7 May 2016

US-backed Chinese separatists, dissidents meet in Dharamsala, India

Kumaran Ira

As Washington presses forward with its anti-China “pivot to Asia,” US-sponsored Chinese exile and dissident groups held an Inter-ethnic/Interfaith Leadership Conference from April 28 to May 1 in McLeod Ganj, a suburb of Dharamsala, India. The stated purpose of the meeting was to discuss how to bring about a transition to “democracy” in China.
The conference was orchestrated by US imperialism along with its regional ally, India, as part of Washington’s growing diplomatic and military-strategic offensive against Beijing. While intensifying preparations for war against China, the US is encouraging explosive ethnic and regional divisions within China, a country with 55 officially recognized ethnic minorities. The goal is to divide China along ethnic lines and ultimately reduce it to semi-colonial status.
The conference, “Strengthening Our Alliance to Advance the Peoples’ Dream: Freedom, Justice, Equality and Peace,” was jointly hosted by a leading Indian-based NGO, the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy (TCHRD), and the US-based Initiatives For China (IFC), led by Tiananmen Square activist and exiled Chinese dissident Yang Jianli.
It brought together representatives of various separatist groups from Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, “pro-democracy  Chinese dissidents, and leaders of China’s religious minorities, including Christians, Muslims and Falun Gong.
US government representatives attended the conference, including representatives of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). Foreign delegates met the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan Buddhist leader, whose exile government is in Dharamsala, on April 28.
The only media permitted at the conference was Radio Free Asia, which is funded by a US federal agency, the Broadcasting Board of Governors. According to India’s the Wire, “reports, videos and articles emanating from event were only broadcast on its Cantonese service, with the station’s English web site not making any reference to the conference or the visa controversy” (that had preceded it.) The Wire cited the president of the US-based Uyghur American Association, Ilshat Hassan, who attended the conference. He made clear that a major topic of the conference was the division of China along ethnic lines.
Hassan said, “The youth from China were arguing that big China should be kept intact, stating that democracy will be coming soon. We didn’t say that we want to be independent, but that we must have self-determination. It will be decided by the people of East Turkestan and the people of Tibet on what they want after they are allowed to decide themselves. I guess they are still young.”
As they seek to foment ethnic nationalism and separatism in China, US imperialism and its allies are seeking to exploit real bitter social conflicts and national divisions that emerge from the reactionary policies of the Chinese regime. It has relied ever more on fomenting Han Chinese nationalism since restoring capitalism in China over the course of the 1980s. It has also resorted to discrimination and outright repression of ethnic minorities like the Uighurs in Xinjiang, which like other inland regions of Chine faces high unemployment and low wages.
There have been escalating ethnic riots in Xinjiang between Han and Uighur people, and Beijing has begun banning beards and Muslim veils, provoking discontent among Uighurs and particularly among the large number of unemployed university graduates. Numerous reports indicate that thousands of Uighurs have travelled to the Middle East to join Islamist militias fighting as NATO proxies in the war for regime change in Syria.
The response of Washington and its allies to this state of affairs is utterly reactionary. They are seeking to exploit the discrimination and oppression faced by the Uighurs to stimulate ethnic-nationalism and divide the working class along ethnic lines, promoting various right-wing bourgeois nationalist groups that they directly control. After orchestrating wars for regime change in Libya and Syria relying on Islamists as proxies, US imperialism and its allies are debating whether to employ similar methods against China.
Many of the organisations at the conference, such as the TCHRD, IFC, and the Uyghur American Association, are assets of US imperialism, directly funded by the US-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The NED finances as many as 22 organisations in Tibet, including the TCHRD, which receives some $60,000 per year from Washington. Its stated mission is to monitor, document and highlight political repression and human rights violations in Tibet.
The NED is also involved in funding groups that claim to represent the mainly Muslim Uyghur ethnic minority to the north-western Chinese region of Xinjiang. The US-based Uyghur American Association and the Munich-based World Uyghur Congress (WUC) groups are funded by the NED to the tune of $295,000 and $260,000, respectively. The WUC is headed by US-based multimillionaire businesswoman Rebiya Kadeer.
Initiatives for China (IFC) receives as much as $86,500 per year from the NED. It was founded by Tiananmen Square activist and exiled Chinese dissident Yang Jianli, who completed his Doctorate in Political Economy at Harvard University.
Jianli was arrested by the Beijing regime and sentenced to five years imprisonment on espionage charges. With the support of a UN Resolution and a unanimous vote of both houses of the US Congress, Jianli was released in 2007. He advocates a transition to “democracy” in China and US leadership of the struggle for “peaceful democratic reform.”
Under the guise of defending the universal right to freedom of religion, the United States Commission of International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) coordinates closely with Chinese dissidents groups. USCIRF is a bipartisan commission of the US federal government, tasked with making policy recommendations to the President, the Secretary of State, and Congress. USCIRF senior representative Katrina Lantos Swett, who founded the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice in 2008, attended the Dharamsala conference.
Direct US financing and supporting of Chinese dissidents against Beijing is a reckless strategy that is escalating diplomatic tensions and threatens to provoke a war between nuclear-armed powers.
Beijing has made clear that it could react violently to overt encouragement by the major powers of separatism in China. At the 2005 National People’s Congress (NPC), the regime passed an “anti-secession law” pledging to go to war in response to a Taiwanese declaration of independence, which it fears could be the signal for the broader promotion of separatism in China.
Before the conference took place, a diplomatic row erupted between China and India over New Delhi’s decision to grant a visa to exiled Uyghur leader Dolkun Isa of the WUC. Although Indian authorities canceled the visa it had granted to Isa after protests from Beijing, provoking harsh criticisms in the Indian media, India offered tourist visas to other Chinese dissidents, including Ilshat Hassan, to attend the conference in Dharamsala.
As the US “pivot to Asia” inflames tensions between the major Asian powers, the attitude of the Indian bourgeoisie towards China is increasingly hostile, as well.
On May 1, the Times of India wrote, “One only need to observe the carefully calibrated yet unmistakably hostile Chinese strategic pursuits vis-a-vis India—be it the CPEC (China-Pakistan Economic Corridor passing through territories historically claimed by India), the OBOR (One Belt One Road Initiative), or the String of Pearls in the Indian Ocean—to understand that if India fails to stand up to the Chinese now, while it still can, it may forever surrender the possibility of resisting Chinese arm-twisting in the future.”

US intelligence agencies expand electronic surveillance worldwide

Thomas Gaist

The US National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency approximately doubled their surveillance of telephone and electronic communications in 2015, according to documents released in a US government “transparency report” this week.
US intelligence analysts carried out some 25,000 analytical searches of archived communications data derived from the NSA’s sweeping data collection programs last year, including nearly 5,000 searches of data collected from communications by US citizens.
The figure represents a more than twofold increase over 2013, which saw the agencies conduct 9,500 searches of the surveillance database.
Neither the NSA nor CIA is, in theory, authorized to conduct domestic spying operations. Nonetheless, the CIA searched some 2,000 US communications, while the NSA searched nearly 200.
No statistics are provided covering surveillance database searches by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The documents do reveal, however, that the FBI issued nearly 50,000 national security letters (NSLs), special memos used by the security apparatus to demand access to contents of private communications from providers in 2015, according to the transparency report.
The NSLs are binding and compel the recipient to maintain total secrecy about the government’s demands for information.
The surge in US government surveillance activity has been accompanied by a legal and political offensive, spearheaded by the Obama administration and the military-intelligence bureaucracy, aimed at further eroding the democratic protections enshrined in Bill of Rights.
As a FISA court judge noted in a secret opinion declassified this week, the military-intelligence apparatus is pushing for statutory changes that “would allow the NSA and CIA to deviate from any restrictions based upon unspecified ‘mandates.’”
The secret FISA order declassified Tuesday, dated November 6, 2015 states: “The FBI, NSA, and CIA all have access to ‘raw,’ or unminimized, information under Section 702
“The NSA and CIA Minimization Procedures included as part of the July 15, 2015 Submission each contain new language stating that ‘nothing in these procedures shall prohibit the retention, processing, or dissemination of information.’”
NSA and CIA are authorized to surveil and analyze any data considered “reasonably necessary” to carry out the agencies’ “legislative mandate,” the document states.
The latest exposures of the US government’s mass spying operations come just days after the US Supreme Court approved changes to an obscure statute, known as Rule 41 of the Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure, which covers the application of the Fourth Amendment to electronic spying by federal agents.
The changes to Rule 41 grant US government operatives essentially limitless authority to hack into, surveil and implant malware into computers and networks anywhere in the world.
According to a letter by Google law enforcement head Richard Salgado, the changes enable “various forms of hacking,” known in the technical jargon as “remote search techniques,” which are essentially hi-tech trojan horse programs that allow agents to manipulate, search, and extract data from infected machines.
Malware-based surveillance is “more invasive than other searches because they often have unknown, widespread and destructive consequences,” Salgado said.
While the rule previously held that state operatives must acquire a specific warrant authorizing a search of clearly defined contents on a given machine, new language allows investigators to deploy surveillance and hacking technology against as many machines and search as many contents as they deem necessary for a given investigation, all on the basis of a single warrant by a single district judge.
The changes state: “A magistrate judge, with authority in any district where activities related to a crime may have occurred, has authority to issue a warrant to use remote access to search electronic storage media, and to seize or copy electronically stored information located within or outside that district.”
“The amendment would eliminate the burden of attempting to secure multiple warrants in numerous districts and allow a single judge to oversee the investigation,” the new language states.
"We could definitely see the government go forum-shopping for judges. The bigger question here is should the government be engaged in hacking at all, and, if so, what should the rules of the road be? That's something Congress should decide,” said Robyn Greene of New America’s Open Technology Institute.
The Rule 41 changes were proposed in May 2015 by the Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure and given final approval by a panel of officials and experts, including the high court, last week.
US Senator Ron Wyden, who recently warned that the new statute is “not just a garden-variety federal rule change,” and that “we’re talking about mass hacks,” has called for Congress to review the hacking rules.
Wyden is one of a group of leading congressmen who have become vocal advocates on behalf of “surveillance reform,” in an effort to appease popular opposition to spying that erupted after the Snowden revelations broke in June 2013, while directing it into safe channels..
In similarly demagogic remarks, Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York recently warned an audience that the NSA is spying on them out of city billboards.
“New spying billboards are being installed across the country, including right here in New York City, and they are being used to collect your mobile-phone data,” Schumer told an audience in Times Square. “They have huge amounts of information on you. Who knows what they could use it for? It’s something straight out of a scary movie,” Schumer said.
Despite his posture of opposition to the spying, however, Schumer made clear that he fully accepts the spying operations.
“We have to move a little bit on the liberty side,” he said. “The wholesale elimination of the [NSA surveillance] program, I think, leaves us too naked in terms of security, and you’ve got to have security as well as liberty.”
The claim that mass spying is necessary to protect Americans’ liberty against “Islamic extremism,” propagated by the state and media establishment and parroted dutifully by liberal and libertarian advocates of surveillance reform alike, is a lie.
The universal acceptance of this lie by the leading promoters of surveillance reform makes clear that the “reform” agenda is little more than a dog-and-pony show, orchestrated by the Obama administration and members of both parties, aimed at restoring a facade of legitimacy to spy programs that have been utterly discredited in the eyes of millions since 2013.
More than a century of historical experience shows that spying on communications by the capitalist state is aimed, above all, at identifying, profiling, and monitoring groups and individuals considered by the state to be threats to the bourgeois order.
The most powerful agencies of the US government are working overtime to assemble dossiers on the views and relations of a population that is becoming increasingly radicalized politically in response to the capitalist crisis.

Turkish Prime Minister Davutoglu resigns amid mounting government crisis

Halil Celik

Turkish prime minister Ahmet Davutoglu suddenly announced on Wednesday his decision to step down as chairman of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and therefore as prime minister. At a press conference, following the meeting of the Central Executive Board of his party, Davutoglu said that the AKP would organise an extraordinary congress to elect his successor.
The resignation is a reflection of deep conflicts within the state, in the midst of Turkish involvement in the Syria civil war and growing tension with Russia, as well as a renewed, bloody civil war with its own Kurdish minority.
Davutoglu resigned after fistfights repeatedly erupted inside the parliament over Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s moves to crush the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP). Last week, and again on Monday, AKP and HDP deputies fought each other in the General Assembly, as the AKP threatens to lift HDP deputies’ parliamentary immunity to allow their trial on terrorism charges.
A barely veiled conflict between between Davutoglu and Erdogan had been growing in the days before Davutoglu’s resignation. On April 29, the AKP’s central executive committee, stacked with Erdogan loyalists, voted to deprive Davutoglu of his right as AKP chairman to appoint regional party officials. Before an emergency meeting with Davutoglu on Wednesday, Erdogan bluntly and publicly told him, “You should not forget how you got your post.”
After the April 29 meeting, there was media speculation over Davutoglu’s political future. Rumours were spread that Erdogan would replace Davutoglu with someone like Transport Minister Binali Yildirim, his close ally, or Energy Minister Berat Albayrak, his son-in-law.
Erdogan blandly dismissed Davutoglu’s resignation, stating that “it is the prime minister’s own decision.” However, Davutoglu made clear it was his response to deep divisions in the AKP.
“I have never negotiated for any post or position over the values and principles I have,” he said, stating that he was angered by the decision to strip him of his powers as party chairman. He added, “As a result of my own examination and consultations with my friends with political experience, including our president, I have come to the conclusion that instead of changing colleagues, it’s much better to change the party chair for the unity of the AKP. … [T]he fate of the AKP is the fate of Turkey.”
Calling for loyalty to Erdogan, Davutoglu cryptically added, “No one should dare to initiate new plots.”
With Davutoglu’s resignation, explosive conflicts inside the Turkish government and bourgeoisie are coming to the surface.
A former foreign minister, Davutoglu is well aware that Turkey has suffered a heavy blow as Erdogan’s policies have simultaneously undermined Ankara’s relations with the United States, the European Union (EU) and Russia. The AKP has also overseen unprecedented social inequality, poverty and unemployment. Nearly half of the Turkish population lives below the poverty line, while a tiny elite appropriates a vast and growing amount of wealth.
Though he was always careful not to criticise Erdogan publicly, Davutoglu has distanced himself from the president on many controversial issues. These include Erdogan’s attempt to concentrate power in his hands by building a “presidential system” and repressive measures against the press, such as pre-trial detention of journalists.
The rift between Erdogan and Davutoglu in the Islamist AKP marks a new stage of the AKP regime’s disintegration, faced with the political aftershocks of the revolutionary upsurge in Egypt in 2011 and the ongoing war launched by NATO that year in Syria. After some initial hesitation, the AKP joined the NATO war drive. The 2013 coup that toppled an Islamist-led regime in Egypt, led by President Mohamed Mursi, came amid the June 2013 protests in Istanbul’s Gezi Park—both of which threatened the AKP government.
Since then, Erdogan has carried out an ever more bellicose policy, both internationally and inside Turkey. He stoked a civil war against Turkey’s Kurdish minority and nearly provoked war with Russia when, with US backing, Turkey shot down a Russian fighter plane over Syria last November. It is increasingly obvious that with his calls for a “presidential” system, Erdogan is trying to deal with insoluble political contradictions by imposing an authoritarian regime.
The AKP is pushing to remove the immunity of 129 deputies, nearly a quarter of the total number, through a constitutional amendment, as the destruction and loss of life in ethnic Kurdish cities continue to rise.
On Tuesday, May 3, the Turkish parliament’s constitutional commission embraced an AKP proposal to add a temporary clause to the Turkish constitution lifting the deputies’ immunity. The proposal was approved with the support of the Kemalist Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), while the HDP voted against it.
During the session of the commission, AKP deputies physically assaulted HDP MPs, who denounced the commission’s decision as a “coup.” After the physical attack against them, the HDP officials decided to withdraw from the commission.
Speaking at his party’s weekly group meeting that same day, HDP Co-President Selahattin DemirtaÅŸ stated that they would discuss other alternatives if HDP parliamentarians were arrested and prosecuted. He said that “citizens…could form multiple parliaments if they wanted.” He called for support to the HDP and invited the CHP to join them in opposing the AKP.
After supporting the AKP’s so-called peace process with the Kurds, the HDP has faced repeated denunciations by Erdogan and Davutoglu for supporting a “terrorist organisation,” that is, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Ankara’s attitude to the “Kurdish question” shifted radically over the course of the Syrian war, as a Russian intervention devastated AKP-backed Islamist forces, and the US and European imperialists embraced Kurdish forces led by the PKK’s Syrian offshoot as a new proxy in Iraq and Syria.
Davutoglu has supported the AKP’s brutal and aggressive policies both in Syria and inside Turkey. He recently denounced calls for autonomy in the mainly Kurdish-populated southeast of Turkey, saying that deputies cannot be forgiven “for hiding behind the shield of [parliamentary] immunity” if they support terrorism. He also reportedly played a crucial role in negotiating the filthy deal with the EU in which Turkey agreed to prevent refugees from fleeing Syria to Europe.
It is Erdogan, however, who emerged as the main instigator of attacks on press freedom and of the witch-hunt against the HDP. While he was earlier the initiator of the so-called peace process with the PKK, the Turkish president, in a close alliance with the army and the MHP, frequently accuses HDP deputies of being extensions of the PKK and has demanded that judiciary bodies prosecute them.
Davutoglu’s departure and the ongoing attacks on Kurdish nationalists plunge not only Turkey into political uncertainty, but also its imperialist patrons, who rely on Turkey as a useful ally for their war plans in the Middle East and for imprisoning millions of refugees trying to flee the region.
“Davutoglu has been the cooperative, Western-oriented face of the government, particularly important in pushing through the refugees deal with the EU,” foreign policy consultant Ian Bremmer told UK Business Insider. “It’s going to be a dangerous time to be in the opposition.”
Soner Cagaptay of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy said that if Erdogan continued to consolidate his power, “it will render the country so brittle politically that when Erdogan leaves office one day, there will be nearly no institutions left standing to keep the country together.”

UK elections intensify crisis in Labour Party

Chris Marsden

The most notable feature of Thursday’s round of elections in the UK is the obvious disappointment of many of Labour’s leading representatives that the party did not perform worse than it did. This was an extraordinary contest, with large swathes of the parliamentary Labour Party not merely predicting a disaster, but actively working for one.
In the run-up to the elections for London mayor, the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly and local councils, Labour’s right wing colluded with the Conservatives and Zionist groups to portray their own party as a hotbed of anti-Semitism, engineering numerous expulsions and suspensions, including that of former London mayor Ken Livingstone.
The message delivered at every opportunity was that Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was responsible for discrediting the party, because anti-Semitism was the inevitable product of hostility to Israel’s battle for “self-determination” and its war against the Palestinians, which was tantamount to “cuddling up” to “Muslim extremists.” This, the right-wing Blairites declared, was just one more expression of how Corbyn’s supposed “left-wing” agenda was consigning Labour to electoral oblivion, in part because “good” Labourites were being saddled with the unwanted image of a “tax and spend” party.
In the event, Labour’s performance was poor, but not disastrous on the scale they had hoped would pave the way for an immediate party leadership challenge. As opposed to predictions of losses of 100, 150, even 200 seats, Labour basically held its share of the vote in local elections and even increased it by 1 percent. It held a number of key swing councils, including Crawley, Harlow, Southampton, Nuneaton and Redditch, but lost Dudley.
In the Welsh Assembly elections, Labour secured 29 seats, just short of a majority, having lost votes and one of its heartland valley seats, Rhondda, to Leanne Wood, leader of Plaid Cymru (Party of Wales). The UK Independence Party (UKIP) won its first seats in the assembly, a total of seven.
Corbyn’s opponents were forced to focus on Labour’s worst performance, in Scotland, where the Scottish National Party (SNP) maintained their electoral grip on the Scottish parliament in Holyrood. Although the SNP lost its outright majority in the 129-seat parliament and received a smaller vote, with 63 seats it remains by far the largest party. Labour won only 24 seats, a loss of 13, coming third behind the Conservatives, with 31.
Labour’s share of the vote in the constituencies fell a further 9.2 percent from its 2011 position. Recently elected Labour leader, Kezia Dugdale, lost her Holyrood constituency seat, only returning as a member of the Scottish parliament on the regional lists. Labour is in danger of losing control of its remaining local authorities. Since the 1950s until recently, Labour was the dominant party in Scotland.
Tactical voting against the nationalists enabled the Conservatives to become the largest opposition party in the Scottish Parliament. Under Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson, who distanced herself completely from the Conservative government at Westminster, the party increased its share of the constituency vote by 8.1 percent and doubled its seat tally, largely by portraying itself as a defender of union with the UK.
Political responsibility for this rests with the pseudo-left groups, which have systematically promoted Scottish independence as a supposedly progressive response to Conservative rule and the rightward shift of the Labour Party. The result of this injection of nationalist poison has been to push large numbers of workers into the clutches of the SNP, which has been given the undeserved gloss of a party of the “left,” and create the conditions for a Tory revival north of the English border.
Dugdale has consistently identified herself as an opponent of Corbyn and lined up with the right-wing attack on Livingstone. She is now indicating sympathy for home rule for Scotland.
Following the vote, Ian Murray, Labour’s shadow Scotland secretary, told the BBC, “I don’t think that the public see the UK Labour party led by Jeremy Corbyn at the moment as being a credible party of future government in 2020. That’s something, after this week’s results, we should reflect on, the leadership of the party should reflect on…”
In the end, the single most important event of the day was Labour’s win in the London mayoral election. Sadiq Khan, a human rights lawyer, has become the first Muslim mayor of a major Western city.
Khan received 1,310,143 votes after second preferences were taken into account, besting the Conservative Party’s Zac Goldsmith, who received 994,614 votes, by a margin of 13.6 percent. Labour also took the majority of seats in the London Assembly, giving the party control of the capital after eight years of Tory rule.
Khan, who stands on the party’s right wing, convincingly defeated his Tory opponent Goldsmith, who ran a filthy racist campaign with the active support of the Conservative national leadership. The Tories sent leaflets accusing Khan of being a supporter of Muslim extremists to Hindu, Sikh and Tamil voters and warned that Labour would tax the gold jewellery of Indian families. Home Secretary Theresa May said Khan was unfit to run London at a time when there was “a significant threat of terrorism,” while former London mayor Boris Johnson accused him of “pandering to the extremists,” referring to both Muslims and the Labour Party.
Goldsmith, whose declared wealth is £281 million, hoped to benefit from accusations that Labour is anti-Semitic.
The results of the elections are nevertheless an indictment of Corbyn, though not in the terms laid out by his right-wing opponents.
In its first national electoral test since Corbyn became leader, Labour has once again demonstrated that it is an unreformable right-wing party of big business, while he has proved to be a man without principles or a political future. To the extent that he is relied on to lead a fight-back, this only inhibits the emergence in the working class of a politically independent socialist opposition to the Tory government.
Labour was in a position to inflict major defeats on the Tories in the midst of the greatest assault on workers’ living standards in the post-World War II period by a widely hated government. It did not do so because Corbyn has backtracked on every one of the promises he made in his campaign for the party leadership, whether on opposing austerity or standing against militarism and war. This reached a new low with his agreement to suspend large numbers of his own supporters in the ongoing anti-Semitism witch-hunt.
Following their attempt to sabotage the elections, the only thought of the party’s right wing will be how best to pursue the campaign to remove Corbyn. In contrast, Corbyn’s main ally, Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, was quick to offer an olive branch, pleading to the right wing, “Look, get behind us and stop carping, there’s room for everyone in this Labour party. Everyone can make a constructive contribution.”

5 May 2016

America’s Biggest Of All Big Lies

Eric Zuesse

On April 26th, Reuters headlined from Romania, “‘We’re Not Here to Provoke,’ Say U.S. Pilots on Putin’s Doorstep”, and gave as an example: “‘We're not here to provoke anybody, we're here to work with our allies,’ says Dan Barina, a 26-year-old pilot on his first trip to a region where tensions have risen markedly since Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Romania's neighbor Ukraine two years ago.”
How can it not be ‘provoking', when Russia now faces a threat from Obama and America's NATO alliance, that’s vastly worse than what America had faced from the Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev and the USSR’s Warsaw Pact alliance in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis? That was just one missile-base, 90 miles from the U.S. — not dozens of them, some right on Russia’s border. Are those American pilots idiots to believe their superiors’ absurd statements about what their mission is, or is insanity the explanation here — or, is there even some third explanation possible for this oblivious statement from the American pilot? Perhaps those soldiers and airmen are simply drowning in (or drunk with) U.S. propaganda? They really believe that Russia is moving too close to NATO, not that NATO has already moved too close to Russia? Really? The Reuters report said that NATO countries were doing this to protect themselves from “an increasingly aggressive Russia.” Wow. But that’s the line promoted by U.S. President Barack Obama. And he’s accepted as a decent person not only by the millions of voters in his own Democratic Party (though not in the Republican Party, which blames him for everything except the truth: that he is governing so far to the right that they have to concoct false ‘leftist’ reasons to criticize him); but, he’s also respected even by the publics in Europe, where they suffer the flood of refugees from the invasions he leads. After all: one must never underestimate the power of propaganda, to warp the public’s minds.
On February 2nd, the U.S. ‘Defense’ Secretary, Russia-hater Ashton Carter, announced — and the equally Russia-hating NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg welcomed and endorsed — America’s quadrupling of its troops and weapons on and near Russia’s northwestern borders; and America’s pilot Dan Barina is part of this extremely hostile action, by the U.S. and NATO, against the people in Russia.
Russia is now surrounded, on and near its borders, by numerous U.S. nuclear weapons — weapons and troops that are as close to St. Petersburg and Moscow as they can possibly get without actually invading Russia.
In 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev dissolved the USSR and ended its Warsaw Pact, upon a promise from the regime of U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush to the then-Soviet (soon-to-become merely Russian) leader, that NATO would move “not one inch to the east” — a promise which the American President told his people in private was actually a lie, but which they, and all subsequent U.S. Presidents, have accepted as Western policy founded on that lie, by expanding NATO not merely “one inch to the east,” but right up to Russia’s very borders. That’s what this February 2nd policy by U.S. President Barack Obama and his NATO stooges is bringing substantially closer to culmination.
How can this not be “provocative”? What type of idiot can believe his superiors when they say “We’re not here to provoke anybody”? Of course, it’s not to “provoke” Russians: it’s to downright terrify them. They’d have to be crazy not to be terrified, at being increasingly surrounded by these WMD, from what is increasingly clearly their enemy.
This big lie, that what America is doing there is ‘defensive’, is stanched up by other, lesser, lies, such as Obama’s lie that the reason why he’s expanding America’s Strategic Defense Initiative (anti-ballistic missile, or ‘star wars’) system, in Europe, has been to protect Europe from Iranian nuclear missiles. Iran never had nuclear weapons, and Obama reached an agreement with Iran that will for decades prevent Iran from having them, but he still expands the SDI system right up to Russia’s borders, as ‘protection against Iran’. The people who protest against Obama’s lies are then marginalized as mere kooks, which is the way to get idiots to ignore even the most barefaced facts (such as Western terrorization of the Russian population), because only idiots can continue to believe such liars as the Obama regime, when their lies are so obvious as this. These protests against Obama and NATO and all of Western aggression, aren’t coming from America’s Republicans or other right-wingers: the smearing of these protesters with that broad-brush taint can be believed only by idiots — people who are willingly suckers, suckers notwithstanding the blatancy with which the facts run against the lies they swallow.
From the very get-go, in 1983 — when the Republican U.S. President, Ronald Reagan (with the active support of Ashton Carter at MIT), started the SDI project, under the lie that disabling a combatant’s retaliatory ability isn’t profoundly aggressive against that opponent (basically checkmating him) — the SDI concept was aimed at achieving an invasion of the Soviet Union which couldn’t be effectively countered; it was aimed ultimately at replacing the balance-of-power system of “Mutually Assured Destruction” (MAD), by a gross imbalance of power that would enable conquest of the opponent; it would enable a blitz-attack against the Soviet Union, an attack which wouldn’t be able effectively to be responded to via a counter-attack; it would enable an attack which would pre-emptively disable that response to it. In other words: it’s all a con, a lie, to say that SDI is ‘purely a defensive measure’. It can be the most decisive aggressive measure, the only way that’s even conceivable to ‘win’ a nuclear war (as some of the West’s aristocrats think can be done).
Wikipedia notes about Ashton Carter: “Carter was a supporter of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, as well as an advocate of preventive wars against North Korea and Iran.[43][44][45] In response to increase in tension in Ukraine, Carter considered proposing deployment of ground-launched cruise missiles in Europe that could pre-emptively destroy Russian weapons.” That’s a “hawkish” background just as Hillary Clinton’s is, virtually indistinguishable from that of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney; and yet, Barack Obama, when he was starting his political career in a region where the opposition to invading Iraq was strong, Obama claimed that he opposed invading Iraq. Yet, somehow, once he was finally inside the White House, suddenly the people he was surrounding himself with were Wall-Street-backed individuals who had supported invading Iraq (and any other country whose leader was friendly toward Russia). He did to Libya, Ukraine, and Syria, what George W. Bush did to Iraq. If that’s not fraudulent ‘democracy’, then what is? The public had been given no indication they would be getting, with Barack Obama, merely a more-articulate version of George W. Bush.
America has been lying not only regarding its aggressive designs against the Soviet Union, but (and this is far more heinous) — afterward, when the supposed ‘ideological’ reason for the Cold War had ended — it is lying even more blatantly in its ‘justifications’ for its (and NATO’s) anti-Russia policies despite communism having ended and the Soviet Union (and its Warsaw Pact) disbanded.
How much longer will the aristocracy that control the U.S. Government be able to get away with such obvious lies, such continuation and even escalation of the “Cold War” after its very raison d’etre (anti-communism) is long-since gone? If it turns out to be too long, then only a matter of time will pass before those buttons get pushed and those nuclear weapons are released, to destroy the world. Horrific as those weapons are, they are built, and manned, to be used. If this seems unimaginable, then the question has to be this: Is it as unimaginable as is the manifested-existing evilness of America’s aristocracy (such as Barack Obama, Ashton Carter, George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, George Soros, the Koch brothers, etc.) and of the aristocracies (in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere) that are allied with it?
And, the use of ‘Crimea’ as an excuse for this restoration of the “Cold War” (which is already a hot war in Ukraine, Syria, and other lands, where the U.S. sees fit to replace leaders that ally with Russia), is just as bogus as is the use of ‘Iranian nuclear weapons’ as an excuse for installing SDI. Any aristocracy that needs to lie so blatantly in order to continue along such a catastrophic path as this, needs to be defeated, instead of to be believed and obeyed. They might as well be Satan. Except that, unfortunately, they’re not mythological — which makes all the difference: this demon is all-too-real.
Here are some news reports from perhaps the world’s best living investigative reporter, Christof Lehmann, who has provided shocking details about how vile this global-aristocratic operation is, regarding Syria — entailing not only the U.S. aristocracy, but the European ones, and the Arabic ones, the entire rotten-through-and-through “Western alliance” (an alliance of aristocracies who can be satisfied with nothing less than their collective global conquest).
The first report, on 2 May 2013, titled “EU Lifts Oil Embargo on Syria – Buys Directly from Al Qaeda”, summarizes the key facts that Western media had already reported (prior to their being virtually banned from reporting these things in the West), things such as that 27 of the 28 EU nations had already decided in April 2013 to purchase oil stolen from Syria by “the Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda linked rebel group,” in order to assist the Saudi and Qatari royals in financing “the moderate opposition forces” (such as Al Qaeda — the group that had perpetrated 9/11 and other terrorist attacks against Western populations; and, even Seymour Hersh reported, on 4 April 2014, that Obama and U.S. allies were supplying weapons to al-Nusra) to defeat the Syrian army of Bashar al-Assad. (Assad is Shiite but secular, the opposite of fundamentalist Sunni Islamic, which is the jihadism that the Sauds and their fellow-Arab royals are devoted to; and Assad is furthermore allied with those Arab-royals’ chief oil-and-gas competitor, Russia; so, Western aristocracies help these Sunni jihadists who are being sent into Syria to overthrow Assad.)
The second in the series, on 8 August 2013, was titled “EU/US Al-Qaeda Massacres on Kurds for Oil and Secession.” It opened with this summary:
In April 2013, the European Union lifted its embargo on the import of oil from “rebel held” Syrian territories. The import [of oil] is primarily to come from the predominantly Kurdish region of Syria. In July and August 2013, confirmed and unconfirmed reports about massacres of Kurds, committed by western-backed, Al-Qaeda associated insurgents, increase simultaneously with an influx of insurgents [jihadists] from western countries. An estimated 17,000 fighters from the Kurdish Workers´ Party, PKK have deployed from Turkey to the region near Irkuk, in the Kurdish Administrated Region of Iraq. The function of the EU/US strategy – massacres [of Syria’s civilian population] for oil, to finance mercenaries [those jihadist groups that are pouring into Syria to eliminate Assad], and to create a demand for secession among Syrian Kurds, over perceived security concerns.
The third in the series, on 22 June 2014, was titled, “U.S. Embassy in Ankara Headquarter for ISIS War on Iraq – Hariri Insider”, and it opened:
The green light for the use of ISIS brigades to carve up Iraq, widen the Syria conflict into a greater Middle East war and to throw Iran off-balance, was given behind closed doors at the Atlantic Council meeting in Turkey, in November 2013, told a source close to Saudi-Lebanese billionaire Saad Hariri, adding that the U.S. Embassy in Ankara is the operation’s headquarters.
A “trusted source” close to the Saudi-Lebanese multi-billionaire and former Lebanese P.M. Saad Hariri told, on condition of anonymity, that the final green light for the war on Iraq with ISIS or ISIL brigades was given behind closed doors, at the sidelines of the Atlantic Council’s Energy Summit in Istanbul, Turkey, on November 22-23, 2013. …
“Certain circles in Washington put a hell of a lot of pressure on Obama to put a gun to al-Maliki’s head”, said the Hariri source, adding that “time was running out and Obama was hesitant.” Asked what he meant with “time was running out” and if he could specify who it was that pushed Obama, he said: …“Who exactly pressured Obama? I don’t know who delivered the message to Obama.” …
The summit was, among others, attended by Turkey’s President Abdullah Gül, U.S. Energy Secretary Ernst Monitz, Atlantic Council President Frederick Kempe, former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, former U.S. National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft [and others]. … Noting that a prominent member of Saudi Arabia’s royal family, Prince Abdul Rachman al-Faisal has been named as the one being “in command” of the ISIS brigades, and if he could either confirm or deny, he nodded, adding that “the Prince” is responsible for financing the operation and for part of the command structure, but that the operations headquarters is the U.S. Embassy in Ankara Turkey.
The fourth in this series, on 7 October 2013, was titled, “Top US and Saudi Officials responsible for Chemical Weapons in Syria”, and it’s so good, it simply must be read (just click onto that link). This report documented that Obama’s accusation that Assad had been responsible for the August 2013 sarin attack in Syria is a lie, and that Obama and his allies are the actual people who were behind that sarin attack. It opened: “Evidence leads directly to the White House, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey, CIA Director John Brennan, Saudi Intelligence Chief Prince Bandar, and Saudi Arabia´s Interior Ministry.” It described the scheme, by the White House, plus Saudi King Salman, plus Turkey’s President Erdogan, plus Qatar’s Emir Thani, to run sarin-precursor chemicals from Muammar Gaddafi’s stockpiles through Turkey into Syria, to be turned there into sarin, so that the 21 August 2013 gassing in Ghouta Syria resulted, and it was blamed, by these liars, against Assad, so that it could be used by U.S. President Obama as the excuse to do to Assad what Obama and his allies had already done to Gaddafi.
There were many subsequent news-reports, by Seymour Hersh and others, which documented different aspects of this operation, but none gave a fuller picture of it than did the original, by Christof Lehmann.
By no coincidence, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, and Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych, all were leaders who had been friendly toward Russia’s Vladimir Putin. The idea among the Western aristocracies is to eliminate all of Putin’s foreign allies, and then (once he has no foreign allies remaining) to get rid of Putin himself, because Putin refuses to buckle to Western control.
As regards jihadist groups such as Al Qaeda and even ISIS: though they’re of big concern to Western publics, Western aristocrats are far more concerned to conquer Russia. Their foreign policies display this top priority of theirs. To these aristocrats, jihadists are just a side-show. The main event is Russia. The end of communism, and of the USSR, and of the Warsaw Pact, don’t really make any difference to them. They want the land, and its resources. They don’t care about the people on it — anywhere. Just nuke ’em, maybe? It’s a messy job, but it’s the type of job for people such as Dan Barina. Western taxpayers pay their salaries, but the people who control what they do are the Western aristocrats.
Thus, for example, Obama’s National Security Strategy 2015 uses the term “aggression” 18 times, and 17 of them refer to Russia; none of them refer to Al Qaeda, nor to ISIS (which he calls instead “ISIL,” because that’s the English-language version of “DAESH,” the name that the royal Sauds give to the organization), nor to the Sauds and the other Arabic royal families, who finance jihadist groups. (Their only demand upon them is to avoid perpetrating their terrorism within their own countries — to do it only abroad.) However, if the West’s enemies are their own aristocracies, which control both their government and their ’news’ media, then it makes sense that their propaganda will blame Russia and its allies (i.e.: blame the countries the West’s aristocrats want to conquer), for everything they can concoct to blame them. Where the public’s main enemy is in charge, it’s natural for that enemy’s chief foreign enemy to be blamed by the government and the ‘news’ media, so as to get one enemy of the aristocrats (their own public) fearful of the aristocrats’ other enemy (the foreign aristocracy they want to defeat). “Let’s have you and him fight it out.”
Western governments have been heisted by Western aristocrats. This is what has become of “Western ‘democracy’” — and not only of Western kings and princes such as reign in the Arabic countries. They’re all actually tyrannies, even the ones (such as Obama) who speak pretty phrases — who lie right and left about why they are doing what they are doing.
The entire U.S. alliance — all of the aristocracies that comprise it — are rotten to the core. Millions of refugees have poured into Europe, and the publics in Europe are outraged, but the people who are behind it all are their own nation’s leadership (both elected and unelected), who support or even participate in American invasions and coups — not those refugees, from the mass-murder and chaos those Western leaders had caused, in Iraq, in Libya, in Ukraine, in Syria, and elsewhere. The publics in the West take the terrorist attacks and other blows, while their government and media blame Russia and its allied countries such as the BRICS, though the real villains are their own national leadership, and the leadership of “the Western alliance” — the invasion-alliance.
The sickness, that’s destroying the world, emanates from Washington and Riyadh, not from Moscow and Beijing. The proper name for it is “conquest.” This is not the way authentic democracy functions. Feudalism used to function this way. Fascism now does. And now, the biggest of all its Big Lies is that it’s all being done in order to “promote world peace and security.” It’s like in George Orwell’s allegorical novel, 1984.
The real enemy lies within, where it reigns, even in the outlying aristocracies. It calls itself “the Western alliance.” It’s not only responsible for the invasions that are increasingly a curse upon the world; it (via the “Collective Defense” provision of the NATO portion of it) constitutes the hair-trigger for global nuclear annihilation.
Either NATO will end, or the world as we’ve always known and wanted to live in it, will. It’s one or the other. George Herbert Walker Bush left us this curse upon the world, and the challenge now is to end NATO now, because, if it shouldn’t have ended when the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact did, then when should it end — or is it going to end only when the world-as-we’ve-known-it ends: in nuclear annihilation? If it’s not going to end in nuclear annihilation, then a global decision will have to be made, that NATO is a criminal organization, which must be ended now.
The result of that would be a better and a safer world, for everybody. Aristocratic dreams of world-conquest have already reached beyond the danger-point, to the alarm-bell. If the solution is not now, it will be the final solution for everybody. The dreams of Obama and many others in the U.S. aristocracy, for “Prompt Global Strike” and “The Rise of US Nuclear Primacy”, are a mythical solution that will actually lead inevitably to such a final solution — not only for Russians, but for everyone.
Peter S. Rieth, at East-West Accord, headlined on April 28th, “Are Poland’s Elites Itching for War with Russia?” and he documented that they are, and that their hatred of Russians goes back at least to when “Poland invaded Kiev in 1919.” He vaguely urges the Obama Administration to withdraw its thousands of new troops and new weapons from Poland, because, “The United States fails to recognize that although it will presumably retain command over any American troops eventually stationed in Poland, it will be helpless in the face of Polish impetuosity.” But his statement is ambiguous, weak, and even evasive: the actual reason that (as he only implicitly acknowledges) the Polish aristocracy’s “impetuosity” could produce World War III, is that both Poland and the U.S. have signed the NATO Treaty with its mutual-defense Article Five saying, in effect, that whenever one member-nation claims to have been attacked by Russia, the U.S. will launch its nuclear weapons against Russia. The only rational opinion of such a commentary as that, is: Cut it out! The reality is: End NATO now!! NATO after 1991 is a criminal organization, the biggest threat to the entire world; and, such pusillanimous commentaries, which don’t even point to the real hair-trigger for nuclear war, are worthless.
Nothing short of ending NATO now, will suffice. Gorbachev ended the Warsaw Pact in 1991. When will NATO end — or will the world end first?
The worst part of it is: Germany, France, and UK, haven’t yet withdrawn from NATO. Until they do, NATO will continue to be the red-hot danger it is. No rational voter in any of those countries will vote for any politician who fails to state clearly: End NATO Now! We must withdraw from NATO!!

More than a million people living in destitution in UK

Alice Summers

Around 1,252,000 people, including 312,000 children, were living in destitution at some point during 2015.
A report released last week by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) has shown that, in a typical week, there were an estimated 668,000 destitute households in the UK. According to the charity, this figure is likely an underestimation, as it is based on the number of households in contact with voluntary sector crisis services. The actual number of destitute people could be significantly higher, as those who do not make use of charitable services fall under the radar.
A person is considered destitute if he or she cannot afford the basic essentials of shelter, food, lighting and heating for the home, weather-appropriate clothing and footwear, and basic toiletries such as soap and toothpaste. Almost half of all destitute households reported a lack of four or more of these essentials in the preceding month, most commonly food and suitable clothes.
According to researchers, those experiencing destitution were generally reliant on a weekly income so low (£140 for a couple with children or £70 for a single adult, after housing costs) that they were unable to afford all of these essentials. Although shelter was often prioritised above other essentials, including food, a quarter of destitute individuals reported having slept rough on at least one night over the preceding month.
Destitution was rarely a one-off or temporary experience, but generally occurred within the context of severe poverty and hardship over a considerable period. Three-quarters of people who responded to the charity’s survey were still destitute three or four months later.
Young, single men were the group most at risk of becoming destitute. Although 79 percent of destitute people were born in the UK, migrants were disproportionately affected—in particular, those from the European Union, the Middle East and Africa. They are particularly at risk of destitution due to the increasingly stringent and chauvinistic controls on welfare benefit entitlement for migrant workers, which limit access to welfare payments such as Child Benefit, Housing Benefit and Jobseeker’s Allowance. This means that there is little in the way of a safety net for migrant workers who lose their job or are unable to find work.
Other key factors cited as pushing migrant and British workers alike from poverty into destitution include debt repayments (usually to public authorities), benefit delays and sanctions, high living costs and poorly paid jobs. Thirty percent of destitute people reported benefit sanctions as contributing to their struggle to make ends meet, with 50 percent having experienced some sort of problem with their claims.
The likelihood of having experienced benefit problems increases among destitute people with “complex needs” such as mental health conditions or drug and alcohol dependency, with 57 percent citing benefit problems as a major factor leading to their economic insecurity and material deprivation. Poor mental health was reported by the majority of those interviewed by the charity, with many interviewees making a direct link between their mental ill-health and the experience of going without essentials.
As well as suffering from mental health problems, many people living in destitution face social isolation and feel “demeaned”, “degraded” or “humiliated” because of being forced to seek help from friends, family or charitable organisations to acquire the basic necessities. Many destitute parents often went without essentials themselves in order to provide more for their children.
The geographic distribution of destitution in the UK very closely matches that of poverty in general. The worst-hit areas are mainly former industrial regions, largely in the north of England, Scotland and Wales, where successive Labour and Conservative governments have brutally dismantled manufacturing jobs for decades.
High rates of destitution are also reported in many London boroughs and some seaside towns, with much lower rates found in the more-affluent suburban and rural districts in southern England. Labour-dominated local councils in the London Borough of Newham, Glasgow and Nottingham are three of the worst-hit areas, as Labour councillors across the UK have imposed every austerity measure demanded by the Tory government.
Although the report could not demonstrate with certainty that destitution has increased recently, because of the difficulty of obtaining accurate data from previous years, this was a very plausible conclusion due to evidence documenting the sharp rise in severe poverty, food bank use, homelessness and benefit sanction rates.
Julia Unwin, chief executive of the JRF, condemned government austerity measures, stating, “It is simply unacceptable to see such levels of severe poverty in our country in the 21st century. Governments of all stripes have failed to protect people at the bottom of the income scale from the effects of severe poverty, leaving many unable to feed, clothe or house themselves and their families.”
In response to the report, a government spokesperson issued a statement filled with contemptuous falsehoods. He declared, “The truth is that relative poverty is at the lowest level since the 1980s. ... This report ignores a number of measures we’ve brought in to improve life chances, including the ‘national living wage’, the extension of free childcare to 30 hours and increases to the personal allowance.”
The “living” wage has in reality brought no noticeable relief for the majority of working families, as it is insufficient to guarantee a basic standard of living or to compensate for the £12 billion of welfare cuts announced alongside it.

Alberta wildfire forces 88,000 to evacuate Fort McMurray

Roger Jordan

The entire population of Fort McMurray, Alberta, was ordered to evacuate Tuesday afternoon after a wildfire that had been burning nearby since Sunday quickly spread and engulfed residential communities. The province declared a state of emergency late yesterday afternoon as authorities struggled to cope with the fire and tens of thousands of evacuees.
Tens of thousands have been evacuated from Fort McMurray, the center of Alberta's tar sands oil production.
The city, which is the principal service center for Alberta’s oil tar sands, has a population of some 85,000. Reports Wednesday indicated that an estimated 70,000 people had left for the south following the evacuation order, while 10,000 went north. 35,000 were expected to arrive in Edmonton, 430 kilometres (267 miles) to the south.
Scenes of chaos prevailed during the evacuation. Motorists fleeing both north and south were stranded for hours on blocked highways. Large numbers of people were seen at the roadside waiting to be rescued after running out of gas. All of the nearby accommodation facilities for tar sands workers had been filled with evacuees, as well as several newly-established emergency camps.
A blaze behind a residence
The evacuation was announced with little warning and at short notice, even though the fire had been burning in close proximity to the city for two days. The wind rapidly picked up speed early Tuesday afternoon, propelling the flames into residential areas previously thought safe. One local resident told the WSWS the scenes were “apocalyptic.”
Alberta Minister of Municipal Affairs Danielle Larivee announced the state of emergency at a press conference late yesterday. Provincial authorities requested aid from the federal government, and Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan announced that the military will be deployed to the area.
Currently, only 200 firefighters, 12 helicopters and 17 air tankers are combating the inferno, which the local fire chief described as “nasty” and “ugly.” The military has confirmed it will also send four CH-146 helicopters to the region. Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynn said her province will send 100 firefighters and 19 support staff.
The fire remained out of control throughout yesterday. At lunchtime, officials confirmed it had surpassed 10,000 hectares and that all attempts to contain it had failed. Later in the day, it threatened to engulf Fort McMurray’s airport. Officials acknowledged that the priority was making sure everyone was safe, and defending critical infrastructure, effectively accepting that further damage to residential properties is inevitable. The emergency services centre in the city was forced to evacuate to the community of Anzac, south of Fort McMurray, as the fire spread.
Reports suggest that at least 1,600 residential homes have already been destroyed in the blaze, meaning anywhere between 6,000 and 8,000 people are left homeless. Conditions for fighting the fire got even worse yesterday as winds picked up in the evening, so more damage will likely become apparent this morning. Already the damage far surpasses that of the worst wildfire catastrophe in recent times: the Slave Lake fire of May 2011, which razed a third of that northern Alberta town to the ground.
In some Fort McMurray neighbourhoods, like Beacon Hill, 80 percent of properties are reported destroyed. The fire even reached the downtown core, engulfing houses there.
Evacuees were largely left to rely on the generosity of members of the local community and the Red Cross, which intervened to provide emergency services.
Scott Long of the Alberta Emergency Management Agency admitted there was a real risk that the majority of Fort McMurray, which has seen its population more than double over the past quarter-century, would be destroyed. “Obviously we’re working towards preventing that,” said Long. “But it is a possibility that we may lose a large portion of the town, yes.”
A number of tar sands companies have cut or entirely shut down production at plants located near Fort McMurray. Shell has shut down its Albion Sands site, while Suncor Energy has cut staffing levels.
The Fort McMurray blaze is only the largest fire in a growing number burning across western Canada. Dry weather conditions over the winter and an unusually warm spring, linked to the strong El Nino weather effect, forced Alberta to declare the start of its fire season on March 1, a month earlier than usual. Eleven forest fires are currently burning in the province.
Yesterday, 300 residents of Lac Ste. Anne County, including from the Alexis First Nation, were evacuated as a wildfire threatened their homes.
In neighbouring British Columbia, authorities had to turn down a request for help from Alberta because their own resources are seriously stretched by numerous fires raging in the Peace River region in the province’s northeast. Since April 1, almost 200 fires have burned across 230 square kilometres of BC.
Two weeks ago, the Peace River Regional District declared a state of emergency, resulting in evacuation orders for the Baldonnel community, the Blueberry First Nation and parts of Fort St. John. At the time, 48 fires were burning in the area.
Predictions are that the fire season this year will be much worse than previous years, even the record year of 2015 when over 10,000 people were evacuated from communities in northern Saskatchewan and Alberta. Mike Flannigan of the University of Alberta said that the number of fires which have broken out in 2016 is double the number at the same time this year.
Under these conditions, Alberta’s provincial New Democratic Party (NDP) government took the outrageous decision last month to slash this year’s wildfire management budget by $15 million. This comes on top of moves by the previous Progressive Conservative government in March 2015 to cut funding for the Firesmart program, which clears debris and trees in proximity to residential areas to prevent the spread of fires.
The NDP’s cuts included reducing contracts for air tankers capable of spreading fire retardant and water from 123 days to just 93 days per year. This move means that as of August 16, Alberta’s contracts with the private firms responsible for operating the tankers will expire. But the fire season runs until October.
While the NDP government insists it will hire the tankers as and when required, this plan was called into question by the head of Air Spray, one of the private providers. “If we get a longer-term contract somewhere else from Aug. 16, then we’re going to go,” said Paul Lane.
The woeful lack of preparedness at all levels of government for catastrophes like the one confronting Fort McMurray is even less forgivable given the widespread evidence of increased risk of wildfires due to climate change. Last year, Canada had to call on assistance from fire crews as far away as Australia to cover firefighting needs.
The damage wrought by the fire is occurring in a community that has already been hit hard by the economic crisis and the collapse in oil prices. Unemployment in the Fort McMurray and Wood Buffalo region increased 40 percent between January 2015 and January 2016, a figure which is likely an underestimation since many workers in the energy sector travel to the region temporarily for employment. Last month, the unemployment rate reached close to 10 percent.
A teacher from a Fort McMurray school spoke to the WSWS about the evacuation. He was given 15 minutes to pack personal belongings and leave the city, along with his girlfriend, her parents, and two dogs. He added that fire services had kept him and his pupils confined to their school for a large part of the day prior to the evacuation announcement.
After leaving the city, he came to a stretch of highway that had been jumped by the fire. Police officers permitted ten vehicles at a time to make a run for it and drive at high speed across the smoking stretch of roadway. As his truck passed through, a gas pipe under the road exploded next to his vehicle.