Despair and Unrest in Mexico

Vijay Prashad

On April 24, thousands of demonstrators marched to the Angel of Independence monument in Mexico City from the municipality of Ecatepec. People from all kinds of backgrounds marched with signs that had the requisite dose of humour and anger. “Revolucion en la Plaza, en la Casa y en la Cama” (Revolution in the streets, at home and in bed), announced one woman, while another wrote on her pregnant belly: “Quiero nacer sin violencia” (I want to be born without violence). A resonant chant went “Ni sumisa, ni obediente. Soy libre, loca y valiente” (Neither submissive nor compliant. I’m free, crazy and brave).

The statistics explain the anger. Seven women are killed every day in Mexico. Over the past three decades, over 45,000 women have been killed. The passive voice is appropriate here. Over 95 per cent of these cases have not been properly investigated by the police and judged by the courts. The impunity rate is stunning. Two-thirds of Mexican women above the age of 15 report in surveys that they have experienced some form of physical or emotional abuse or discrimination at work.

The slogans for the march—“Vivas nos queremos” (We want to stay alive) and “Ni una menos” (Not one female less)—echoed other familiar slogans from earlier marches. During the disappearance of dissidents in the dirty wars of the 1980s in South and Central America, their supporters would mutter, “Vivos los queremos” (We want them alive) and “Ni uno mas” (Not one man less). This slogan has returned to Mexico, says Aurelia Gomez Unamuno, whose forthcoming book, Memoria y violencia, studies the memories and testimonies of Mexican guerrillas of an earlier era. In the most recent instance, 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in the State of Guerrero vanished in September 2014. Their families and friends continue to fight to find out what happened to these young men who were training to be rural schoolteachers. “We want them alive” is the slogan for the “disappeared”. “We want to stay alive” is the slogan of the women.

Forty-three students’ disappearance

In 1968, as part of the Dirty War, the Mexican state massacred hundreds of students in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco section. Each year, there is a large demonstration at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas (the Plaza of Three Cultures), the site of the massacre. In 2014, the students at Ayotzinapa went off to commandeer buses so that they could go to that demonstration on October 2. These students were mainly indigenous Amerindians, one of the three cultures of Mexico (pre-Colombian, colonial Spanish and Mestizo). Masked men and the police ambushed the buses on their way back to the campus. Six students died at the scene. One bus, with 43 students, vanished. The government said that the local drug gang, Guerreros Unidos, had killed the students and incinerated their bodies. This, said Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam, was the “historical truth”. They wanted the case, as with other cases, to vanish.

The families and friends of these missing students would not back down. Their perseverance caught the imagination of others in Mexico and across Latin America. Pressure on Mexico’s President Enrique Pena Nieto pushed him to allow the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights to send a team of five experts to investigate the disappearance. Mexico has been protective of its sovereignty. This was a historic capitulation to the demands of its people and recognition of the failure of its own investigative mechanisms.

Pena Nieto assumed that the panel’s work would be perfunctory, the writer Francisco Goldman told this writer. Goldman’s book The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (2014) eerily foretold the collapse of the golden story of Pena Nieto.

With his typically careful eye, Goldman has been following the investigation into the “43”. Goldman watched as the commission, known as GIEI, worked “seriously, with an obsession”. The Colombian prosecutor Angela Buitrago went over 185,000 pages of the old case file, while Guatemala’s former Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz analysed the documentation with her well-known rigour. GIEI invalidated the government’s case. Attacks in the establishment media came alongside a cold shoulder from the government. “The conditions to conduct our work don’t exist,” said Claudia Paz.

What did the experts at GIEI find? That Guerreros Unidos had used buses to smuggle heroin and cocaine to the United States. It was likely, they suggested, that one of the buses commandeered by the students carried large amounts of drugs. Gunmen of the gang alongside soldiers and policemen blocked the highway most likely to recover that bus.

Complicity between the Mexican establishment and the world of drugs is well documented, most notably by the investigative journalist, Anabel Hernandez, in Narcoland.

Christy Thornton, a historian of Mexico, told this writer: “The federal government is seeking desperately to protect itself.” That its Attorney General would muddy the waters “is a sign of just how high up the corruption goes”. The drug trade has overwhelmed the Mexican economy. The journalist Carlos Loret de Mola says that the drug cartels are three times more profitable than the five hundred largest Mexican firms. It is little wonder then that drugs might have played a role in this tragedy, or that the Mexican establishment would go to such lengths to hide the story.

‘Of little value’

In his book The Femicide Machine, Sergio Gonzalez Rodriguez writes of the people “who are considered of little value”. These are the 43 students, surely, but also the tens of thousands of women whose murders have not been investigated.

Ten days before the April 24 protest, Luisa Carvalho, the regional director of the Americas and the Caribbean for U.N. Women, spoke in El Salvador at the release of a report on femicide. “Femicide and other forms of violence against women in the region continue to grow,” she said, “and the application of justice continues to be limited with a rate of 98 per cent impunity for the offenders.”

Governments seem uninterested in these crimes. A United Nations report from 2003 laments “the relative incapacity of the state to adequately solve these cases”. A fog grows over them. People begin to think of them as mysterious, when in fact there are very clear reasons why these women are being killed.

“The ongoing death toll is not mysterious,” said Rosa-Linda Fregoso, author of Feminicidio en America Latina. “It is a consequence of the historic structure of impunity in place in Mexico, the failure on the part of the Mexican state to adequately prevent and investigate violence against women at all levels.” Aurelia Gomez told this writer that the violence takes place out of a combination of “machista rage, drug cartels protected by authorities, and permissiveness from the authorities in general”. In 2007, Senator Marcela Lagarde Rios, who coined the term Feminicidio, pushed through the General Law to Provide Women with Access to a Life Free of Violence. Despite the presence of this important law, Fregoso said, “Mexico’s judiciary, legislative and criminal justice sectors are staunchly patriarchal.” The disregard for crimes against women is normal.

‘The state did it’

The Mexican state, says Aurelia Gomez, efficiently dismantles social movements—workers and peasant unions, teachers and students’ organisations. But the drug cartels remain intact. Plan Merida of 2008 links Mexico to the U.S.’ Global War on Terror, with the new term of art being “narco-terrorism”. Funds from the U.S. government flood Mexican law enforcement agencies, which use this new money and equipment to break one drug ring in order to profit another.

“Blood, death, threats, exploitation, weapons, unlimited profits; this is the big business created by the illegality of drugs,” writes Rodriguez in The Femicide Machine. There is little hope in the state’s institutions for the families and friends of the 43 and for those who marched on April 24. Drug cartels are in the blood stream of Mexican institutions. To expect the Mexican state to tackle this would be like presuming a heart surgeon could do an open-heart operation on herself. At protests for the 43, a common slogan is “Fue el estado” (the state did it).

At the last public meeting of GIEI, the families and friends of the 43 shouted: “No se abandona” (do not abandon us).

There was a feeling, says Francisco Goldman, that with the departure of the international commission, nothing will happen. It is a feeling shared by the families of those who have disappeared. Justice eludes them. They indict the state. Who will give them justice from the state? “These people live in an abyss,” Goldman told this writer. “They are forced by the state to live in the shadows, as a ghost with your ghosts.”

The Great Leap Backward: America’s Illegal Wars on the World

Luciana Bohne

Can we face it in this election season? America is a weapons factory, the White House a war room, and the president the manager of the neoliberal conspiracy to recolonize the planet. It exports war and mass poverty. On the economic front, usurious neoliberalism; on the military front, illegal wars. These are the trenches of America’s battle for world domination in the 21^st century.

If not stopped, it will be a short century.

Since 1945, America’s Manifest Destiny, posing as the Free World’s Crusade against the Red Menace, has claimed 20 to 30 million lives worldwide and bombed one-third of the earth’s people. In the 19^thcentury, America exterminated another kind of “red menace,” writing and shredding treaties, stealing lands, massacring, and herding Native populations into concentration camps (“Indian reservations”), in the name of civilizing the “savages.” By 1890, with the massacre of Lakota at Wounded Knee, the frontier land grab—internal imperialism– was over. There was a world to conquer, and America trained its exceptionally covetous eye on Cuba and the Philippines.

American external imperialism was born.

Then, something utterly dreadful happened in 1917—a successful social revolution in Russia, the second major after the French in 1789, to try to redistribute the wealth of the few to the advantage of the many. The rulers of the world—US, Britain, France and sundry acolytes—put aside their differences and united to stem the awful threat of popular democracy rising and spreading. They invaded Russia, fomented a civil war, funding and arming the counter-revolutionary forces, failed, and tried again in 1939. But Hitler’s war of extermination on the USSR ended in a spectacular victory for Moscow.

For a while, after 1945, the US had to behave as a civilized country, formally. It claimed that the USSR had a barbarian, all-conquering ideology, rooted in terror, disappearances, murder, and torture. By contrast, the US was the shining city on the hill, the beacon of hope for a “the free world.” Its shrine was the United Nations; its holy writ was international law; its first principle was the inviolability of the sovereignty of nations.

All this was rubbish, of course. It was an apartheid society. It nuked Japan not once but twice, deliberately selecting civilian targets. It shielded from justice top Nazi criminals to absorb them as partners in intelligence structures. It conducted virtual “show trials” against dissidents during the hysteria of the McCarthy congressional hearings, seeding the country with a harvest of fear. It waged a genocidal war on Vietnam to prevent independence and unification. It assassinated African independence leaders and bestowed fascist dictators on Latin America. It softly occupied Western Europe, tied it to itself through military “cooperation” in NATO, and it waged psy-op war on its opposition parties. Behind the civilized façade was a ruthless effort to take out the Soviet Union and crush self-determination in the colonial world.

By hook and by crook, the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, and America went berserk with triumphalism. Now, at last, the conquest of the world, interrupted in 1917, could resume. The global frontier reopened and America’s identity would be regenerated through violence, which had delivered the American West to the European invaders in the 19^th century. The benign mask dropped. Behind it came a rider on a pale horse. According to the ideologically exulted, history had ended, ideologies had died, and the messianic mission of the US to become the steward of God’s property on earth could be fulfilled.

The “civilizing mission” was afoot.

A cabal of neo-conservative policy wonks first sketched what I call the Great Leap Backward into lawlessness as a revival of the myth of the frontier in the 1990s. “The Plan for a New American Century” (PNAC) envisaged the 21^st century as a unilateralist drive to entrench American values globally—what the PNAC ideologues call “freedom and democracy”—through preemptive wars and regime change. This frenzied delirium of US military domination turned into official foreign policy with the Bush Doctrine after 9/11, but it was the Clinton administration’s Doctrine of Humanitarian Warfare before 9/11, that shut the door on the prohibition of aggressive wars by the UN Charter, remaking the map of the world into a borderless American hunting reserve by removing the principle of sovereignty and replacing it with “right to protect” (R2P)—or humanitarian pretext for use of force.

Clinton’s doctrine was an act of supreme, even witty, exploitation of liberal principles and commitment to policies of human rights. It was how the liberal left was induced to embrace war and imperialism as the means of defending human rights. The Carnegie Endowment cooked up the doctrine in 1992. Its report, “Changing Our Ways: America’s Role in the New World,” urged “a new principle of international relations: the destruction or displacement of groups of people within states can justify international intervention.” The report recommended that the US use NATO as the enforcer. It must be noted, too, that the principle of “humanitarian war” has no authority in international law. The Charter of the United Nations sought to outlaw war by making it impossible for unilateral interventions in the business of sovereign states by self-appointed guardians of human rights. The reason behind the proscription was not heartlessness but the consciousness that WW II had been the result of serial violations of sovereignty by Germany, Italy, and Japan—by militarist imperialism, in other words.

The bell tolled for the UN and the old order in the 1999 Kosovo War. The bi-partisan effort to dismantle the architecture of the post war’s legal order played out there. With the Kosovo War, the Clinton administration launched the first humanitarian war and set the precedent for waging war without Security Council clearance of many to follow by both Republican and Democrat administrations. The Clintonites who used NATO to bomb Serbia to protect ethnic Albanians in Kosovo from non-existing Serbian genocide may or may not have appreciated the fact that Hitler had used the pretext of R2P—humanitarian intervention—to launch WW II by claiming to protect German minorities in Poland, but they certainly knew that the monopoly on use of force rested with the UN’s Security Council. This monopoly was secured after WW II precisely to prevent unilateral attacks on sovereign states through bogus claims of altruistic interventions, such as Hitler had championed and pursued. Ironically for critics of the Soviet leader, it was Stalin who insisted at the Yalta Conference that if the USSR were to join the United Nations a veto in the Security Council was a must to insure that any war would be a multilateral consensus and a multilateral action.

As the Clintonites understood, the postwar legal authority for peacekeeping and the prevention of war entrusted to the UN Security Council posed a colossal obstacle to the pursuit of American world domination. For the vision of PNAC and the Carnegie Endowment to become reality, the United Nations, the guarantor of sovereignty, had to go. In the run-up to the Kosovo War, the Clintonites fatally and deliberately destabilized the United Nations, substituting the uncooperative UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali with the subservient NATO shill, Kofi Annan. Annan obligingly opined that in the matter of war and peace, UN Security Council resolutions were not the only way to skin a country– especially one chosen by the US for remaking, partitioning, or regime changing, a cynic might add.

So now we live in a dangerous world. Once again, since the 1930s, the world is being stalked by an expansionist power answering to no law but its own unilateral, humanitarian vigilantism. The Kosovo precedent has spun out of control. Libya smolders in the ashes of NATO bombs, dropped to prevent “genocide”; Syria fights for survival under attack by genocidal terrorist groups, armed, trained and funded by genocide preventers grouped in the NATO alliance and the Gulf partners; Afghanistan languishes in a permanent state of war, present ten thousand American troops which bomb hospitals to promote human rights; in Iraq, the humanitarians are back, after twenty-five years of humanitarian failure. And in Ukraine, Nazi patriots are promoting American democratic and humanitarian values by shelling Donbass daily. I hesitate to mention Africa, where humanitarian Special Forces are watering the fields where terrorists sprout like mushrooms after rain—in Mali, Nigeria, Somalia, Kenya.

Then there is Yemen, perhaps the most callous, vicious, and careless humanitarian crime of a litany of crimes against humanity in the Middle East. The US government has recently admitted deploying troops to Yemen. The Pentagon claims that the deployment will assist Saudi Arabia (“the Arab coalition”) to fight al-Qaeda in Arabian Peninsula. Can a sentient being meet such a grotesque claim with anything but infernal laughter? Help Saudi Arabia to fight its own creature? Are we stupid yet?

$4 trillion dollars later, spent on the War-on-Terror/Humanitarian-R2P, the pattern of military destabilization of sovereign states proceeds apace, one recalcitrant, independent country at a time in the Middle East and North Africa. For the rest of the world, the surrender of sovereignty is sought by means of economic globalization through trade pacts—TTP, TTIP, etc.—that virtually abolish the constitution of states, including our own. Spearheading the economic effort to control the periphery and the entire world is the so-called “Washington Consensus.”

It hugs the market-fundamentalist idea that global neoliberalism and core finance capital’s economic control of the planet by means of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) is the option to poverty and social chaos.

Neither military nor economic war on the sovereignty of nations has yielded anything close to a stable, prosperous, and peaceful world. It had delivered death, destruction, debt, market crises, tidal waves of refugees and displaced persons, and concentrated masses of wealth in a few but powerful hands. What the poet W.H. Auden called “the international wrong,” which he named “imperialism” in his poem “September 1939,” is the crisis that stares out of the mirror of the past into our faces, and it bodes war, war, and more war, for that is where imperialism drives.

In this scenario, no potential presidential candidate—even establishment-party dissenter—who does not call for both the end of the bi-partisan “Washington Consensus” and the end of bipartisan militarist aggression can reverse the totality of the “international wrong” or stem the domestic descent into social brutalization. If none calls this foreign policy debacle “imperialism,” elections will be a sleepwalker’s exercise. Nothing will change. Except, almost certainly, for the worse.

Trade Deals and the Environmental Crisis

Rob Urie

With the release of leaked documents from the TTIP (Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) ‘trade’ deal Greenpeace framed its conclusions more diplomatically than I will: the actions of the U.S. political leadership undertaken at the behest of American corporate ‘leaders’ and their masters in the capitalist class make it among the most profoundly destructive forces in human history. At a time when environmental milestones pointing to irreversible global warming are being reached on a daily basis, the U.S. political leadership’s response is to pronounce publicly that it favors environmental resolution while using ‘trade’ negotiations to assure that effective resolution never takes place.

Those representing the U.S. in these negotiations are mainly business lobbyists who have been given the frame of state power to promote policies that benefit the businesses they represent. The thrust of the agreements is to enhance corporate power through legal mechanisms including patents, intellectual property rights and ISDS (Investor-State Dispute Settlement) provisions that create supranational judiciaries run by corporate lawyers for the benefit of corporations. Shifting the power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions to the corporations producing them precludes effective regulation in the public interest. The position that environmental harms must be proven before regulations are implemented leaves a dead planet as the admissible evidence.

U.S. President Barack Obama is both the most articulate American politician urging action on climate change and the central Liberal proponent of the trade agreements. The apparent paradox isn’t difficult to understand— the trade agreements will be legally binding on signatory states while Mr. Obama’s statement of the problem won’t be. As evidence of global warming mounts the Republican tactic of denial is looking more and more delusional. By articulating the problem Mr. Obama poses Democrats as the solution while handing the power to curtail greenhouse gas emissions to business lobbyists and corporate lawyers.

History is important here: the claim of ‘anthropogenic,’ or human caused, climate crisis universalizes the consequences of capitalist production when the carbon emissions that are causing it can be tied through both history and geography to the rise of capitalism. While the ‘industrial revolution’ began in England, it was the second industrial revolution and more
particularly, U.S. industrial production since the end of WWII, that is responsible for the exponential increase in carbon emissions behind global warming. At this stage the addition of China as major carbon emitter can be tied largely to its exports to the West.

The spread of capitalist production makes global warming very difficult to resolve. Were the U.S. and developed Europe the only material greenhouse gas emitters, capitalist logic would be inexorably linked to its product. However, the spread of this production has naturalized it by creating the illusion of the universality of both stuff lust (commodity fetish) and the social mechanisms for producing it. The environmental implausibility of seven billion people driving cars and living in McMansions has given way to the local logic of manufactured wants motivating an entrenched economic order.

The rise of neo-liberal ‘state capitalism’ infers a period that never existed when state and economic power were separate and distinct. It is hardly an accident then that ‘free-trade’ agreements codify the relations of state and corporate power. Following from Bill Clinton, Barack Obama’s sleight-of-hand is to pose the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) and TTIP ‘agreements’ as economic policies when their intent is to cede political control to large corporations. Social understanding is gradually moving from corporations being political actors through campaign contributions to their being political entities that decide public policy through these ‘trade’ agreements.

The real paradox in play is between democracy and capitalism. ‘Trade’ deals are profoundly anti-democratic in that they cede civil control to ‘private’ corporations. Policies that maximize profits for corporations and their owners do so by reducing or eliminating democratic control over civic life. In civic logic ending human life on the planet is Dr. Strangelove-level insanity. In the realm of capitalist logic we all benefit from the stuff that capitalism produces, so what is the problem? The Liberal claim that ‘we’ can have both the stuff of capitalist production and environmental security through ‘smart’ capitalism ignores the ‘private’ control of the public realm inherent to capitalism.

What is made evident by the documents leaked by Greenpeace is that electoral politics are largely irrelevant to the business of ‘governing.’ The U.S. representatives negotiating ‘U.S.’ trade positions no more represent your and my interests than do the business executives selling us products. The public’s role in elections is as consumers of political rhetoric. Hillary Clinton’s willingness to say anything to win election reflects that her ‘product’ is political rhetoric and that it will bear no relation to her actual policies once the ‘sale’ is made. More profoundly, were Bernie Sanders to be elected his ability to govern in the public interest would be bounded by institutions dedicated to supporting ‘private’ interests.

In this sense Mr. Obama’s willingness to articulate positions on climate resolution, economic justice and concern for ‘human rights’ while doing the opposite is his skill as a political ‘leader.’ As long as this system is considered legitimate it will confer political legitimacy back on those elected. The oft heard complaint that elections don’t change anything depends on the ‘anything’ under consideration— the choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is ‘consumer choice’ politics. The choices not available through electoral politics are: ending the threats of climate crisis and nuclear weapons, placing economic justice as the central role of Western governments, ending wars of choice while de-militarizing the West and creating new forms of democratic participation.

The logic of ‘smart’ capitalism proceeds from the base conceit that people want the stuff of capitalism and that capitalist production is the way to get it. History locates this want as a consequence of capitalist propaganda undertaken in the U.S. in the early twentieth century— it is no more ‘natural’ than a toaster oven. The aggregating logic of capitalist ‘efficiency’ produced the environmental aggregates of global warming and climate crisis. The capitalist logic of more capitalism to resolve the consequences of already existing capitalism proceeds from the premise that manufactured wants need to be met rather than simply not manufactured. Current ‘trade’ deals rely of these manufactured wants as a form of political control by the corporate class. The choice is ours to reject manufactured wants in favor of self-determination. As the capitalist class understands, doing so would end capitalism and the economic order it represents.

“National Security, Holier Than ‘Human Security’ In India”

K.M Seethi

The leaders of the ‘holy’ land of India who make ‘poverty and starvation deaths’ as political ‘weapons’ against their respective opponents must relook the colossal amount being spent on weapons and their guards every year in the name of ‘national security.’ How much money the government can set apart for ‘food security’ and ‘health security’ of millions of such people whose status is now derogatorily compared with Somalia?

Obviously, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had least respect for ground realties, while addressing people in the election campaigns underway in different states, especially when he deploys statistics to denigrate a state like Kerala. Speaking on Kerala’s ‘development tragedy’ (not trajectory), he said that the child mortality rate among the /ST population in Kerala is much worse than the situation in Somalia! The methodology of comparison was fraught with dangerous consequences, besides his statistical skulduggery. The UNICEF says that the mortality rate in Somalia is amongst the highest in the world; one out of every seven Somali children dies before seeing their fifth birthday (137 deaths/1,000 live births) with a higher number in south and central Somalia. Is this the situation among the SCs and STs in Kerala? Obviously, he is choosy when he makes a comparison. He selects a particular section in Kerala and takes Somalia as a whole.

Modi ignores Kerala as a whole and forgets about India (all India average is well above 40/1000). Will he make a comparison between Kerala (the lowest in India, 12/1000) and Gujarat where the infant mortality rate is as high as 36/1000, nearer to all India figure? Never. More so, he will not say anything about STs and SCs in Gujarat. Modi as PM should be more informed, careful and mature in dealing with the politics and economics of states in India. He must stop playing to the gallery with a view to ‘opening an account’ with ‘zero balance’. The net result could be, the attempts to ‘liberate’ the masses from the politics of the ‘Left-Right’ he ridiculed will move in the direction of communal ‘Lift-Tilt’ with insidious social consequences. Rather he must congratulate himself on taking the ‘Right-Right’ politics in the centre to the ‘Extreme Right’ with very little possibility of liberating the poorest of the poor in this country.

All this said and done, will Modi relook the allocation for national security every year in this country ? Just see the Union budget allocation of this year (2016-17) for defence and national security. A colossal amount of Rs. 3, 40,921.98 crore (US$ 52.2 billion) for the Ministry of Defence (this also included, for the first time, the defence pensions amounting to Rs. 82332.66 crores).

But the total cost does not cover the amounts set apart under other ministries such as Rs. 3000 crores for nuclear sector (including nuclear weapons), Rs.7509 crores for space (including missiles and rockets) , and other allocations under the Ministry of Home - Rs 16,228.18 crore for CRPF, Rs 14,652.90 crore for BSF, Rs 16,228.18 crore, 4,231.04 crore for Indo-Tibetan Border Police, Rs.4,363.88 crore for Assam Rifles, Rs 3,854.67 crore for Sashastra Seema Bal, Rs 688.47 crore for National Security guards etc etc.....

The cumulative spending of all these ministries for ‘national security’ is so high that even one per cent of the total amount is enough to lift 8.6 per cent tribes of the Indian population from the deep morass of poverty and starvation, a real-time human security predicament of dears living in our midst - whether in Kerala, Gujarat or Jharkhand. Dwight D. Eisenhower once said: ”Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

Eisenhower may be a former President of the United States whose history is intimately linked with the history of military-industrial complex. Yet, wisdom comes albeit belatedly, even from those who would harbour a notion of security bereft of any human essence. Rosa Luxemburg had predicted almost a century ago that militarism and high defence spending would be indispensible for the ruling classes in the capitalist countries. It had fulfilled “a quite definite function in the history of capital, accompanying as it does every historical phase of accumulation.” It had played “a decisive part in the first stages of European capitalism, in the period of the so-called ‘primitive accumulation’, as a means of conquering the New World and the spice-producing countries of India. “ Subsequently, “it is employed to subject the modern colonies, to destroy the social organisations of primitive societies so that their means of production may be appropriated, forcibly to introduce commodity trade in countries where the social structure had been unfavourable to it, and to turn the natives into a proletariat by compelling them to work for wages in the colonies.” This obviously applies to the ruling dispensations of the postcolonial countries like India. Luxemburg had stressed with enormous foresight that "political violence is also the instrument and vehicle of the economic process; the duality of the aspects of accumulation conceals the same organic phenomenon, originating in the conditions of capitalist reproduction."

No wonder, India placing itself as a junior partner of the US is more or less following the logic of this militaristic path of exchange relations, both within and across the region of South Asia. In this global social remapping, human security seldom matters, leave alone the fate of indigenous communities.

This Is Where The Jobs Are!

Vijaya Kumar marla

Diminshing Employment opportunities

There is a popular story about a journalist being taken around a modern process industry that is fully automated. The factory owner proudly announces that whole process is ‘untouched by human hands’. In the control center, the journalist finds an operator and a dog. The journo enquires, “I understand why the man is there? But what is the need for a dog?” The factory owner promptly replies, “the dog ensures that the man does not touch any button!”

In the early stages of India’s industrialization, in the 50-60 decades, the setting up of a heavy industry could transform a whole region into an industrial hub. Steel plants such as Bhilai and Bokaro employed 50-60 thousand workers each and also created income opportunities to lakhs of others through indirect sources of income. But today, a modern steel plant, set up in private sector, with more output capacity than Bhilai or Bokaro hardly employs 1000 people. As per the international norms, to produce 1 million tons of steel, only 300 skilled workers are sufficient in an automated plant. Similar is the case with Thermal Power Plants, whose employment potential for say, a 1000 MW capacity plant, had come down from 2000 workers to just 30 in the last 40 years. The situation is no different in modern process plants such as petrochemicals and fertilizers. In today’s auto manufacturing plants, where the whole manufacturing and assembly process is automated to a high degree with a scattering of a few humans. Reputed consulting firms such as Mc Kinsey and top research institutes such as MIT have announced that automation will take away 47% of all jobs in the coming 2 decades and the jobs will never comeback. It is predicted that even the software jobs which had placed India in the world league as a software superpower, has already seen its best days. Many of the routine software jobs such as code-writing and bug hunting are predicted to go the way of the dodo. With the increasing prospect of each softbot taking over the jobs of thousands of humans, our much hyped software industry has to search for innovative methods to stay in business. As it is, the employment in software sector is a mere 0.02% of the total workforce in the country. Outsourcing to third world countries (both manufacturing and services) are likely to taper off in the coming days. IT outsourcing will also meet a similar fate. KPMG, a global consulting firm, even announced “The Death of Outsourcing” in a research paper last year.

The use of computerized technology and networks brings about automatic systems that can replace not only physical labour, but even expert employees. Studies of contemporary office automation find a similar process of replacing middle level managers and professionals. Foxconn, the Taiwanese multinational that manufactures most of the mobile phones sold worldwide, has removed 10 lakh workers in China and replaced them with 5 lakh robots. Many American companies sourcing their components from China are now shifting manufacture back to US with completely automated plants.

The changing nature of work

As we know, high GDP growth has not been producing jobs. This is bound to happen under capitalist production in the long run since capitalists are motivated by profitability and are prepared to dispense with hiring labour completely if a machine can do the job and give them higher profits. The very fact of technological change and higher labour productivity means higher joblessness and this is compounded when the state misguidedly cuts back on development spending in the name of fiscal discipline. This swelling of the labour reserves manifests itself among other things as an increase in the informal sector employment.

Unfortunately there is not much capacity to absorb them. The already limited employment possibilities in the industrial sector have been further reduced by the neo-liberal regime. Many small and labour intensive manufacturing units have rapidly closed down and the traditional big industrial units have resorted to retrenchment and out-sourcing.

The modern units are capital and import intensive with space only for a few highly skilled workers. This leaves the service sector, which, like agriculture, has the sponge capacity to absorb excess labour at low-productivity low-income level. The corporate profitability in India hinges substantially on the lowering of a wide range of fixed costs through outsourcing. Those that manage to get contract jobs in the service sectors, have to work for more than 12 hours a day, often without paid leaves, medical benefits and no worker rights. The pay is marginal, often below Rs. 5,000 a month. For example, in the last 15 years, real wages paid to workers (in relation to their purchasing capacity) had halved, where as the profits to the employers have multiplied many fold. In our country, about 93% of the 47 crore work force is engaged in the informal sector, with demeaning working conditions and pathetically low and uncertain wages.

10 crore jobs – a pie in the sky?

Economic reforms have brought in foreign investment in capital intensive areas, but have not created jobs proportionally. And now the present BJP government at the center is talking about making India a manufacturing hub and creating 10 crore jobs through their proposed “Make-In-India” program, with a supposed FDI component running into crores of crores of rupees.

The present FDI inflow into our country does not exceed Rs. 2.0 lakh crores. To create one job in the hi-tech sector, not less than 15 crores of capital investment is required. And moreover, according to OECD report 2011, only 15% of FDI that enters a country goes in to job creating industrial investment. Even assuming that one manufacturing job can create another nine jobs in all other sectors (which is a highly optimistic), to create 10 crore jobs, as touted by the government in their “Make-In-India” project, Rs. 13 crore crores of FDI is required per year for the next seven years for the “Make-In-India” program, the common man has to shell out 2.5 times that amount as tax concessions and subsidies in various forms to be doled out by the government to the investors. No one knows, from where the government is going to bring in that kind of FDI money (which is more than 750 times our annual share of FDI inflows) and also pay the investors subsidies and tax concessions. The fact is that ultimately, the common man has to bear this burden. But why should we hanker after the actual annual inflow of Rs. 1.68 lakh crores of FDI, when the black money generation in our country itself is Rs. 35 lakh crores and the government showers about Rs. 6.2 lakh crores as tax concessions and subsidies in the annual budgets on the rich.

The type of industrialisation India is experiencing with its high growth rate has three characteristics that are unmistakably neo-liberal. First, it is led by private corporations. Second, the role that the government plays at the central and at the state level is that of a promoter, an agent of private corporations, not one of a regulator and protector of human rights. And ‘crony capitalism’, that is the collusion between the rich and those in power with the bureaucracy serving as their servants in the process of looting the people is the third defining feature.

Why ‘Make in India’ is kapüt

The world is just not ready for the major manufacturing boom that India needs to create enough jobs for its burgeoning population. There is already excess manufacturing capacity in the world and many industries worldwide are working below their capacity levels. Both manufacturing and services now span enormous global networks, with pockets of strong expertise (like India, in software services) supplying to the world. Tech manufacturing is no longer dependent on abundant cheap labour as much as other factors, especially capital.

Manufacturing (like services) is a globally-collaborative exercise today involving product design, software, hardware, and testing. The value lies in design, Intellectual Property (IP) and software, and not in manufacturing. Apple manufactures almost all of its products outside the US, mostly in China. But its Taiwanese contract manufacturer Foxconn makes a measly 3 percent margin while Apple, in California, makes 30 percent margin. Today, value is where IP, design and software are - not where manufacturing happens.

Moreover, we should not forget that a nation’s wealth is created by human labour in agriculture and in extracting and processing of raw materials into usable commodities in factories. Ultimately all wealth comes from mother earth only. It is a faulty conception to say that wealth is created in services. Hence there is logical limit to how much the service industry can expand and provide employment relative to industry and agriculture.

The challenging task of creating skilled manpower

The BJP government time and again advertise that their government is going to impart technical skills to 30 crores of young people in the coming 5 years. Will it go the same way as Modi’s overambitious ‘Make-in-India’ program, which is a non-starter? The Modi sarkar has a lot of expertise in floating political hot air balloons, that look attractive but pop out of existence soon enough.

According to the government, only 3% of the workforce in the country is skilled and that it recognizes the urgent need to improve the technical skills in the country. Which literally means that out of the 45 crores or thereabout working population, 97% have to be imparted technical skills. The minister and his government should do well to be reminded of the fact that over 70 per cent of the labour force in all sectors combined (organised and unorganised) is either illiterate or educated below the primary level. Making them technically skilled cannot happen overnight, or even in the time frame envisaged by the planners of ‘Make-In-India”, of which the first 2 years were totally uneventful. As Nobel Laureate Economist Amartya Sen said, “I know of no example of an undernourished and uneducated labour force producing memorable growth rates!” As the experience of China, South Korea and other countries had shown, an effort of such massive proportions has to start at the level of primary education and also accompanied simultaneously by adult literacy campaigns on a war footing, with commitment and necessary budgetary expenditure.

Moreover, the ongoing privatization of education at all levels has brought down educational standards and the quality of our graduates and more so professional graduates is pathetically low. Many HR and placement agencies complain that the lack of skills on the part of fresh job seekers is the main cause of unemployment. But the fact is that, with ever changing technologies, no amount of education is going to equip the job seekers with the rapidly changing skill requirements in a modern economy. It should be made mandatory for the employers to train fresh recruits and upgrade them on a continuous basis to make them fit to work in an ever changing environment. But sadly the government ignores this fact and employers escape their responsibility to increase profits. The victims are the workers.

Modern economies now produce a huge array of goods and services, involving such a wide range of different inputs in such complex configurations that for many tasks (though not all) simple muscle power is no longer enough. The evolution of an ever-more complex technical division of labor has created a constantly changing demand for an extremely diverse range of skills, many of which are specific to particular stages of industrial development.

To impart technical skills to 30 crore young people requires at least 1.5 crore trainers on a 1:20 basis, equipped with the necessary knowledge to impart the necessary technical skills in various area of modern technology. Even if we assume that the 30 crore young people are trained in 3 batches of 2 years each, we require at least 50 lakh highly skilled trainers and a huge infrastructure to impart the skills. Practical training on modern machines is another big problem. That in itself is a big question. First, we have to start training the trainers, if required, by bringing in experts from within and outside the country. Even if we succeed in creating 30 crores of skilled workers, where are the opportunities to employ them?

This is where the jobs are!

The fact is that the Indian labour force is more skilled in traditional occupations, such as handicrafts, textile and agro-based activities. During the formulation of the 12th Five Year Plan this issue came into focus and experts agreed that manufacturing as we understand in modern times would not fetch Indians jobs. Rather, refocusing on India’s traditional occupations could potentially create 10 million jobs a year.

The significance of the rise in rural unemployment and the lack of concern with it have to be understood in the context of the fallacious official view that it does not really matter if people are unable to find work within the primary sector (agriculture) because in any case they should be moving out into more productive occupations outside agriculture. The argument is logically unsound since countries with large labour reserves like India and China can never solve their unemployment problem without active measures to support peasant production and follow labour-intensive growth strategies, which are anathema to capitalists.
The Third Census had shown that the employment generated by the SSI sector per Rs. one lakh of investment was 1.62, as against only 0.20 in the manufacturing sector covered by the Annual survey of Industries. This means that a medium size enterprise in the organized sector requires an investment of Rs.5 lakhs to generate employment to one person whereas the SSI sector generates employment for 8 persons with the same investment. And heavy industry, which is heavily automated requires Rs. 15 crores and above to generate one job.

The only solution lies in creating jobs in the rural areas and increasing investments in agro-based industries and renewable energy applications. This only can ease the acute unemployment situation. To increase employment, the Planning Commission asserts that we must pay special attention to labour intensive manufacturing sectors such as food processing industry, textiles, small and medium enterprises, tourism and construction. Modern technological developments make it possible to create small scale manufacturing centers in rural areas, that will be capable of producing a wide range of hitech products, without necessitating large scale shift of population in search of livelihoods.

Development of rural areas will stop the migration of the rural people to the cities and this will not put more pressure on the urban jobs. If India as a nation has to progress, there is little doubt that India’s villages too have to progress. India needs creative solutions to start a revolution which can take its villages fast forward in time, such as the creation of a knowledge and information economy that can create opportunities and thereby prosperity to impoverished areas:

a) To create a self-reliant, self-sustainable village economy.

b) To provide resources for locally-made products to be value added to the highest possible degree within the village so that wealth generated stays with the villagers.

IT and modern technology can be used for improving agricultural productivity and this creates more opportunities for the educated jobless in rural areas. IT and modern technology should be used to make handicrafts sector more productive and thereby create better income opportunities for youth. Investments in dispersed utilization of renewable energy can generate crores of rural livelihoods. Thereby we can create Hi-Tech jobs in rural areas, which can in turn create a vibrant rural economy. But it requires a determined shift away from neo-liberal economics.

How Rising CO2 Levels May Contribute To Die-Off Of Bees

Lisa Palmer

As they investigate the factors behind the decline of bee populations, scientists are now eyeing a new culprit — soaring levels of carbon dioxide, which alter plant physiology and significantly reduce protein in important sources of pollen.

Specimens of goldenrod sewn into archival paper folders are stacked floor to ceiling inside metal cabinets at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. The collection, housed in the herbarium, dates back to 1842 and is among five million historical records of plants from around the world cataloged there. Researchers turned to this collection of goldenrod — a widely distributed perennial plant that blooms across North America from summer to late fall — to study concentrations of protein in goldenrod pollen because it is a key late-season food source for bees.

The newer samples look much like the older generations. But scientists testing the pollen content from goldenrod collected between 1842 and 2014, when atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide rose from about 280 parts per million to 398 ppm, found the most recent pollen samples contained 30 percent less protein. The greatest drop in protein occurred from 1960 to 2014, when the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose dramatically. A field experiment in the same study that exposed goldenrod to CO2 levels ranging from 280 to 500 ppm showed similar protein decreases.

More than 100 previous studies have shown that elevated levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide decrease the nutritional value of plants, such as wheat and rice. But the goldenrod study, published last month, was the first to examine the effects of rising CO2 on the diet of bees, and its conclusions were unsettling: The adverse impact of rising CO2 concentrations on the protein levels in pollen may be playing a role in the global die-off of bee populations by undermining bee nutrition and reproductive success.

“Pollen is becoming junk food for bees,” says Lewis Ziska, a plant physiologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Research Service in Maryland and lead author of the study. The study itself concluded that the decline of plant proteins in the face of soaring carbon dioxide concentrations provides an “urgent and compelling case” for CO2 sensitivity in pollen and other plant components.

Elevated CO2 levels affect plant physiology by enabling the plant’s starchier parts to grow faster and bigger, since atmospheric carbon dioxide is a building block for plant sugars. For goldenrod, this growth essentially dilutes the plant’s total protein, rather than concentrating it in the grain, which makes a starchier pollen.

“I knew there was work done on insects about how rising CO2 would reduce the protein content of leaves, and so insects will need to eat more leaves to get the same amount of protein,” says Ziska. “But until now, we didn’t know about how CO2 affects protein content in pollen.” The study is a synthesis of the knowledge about what is happening to bees and how CO2 impacts the quality of plants, and it brings those two disparate ideas together.

A number of new and accumulating pressures are threatening bee populations. From 2006 to 2011, annual losses from managed honeybee colonies averaged 33 percent per year in the United States, according to the USDA. Beekeepers have had to replace 50 percent of their colonies in recent years. Factors such as mite outbreaks and the use of neonicotinoid pesticides have been implicated in so-called “colony collapse disorder.”

“I am not saying that understanding neonicotinoids or Varroa mites is not important, but I am saying that how bees respond to these stressors might have something to do with their nutrition,” says Ziska. “If we are mucking around with their nutrition, all these other responses could be affected.”

Bees eat two foods to keep them alive, nectar and pollen, which are fundamentally sugar and protein. Bees can scout a good source of nectar and tell the rest of the hive where it can be found. But bees don’t have a communication strategy for protein. They cannot recognize whether the pollen they consume is a good protein source or not. And by late fall, when bees begin to store food for the winter, the pollen choices are limited.

“It’s not like honeybees and native bees have a menu of lots of different species to choose from,” says Joan Edwards, a pollen ecologist at Williams College in Massachusetts and co-author of the goldenrod study. “Because goldenrod and asters are the only food available for bees [in late season], it limits their ability to adapt. They can’t turn to another food source.”

Some beekeepers have turned to supplementing food for honeybee populations, but native bees like bumble bees don’t have that option, explains Edwards. “Native bees do the lion’s share of pollination,” says Edwards. “Bumble bees and solitary bees provide a free ecosystem service for our food supply. Lack of protein is threatening native pollinators, which has huge public health consequences.” Roughly 35 percent of global crop production depends on pollination to produce fruit, vegetables, seeds, nuts, and oils.

Unlike other insects, which will eat more leaves to compensate for lower protein levels in their food, bees will eat a quantity of pollen, but will not adjust consumption based on nutritional inferiority, says entomologist Jeff Pettis, research leader at the USDA’s bee laboratory. However, at least one laboratory study indicates that bees can be resilient to nutritional stress. The laboratory bees foraged for a broader diet, if one is available, to compensate for a nutrition imbalance by identifying complementary types of pollen — similar to how vegetarians balance legumes and grains to get a complete protein.

“Overall the diet of pollinators is going down due to land degradation, pesticide use, and habitat destruction, and now the protein content of their pollen is less,” says Pettis. Scientists know that inferior-quality pollen has an immediate effect of shortening the lifespan of bees because it directly affects the size and strength of the bee colony that will survive until spring. The lack of nutrition may alter bee behavior and vigor and contribute to colony collapse and degraded health of pollinators.

May Berenbaum, professor of entomology at the University of Illinois, says that bees are having a hard time getting enough protein as it is. “A declining quality of protein across the board almost assuredly is affecting bees,” she says. “Like humans, good nutrition is essential for bee health by allowing them to fend off all kinds of health threats. Anything that indicates that the quality of their food is declining is worrisome.”

By itself, the relative effect of lower nutrition might be small, but it still might be important, says David Hawthorne, associate professor of entomology at the University of Maryland. “It’s like death by a thousand blows,” Hawthorne says. “With all of these other stresses on bees, it could still matter because it may just be the straw that breaks the beehives’ back.”

The findings that the nutritional quality of plants is changing and affecting pollinators fits squarely with a new field of interdisciplinary research called Planetary Health, which has emerged to assess the links between a changing planet and plant and human health.

Samuel Myers, a senior research scientist at Harvard’s School of Public Health, has published groundbreaking studies on how rising CO2 levels lower the nutritional quality of foods that we eat, like rice, wheat, and maize, which lose significant amounts of zinc, iron, and protein when grown under higher concentrations of CO2. Plant composition depends on a balance between air, soil, and water. As CO2, the source of carbon for plant growth, proliferates quickly in the atmosphere, soil nutrients — such as nitrogen, iron, and magnesium — remain the same. As a result, plants produce more carbohydrates, but dilute other nutrients.

In one study, Myers estimated that lower nutritional values in crops will push an estimated 132 million to 180 million people into a new risk of zinc deficiency. “Low levels of micronutrients are already an enormous health burden today and where people get iron and zinc is primarily from these kinds of crops,” says Myers. “With rising CO2, they get significant further reductions. That is a big deal from the global nutritional standpoint.”

Myers — director of the Planetary Health Alliance, a new trans-disciplinary consortium aimed at understanding and addressing human health implications of Earth’s changing natural systems — also modeled how the complete decline in pollinators would affect human health. He calculated that the loss of pollinators would place 71 million people into vitamin A deficiency (which is linked to child mortality) and 173 million into folate deficiency (which is associated with birth defects). An additional 2.2 billion people already lacking in vitamin A would suffer more severe deficiencies, he projected. Overall, there would be 1.4 million excess deaths annually from complete pollinator decline.

Now, new research questions are emerging to connect Myers’ research with Ziska’s with the goal of improving understanding of where this reduced pollen protein content is occurring globally and whether it is altering the nutritional status and health of bee populations. “One could imagine there are new nutritional impacts yet to be discovered,” Myers says. “If it is happening in goldenrod, there is no reason to believe this is not happening in other plants.”

Myers said that a core principle in the field of planetary health is the element of surprise, which Ziska’s study illustrates. “We are fundamentally transforming all of the biophysical conditions that underpin the global food system,” said Myers. “Global food demand is rising at the same time the biophysical conditions are changing more rapidly than ever before. Chances are there are more surprises coming down the road. This is the tip of the iceberg in our understanding of changing health in a system that is changing rapidly.”

Beyond the pollen–bee nexus, the extent and rate of multiple interacting environmental changes — including global warming, biodiversity loss, freshwater depletion, ocean acidification, and land use change — are unprecedented in human history. “The research showing how loss of pollinators could have serious adverse effects on nutrition and health outcomes is an important example of how environmental change can undermine human health,” Sir Andy Haines, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said in an email.

Researcher Lewis Ziska thinks plants will adapt and change to rising atmospheric carbon dioxide. But gesturing to the stacks of specimens at the herbarium at the Museum of Natural History, he says, “Here are 450,000 plant species, and every other living organism depends on plants as a food source. The fact that they are changing, all at different rates in an unprecedented time — it is pretty remarkable in trying to assess how the entire food web is changing.”

Submarine project no solution for South Australia’s employment crisis

John Braddock

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced last month that the French government-backed company DCNS was awarded a $50 billion contract to build 12 advanced submarines to replace the Australian Navy’s fleet of 6 aging Collins class vessels. DCNS defeated rival bids from German company ThyssenKrupp and Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.

The project will complete, over the coming decade, the largest re-equipping of the navy since World War II. DCNS agreed to mostly build the submarines at a shipyard at Osborne, near Adelaide, the South Australian state capital. The facility, operated by government-owned shipbuilder ASC and established in 1985 for the Collins project, will undergo a major expansion. It is currently building patrol boats and three “Air Warfare” destroyers, with 9 frigates due to begin construction in 2020.

ASC facilities at Osborne in Adelaide

The costly naval upgrade, which will be funded from deepening assaults on public services, is being promoted to the population on the basis of lies. The submarines, it is claimed, are necessary for Australia’s “defence” and “national security,” intended for operations in the Pacific region.

In fact, the navy is being made ready to play an essential part in the US-led build-up for war against China. The French “Barracuda” class submarines have been chosen for their long-range offensive capabilities, suited in particular to deployment in the South China Sea. The US military, which was closely involved in the evaluation process, expects them to be fully interoperable with the US navy, equipped with American combat and weapons systems.

To whip up support for the project, the political, media and business elites at both state and federal levels have sought to exploit the deepening concerns of workers whose living standards are being devastated by a dire economic situation. South Australia, home to 1.7 million people, was once a manufacturing and mining centre. After sustained cutbacks by successive governments and major companies, it now has soaring unemployment. It is regularly described in media commentary as Australia’s “rustbelt.”

The militarist agenda, and the catastrophic dangers it poses for the population, including the possibility of an attack on Australian soil, is concealed behind a raft of false promises of jobs, industrial development and technological advancement. Turnbull emphasised that the 12 submarines would be built “here in Australia with Australian jobs, Australian steel, Australian expertise.” The statement, with its crude appeal to nationalism, was also an attempt to boost the fortunes of the Liberal-National Coalition government in the July 2 federal election, particularly in South Australia’s marginal seats.

DCNS promotional booklet

The day after Turnbull’s announcement, letterboxes throughout Adelaide were inundated with glossy booklets produced by DCNS. Headed “Why France and Australia are stronger together,” they misleadingly boasted the immediate creation of 2,900 jobs at the Osborne shipyard.

The Sunday Mail claimed, without offering any evidence, that another 4,000 jobs “would otherwise have gone offshore.” South Australia’s Labor Party Premier Jay Weatherill flew to Paris, accompanied by a taxpayer-funded media contingent to secure, he declared, “every job” he could from the contract.

The contract’s bidding process included a lobbying blitz by both DCNS and ThyssenKrupp. DCNS filled billboards around Adelaide and ThyssenKrupp took out nationwide television advertising, each promising jobs and beefed-up national “security” should either win the contract.

The federal government, under pressure from Washington to cement Australia’s growing military relationship with Japan, appeared for some time to favour the Mitsubishi bid, but it would have meant less construction in Australia. The South Australian government, opposition politicians and local media launched a four-year campaign to ensure the project would be based at Osborne.

The trade unions played a reactionary role, abetting the militarisation of society. The three main unions at ASC—the Australian Workers Union (AWU), the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union and the Communications, Electrical and Plumbers Union—agreed with the state Labor government to “minimise” industrial action so as to enhance the chances of the submarines being built in Adelaide. The accord mirrored a similar deal in 2006 over the $8 billion destroyer contract.

On February 19, SA Unions, the state’s peak union body, organised a rally as part of a wider nationalist “I’m Backing Australian Jobs” campaign, to protest what it called the federal government’s “lack of commitment to our subs and its moves to offshore Australian maritime jobs.”

The destruction of Australia’s industrial base is, however, part of a sweeping global offensive against the working class, particularly in manufacturing sectors such as automobiles, steel and mining. Worldwide, hundreds of thousands of jobs are being destroyed in a process in which the unions, at home and abroad, have been totally complicit. Workers in Australia, like those and around the world, are being made to pay for an historic breakdown in the world capitalist economy.

Turnbull’s reference to “Australian steel” was seen as an indication that the Arrium-owned steel plant in the South Australian city of Whyalla could be rescued from closure, preventing the loss of 2,000 jobs. However, without major investment the plant is in no position to manufacture the high-grade steel required for submarine construction, and its retention is highly unlikely in the face of the global steel crisis.

Arrium, one of the two remaining steel manufacturers in Australia, was placed in voluntary administration on April 7, owing more than $2.8 billion to banks and other creditors, $1 billion to suppliers and $500 million to its employees. The AWU has already worked with the company and banks to impose $100 million worth of cuts, overseeing the elimination of 250 jobs at Whyalla and a 10 percent pay cut for 400 workers at Arrium’s nearby iron ore mine.

If Arrium is liquidated or restructured, Whyalla and other towns will be devastated. The surrounding Upper Spencer Gulf region has already seen thousands of jobs destroyed. In the six months to June 2015, the state’s mining sector eliminated over 5,000 jobs. On April 27, the last train from the Leigh Creek coalfield made a final delivery of coal to the Port Augusta power station, which closed two weeks later. Up to 400 direct jobs are being shed in Port Augusta and Leigh Creek, with thousands more lost in the supply chains.

South Australia’s official unemployment rate, the highest in the country, jumped in February to 7.7 percent—or 66,900 people—from 6.8 percent in January. Across the northern suburbs of Adelaide and the satellite town of Elizabeth, where the General Motors Holden (GMH) car assembly plant is to be mothballed in 2017, unemployment is already 10 percent, and youth unemployment over 40 percent.

Last May, with the help of the car industry unions, GMH wiped out 270 jobs at the Elizabeth plant. The closure will see the remaining 1,260 workers thrown into unemployment. Hundreds of suppliers will be hit. Vehicle components manufacturers Futuris and Toyoda Gosei have announced they will end operations next year, when the entire Australian car assembly industry shuts down.

Claims that the submarine build will rescue the state are entirely bogus. Promises that laid-off car assembly workers will be “retrained” to fill vacancies in any high-tech positions building submarines are a fantasy. Any shipyard jobs, moreover, will be tied to the catastrophic perspective of preparing for war.

Sri Lankan refugees imprisoned after removal from Australia

Max Newman

In blatant defiance of international law, the Australian government forcibly deported 12 asylum seekers back to Sri Lanka after they arrived on a small wooden boat in Australian waters last week. On board were nine men, one woman, one child and an infant, all reportedly of Sinhalese descent.

As soon as they landed in Sri Lanka, the refugees were imprisoned by the country’s notorious Criminal Investigation Department (CID), underscoring the flagrant violation of the 1951 Refugees Convention, which bans the refoulement (removal) of asylum seekers to face the risk of persecution. The CID has a documented record of torture and violent treatment of opponents of the Sri Lankan government.

The speed and directness with which the refugees were delivered into the hands of the CID takes to a new level the criminality of the bipartisan anti-refugee regime established by successive governments in Australia over the past two decades, starting with the mandatory detention of all asylum seekers by the Keating Labor government in 1992.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s Liberal-National government, following the lead set by the previous Rudd and Gillard Labor governments, flatly denied the refugees their fundamental legal and democratic right, also recognised by the Convention, to even apply for asylum.

Instead, after arriving in the shallow waters of the Cocos Islands, a small territory controlled by Australia in the Indian Ocean, on May 2, the asylum seekers were immediately imprisoned by the Australian Federal Police (AFP).

On May 6, all 12 were forced onto a white minibus, which had the windows blocked by cardboard, and driven to the airport. They were forced onto a chartered jet that flew them back to Sri Lanka.

In Sri Lanka, the refugees were handed over to the CID. Such returnees face imprisonment for up to three years for trying to leave the country without permission. Sri Lankan Immigration Department spokesman Lakshma Zoysa said an investigation would determine how the people left Sri Lanka. Displaying the contempt for basic rights shared by President Maithripala Sirisena’s government, he stated: “They are involved in criminal activities, yeah, that’s an immigration crime.”

Zoysa claimed not to know where the refugees were being held. Asked if they were being detained, he replied “maybe.” Zoysa claimed they were being treated properly, saying: “We are not torturing them, our CID officers … handled them [in a] legal manner.”

Australia’s Immigration and Border Protection Department initially refused to confirm reports of the boat reaching the Cocos Islands, saying it would “not comment on operational procedures.” This was in line with the military secrecy imposed on all Australian operations to forcibly turn back refugee boats or transport asylum seekers back to the countries they fled.

Immigration and Border Protection Minister Peter Dutton later confirmed that the boat had reached the Cocos Islands, while claiming that “we were able to successfully return those 12 people, which included men women and children, back safely to Sri Lanka on the sixth of May.” He also announced that Australia had intercepted three asylum boats so far this year, but refused to provide details on the other two boats.

Since the Liberal-National government adopted the militarised “Operation Sovereign Borders” policy in 2013, an unknown number of boats has been turned back. Only several boats have been acknowledged as reaching Australian territory before being intercepted.

The last vessel officially reported to have reached Australian waters was a small Indonesian fishing vessel carrying 16 asylum seekers. It was captured by the Australian Navy last November and forced to sail back toward Indonesia without enough fuel to safely reach land.

The deportation of Sri Lankan refugees was pioneered under the Gillard government in 2012, working in collaboration with Sirisena’s predecessor Mahinda Rajapakse. The Labor government established a close partnership with the Sri Lankan police apparatus operating together to intercept refugees.

Gillard’s government also worked hand in hand with the Sri Lankan regime to forcibly return 650 asylum seekers who were already in Australia’s detention centres. Arbitrary “screening processes” were instituted, effectively blocking refugee visa applications.

The Liberal-National government continued this practice, first under Tony Abbott and then Turnbull. According to a Human Rights Law Centre report, between October 2012 and September 2014, 1,248 refugees were sent back to Sri Lanka.

This was despite the known likelihood of torture. When a journalist pointed to well-documented allegations of torture in Sri Lanka, Prime Minister Abbott declared that while his government “deplores the use of torture, we accept that sometimes in difficult circumstances difficult things happen.”

Desperate asylum seekers have fallen victim to the most reactionary policy calculations. Domestically, Australian governments have demonised refugees, making them scapegoats for rising unemployment and declining social conditions. In foreign policy, they have collaborated with the authorities in Sri Lanka, a strategically-located island in the Indian Ocean, supporting the US “pivot” or “rebalance” to the Indo-Pacific region, directed against China.

Officially, Labor introduced the policy on the pretext of preventing “people smuggling.” The real targets were the people fleeing from oppression and victimisation in Sri Lanka and other locations, including the Middle East, where millions have been displaced by the wars launched by the US and its allies, notably Australia.

Precisely because governments around the world are emulating Australia’s barbaric model, refugees fleeing these countries have no choice but to pay “smugglers”—often poor fishermen—to escape.

The masquerade of combatting “people smuggling” was further exposed last year when it became evident that successive Australian governments paid such smugglers to return asylum seekers to Indonesia and elsewhere.

Largely because of the protracted war and repression by the Sri Lankan government and military against Tamils, Sri Lankans once accounted for the largest group by nationality seeking asylum in Australia. In January 2013, there were 3,437 Sri Lankan refugees either in Australian detention centres or in “community detention” awaiting protection visas. Today, as a result of the bipartisan crackdown, that number has fallen to just 221.

The fact that the latest asylum seekers were said to be ethnic Sinhalese demonstrates that Tamils are not the only victims of the repression in Sri Lanka, and that the repression has continued long after the civil war was brought to a bloody end in 2009.

While Labor initiated the mass deportation of Sri Lankans, it could not have done so without the assistance of the Greens, who kept the minority Labor government in office from 2010 to 2013. In the campaign for Australia’s July 2 election, the Greens are once again proposing a Labor-Greens government, while posturing as advocates of a more humane refugee policy.

This duplicity underscores the reality that no party within the political establishment, including the Greens, has any real difference with the underlying policy of defending the nation-state borders at the expense of some of the most vulnerable members of the world’s working class.