? Why are wages no longer rising along with productivity?

(What Killed the Middle Class, Zero Hedge)

It seems fairly obvious that if wages don’t rise with productivity, then personal consumption is going to flag and the economy’s going to tank. If that’s the case, then boosting wages should be a top priority among policymakers, right?

But it’s not. The top priority for most politicians is kowtowing to their private sector bosses who fund their campaigns and make sure they have a nice-comfy job when they finally call it quits after years of groveling service. Isn’t that the way it usually works for these so-called “public servants”; they craft legislation that serves their fatcat constituents and then count the days until their next big payoff?

The point is that economic policy is not designed to improve conditions for ordinary working people. It’s not even designed to strengthen the economy. If that was the case, then there’d be some effort to hire more public workers to increase activity, boost business investment and strengthen growth. That would be the obvious remedy for today’s sluggish economy, wouldn’t it? Instead, Obama has done the exact opposite. He’s slashed the deficits by a full trillion dollars and allowed more than 500,000 government employees to get their pink slips. As a result, the economy has been chugging along at half-speed for nearly a decade. Thanks for nothing, Barry. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

Now check out this “Government Job Destruction” chart at the Streetlight blog:

(Government Job Destruction, Streetlight blog)

And it doesn’t stop there either, because all this wretched belt-tightening has reduced consumer demand which has forced corporations to decrease the amount capital they reinvest in their businesses. So, just as wages have been suppressed in developed countries around the world, so too, business investment has been sharply curtailed just about everywhere eliminating another critical source of stimulus. Check out this clip from the Daily Reckoning:

“Yesterday’s release of domestic capital expenditure (capex) figures were a sorry sight. In the three months to September, business investment fell a barely believable 9.2%. …

In light of plunging domestic spending, it’s a good opportunity to reflect on what’s happening to global capex. (Capital Expenditures) Like Australia, the world as a whole has something of an investment problem. And there’s no sign that things are likely to improve anytime soon…

Outside of the US, it appears as if the world has decided to forego investing altogether. Business spending is down by 6% in the US; over 20% in Europe; 15% in China and Japan. As for the rest of the world, Australia included, capex is down a whopping 28%.” (Australia’s Capex Collapse is Part of a Global Disease, Daily Reckoning)

Okay, so corporations aren’t investing in their businesses because wages are flat and demand is weak. Is that really a big deal?

It IS a big deal, because there are only so many sources of spending in the economy, and when businesses, governments and consumers all reduce their spending at the same time, the economy slows to a crawl and stays like that until something changes. Unfortunately, nothing has changed which is why GDP is still hovering around 2 percent a full eight years after Lehman Brothers blew up.

But, why? Have policymakers suddenly forgotten how the economy works or what fiscal levers to pull to kick-start growth?

Of course not. They simply refuse to do what’s needed. Instead, Congress has used the crisis to hand over control of the system to the central banks and their deep-state powerbrokers. Now, wherever you look, the politicians are on the sidelines sitting on their hands while the CBs dictate policy. It’s crazy. It’s like regime change without all the blood.

And how has this bloodless coup effected working people?

It’s been terrible. While stock prices have nearly tripled and speculators have raked in trillions, median household income has dropped by more than 7.2 percent, incomes are falling, wages are flatlining and more and more people are hanging on by the skin of their teeth.

Did you know that 85 percent of Americans say that it’s harder to maintain a middle class standard of living today than it was 10 years ago? (Pew Research Center) Or that “77 percent of all Americans live paycheck to paycheck at least some of the time”, or that “one of every four workers in the US brings home wages that are at or below the federal poverty level”, or that “47 million Americans are on food stamps, or that “40.4% of the U.S. workforce is now made up of contingent workers,” mainly temps, contract workers and part-time labor?

Anyway, you get the picture. Making ends meet is getting harder all the time. But why would wealthy elites support policies that are so obviously destructive to working people and the overall economy?

For money, that’s why. Lots of money. Check it out:

“Between 2009 and 2012, according to updated data from Emmanuel Saez …The top 1 percent saw their real income grow by 34.7 percent while the bottom 99 percent only saw a 0.8 percent gain, meaning that the 1 percent captured 91 percent of all real income…

Wage income continues to be flat. Wages grew just 1.7 percent last year, the slowest rate since at least the 1960s. That’s not because American workers are slacking off, though. While they have seen an entire decade of stagnant or falling wages, they’ve increased their productivity by nearly 25 percent.

At the same time, the stock market has been reaching record highs, which mostly helps the wealthy who are much more likely to own stocks, thus exacerbating income inequality. Corporate profits have also hit records and boosted executive pay without trickling down to workers.” (The 1 Percent Have Gotten All The Income Gains From The Recovery, Think Progress)

But it could just be a big mistake, couldn’t it? I mean, maybe the central banks really didn’t know that their policies would work the way they have.

Be serious. Do you really think that this relentless upward waterfall of money to uber-rich tycoons (“95% of income gains from 2009 to 2012 went to the top 1% of the earning population”) is a mistake, that it’s merely the unintended consequence of well-meaning monetary policies that were designed to spur lending and strengthen growth but, by pure happenstance, backfired and triggered the biggest redistribution of wealth to voracious, do-nothing plutocrats in history?

Is that what you think?

You don’t need to be Leon Trotsky to figure out what’s really going on here. Heck, even Warren Buffett nailed it when he said, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s…winning.”

You got that right, Warren.

What Do Terrorists Want?

Sheldon Richman

After the terrorist violence in Brussels many people, including Barack Obama, said we should not change our way of life and live in fear because that is what terrorists want. Maybe, but is that all they want? It seems that something important is left out of the story. In the classical model of terrorism, instilling fear (along with causing death and injury) is not an end in itself. It’s a means to an end.

Terrorists don’t necessarily get a kick out creating carnage and fear (though it is possible). Primarily they want the survivors’ fear converted into action aimed at changing their government’s policy. Thus terrorism, if it to have any meaning, is a political, not a sadistic, act. In the paradigm case a weak nonstate group, unable to resist a state’s military or to change its policy directly, terrorizes the civilian population of that state in the hope it will demand a change in foreign or domestic policy. (Let’s leave aside for this discussion that terrorism has been strategically (re)defined by the United States and its allies such that it can apply only to their adversaries, even when they attack military targets instead of civilians.)

It’s not hard to fathom why the full story of terrorism is not acknowledged by officials and pundits: it would draw attention to what the U.S. government and allied states have long been doing to people in the Muslim world. Nearly all Americans seem to think it’s a sheer coincidence that terrorism is most likely to be committed by people who profess some form of Islam and that the U.S. military has for decades been bombing, droning, occupying, torturing, etc. in multiple Islamic countries.

Or perhaps they think U.S.-inflicted violence is just a defensive response to earlier terrorism. (I might be giving people too much credit by assuming they even know the U.S. government is doing any of this.) When the U.S. military isn’t wreaking havoc directly, the U.S. government is underwriting and arming tyrants like those in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and elsewhere. And just to complete the picture, the U.S. government fully backs the Israeli state, which has oppressed Palestinians and occupied their land for many decades.

All this is what Islamist terrorists say they seek revenge for (more here), and the U.S. government acknowledges this. (That does not excuse violence against noncombatants, of course.)

But telling the full story about the terrorists’ objectives might inadvertently prompt a fresh look — maybe even a reevaluation — of America’s atrocious foreign policy. The ruling elite and the military-industrial complex would not want that.

Since questioning and changing U.S. foreign  policy are out of the question, the pundits and “terrorism experts” look for other ways to prevent terrorism. Unsurprisingly, everything they come up with entails violations of our civil liberties. Discussions about “profiling” are featured on cable news channels almost regularly. Should we or should we not profile? Those few who say no are accused of “political correctness,” the handy put-down for anyone who is leery about violating privacy or gratuitously insulting whole classes of people.

But let’s think about profiling for a moment. As acknowledged, when one hears about public, indiscriminate suicidal violence, such as occurred in Brussels, it is reasonable to wonder if the perpetrators professed some “extreme” variant of Islam. (That doesn’t mean another group, say, neo-Nazis and white nationalists, couldn’t be the perps, as in the case of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.)

But since Islamists come to mind first, that might give us a clue to how to profile. As part of the profiling, why not look for links to countries the U.S. government and its allies bomb, occupy, or otherwise abuse? The media inform us that many of the terrorists in Europe first went to Syria to try to overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad (whom the U.S. government wants overthrown), but then came home angry after NATO countries started bombing the Islamic State there and in Iraq, with the inevitable civilian casualties. In some cases Syrian nationals sneaked into Europe through Turkey.

So the perpetrators of the next terrorist act are likely to be Islamists with links to or sympathy for people terrorized by the United States and its allies — namely, in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan. But if that kind of profiling makes sense, wouldn’t it make even more sense simply to stop inflicting violence on the Muslim world?

Islamic Extremism is a Product of Western Imperialism

Garry Leech

As we struggle to come to terms with the latest terrorist attacks in Brussels, it is important that we understand the causes of such extremism. After all, Islamic extremism was virtually unknown fifty years ago and suicide bombings were inconceivable. And yet today it seems that we are confronted with both on a daily basis. So what happened to bring Islamic fundamentalism to the forefront of global politics? While there are many factors involved, undoubtedly one of the primary causes is Western imperialism. Western intervention in the Middle East over the past century to secure access to the region’s oil reserves established a perfect environment in which Islamic fundamentalists could exploit growing anti-Western sentiment throughout the Islamic world with some establishing violent extremist groups. The most recent consequence of this process is the terrorist group known as the Islamic State, which emerged out of the chaos caused by the US invasion of Iraq.

In order to understand the rise of the Islamic State we must first briefly review the history of Western intervention in not only the Middle East but throughout the world to reveal that Islamic extremism in not a unique phenomenon. For the past 500 years, peoples throughout the world have resorted to acts of violence that today would be classified as terrorism in efforts to resist Western imperialism. Indigenous peoples in the Americas often used violent tactics to defend themselves against the brutal European colonizers. There were also many violent slave revolts by Blacks who had been shipped from Africa to the Americas in the service of Western imperialism.

In Southeast Asia, the Filipino people first violently resisted the Spanish and then rose up again when the United States became the new colonial ruler of the Philippines in 1898. Apparently, Washington’s newest colonial subjects didn’t appreciate President William McKinley’s concern for their well-being when he arrogantly declared that since Filipinos “were unfit for self-

government, … there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.” Meanwhile, in South Africa, the Zulu people were resorting to violence in an effort to resist British attempts to “civilize” them in the late 1800s. Back then, those who violently resisted Western imperialism weren’t labelled “terrorists,” we just called them “savages.” These are just a few examples of the countless attempts throughout the global South to resist the violent and often brutal expansion of Western imperialism, which included not only the imposition of Western values and culture on people, but also Christianity.

One of the reasons that Islamic extremism has only come to the fore in recent decades is the fact that Western imperialism in the Middle East is a relatively recent occurrence. Western imperialism didn’t begin to make serious headway in the Middle East until the early 20th century. Consequently, we haven’t yet succeeded in our quest to violently subjugate the peoples of that region to the degree that we have peoples throughout most of the rest of the world. Insome Middle Eastern nations, Western imperialism initially took the form of traditional colonialism, which involved direct rule. In other countries, it has constituted a neo-colonial approach utilizing international institutions such as the UN Security Council, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank as well as direct US and European intervention in the forms of military coups and outright war.

While European nations, particularly Britain, had made some inroads into the Middle East in the late 1800s, it was the discovery of oil in Iran in 1908 that marked the arrival of Western imperialism. The London-based Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) gained the rights to Iran’s oil and, because its major shareholder was the British government, Britain effectively controlled Iran’s oil sector. During the ensuing decades there were major protests by the Iranian people who were unhappy with foreign ownership of the country’s oil and the fact that Iran was receiving only 16 percent of its own oil wealth. In 1950, the Iranian parliament finally responded to popular demands and voted to nationalize the country’s oil sector. The following year, Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh established the National Iranian Oil Company.

Unhappy with Iran’s decision to claim ownership of its own oil resources and to use them for the benefit of the Iranian people, the United States and Britain orchestrated a coup to oust the moderate, secular and democratically-elected Mosaddegh government. Shah Reza Pahlavi was installed in power and the new pro-Western dictator immediately re-opened the door for Western companies to return to Iran. And to ensure that the Shah maintained iron-clad control over the population, the United States provided him with military aid as well as training for his secret police force, which would brutalize the Iranian people for the next 26 years.

Under the Shah, Western oil workers flooded into Iran and the country’s capital Tehran became a decadent playground for high-paid foreign oil workers who engaged openly in un-Islamic activities including alcohol consumption, casino gambling and prostitution. And while the country’s oil wealth was flowing into the pockets of foreigners and the Shah and his cronies, most Iranians were struggling to survive in poverty. Not surprisingly, Islamic fundamentalists began pointing to Western imperialism and Western decadence as an affront both to Islam and to the Iranian people. It was a narrative that began to resonate with many impoverished Iranians who had traditionally been moderates. In 1979, under the leadership of the Ayatollah Khomeini, a popular revolution overthrew the Shah’s repressive regime and established an Islamic state.

Reflecting on the US role in Iran, former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stated, “In 1953 the United States played a significant role in orchestrating the overthrow of Iran’s popular Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. The Eisenhower Administration believed its actions were justified for strategic reasons; but the coup was clearly a setback for Iran’s political development. And it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs.”

The first significant success for Islamic fundamentalism directly resulted from the United States and Britain overthrowing a democratically-elected and secular government and their subsequent support for a brutal dictatorship, all in the name of securing access to oil. Today, we are not only still dealing with the consequences of this Western imperialism in our relations with Iran, but also with Iran’s support for other fundamentalist groups in the region such as Hezbollah.

The same year that Iran became an Islamic state, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to defend that country’s unpopular Soviet-backed regime from a growing insurgency. The mujahideen rebels, like the Islamic revolutionaries in Iran, were fighting against a Western-backed dictatorship. This time it was the atheist communists of the Soviet Union that were the imperialists. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan only boosted the strength of the mujahideen as recruits flocked from throughout the Islamic world to help liberate the country from the foreign infidels. Many of the tens of thousands of recruits came from Saudi Arabia, which contributed to the fundamentalist movement known as Wahhabism expanding from being a fringe sect of Islam that primarily existed in Saudi Arabia to a major religious force throughout the Sunni Islamic world.

The United States viewed the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan through a Cold War lens and began providing weapons and training to the Islamic fundamentalist mujahideen rebels. During the 1980s, Washington supplied the mujahideen with $4 billion in arms that significantly strengthened the fundamentalists and President Ronald Reagan publicly referred to them as “freedom fighters.” One of the mujihadeen beneficiaries of US aid was a Saudi named Osama bin Laden. The primary objective of the war for this particular “freedom fighter” was the removal of a Western military from Islamic lands. The mujahideen succeeded in their holy war in 1989 when the Soviet Union withdrew its forces. And then, in 1996, following a civil war between various factions of the mujahideen, the recently-formed Taliban emerged victorious and established a fundamentalist government.

As a 1993 article in the British daily Independent made clear, Osama bin Laden was viewed by the West as a warrior, not a terrorist, for his role in the mujahideen. The article, titled “Anti-Soviet Warrior Puts His Army on the Road to Peace,” described bin Laden’s work building roads in the impoverished nation of Sudan in the early 1990s. But bin Laden was not only building roads, he was also establishing a new organization with his mujahideen fighters that would eventually be called al-Qaeda. The mission of al-Qaeda essentially remained the same as that of the mujahideen in Afghanistan: to drive Western military forces out of Islamic lands. This time the target was US troops based in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait following the first Gulf War. Consequently, bin Laden went from being a “freedom fighter” to a “terrorist” virtually overnight even though his mission hadn’t changed, only the target.

From the perspective of Washington, bin Laden was a “freedom fighter” when he was fighting against the Soviet military presence in Afghanistan but was a “terrorist” when he fought against the presence of US military forces in the Islamic world. From the perspective of bin Laden and his Islamic extremist followers, however, nothing had really changed. Whether it was Soviet soldiers or US troops, both constituted Western military forces that had to be removed from Islamic soil.

Ultimately, Western intervention in the Islamic world gave birth to al-Qaeda. First, Soviet military support for a puppet regime in Afghanistan, then US backing of the Islamic fundamentalists who constituted the mujahideen rebels, and, finally, the establishment of US military bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait during the first Gulf War. As a consequence of these imperialist actions, Islamic extremists in the form of the Taliban and al-Qaeda emerged as powerful forces with the latter feeding off the growing disenchantment among Muslims angry at Western militarism in the Islamic world, Western backing for corrupt governments in the Middle East, and US support for Israel and its illegal occupation of Palestinian territories.

Following al-Qaeda’s terrorist attacks against New York City and Washington, DC on September 11, 2001, the United States launched its war on terror and targeted the Islamic extremist group in Afghanistan. However, the Bush administration also sought to exploit the 9/11 attacks to justify ousting Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Top Bush administration officials launched a massive propaganda and misinformation campaign to convince the American people that Hussein was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks and linked to al-Qaeda, both of which were untrue. They also portrayed Hussein as a terrorist threat because he possessed weapons of mass destruction, which was another lie.

As the reports by UN weapons inspectors had made clear, Iraq no longer possessed any chemical or biological weapons; they had been destroyed in accordance with UN Security Council resolutions following the first Gulf War in 1991. Furthermore, the Bush administration’s propaganda campaign conveniently ignored the fact that the weapons of mass destruction that Iraq had possessed and used during the 1980s were supplied to it by the United States when Hussein was an ally against the fundamentalist regime that had come to power in Iran.

In March 2003, President George W. Bush ordered the US military to invade Iraq without authorization from the UN Security Council and in direct violation of international law. Four days before the invasion, Vice-President Dick Cheney declared, “From the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.” But one year later an extensive nationwide poll in Iraq showed that 71 percent of Iraqis saw the US troops as “occupiers” rather than “liberators.” Such a response should not have been surprising given that some 100,000 Iraqis had been killed as a result of the invasion and occupation.

The military occupation gave rise to an insurgency that sought to oust the foreign occupying troops. Prior to the US invasion there had been no Islamic extremist groups operating in the country. But the emergence of the broad-based insurgency and the post-invasion chaos opened the door for al-Qaeda to enter Iraq. And it was out of both the insurgency and al-Qaeda that the fundamentalist Islamic State (originally known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS) emerged in 2006.

Following the invasion, the United States dismantled Saddam Hussein’s military and many of the unemployed former officers ended up joining the insurgency. Some of these military officers conspired with a breakaway faction of al-Qaeda in Iraq to form the Islamic State. The new extremist group sought to establish an Islamic caliphate in northern Iraq and Syria. The Syrian civil war in 2011 allowed the Islamic State to cross into Syria where it grew dramatically stronger and began to consolidate control over territory. It then re-focused its efforts on Iraq and easily defeated the new US-trained Iraqi army and consolidated its control over northern parts of that country in 2014. Meanwhile, the West’s military intervention in Libya in 2011 helped turn that country into a failed state and opened the door for the Islamic State to establish a foothold in that part of North Africa.

The Islamic State has had significant success recruiting disenchanted Muslims from around the world to join its ranks and to carry out terrorist attacks in Western nations such as France and Belgium. Last year, even former British Prime Minister Tony Blair acknowledged “there are elements of truth” in claims that the invasion of Iraq led to the creation of the Islamic State. As Blair admitted, “Of course, you can’t say those of us who removed Saddam in 2003 bear no responsibility for the situation in 2015.”

Once again, Western imperialist actions in the Middle East had given rise to Islamic extremism. But the rise of the Islamic State should not have come as a surprise to anyone. That the Bush administration’s illegal invasion of Iraq laid the foundation for the emergence of the Islamic State was entirely predictable. After all, the West’s ouster of the moderate and secular Mosaddegh and its backing of the Shah’s ruthless regime in Iran had given birth to that country’s Islamic fundamentalist revolution. And Washington’s military support of fundamentalist rebels in Afghanistan and its establishment of military bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait ensured the emergence of al-Qaeda.

Meanwhile, Western imperialism in other parts of the Middle East over the past century has also contributed to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. While most of the Arab states in the region gained independence following World War Two, the United States and Britain essentially handed over most of Palestine to European Jews so they could create the Jewish state of Israel. And, ever since, Israel has received unconditional US support to brutally repress the Palestinian people and to repeatedly violate international law, which has generated widespread anti-Western sentiment throughout the Middle East. It wasn’t until after almost 40 years of Israeli rule over Palestinian lands that Islamic fundamentalism and the tactic of suicide bombing finally made inroads among the traditionally moderate Palestinian population. This occurred when Hamas was formed in the Occupied Territories in the mid-1980s. Similarly, it was Israel’s US-supported invasion of Lebanon that gave birth to the fundamentalist group Hezbollah during the same decade.

Over the past one hundred years, the Middle East has been targeted by Western imperialism in the violent manner that the rest of the world has endured for centuries. Nowadays we use politically correct terms such as “democracy promotion” and “human rights” instead of “civilize” and “Christianize,” but they essentially mean the same thing because they are simply the latest justifications for stealing resources and imposing Western values on other cultures. Not surprisingly, as has been the case throughout the rest of the world over the past 500 years, there is widespread resentment and anger towards the West for its imperialist policies in the Middle East. And, also not surprisingly, some fundamentalist Muslim resisters to Western imperialism have resorted to extreme tactics.

Finally, perhaps one of the most disturbing aspects of Western imperialism in the Islamic world is the fact that each consequence has been more extreme than the previous one. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban were far more extremist than the Islamic government that came to power in Iran. And the Islamic State is even more extremist than al-Qaeda. Which begs the question: What new and even more extremist monstrosity are we currently creating with our ongoing military interventions and imperialist policies in the Islamic world?

How Israel Makes Money From Blockading Gaza

Ryan Rodrick Beiler

A Palestinian farmer harvests strawberries from a field in Beit Lahiya, in the northern Gaza Strip, on 10 December 2015.
(Mohammed Asad / APA images)

Palestinians whose livelihoods are forcibly enmeshed in Israel’s economic system are often used as human shields against the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement.

The frequent accusation made by critics is that boycotts of Israeli businesses, especially settlement businesses, will hurt the very Palestinians that BDS activists say they support.

At times, settlement advocates even deploy Palestinian spokespersons to speak positively about the higher wages they receive working for settlement businesses.

A new report released by UK-based Corporate Watch brings the voices of the Palestinian farmers and agricultural workers to the debate over how the BDS movement can best resist Israeli exploitation of their land and labor.

Corporate Watch’s report, titled, “Apartheid in the Fields: From Occupied Palestine to UK Supermarkets,” focuses on two of the most vulnerable segments of Palestinian society: residents of the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank’s Jordan Valley.

Farming under siege

Anyone entering Gaza through the Erez checkpoint on the northern boundary with present-day Israel, traverses a long, fenced corridor running through the so-called “buffer zone” enforced by the Israeli military.

This poorly defined area ranges from 300 to 500 meters along the inside perimeter of Gaza.

Since 2008, the report states, more than 50 Palestinians have been killed in this zone. Four Palestinian civilians have been killed and more than 60 injured so far this year.

According to the UN monitoring group OCHA, this zone also takes up 17 percent of Gaza’s total area, making up to one third of its farmland unsafe for cultivation. Areas that once held olive and citrus trees have now been bulldozed by Israeli forces.

Corporate Watch says that even though Palestinians are routinely shot at from distances greater than 300 meters, farmers whose land lies near the border have no choice but to cultivate these areas despite the danger.

Economic warfare

In addition to the lethal violence routinely inflicted on Gaza, Israeli authorities enforce what they have called “economic warfare” – a de facto boycott of almost all agriculture originating in Gaza.

Virtually no produce from the enclave is allowed into Israeli or West Bank markets, traditionally Gaza’s biggest customers.

From the time Israel imposed its blockade on Gaza in 2007 up until November 2014, a monthly average of 13.5 trucks left Gaza carrying exports – just one percent of the monthly average of goods shipped out just prior to the closure.

By contrast, already this year more than 22,000 trucks have entered Gaza, many carrying Israeli produce considered unsuitable for international export.

Dumping it on the captive market in Gaza further undermines local farmers.

The trickle of exports that Israel permits from Gaza go primarily to European markets, but this is only allowed through Israeli export companies that profit from the situation by taking commissions and selling Gaza products for far higher prices than they pay the producers.

“The Israelis export Palestinian produce and export it with an Israeli label,” Taghrid Jooma of the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees told Corporate Watch. “For example, they export roses from Gaza for nickels and dimes and sell them for a lot of money.”

Muhammad Zwaid of Gaza’s only export company, Palestine Crops, told Corporate Watch that part of the problem is that Palestine lacks its own bar code and so any produce exported through Israel carries an Israeli one.

“We have our own stickers,” said Zwaid, “but [Israeli export company] Arava has asked for them to be smaller and often Arava stickers are put on top of ours. Our produce is taken inside Israel by the Israeli company and then taken to a packing station where it is repackaged.”

Supporting BDS

Corporate Watch reports that while many of the farmers they interviewed support BDS, they also want the opportunity to export their produce and make a living.

This presents a quandary because a boycott of Israeli export companies like Arava will include Palestinian products as well.

Even so, the farmers interviewed maintained their support for BDS as a long-term strategy that outweighs the limited benefits of current export levels.

“What we need is people to stand with us against the occupation,” said one farmer from al-Zaytoun. “By supporting BDS you support the farmers, both directly and indirectly and this is a good thing for people here in Gaza.”

“Farmers all over the Gaza Strip were particularly keen on getting the right to label their produce as Palestinian, ideally with its own country code, even if they have to export through Israel,” the report states. “Country of origin labels for Gaza goods is something the solidarity movement could lobby for.”

Mohsen Abu Ramadan, from the Palestinian Non-Governmental Organizations Network, suggested to Corporate Watch that one strategy could be to engage farming unions around the world to urge them to endorse BDS in solidarity with Palestinian farmers.

Bulldozing the Jordan Valley

While Israel’s siege and deadly assaults have rightly focused international attention on Gaza, Israel’s actions in the Jordan Valley have generated far less outrage.

Yet well before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s current extreme right-wing government made clear its opposition to a viable Palestinian state, he had pledged to never give up control of this agriculturally rich region under any two-state configuration.

Occupation authorities refuse virtually all Palestinian requests to build or improve infrastructure in the region. Residents face severe restrictions on access to electricity and water as well as other basic infrastructure.

Demolitions of Palestinian homes have increased in recent months, and in February, Israel carried out the largest demolition in a decade.

Routine violations

In the Jordan Valley, settlement agriculture often relies on Palestinian labor – including child labor – to do hazardous jobs for a fraction of what would be paid to Israeli citizens.

Though entitled to the Israeli minimum wage according to a high court ruling, many workers are routinely paid as little as half that.

Palestinians Zaid and Rashid are employed in Beqa’ot, a settlement built on land seized from Palestinians. They receive wages of $20 per day, about a quarter of which goes for daily transport.

They receive no paid holidays despite the fact that the Israeli government advises that workers are entitled to 14 days paid holiday and must receive a written contract and payslips from their employer.

Although they are members of a Palestinian trade union, their settler employers do not recognize any collective bargaining rights.

Workers are moreover frequently pressured into signing documents in Hebrew — which they cannot read — stating that they are being treated according to law. Workers fear being fired if they do not sign.

While Palestinians working in settlements are also required to obtain work permits from the military occupation authorities, several of those interviewed for the report had no such permits, leading to suspicions that employers may be attempting to further circumvent Israeli labor laws by using undocumented workers.

Both Zaid and Rashid told Corporate Watch they back the call for a boycott of Israeli agricultural companies.

“We support the boycott even if we lose our work,” Zaid said. “We might lose our jobs but we will get back our land. We will be able to work without being treated as slaves.”

Label games

Corporate Watch profiles the five main Israeli export companies: Arava, Mehadrin, Hadiklaim, Edom and the now defunct Carmel Agrexco.

A common practice by these companies is mislabeling goods as “Produce of Israel” even when they are grown and packed in West Bank settlements that are illegal under international law.

Corporate Watch also documents the varying degrees of success that BDS activists have had in targeting these companies.

Since 2009, following pressure from activists, the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs issued guidelines stating it is an “offense” to mislabel settlement goods as “Produce of Israel.”

Similar guidelines approved by the European Union late last year outraged Israeli politicians, despite the fact that the same practice has been United States policy since the mid-1990s.

Despite the guidelines, however, UK stores continue to stock Israeli products with misleading labels.

As recently as 2013, Corporate Watch found labels from the Israeli settlement of Tomer for the Morrisons store brand of Medjoul dates.

In another example, the Aldi chain was caught selling grapefruits from Carmel Agrexco labeled as products of Cyprus.

Beyond settlement boycotts

Of the supermarket chains targeted by BDS campaigns, only one, The Co-operative, has pledged to “no longer engage with any supplier of produce known to be sourcing from the Israeli settlements.”

This means that not only would the Co-op not stock settlement produce, but that it would not buy produce grown in present-day Israel from companies that also have settlement operations.

This made it the first major European chain to take such a step.

Corporate Watch points out that while not directly supporting the settlement economy, those Israeli companies without settlement operations still pay taxes to the Israeli government, which supports its ongoing occupation, colonization and oppression of Palestinians.

It notes that the Co-op took a much stronger stance regarding apartheid-era South Africa, when it boycotted all South African products.

In accordance with the 2005 BDS call from Palestinian civil society, Corporate Watch advocates a full boycott of all Israeli goods