Vast increase in “zero-hours” labor contracts in Britain

Edwin Wills

A new report from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reveals that the official number of workers on “zero-hours” contracts in Britain has soared to 801,000, amounting to 2.5 percent of the workforce.

Workers on zero-hours contracts have to be ready to work any time they are required. The majority are on minimum wage with no guaranteed hours or income and suffer irregular pay. They are forced to work intensively, often with unpaid meal breaks or none at all. As a result, the majority struggle to pay bills, to save money and to get access to loans, rent or mortgages. Many do no get enough income (£5,772 a year) to qualify for the state pension.

According to the ONS, the number of workers on zero-hours contracts in 2005 stood at 100,000, but by December 2015 it had increased to its now-record levels. It also revealed that zero-hours contracts have risen by 15 percent in the last three months.

The ONS figures may substantially undercount the real levels. In 2013, the ONS said the use of such contracts had risen from 189,000 to 250,000. However, in an extensive survey at the time, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) said there were approximately 1 million (four times the ONS’s calculation) workers on these types of contracts.

The ONS reports that those on zero-hours contracts work an average of 25 hours per week. More than a third of these would like to work more hours, compared to 10 percent of workers on normal contracts. The CIPD warned that businesses are giving fewer hours, none at all or firing those who object to their treatment.

The Trades Union Congress (TUC) reported that, on average, zero-hours workers earn £188 per week, in contrast to £479 for those workers with fixed contracts. However, 39 percent of zero-hours contract workers earn below £111 a week.

The TUC report is an indictment of the disastrous impact on workers of the TUC’s own pro-capitalist policies. The growth of zero-hours contracts is a direct outcome of the collaboration of the trade unions with the Conservative government’s austerity measures and the destruction of well-paid, previously secure jobs.

As a result, zero-hours contracts have spread throughout the public and private sector, from agriculture, hotels, catering, education and health, social care, the National Health Service, and advertising, to high street food chains and major retailers, supermarkets and manufacturing. Thirty-eight percent of those on zero-hours contracts are 16 to 24 years old, and 23 percent are in full-time education.

Jon Ingham of Glassdoor recruitment explained, “There is now a significant proportion of the young workforce without guaranteed incomes.”

Zero-hours and similar contracts are having a severe impact on workers and their families. A number of organisations describe what they have defined as “income shock” when reduced hours or none at all result in desperate moments of poverty and hunger.

StepChange, a debt charity, issued a report showing 14 million people suffered “income shock” in the last year. It said the growth in zero-hours contracts, self-employment and similar contracts created conditions for “sudden” income falls. StepChange reported that up to two thirds of people on zero-hours contracts suffered income shocks in 2015. It added that those without permanent jobs were twice as likely to suffer, resulting in higher debt through high-interest loans, credit cards and overdrafts, creating further dependence on the use of food banks.

An added problem for those on zero-hours and similar contracts was highlighted in March by the charity Citizens Advice. In 2015, around 380,000 workers contacted them concerning workplace situations. Of these, 67,000 were related to abuses of pay and work-related benefits. At the same time, they recorded a near doubling of demands for redress of unauthorised deductions from wages, from 4,900 in 2014 to 9,000 in 2015. This is only the tip of the iceberg.

Gillian Guy, the chief executive of Citizens Advice, said for workers in such “casual and insecure work, it’s particularly concerning that there’s an emerging trend of pay errors and wage theft that can further undermine people’s financial security.”

Tania Weber, an employment caseworker with Citizens Advice in Kent, explained, “Many of the clients we see don’t work set hours and their employer doesn’t record their hours or work out their entitlements properly. ... People don’t get paid for all the hours they’ve worked, don’t get holiday pay, or don’t get paid at all. We’ve seen cases where employees who’ve asked for their wages get sacked, or where people have tried to pursue their employer and the business has simply gone insolvent without paying up.”

A report by Alex Wood and Brendan Burchell at the Cambridge University Department of Sociology into work practices at a large supermarket drew attention to the impact on the well-being of workers on such contracts. The report has been sent to the Conservative government’s review of zero-hours contracts being conducted by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. The department is dedicated to smashing up workers’ employment rights and working conditions. It is headed by Business Secretary Sajid Javid, a former senior banker, who is the author of the Trade Union Bill criminalising strikes and protests that is currently being legislated.

Wood noted, “People and their families are suffering enormous levels of anxiety, and even mental illness, because of what is fast becoming common practice. … High unemployment and tough economic times, combined with ever-increasing flexible working practices that favour big business, is creating a culture of servitude, trapping people in vicious cycles of instability, stress and a struggle to make ends meet. It’s affecting psychological well-being to an extent that no one is grasping.”

Such contracts are the British manifestation of an international phenomenon. In 2015, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) explained that a factor in the growth of poverty is what they call “non-standard” work. The OECD added that since 1995-1996 more than half of all jobs created amongst its member states are in the category of “non-standard” work. The report adds that families living on such contracts suffer significantly higher poverty.

In March, Seamus Nevin, the Institute of Directors’ head of employment and skills summed up how these intolerable conditions have been deliberately cultivated by business, successive Labour and Conservative governments and the trade unions. He said, “One of the reasons that UK employment figures remained so impressive despite the financial crisis is because employers have been able to adopt zero-hours contracts instead of having to make redundancies.”

Apple sales decline points to faultlines in global economy

Barry Grey

Apple Inc., the world leader in market capitalization, reported on Tuesday its first quarterly sales decline in 13 years. The fall in both revenue and profits was worse than analysts had predicted and was led by the first quarterly decline in sales of the company’s top-selling product, the iPhone, since its introduction in 2007.

Apple shares, already down 20 percent on the year, fell another 6.26 percent on Wednesday, dragging the Nasdaq down half a percent for the day.

The sharp reversal of the company’s growth trajectory was a reflection not only of stagnation and slump in the real economy, behind the giddy heights on world stock markets, but a warning that vastly inflated asset values are unsustainable and will inevitably come crashing down.

Financial analyst John Shinal, writing in USA Today, summed up the implications of the company’s quarterly report by saying, “Put it all together and you get a recipe for a coming bear stampede out of Apple shares.”

Perhaps more than any other firm, Apple exemplifies the colossal and historically unprecedented inflation of prices assigned by the market to stocks and other financial assets since the Wall Street crash of September 2008. Driven upward by multitrillion-dollar bank bailouts and an orgy of money printing and debt expansion promoted by the world’s central banks, stock prices have tripled since the low point of the post-Wall Street crash recession, further enriching the world’s financial oligarchs and widening the chasm between the rich and super-rich and the rest of the planet.

This process is starkly illustrated by one statistic: In 2003, when Apple last suffered a quarterly sales decline, its market capitalization (the value of its shares) was $5 billion. Today, even with the recent drop in Apple stock, the company’s market value is well over $500 billion—more than a hundred-fold increase.

The massive and irrational inflation of stock values is an expression of the growth of financial parasitism. In the feverish pursuit of profit, capital is going not into productive investment—on the contrary, the social infrastructure is being left to rot and the living standards of the working masses are being driven down—but instead into increasingly risky, exotic and fraudulent forms of speculation.

The real economy is deteriorating. As the International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned in its “World Economic Outlook” released earlier this month, the rate of growth of trade, productivity and investment is slowing. The IMF downgraded its projection for world economic growth for the fourth consecutive time over the past year, and revised downward its estimates for every major part of the global economy, from the US, Europe and Japan, to Latin America, Africa, Japan and China. It warned of the “threat of a synchronized slowdown.”

The inability of world capitalism to return to normal rates of growth, despite the recourse by central banks to zero and even negative interest rates and “quantitative easing” money-printing operations on a vast scale, is reflected in slumping demand and depressed prices for commodities such as oil. The imposition of ever more brutal austerity on the working classes of North America, Europe and, increasingly, the rest of the world only deepens the slump.

In recent months, the US has seen a wave of store closures by retail chains as the destruction of decent-paying and secure jobs undermines sales to working class customers. Last week, Sears/Kmart announced scores of new closures, following the shutdown of hundreds of stores by Walmart and Macy’s.

The slowdown in the Chinese economy, the main source of world economic growth in the aftermath of the 2008 crash, is wreaking havoc on countries that export both commodities and industrialized goods, and on the revenue and profits of major corporations. At the same time, private and public debt are spiraling out of control, leading to a new and even more disastrous financial crisis.

Over the weekend, the Financial Times reported that China’s debt had risen to a record 237 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, prompting warnings that the second biggest economy in the world could be heading for a Lehman Brothers-style collapse or a period of protracted low growth, such as in Japan.

This is the context in which Apple reported a 13 percent decline in overall sales and a 22 percent decline in profits for the first quarter of 2016. Sales of iPhones fell by more than 16 percent. Sales of the company’s other products also fell, with iPads falling 19 percent, Mac computers dropping 12 percent, and the “other products” segment, which includes the Apple Watch, plummeting 50 percent.

Sales to Greater China, which includes Hong Kong and Taiwan, fell faster than anywhere else. They declined 26 percent, compared to the same quarter of 2015 when they rose 71 percent.

Although the Chinese market accounts for only 25 percent of Apple’s total sales, it was responsible for 60 percent of the firm’s revenue decline in the first quarter. An analyst in Shanghai with the research group Canalys was cited by the New York Times as saying said he expected the Chinese smartphone market to grow only 4.7 percent in 2016, as compared to 50 percent annual growth as recently as 2013.

For the current quarter, Apple predicted an even worse performance, with estimated revenues of $41 billion to $43 billion, at least $7 billion below the first quarter.

Apple was not the only major US company jolted Wednesday by the impact of the global economic crisis. Twitter shares plunged after the social media company released financial results showing weaker than expected revenue and a second-quarter projection that disappointed market expectations.

In response to the turmoil in the energy sector from the collapse in oil prices, Standard & Poor’s stripped Exxon Mobil of its top credit rating for the first time since the Great Depression.

The decline in Apple’s sales is one more indication that an entire period of economic and geo-political development, spanning a quarter century, is coming to an end, ushering in a new and violent period of economic conflict, nationalism and militarism between major powers, together with an upsurge in the class struggle.

In October 1987, Wall Street suffered the biggest one-day fall in the Dow Jones Industrial Average in history. This signaled the collapse of the reactionary nostrums of the Reagan-Thatcher years.

The Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 and dissolution of the Soviet Union two years later opened up new markets and new sources of raw materials and cheap labor for the US and the other imperialist powers, giving world capitalism a temporary boost. But the expansion of the 1990s was fueled above all by cheap credit provided by the Federal Reserve, the further deregulation of the banks, and the benefits for the ruling class from the collapse of the old labor movements.

This credit-fueled bubble came crashing down by the end of the decade, with the crisis of the so-called “Asian Tigers,” the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, and the Russian default. Next came the dot.com bubble, which imploded in 2000-2001. It was followed by the sub-prime housing bubble, which burst in 2008, producing the biggest financial and economic crisis since the Great Depression.

The current bubble is greater and more pervasive than any of the previous ones, involving at its center a massive accumulation of debt by the central banks themselves. And the gaping contradiction between the “recovery” for the stock markets and the bank accounts of the rich and the deepening social crisis facing the working class is sparking growing social opposition and a profound political radicalization.

The systemic crisis of world capitalism is, as in the years leading up to World War II, driving the ruling classes ever more violently to seek a way out of their impasse through nationalism, war and dictatorship. At the same time, it provides the impulse for socialist revolution, the only alternative to world war. The crucial question that must be resolved is the building of a new political and revolutionary leadership for the coming struggles of the working class.

America’s war election

Patrick Martin

As the American political establishment enters the final stages of the primary contests to choose the presidential nominees of the Democratic and Republican parties, the acute danger confronting the US and international working class emerges more clearly. The leading contenders in both parties, Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump, are committed to a vast military escalation following the November election.

In a speech on foreign policy delivered Wednesday, Trump combined virulent nationalism with a pledge to carry out a massive buildup of the American military to overcome any and all opposition to the drive of US imperialism for world domination.

Declaring “America First” to be the guiding principle of his foreign policy, Trump proclaimed, “We will develop, build and purchase the best equipment known to mankind. Our military dominance must be unquestioned, and I mean unquestioned, by anybody and everybody.”

The billionaire real estate mogul linked military supremacy with the restoration of the once dominant economic position of American capitalism, pledging to eliminate “quickly” the US trade deficit with China, now more than half a trillion dollars a year, as well as the $1 trillion US manufacturing trade deficit.

These figures underscore the delusional character of Trump’s grandiose ambitions. The trade deficits are not the result of poor trade deals, but the outcome of the protracted decline of American capitalism over nearly half a century. It is this historical crisis that drives US imperialism to the ever more reckless use of military force.

Insofar as he criticized American foreign policy in the past three administrations—those of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama—it was for an inordinate focus on the Middle East, with the result that the region is today, in Trump’s words, “more unstable and chaotic than ever before.”

The slogan of “America First,” the axis of Trump’s speech, is associated historically with sections of the US ruling elite oriented more towards dominance of the Pacific than the Atlantic. That might explain Trump’s relatively conciliatory language towards Russia, in contrast with his strident demands that China toe the US line on trade, North Korea and the South China Sea—demands that are central to the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia.”

Trump made an open appeal to the military for support. “Our generals and military leaders,” he said, should be given free rein once an armed conflict begins. “If America fights,” he said, “it must fight to win.” Referring to US soldiers and veterans, he added, “A great country takes care of its warriors. Our commitment to them is absolute, and I mean absolute.”

Trump concluded the speech with a denunciation of “the false song of globalism,” declaring, “The nation-state remains the true foundation for happiness and harmony.” This was not the only part of his address that recalled the speeches of Hitler and Mussolini.

Trump’s remarks were notable for the openness with which they expressed the American ruling class’s ambition of global domination. However, the policy of his probable Democratic opponent, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, a more experienced representative of American imperialism, is, if anything, even more ruthless.

The likely contest between Trump and Clinton will be a clash of warmongers. As an admiring New York Times profile explained last week, Clinton is the most hawkish of the remaining Democratic and Republican candidates and has the closest ties to the military-intelligence apparatus, particularly the Pentagon brass. “For all their bluster about bombing the Islamic state into oblivion,” the Times wrote, neither Trump nor Senator Ted Cruz “have demonstrated anywhere near the appetite for military engagement abroad that Clinton has.”

It is noteworthy that her campaign delegated its response to Trump’s speech to former secretary of state Madeline Albright, one of the principal architects of the 1999 war against Serbia and a leading advocate of a confrontational policy against Russia in Eastern Europe.

Clinton’s Democratic rival Bernie Sanders is playing a critical role in preventing anti-war sentiment from finding any expression in the 2016 elections. He combines rhetorical denunciations of the “millionaires and billionaires” and fraudulent claims to represent a “democratic socialist” perspective with uncritical support for the predatory foreign policy of the Obama administration. On Monday, in an interview on MSNBC, he declared his support for Obama’s latest increase in troop levels in Syria and the White House’s “kill list” of people targeted for drone-missile strikes.

There is enormous opposition to war in the American and international working class. The elections have been dominated by mass anger and hostility to the political establishment, largely of a left-wing character. Yet the outcome will be a campaign between the most right-wing, pro-war candidates in generations.

The real alternative to the program of imperialist militarism is the campaign of the Socialist Equality Party. Our candidates for president and vice-president, Jerry White and Niles Niemuth, are the only ones who tell the truth to the working class about the crimes committed by American imperialism and the even greater ones being prepared for after the election. Tens of millions of youth and working people must be mobilized against the warmongers in Washington and on Wall Street.

Toxic Range: the BLM’s Growing Chemical Addiction

Katie Fite

BLM is escalating herbicide use on public lands in the wake of the September 2015 Sage-grouse Plan Amendments and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Not Warranted Finding for ESA listing. A primary agency excuse for forsaking sage-grouse ESA protection is the pipe dream that new habitat will be created through radical deforestation, and that fuelbreaks will stop fires. The Finding lays it out:

Cumulatively, the FIAT assessments of the five priority areas identify more than 16,000 km (10,000 mi) of potential linear fuel treatments, approximately 2.99 million ha (7.4 million ac) of potential conifer treatments, more than 2 million ha (5 million ac) of potential invasive plant treatments, and more than 7.7 million ha (19 million ac) of post-fire rehabilitation (i.e., should a fire occur, the post-fire rehabilitation identifies which areas BLM would prioritize for management) within the Great Basin region …

The deforestation acreage is larger than Vermont. Native pinyon and juniper trees are treated as weeds, rather than a forest community vital for biodiversity and buffering climate change effects. Real weeds will have a field day in the wake of the bulldozers, bull hogs, masticators, chain saws, mowers, roller-choppers, brush beaters and “prescribed” fire unleashed for subduing woody vegetation. Lands will be doused with herbicides to try to keep cheatgrass, rapidly advancing medusahead, and others from thriving in the wasted, bared soils and hotter, drier, grazed sites. The fuelbreaks will raze sage and trees across a distance greater than that between Patagonia and the North Pole. These cleared zones will parallel many roads on public lands, further fragmenting wildlife habitats and providing fertile grounds for flammable annual grass in the chronically grazed arid landscape, and for human-caused catalytic converter, target shooting and other fire ignitions.

BLM is further reverting to a 1960s worldview of farming-style manipulation of wild lands, mainlining chemicals in support of its treatment habit. This distracts attention from the fact that the new BLM Sage-grouse Plan Amendments allow livestock grazing and many other threats to the bird to continue with little real change, despite a torrent of litigation claiming otherwise. In support of the folly, NRCS and BLM have concocted elaborate models deeming native forest and sage expanses unhealthy or “at risk”. After clearing, the land may be seeded, often with a mix of exotic forage grass and “cultivars”, not the local native plant ecotypes, but plants bred to be big and tough and a livestock forage boon. Places purged of woody plants will be embedded in a landscape “compartmentalized” (BLM’s term) by fuelbreaks.

Livestock grazing is a primary cause of weed infestation and dominance across public lands. But BLM refuses to deal with livestock as a cause of weeds. PEER very recently filed a complaint with CEQ and rancher sycophant Interior Secretary “what’s good for the bird is good for the herd” Sally Jewell over BLM’s denial of the climate effects of cattle and sheep grazing.

That’s only part of it. BLM is a weed denier of the worst sort, and willfully blind to the adverse climate effects of its land clearing. Instead of addressing cattle causes of weeds, BLM’s time honored method is to spray and walk away, leaving livestock free to graze and trample sprayed land in short order, churning soils and copiously defecating, ensuring a fresh batch of weeds takes hold.

2007 Weed EIS and PER Set the Stage

In 2007, BLM completed a Westwide 17 State Weed EIS and risk assessments for expanded herbicide use tripling sprayed acres, along with a Programmatic Environmental Report PER bedfellow laying out burning, chaining, mastication, bull hogging, mowing, brush beating, harrowing, “biological thinning” (dustbowl style grazing) and other severe weed-causing disturbance assaults on native vegetation communities. Environmentalists implored the BLM to address weed causes, employ passive restoration and minimize spraying. BLM ignored this, saying weed causes were dealt with in “allocations” of Land Use Plans. The many Plans issued since then do not address causes of weeds in divvying up “forage” and other allocations, like this and this. Risk assessments based on minimal info, predictably found the chemicals were safe for public land. The PER’s ecological impacts were never analyzed. The fore-shadowed radical treatment disturbance, now funded by hundreds of millions of dollars of sage-grouse and fuels funds, is laying waste to the West. BLM’s project rationales are a constantly moving target.

The Oust Debacle

As BLM was preparing the Weed EIS, it became embroiled in litigation with southern Idaho farmers over a crop catastrophe. BLM had ballyhooed DuPont’s Oust herbicide as a panacea for cheatgrass. Prominent range staff that had long pushed exotic forage plants as desirable on “rangelands” worked closely with DuPont to fine-tune the chemical.

“Oust is the best tool we’ve ever had, yes sir,” says Scott Anderson, a supervisor in the BLM’s Shoshone, Idaho, office. “There’s nothing like it.”… “In the mid-1990s, BLM officials began using it experimentally against cheatgrass, which the agency had been fighting a losing battle to control. They discovered that when sprayed immediately after a fire, Oust was nearly 100% effective in suppressing the growth of cheatgrass for at least a year. “That gave us an opportunity to come in and reseed the sagebrush and other desirable vegetation,” explains Mike Pellant, a BLM rangeland ecologist in Boise.

Oust kills plants by preventing roots from taking in water and nutrients from the soil.

It did this splendidly when the wind blew herbicide-infested soil onto crop fields and poisoned the earth. After the farmers finally figured out what had happened, BLM declared an Oust moratorium. Prolonged litigation ensued, with over 66 days of testimony in federal court. A jury trial and verdict found BLM bore 40% responsible, and Dupont 60%. Damages of 17 million dollars were awarded to the farmers. But the District Court ruling was appealed, and reversed by the Ninth Circuit in 201l. Courthouse News described the long ago initial filing “a day late and 17 million dollars short”.

“Idaho farmers filed their complaint a day too late to collect damages from the government after their crops were caught in the crossfire of a federal agency’s herbicidal battle against non-native grass, the 9th Circuit ruled Thursday … The farmers’ claims against the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) are “forever barred,”.

Oust affected so much ag land that damage was detected. Most of the spraying takes place in remoter wild places where drift effects could escape detection.

Meanwhile, BLM kept on spraying, purposefully blind to weed causes. The 2007 Weed EIS blessed Plateau (Imazapic) as the new cheat panacea. Mowed and roller-chopped sage, prescribed burned forests and sage, and wildfire areas were doused with Plateau. It was applied over untold 100,000s of acres following fires. But there is still a hitch. Plateau kills “desirable” seedlings similar to Oust. So at the same time BLM has been spending tens of millions of dollars on seeding burned lands ostensibly for sage-grouse, it applied a potent lingering seedling killer. A scientist letter responding to BLM’s unprecedented 67 million dollar rehab boondoggle for the Soda Wildfire pointed out:

First, spraying a pre-emergent herbicide (imazapic/Plateau) may not have much effect on cheatgrass in 2015 because it germinated prior to application. Second, and much more importantly, imazapic will kill any seedling forbs that emerge from the seed bank. This will decrease abundance and diversity of forbs which are necessary for sage grouse …

Plateau also kills sage seedlings and the native seeds in the soil seedbank. Without sage, the sage-grouse, pygmy rabbits and other wildlife are doomed.

Oregon: A Special Case, and Sacrificing the Eastside

Oregon citizens and activists have often been alert, vocal and litigious in opposition to public and private lands herbicide campaigns that take place in the big dollar timber country on the west side of the Cascades. So BLM deals with ecosystems and people there a bit more lightly. In 1984, an injunction in Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides et al. v. Block prohibited herbicide use by BLM and the Forest Service in Oregon. BLM prepared a new EIS for four herbicides in 1987, and the injunction was modified, allowing 2,4-D, dicamba, glyphosate, and picloram. In 2010 a new EIS expanded herbicides. It has fewer protections for lands, waters, fish, frogs, wildlife and people on the eastside of the Cascades. BLM added 10 more herbicides west of the Cascades, but did not allow aerial spraying, vs. 13 more herbicides east of the Cascades and allowed aerial spraying.

In synch with its 2007 EIS, BLM went far beyond treating “noxious” weeds in Oregon. “Management objectives” ballooned: the control of all invasive plants; the control of plants as necessary to control pests and diseases …; the control of vegetation to meet safety and maintenance objectives …; and, the treatment of vegetation to achieve specific habitat goals for Federally Listed and other Special Status species …

East of the Cascades, 2,4-D, Dicamba, Fluroidone, Imazapic, Imazapir, Picloram could be sprayed aerially (note this is fewer chemicals than inflicted on the rest of the states aerially in the 2007 EIS). There is so-called “restricted” use of Chlorsulfuron, glyphosate, hexaninone, metsulfuron metyl, tebuthiuron “only where no other means available” … “where practical, limit glyphosate and hexaninone to spot applications”. Weasel word language is pervasive, providing leeway to wiggle out of promised protections. If livestock might eat the plants, BLM is to apply “at the typical rather than the maximum rate”, but no word on what to do about native ruminants“don’t apply some chemicals where wild horses are present, or herd them out of the area”. There is minimal protection for recreation – a campground might be fleetingly signed. Protections recommended for reptiles and amphibians were not adopted, even provisions leaving bits of untreated habitat as refugia were scuttled. BLM is increasingly outsources spraying, through agreements with Counties and “cooperators”. Protections that appear to have survived could readily fall by the wayside in practice.

The Spray and Walk Away Path Forward

Now BLM has just released a Final EIS adding three more bizarrely named chemicals (rimsulfuron, fluroxypyr, aminopyralid) for use across the West in its War on cheatgrass, medusahead, prickly pear (which with along with the saguaro are a keystone desert species), pigweed and others. NOTE: I can’t get this link to work now

BLM claims these chemicals are safer for the environment and human health than those already in use. Safe, like aminopyralid that can be spread through manure? Or safe like post-emergence burndown rimsulfuron that is touted as great for mixing with others of its ilk, and for which even BLM’s assessment admits a drift risk for non-target vegetation? Just like Oust and Plateau, rimsulfuron kills seedlings of the very plants that wildlife must have to survive. There are only a few days left to weigh in on this latest EIS (blm_wo_vegeis@blm.gov). Meanwhile, step-down EA analyses expanding aerial spraying and broadening herbicide use are proliferating at the BLM District level.

BLM insisted their were minimal downsides to the banished Oust, the fallen from favor Plateau and the rest of the toxic lot, including woody plant killers like Tebuthiuron, which caused a profusion of cheatgrass in Nevada sage purging reminiscent of the 1960s. The current chemicals and all their associated carriers, adjuvants, breakdown products and other associated toxins, including unknowns from mixes of multiple active chemical ingredients that BLM allows, had been deemed safe in the 2007 EIS. Now that BLM has had a revelation that they are less safe, it is not dropping a single chemical.

What will the 7 million acres of new treatments, 10,000 linear miles of permanent bleak fuelbreaks, and rehabbing of failed fire rehabs (often using many of the same old techniques) do to the land? And how much spraying will accompany forest clearing for porkbarrel biomass? Beyond the butchered landscape, desertification and destroyed habitat, it may often be impossible for people to avoid unwanted exposure to herbicides on visits to public lands. Access roads will be bordered by FIAT-ordained fuelbreaks for long stretches. Cleared of “brush” and seeded with exotic forage grass, they will be favored cattle loafing areas. Aerial herbicide use in wild land settings with fickle weather ensures drift onto the road and dust, onto camping sites, killing non-target vegetation, polluting water in springs and streams, and contaminating sage-grouse, antelope and pygmy rabbit foods. New irreversible native species habitat loss and expanded habitat fragmentation will take place. Public lands will bear an even greater resemblance to an intensive cattle ranch operation under this desolate paradigm. How long will agency grazing climate and weed denial go on? Or denial of the climate consequences of deforestation right here at home? But look everybody, over there, a bright shiny new million dollar treatment saving sage-grouse.

Number Of Palestinian Children In Israeli Prisons Soars

Charlotte Silver

Dima al Wawi, 12, the youngest Palestinian female detainee, is welcomed by her family at the Jbara checkpoint in the
occupied West Bank, after her release on 24 April. (Keren Manor / ActiveStills)

Israel has sunk to new lows this year: arresting and imprisoning its youngest female detainee, 12-year-old Dima al-Wawi, and sentencing her to nearly five months in prison.

Dima was arrested in February after she allegedly approached the settlement of Karmei Tzur in the southern occupied West Bank with a knife. All of Israel’s settlements are illegal under international law.

She has said her intention was to stab a security guard, but the incident resulted in no injuries.

Israel released Dima on Sunday, after she served half her sentence, following a successful appeal of her detention by her family on the grounds that Israeli law prohibits incarcerating children under 14.

But Israel has also reached grim new highs this year, incarcerating a much greater number of Palestinian children between the ages of 12 and 15, making Dima’s imprisonment disturbing not so much for its novelty but for how routine it is.

At the end of December 2015, 116 Palestinian children between 12 and 15 years old were held in Israeli military detention, an eleven-fold increase from the previous year.

In total, 440 children under 18 are currently held in military detention, which is the highest number since the Israeli army began sharing data in 2008, and almost two-and-half times the number imprisoned a year ago.

According to Defense for Children International–Palestine (DCIP), no other country in the world systematically prosecutes hundreds of children in military courts each year.

DCIP thoroughly documents the alarming trends in Israel’s incarceration of children in a new report, No Way to Treat a Child, which details the extent to which Israel has degraded the rights of children living under its military rule.

The researchers collected 429 sworn testimonies between January 2012 and December 2015.

The report reveals that in 97 percent of the cases, no parent or lawyer was present during interrogation and in 88 percent of the cases the children were not informed of the reason for their arrest.

Shackles

Following harsh censure in 2013 for its treatment of Palestinian children in military courts by the UN children’s fund, UNICEF, and the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, Israel made several attempts to publicly reform the image of how it treats Palestinian children.

Israel amended its military orders to prohibit night arrests of minors, blindfolding and restraining children with shackles and handcuffs.

But as DCIP documents, those practices are still widely used.

Moreover, in November 2015, Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, amended the Youth Law to institute mandatory minimum sentences for children alleged to be involved in throwing stones, and increased maximum sentences for children who throw stones at a moving vehicle.

“Under the military legal framework,” the report states, “any soldier or police officer is authorized to arrest persons without a warrant, even children, where they have a suspicion that the individual has committed an act violating one of the ‘security offenses’ in Israeli military law.”

“Most children are arrested on suspicion, without arrest warrants. There is little to no independent oversight over arrests,” the report adds.

Meanwhile, according to DCIP, Israel maintains that it is not obliged to extend international human rights law, including protections outlined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, to Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank – arguments that have been rejected by the International Court of Justice and several UN human rights treaty bodies.

Dima’s case is emblematic of many of the abuses documented by DCIP. She was interrogated without her parents or a lawyer and attended her court sessions with her feet in shackles.

She was also sentenced after accepting a plea bargain, confessing to attempted voluntary manslaughter and illegal possession of a knife. More than 99 percent of DCIP’s cases ended with plea deals.

At her homecoming from prison on Sunday, Dima said that her one respite during her two-and-a-half-month ordeal was that she was allowed to play with other incarcerated girls.

But this is telling of a concerning trend: though still a minority, the number of young Palestinian girls in Israeli prison has reached new heights – there were 12 as of February.

Coerced confessions

“As the number of arrests of children has grown amid the escalation of violence in recent months, so has the number of cases in which international norms protecting children are violated,” Human Rights Watch states in its recent report on the abuse of detained Palestinian children.

The DCIP and Human Rights Watch reports demonstrate that within the Israeli military system, Palestinians’ status as children yields to their presumed criminal status, justifying the denial of a host of protections that should apply to minors according to international norms and sometimes even Israeli law.

The systematic abuse of children, from arresting them in the middle of the night, to keeping them from their parents, to inflicting physical abuse, is aimed at coercing confessions.

Seventeen-year-old Bashir, who was summoned for questioning, told DCIP, “[The Israeli interrogation officer] kicked me twice on my legs, punched me twice in the stomach and three times on the head, while shouting, ‘You better confess because I won’t stop beating you unless you confess.’”

DCIP records that 27.5 percent of children experienced some form of physical violence during interrogation.

“The main philosophy of interrogation is to exert as much pressure on the person under interrogation and keep his resistance as low as possible,” Ayed Abu Eqtaish, the accountability program director at DCIP states in Detaining Dreams, a new short documentary, above, produced by the organization.

DCIP writes, “Interrogation sessions serve as the primary means of securing evidence against children.”

The documentary interviews four teenagers who were arrested in the spring of 2014 and severely beaten during their arrests and subsequent interrogations.

Abed, who was 14 at the time of his arrest, recalls that he was chained to a wall with his feet barely touching the ground, as the soldiers delivered blows to his body: “It reached a point where all I felt was pain.”

System of control

DCIP emphasizes that “cosmetic” changes to Israeli military law cannot adequately address the mistreatment of children in the military court system because “the system serves control interests of the occupation,” rather than the interests of administering justice.

“The Israeli military’s resistance to implementing a summons process for Palestinian minors, or other practical changes to address violence and abuse, suggest an inherent conflict within the military court system between seeking justice and legitimizing control of the Palestinian population living under military occupation.”

Electoral Politics And The Illusion Of Control

William Hawes

We have all been told a lie. The lie that says democracy can be maintained only through voting, through purely representative, parliamentarian means. When the founding fathers set up the Constitution and Bill of Rights, they were wary of any truly popular, working and middle class control of the United States. Our government was to be run as a republic, designed by elites, for the elites. Our three branches of government were not simply invented for checks and balances: another reason was to stymie any massively popular mandates that would go against the interests of the oligarchy.

Today, the checks and balances used ostensibly to prevent tyranny are being used against us: even though a high majority (65%) is against government surveillance which violates privacy, and 78% want Citizens United overturned, we are stuck with a broken system and statesmen bought off by corporations. Even though 80% of eligible citizens didn’t vote in the 2014 elections, this year our out-of-touch pundits and mass media puppets prattle on unceasingly about our democracy, still misguidedly believing these candidates represent the will of the people.

Just sixteen years ago, our very own electoral system, in the form of a gilded cage, shut down the popular will of the people, as Al Gore won about 500,000 more votes than George W. Bush, yet still lost. Although the decision was made over 200 years ago, we have decided that the antiquated Electoral College system should still be used today.

More broadly, our never-ending election cycle serves as a palliative for ordinary Americans, but does nothing to cure the underlying disease and rot within our political system. Progressive liberals can take pleasure in Sanders’ statements supporting a raise in the minimum wage, debt relief for students, fighting income inequality, etc. Yet Sanders has no broad coalition in Congress to advance his agenda and to fight his “revolution”. Isolationist, non-interventionist conservatives can take pride in Trump’s support of Russia’s fight against ISIS in Syria, and his token rhetoric towards re-working unfair free trade agreements and bringing back jobs. Yet Trump’s pandering towards racists and xenophobes will only accelerate the descent towards fascism that the US has been slipping into for decades.

The second lie we’ve been told, or assumed implicitly, is that we are in control of our national destiny. Through the vote, we can supposedly make a clean slate every four years, to make up for the misdeeds of our past political leaders. The truth is much murkier. Our national security state and intelligence services have been built up to Leviathan levels, and presidential candidates are instantly discredited and marginalized for suggesting even small decreases in military spending. Corporate lobbyists and the conglomerate multinationals control the political landscape, determining the limits of discourse and shutting down anyone who exceeds the boundaries. Absurdly, third party candidates, some of the only ones with fresh ideas to invigorate our democracy, are demonized. Mainstream media coverage reinforces these imaginary limits of discussion, and Independents, Greens, Socialists, and Libertarians are relegated to the sidelines.

As the neoliberal order reinforces and deepens material poverty and intellectual ignorance, public discourse narrows without totalitarian overt manipulation. This makes issues seem as if they are progressing naturally, when public debate and consent is in actuality homogenized and conformist. This is analogous to the concept known to scientists as “shifting baselines”: here it applies to a public that accepts deeper cuts to social services, increases in privatizations, and increased militarization and policing of the public sphere, because the momentum seems inexorable and immutable. The establishment uses rhetorical threats and excuses to further corporate agendas and destroy civil society, all in the name of maintaining “economic growth” and upholding “law and order”.

The truth is that only by staring into the abyss can we collectively begin to dig ourselves out of our self-dug graves. The US has been in an unofficial recession since 2008. Millions of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, with minimal society safety nets, leading to insecurity, uncertainty and cynicism towards the future, and crippling anxiety. Politicians routinely show they do not care about the working class and the poor when they speak to the “middle class”, whatever that means anymore. Our leaders are handpicked by Wall Street billionaires, and/or defense and fossil fuel industrialists. Abroad, covert war is ongoing in a dozen or more countries in Asia and North Africa.

With so many minds confined to the hypnotic and myopic gaze focused on high technology, mass media, and our official “leaders”, 21st century man falls further into enslavement every day. As Fromm would say, we Escape from Freedom into self-indulgence and apathy, leaving hard decisions to technocrats and oligarchs. Control over our food, medicine, intellectual property, and basic social and environmental rights are consolidated into a handful of multinational corporations who inundate us with false needs through advertising and propaganda. Computer algorithms tell us what to buy, and social media manipulates our emotions, fulfilling the preaching of techno-dystopian prophets who warn of non-human intelligence guiding humanity towards dark futures.

Revolutionary fervor lurks under the surface, yet whether a popular progressive movement can blossom remains to be seen. Conversely, a missed revolution could easily results in an authoritarian and fascist takeover by the reactionary far-right. One thing we know for certain is that continuing under this two-party charade will only lead us to our doom.

Average citizens have never had any control of the republic since its founding. A complete constitutional overhaul is needed, and forms of direct, consensus, and deliberative democracy must be woven into a hybrid system. Elections should be funded by the public, with no corporate money allowed, shorter election cycles, and no discrimination towards third parties, unlike the current Commission on Presidential Debates. State governments should gain power, and federal programs reigned in and redefined towards streamlined regulation and oversight. Tax subsidies should be stripped from the fossil fuel industries entirely and redirected towards the best scientists and engineers in the field of renewable energy.

What is desperately needed is a shift in worldview to promote government that sees its job as not simply to tax and legislate, but to also support healthy life-world systems. Also, promoting humble and dedicated leaders who are stewards of community and the Earth, who do not insist on blatant exploitation of distant nations and pillaging resources, would go a long way. This cannot be done within the confines of the Democratic and Republican parties, who thrive on domination, coercion, control, and manipulation of public interests.

To break the cycle, we must collectively embrace our frailties and limitations. The deadly, patriarchal energy technologies such as the petrochemical industries and nuclear energy must be shut down. We must learn from the man-made tragedies of Bhopal, Katrina, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, and dismantle dangerous plants and factories, and begin to move humanity away from areas susceptible to natural disasters and coastal flooding. The US, Russia, and the nuclear nations must formally apologize for the atmospheric nuclear testing in the fifties and sixties which will kill millions from cancer, and ban nuclear weapons for good.

Learning to relinquish control and learning to keep one’s ego in check are two of the ultimate tests our leaders must accept. As the Tao Te Ching says:
“Therefore the sages:

Manage the work of detached actions
Conduct the teaching of no words
They work with myriad things but do not control
They create but do not possess
They act but do not presume
They succeed but do not dwell on success
It is because they do not dwell on success
That it never goes away” 

Far-right victory in Austrian presidential elections: A warning

Peter Schwarz

The electoral success on Sunday of the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) in Austria is a warning for all of Europe. It shows that the rise of right-wing parties, nationalism, racism and war is inevitable if the fate of Europe is left in the hands of the established parties and the working class does not carry out its own independent political intervention.

The FPÖ candidate for president Norbert Hofer received 35 percent of the vote in the first round of the presidential elections. The 45-year-old will compete in a run-off election on May 22 against 72-year-old economics professor Alexander Van der Bellen, the Green Party’s candidate, who finished well behind in second place with 21 percent of the vote. Hofer has a good chance of victory. In that case, an ideologue of the far right would assume the presidency in Vienna for the first time in the 71-year history of the second Austrian republic. Hofer holds Islamophobic and xenophobic positions, sympathises with the German Pegida movement and opposes the European Union.

The Social Democrats (SPÖ) and the conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), who have governed the country since 1945 on their own or in coalitions and form the present government, were decimated on Sunday. The two so-called people’s parties won less than a quarter of the vote combined. Their candidates won 11 percent of the vote each. Both candidates secured less than a million votes together, while Hofer received 1.5 million alone.

The responsibility for the rise of the far right lies squarely with these two parties, as well as with the trade unions and pseudo-left groups operating in their milieu to cover their backs.

In 1999, then ÖVP Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel paved the way for the FPÖ’s rise by bringing its leader at the time, Jörg Haider, into his government in spite of considerable international protest. Since then, the FPÖ itself went through a split, was shaken by a series of crisis, corruption scandals and affairs and has moved further to the right. Despite this, the party has been able to secure a series of electoral successes, culminating Sunday in its best ever election result at federal level.

The reason for this is firstly the social attacks carried out by the government in Vienna. Since parliamentary elections two-and-a-half years ago, the grand coalition led by SPÖ Chancellor Werner Faymann has pursued a strict austerity programme at the expense of the working class. It has increased the retirement age, cut public sector jobs and restricted wage increases. The number of unemployed has risen from 300,000 to 475,000 within five years. More than one in ten are now out of work.

The government has collaborated closely with the trade union bureaucracy, to which it is firmly aligned through a corrupt system of relations. Since no party opposes these cuts, the FPÖ has been able to channel the anger and frustration behind itself.

Although the FPÖ agitated against refugees, election analysts say it was not an anti-refugee vote. Much more decisive was the outrage at the SPÖ/ÖVP government, which according to a Sora poll has a disapproval rating of 68 percent.

“Only one in ten described the developments of recent years as positive, and frustration at politics in general was felt by 80 percent,” an article published by Deutsche Welle states. “In addition, fears are growing about job security after years of growing unemployment, many citizens fear an economic decline.”

The second reason is that the Social Democrats and the People’s Party have paved the way for the FPÖ by adopting in large measure its xenophobic politics and making it the basis of government policy. They sealed the borders with Hungary and Italy, introduced upper limits for refugees, and did away with the right to asylum, in collaboration with right-wing governments in Hungary and the Balkans. In the Austrian state of Burgenland, the Social Democrats even formed a coalition government with the FPÖ.

Under these conditions, a Sora poll suggests that only 5 percent of workers voted for SPÖ candidate Rudolf Hundstorfer, who led the Austrian trade unions in 2007 and has headed the labour and social affairs ministry since 2008. Seventy-two percent expressed their anger by voting for the FPÖ candidate.

There is no shortage of those who are placing the blame for the strengthening of the FPÖ on the working class and calling for an “alliance of democrats” against the FPÖ – i.e. with the corrupt government parties, the Greens and the trade unions. The Communist Party calls for a vote for Van der Bellen, while the Sozialistische Linkspartei, the Austrian wing of the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI), is inviting “the left wing of the SPÖ and the unions” to campaign against Hofer together.

In reality, this is the surest way to further accelerate the FPÖ’s rise.

The rise of the far right can be halted only by an independent political movement of the working class, which wages an irreconcilable struggle against the austerity policies, xenophobia, the build-up of state repression and the militarist policies of the government and all bourgeois parties. Such a movement would cut the ground from under the feet of the right-wing demagogues and win to its side sections of the impoverished middle class currently voting for the FPÖ.

There are similar developments to those in Austria in a number of European countries. In France, the influence of the right-wing extremist Front National is growing due to the right-wing policies of President François Hollande and his Socialist Party government, which is supported by the trade unions and a variety of pseudo-left groups. In Germany, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is profiting from the right-wing programmes pursued by the SPD and Left Party. And in Greece, the betrayal by Syriza has encouraged the rise of the fascist Golden Dawn.

These right-wing parties are ecstatic about the electoral success of the FPÖ. FN leader Marine Le Pen described it as “a strong impetus for the patriotic movements” in all countries. The Dutch right-wing populist Geert Wilders tweeted “fantastic.” And AfD executive committee member André Poggenburg stated, “With that, our political allies in Austria have set down a further important milestone.”

In Germany, the Left Party, itself responsible for social cuts in a number of states where it holds power, is calling for an anti-AfD alliance encompassing the trade unions, churches and SPD, as well as the Greens and the conservative CDU/CSU. Such an alliance would have the task of leading the opposition to the far right into a political blind alley.

Like all bourgeois parties, the Left Party fears a movement of the working class that threatens the foundations of capitalism much more than it fears the AfD. It would, if necessary, work together with the AfD, as the Austrian SPÖ is already doing with the FPÖ.

The anger and opposition of millions of people demands a new strategy. The struggle against the far right, social cuts and war requires the mobilisation of the international working class on the basis of an anti-capitalist and socialist programme. The same crisis of global capitalism that drives the ruling class ever further to the right also creates the conditions for the building of such a movement.