US forces in combat in Somalia as AFRICOM plans for war across continent

Thomas Gaist

American military forces launched combat actions in the East African country of Somalia on Tuesday, destroying at least three military vehicles manned by fighters with the militia group al-Shabab.

US personnel provided “defensive fire,” including salvos of helicopter-based missiles, during fighting near an African Union (AU) checkpoint manned by Ugandan troops.

The US troops, who are deployed to Somalia as “advisors” to the African Union AMISOM force, engaged in other combat operations earlier this week, carrying out a raid against the Somali village of Toratorow. They have been operating from their headquarters inside the fortress-like international airport in the Somali capital of Mogadishu, where they have organized a special proxy unit known as the “Lightning.”

The announcement that there are American “boots on the ground” in Somalia, comes within days of revelations that the US has been waging secret “small wars” in Libya and Yemen. The White House is now considering options drawn up by the Pentagon for expanded attacks against Libya.

Washington is preparing to launch or deepen an array of similar interventions throughout sub-Saharan Africa, where the US military’s Africa Command (AFRICOM) is currently examining a dozen locations for new bases. More than 6,000 American Special Operations soldiers are active in at least 26 separate locations throughout the continent. AFRICOM plans to relocate its central command, originally based in Germany in an effort to dampen accusations of neocolonialism, to an undisclosed site on the continent, with Morocco rumored as the leading choice.

In the countries bordering the Lake Chad Basin, recently described as “ground zero for Islamic State in Africa” by AFRICOM’s top special forces officer, the Pentagon is opening an entire new regional war theater, deploying hundreds of ground troops and commando teams to Cameroon and Nigeria and establishing a new drone base in Niger.

Since coming to power with backing from the White House, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari has imposed military rule in the northern provinces and carried out brutal atrocities against the civilian population, including the massacre of hundreds of Shia minorities by regular army units early this year.

Buhari has sought to place the Nigerian government fully in line with the US “war on terror,” purging the state of officials and military officers from the previous administration of President Goodluck Jonathan, which fell afoul of Washington due to the growth of Chinese influence in the Nigerian economy.

“Buhari made clear from the get-go that his number one priority was reforming the military to defeat Boko Haram,” a US official told Reuters Tuesday.

“He sees us as part of that solution,” he said.

The US plans to train two Nigerian infantry battalions by the end of the year. The Obama administration authorized deployment of a fleet of F-16 fighters to Nigeria, the largest oil producer in Africa, earlier this month.

The F-16 jets, as the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center director J. Peter Pham noted, are only used against “mass forces in a conventional war.”

Such remarks must be taken as grave warnings to the African and international working class. Throughout Africa, as in Eastern Europe and Asia, major land battles and set-piece warfare of the type that laid waste to much of the planet during the 20th century are once again being prepared.

Just as in Iraq and Syria, the Pentagon’s intervention in Nigeria, justified in the name of combating a Boko Haram militia that, as Pham admits, “does not even control any towns or villages,” is presented as an “advise and assist” operation, but is being used to employ military force to assert US hegemony.

The US Army is preparing to intervene throughout Africa. AFRICOM plans to deploy troops against “ISIS in the north, Al Shabab in the east and Boko Haram and A.Q.I.M. in the center and the west,” US General Darryl Williams said Monday.

“We’re building these relationships so that if called in, we can respond,” Williams said.

Forty leading US and African generals are meeting for the African Land Forces Summit. The summit, hosted by Tanzanian Land Force Commander, General James Aloisi Mwakibolwa, saw Botswana’s military receive special praise for its close collaboration with US ground units through the National Guard State Partnership Program during remarks by US General Gregory Lusk.

Not only in Africa but in Europe and Asia, the US Army is preparing “to fight higher-end, great-power conflicts,” as the New York Times reported Monday. Speaking to the Times in Tanzania, General Mark Milley warned that training for US National Guard troops would have to be stepped up because, “I do not think we will have the luxury of four or five months lead time” to deploy them for battle.

Under the false pretext of fighting terrorism, US imperialism is striving to secure its hegemony over Africa, launching ever more wars of aggression in an effort to exclude the European colonial powers from their former spheres of influence.

That the new scramble for Africa will contribute to the increasingly explosive divisions within the NATO alliance was underscored earlier this month with the recent signing of a US-Senegal pact that authorizes deployment of more US forces to the former French dominion.

In an effort to seize hold of the lion’s share of the continent’s wealth and deny access to its strategic resources to its main competitors on the world stage, American imperialism is preparing new and unprecedented crimes against the poorest continent on Earth.

US and its allies threaten escalation of Syrian war

Bill Van Auken

Foreign ministers of the major powers, including both Washington and Moscow, ended a meeting of the International Syria Support Group (ISSG) in Vienna with no proposal for a date to resume peace talks between the Syrian government and the collection of Western-backed Islamist militias that constitute the “armed opposition.”

The so-called rebels walked out of the last round of talks in Geneva, accusing government forces of continuing to attack their positions in violation of a February 27 cessation of hostilities brokered by the US and Russia.

The government of President Bashar al-Assad and its allies, Russia and Iran, have insisted that continued operations were being carried out against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and the Al Nusra Front, Syria’s Al Qaeda affiliate, both of which are designated by the United Nations Security Council as terrorist groups and remain excluded from the shaky cease-fire.

In a communiqué issued at the close of the Vienna meeting, the ISSG member states warned that the consequences of a failure to fully implement the cessation of hostilities “could include the return of full-scale war.”

While the communiqué warned of consequences for any party violating the agreement, including “the exclusion of such parties from the arrangements of the cessation and the protection it affords them,” it gave no indications of what concrete actions would ensue.

What is painfully obvious, however, is that alleged violations by forces loyal to the government of Assad could provoke retaliation from the US, whose warplanes are already engaged in strikes on ISIS targets in Syria. At least 250 Special Operations troops have also been deployed on the ground, without the permission of Damascus and in violation of international law.

A US air strike against the city of al-Bukamal in Dayr al-Zawr province near Syria’s border with Iraq reportedly killed three children and one woman on Monday.

Violations by the so-called rebels, meanwhile, are ignored by their Western sponsors, and would be punished only by the government and its ally, Russia.

This is clearly a formula for an intensification of a conflict that has already claimed over a quarter of a million lives, while driving some 11 million Syrians from their homes. It also creates the conditions for the Syrian conflict to spill over into a wider war pitting the US against Russia.

Washington only entered into the Syrian “peace process” as a means of buying time under conditions in which Russia’s intervention on the side of the Assad government had reversed the tide of battle against the Western-backed Islamist militias and thrown the US-orchestrated war for regime change into disarray.

From the outset, the Obama administration has threatened to resort to a “Plan B” if the negotiations in Vienna and Geneva fail to achieve Washington’s original aim in stoking the bloody war in Syria: the toppling of the Assad government and the imposition of a more pliant Western puppet regime. Last month, unnamed senior US officials let it be known that “Plan B” would include the provision of more sophisticated weaponry to the “rebels,” including MANPADS, portable shoulder-fired missiles that could bring down Russian planes.

Secretary of State John Kerry, speaking to the media alongside Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and UN special envoy Steffan de Mistura at the close of the Vienna conference, issued a direct threat to Syria’s Assad, stating, “He should never make a miscalculation about President Obama’s determination to do what is right at any given moment of time where he believes he has to make that decision.”

For his part, Lavrov charged that Washington’s key regional allies, including Turkey, are pouring more arms into Syria to fuel the conflict. Lately, he said, this has included the provision of tanks to the “rebels.”

The “main supply conduit for extremists,” the Russian foreign minister said, is a 90 kilometer stretch of the Turkish-Syrian border controlled on one side by the Turkish military and, on the other, by ISIS. He charged that there existed “a large, widely-spread network created by Turkey on its side of the border to continue and cover up these supplies.”

Kerry spent the weekend preceding the Vienna talks in Riyadh, meeting behind closed doors with representatives of the Saudi monarchy, a principal US regional ally and main supporter of the Islamist forces in Syria. The Saudi regime was the organizer of the so-called High Negotiations Committee, which was formed to represent these Salafist jihadi militias in talks with the Syrian government.

Speaking at the conference in Vienna, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir advocated a speedy escalation of the war for regime change in Syria.

“We believe we should have moved to a ‘Plan B’ a long time ago,” Adel al-Jubeir told reporters. “The choice about moving to an alternative plan, the choice about intensifying the military support [to the opposition] is entirely with the Bashar regime … He will be removed, either through a political process or through military force.”

Meanwhile, Turkey, Washington’s NATO ally and also a key backer of the “rebels,” threatened Tuesday to carry out a unilateral military intervention in Syria.

President Tayyip Erdogan told a meeting in Istanbul that the Turkish military would act alone, supposedly to deal with ISIS missile attacks coming across the Syrian border and striking the town of Kilis.

“We will solve that issue ourselves if we don’t receive help to prevent those rockets from hitting Kilis,” he said. “We knocked on all doors for a safe zone at our southern border. But no one wants to take that step.”

Erdogan’s statement echoed that made by Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu earlier this month: “If necessary, Turkey may launch a ground military operation in Syria by itself.”

Erdogan’s remarks made clear that his concern is not ISIS, which Ankara has armed and supplied, but rather the growing strength of Syrian Kurdish forces near the Turkish border. In a thinly veiled criticism of US backing for these forces, he declared: “States which exercise control over the world’s arms industry give their weapons to terrorists. I challenge them to deny this.”

The Turkish government is committed to the war for regime change in Syria and has demonstrated, with its shoot-down of a Russian jet last November, its willingness to push this conflict into an armed confrontation with Moscow.

There is little doubt that the Saudi and Turkish regimes are openly advocating a policy that is being supported within powerful sections of the US ruling establishment and military and intelligence apparatus.

An escalation of the Syrian bloodbath also has the backing of the leading candidates in both the Democratic and Republican parties, but its initiation is almost certain to be postponed until after November in order to prevent the subject of war becoming an issue in the US presidential election.

Russia-Japan: Onset of a Thaw?

Monish Gulati

On 6 May 2016, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Sochi. During the meeting, Abe presented an eight-point plan on bilateral economic cooperation with Russia, which included cooperation on oil and gas development and modernisation of seaports and airports in Russia's far east.

Relations between Russia and Japan had hit the skids after the Ukraine crisis in 2014. At a time when relations between Russia and China are at their closest in recent years, and the acrimony between Japan and China on one hand and Russia and the US on the other, are at their peak, why is Japan reaching out to Russia

Recent ParleysDiplomatic relations between Tokyo and Moscow have remained strained due to a decade old dispute over a group of islands claimed by both. Both governments are yet to sign a peace treaty to end World War II after the erstwhile Soviets had seized four islands (Etorofu, Kunashiri and Shikotan, and the Habomai islets group) off Hokkaido, which is part of what Tokyo identifies as the Northern Territories and Moscow, as the Southern Kurils.

The current phase of Russo-Japanese relations can be traced to April 2013, when Abe became the first Japanese leader in a decade to make an official visit to Russia in a bid to resolve the territorial differences and expand energy ties. This was a special effort by Tokyo to open a new chapter in its relations with Moscow.

However, shortly after Abe visited Sochi in February 2014 for Winter Olympics, bilateral relations grew strained. Japan went on to join the US and the EU in imposing sanctions on Russia in order to penalise it for annexing Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula. Consequently, Russian president’s Tokyo visit that was scheduled for later that year, was put off.

Abe in Sochi: Round II

After his three-hour meeting with Putin in Sochi on 6 May 2016, Abe told reporters that he sensed a movement towards a “breakthrough” in the stalled peace treaty negotiations. The meeting had included a 30-minute session where the leaders talked one-on-one. Both leaders also agreed to hold a meeting of senior officials on the territorial dispute in June 2016.

There are differing perceptions of Abe’s latest visit to Russia. The US and EU view it as a breakthrough in Kremlin’s efforts towards ending the two years of isolation Russia faced due to the Ukraine issue. Russia on the other hand attributes Abe’s visit to the China factor and the current situation in East Asia that including concerns over the North Korean nuclear missile programme and the East China Sea dispute.

The visit is also being seen as a failure of US President Barack Obama's policy in trying to isolate Russia over the Ukraine issue. In February 2016, Obama had asked Abe to postpone his Russia visit until after the G7 summit – one which Russia is excluded from, and Obama would be attending – that is scheduled to be held in Japan's Ise-Shima region on 26-27 May. A spokesperson of the US Department of State had recently stated that Washington wants a “continued unity” of its partners in dealing with Russia.

To that end it is felt that Abe timed his Sochi visit with Washington’s ongoing consultations with Moscow over the Syrian crisis so that US could not insist on Japan’s commitment in isolating Russia.

Japan sees a role in Putin’s pivot to the east; and one of the elements of this pivot is the development of Russia’s resource-rich far eastern regions that are likely to witness substantial Chinese involvement. This is likely the motivation for Japan’s sanctions against Russia over Ukraine being moderate and symbolic. At present, Tokyo’s confidence in its economic leverage also comes from state of the Russian economy, which has been hit by falling energy prices, depreciating currency, and high inflation.

Assessment

Russia’s geopolitical isolation and economic situation has enabled China to squeeze more out of its dealings with the former. To address this growing imbalance, Russia needs strong partners and strategic options to leverage its uniqueness and one can see immense potential in Japan as a partner to Russia.

The significance of this engagement lies in the promise that strong Russia-Japan relations will better enable both countries to tackle their economic and geopolitical challenges. So far, both countries have only restricted and decreased their respective options and capacities by not cooperating and collaborating.

While Russia, with falling energy prices and a depreciating Rouble, has found it increasingly difficult to market its oil and gas and finance its energy infrastructure developments, its neighbour Japan has been importing expensive LNG  from half way across the world to meet its energy requirements. This, despite Japanese firms already possessing stakes in oil and gas projects off the Russian far eastern island of Sakhalin. Both countries can mitigate their economic problems to a degree by simply enhancing their bilateral trade, investment and energy ties.

An uptick in Russo-Japanese ties would not only improve their geopolitical postures and options but would also transform the Asian geopolitical canvas.

Who Is The More Vicious Liar: Trump, or Obama?

Eric Zuesse

There was a drastic refocus by U.S. President Barack Obama away from being anti-jihadist and toward being anti-Russian, after his first Presidential term ended and as soon as his second Presidential term began; but the signs that Obama presented during his re-election campaign in 2012 were in exactly the opposite direction — that he was going to reduce, not increase, American armaments against Russia.

A major reason why the American people re-elected U.S. President Barack Obama, instead of elected a new President Mitt Romney, was Romney’s having said of Russia, on 26 March 2012,

Russia, this is, without question, our number one geopolitical foe. They — they fight every cause for the world's worst actors. … Russia is the — the geopolitical foe.

Not just “a” geopolitical foe, but “the” geopolitical foe.” (Wow! In a world with growing jihadist movements, such as Al Qaeda and ISIS?)

Obama responded to that at the re-election campaign’s end, by springing this upon Romney during a debate, on 22 October 2012:

Governor Romney, I'm glad that you recognize that Al Qaida is a threat, because a few months ago when you were asked what's the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia, not Al Qaida; you said Russia. In the 1980s, they're now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War's been over for 20 years.

Obama’s campaign had very successfully presented himself as having killed Osama bin Laden and many other Al Qaeda leaders; and, though no polling has been done on whether the American public considered jihadists (fundamentalist-extremist Islamists who seek a global “Caliphate”) to be “our number one geopolitical foe,” or Russia to be that instead, the poor polling that has been done relating to that matter, suggests the majority of Americans would have selected “jihadists,” not “Russia,” as being “our number one geopolitical foe”; and, in the final analysis, the 2012 Presidential contest exit polls did show Obama (who was publicly less hostile toward Russia than Romney and the Republicans were) with a 42% to 36% advantage over Romney on the national-security question: "Who Do You Trust To Handle International Crisis?” The exit polls showed Obama winning the total vote by around 50% to 48%; so, “International Crisis” went for Obama, and against Romney, considerably more than did the overall exit-polled Presidential vote, and this at least suggests that Obama not Romney gained from this public disagreement over “our number one geopolitical foe."

Regarding the incident on 26 March 2012, when Obama spoke with Russian President Dmitriy Medvedev at the South Korean“Nuclear Security Summit”, Politifact reported:

In March 2012, at a summit in South Korea, Obama was caught in a "hot mic" incident. Without realizing he could be overheard, Obama told Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he would have more ability to negotiate with the Russians about missile defense after the November election.

"On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved, but it’s important for him [the incoming President Putin] to give me space," Obama was heard telling Medvedev, apparently referring to incoming Russian president Vladi­mir Putin.

"Yeah, I understand," Medvedev replied.

Obama interjected, saying, "This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.”

So: Obama was telling Putin there, through Medvedev, that his next Administration would soften its stand on America’s installing in eastern Europe, near and even on Russia’s borders, missiles that are designed to disable Russia’s ability to retaliate against a U.S. nuclear first-strike — the U.S. ABM or anti-ballistic-missile system.

Obama wasn’t lying only to America’s voters; he was shown there privately lying to Putin, by indicating to Medvedev that instead of becoming more aggressive (by his planned ABMs) against Russia in a second term, he’d become less aggressive (by negotiating with Putin about the matter — as you can see there, the nub of it was George Herbert Walker Bush’s lie to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990).

The missile system to disable Russia’s retaliatory force is extremely aggressive (the termination of the nuclear balance — called “Mutually Assured Destruction,” or MAD — replacing that by nuclear weapons as instruments of conquest), and Putin had been constantly making clear that he wouldn’t accept it without hiking Russia’s armaments so as to counter it, if Obama goes forward with it.

Obama’s double-lie there — both to Americans in public, and to Putin in private — was as vicious as can possibly be imagined, because it could produce a nuclear war, which is something that neither the American people want, nor the Russian people want, nor Vladimir Putin wants, even if Barack Obama might (and he’s certainly playing a bold game of poker over it, which is the most vicious part of this entire affair).

But actually, Obama’s lie was even worse than this, because, from the very moment when he entered the White House in 2009, he already was hoping to invade Syria so as to eliminate Russia’s ally there, Bashar al-Assad. And, furthermore, Obama at the very start of his second term began preparations to overthrow another key Russian ally, the democratically elected President of Russia’s next-door neighbor Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych. The coup in Ukraine started being implemented on 1 March 2013, which was well before the excuse for it (Yanukovych’s 20 November 2013 turn-down of Ukrainian membership in the EU) had even occurred; so, the lie that Obama’s anti-Russian sanctions are because Russia accepted Crimea’s return to Russia, after Obama actually stole Ukraine from its former Russian alliance, after Yanukovych rejected the EU’s offer to sell, to Ukraine, EU membership for a cost of $160 billion to be borne solely by Ukrainians, after Obama had set all of that up almost immediately after his second term began, is actually a string of lies by Obama about what he was doing and about what Putin was doing, and about what it all meant — and means.

And then, when Obama did spring his coup, in February 2014, which was an extremely violent coup, it was very reasonably seen to be a dangerous threat to the regions of Ukraine (Crimea and Donbass) that had voted over 75% for the man whom Obama had just overthrown, and they seceded in Crimea and in Donbass, because not only of the very real threat (and the Obama-regime’s ethnic-cleansing campaign against Donbass), but because they saw no legitimacy in their being ruled by their enemies, who are fake proponents of ‘democracy’, but actually aspiring global dictators.

Does there exist any lying by Donald Trump which trumps that? I have never been a Republican, but I certainly won’t vote for Hillary Clinton, who, in all details, has been similar to Obama on each of these matters, only even more reckless about her aggression than Obama has been — she was the Administration’s “super-hawk”.

On 9 January 2012, the geostrategist F. William Engdahl presented relevant immediate background for Obama’s lie asserting his alleged disagreement with Romney about Russia, when Engdahl headlined “Why Washington Wants ‘Finito’ with Putin”, and he opened (and he was one of the first Westerners to have read correctly the tea leaves on this):

Washington clearly wants ‘finito’ with Russia’s Putin as in basta! or as they said in Egypt last spring, Kefaya — enough!. Hillary Clinton and friends have apparently decided Russia’s prospective next president, Vladimir Putin, is a major obstacle to their plans. Few however understand why.

Russia today, in tandem with China and to a significant degree Iran, form the spine, however shaky, of the only effective global axis of resistance to a world dominated by one sole superpower [to clarify: dominated by U.S.-based international corporations].

On December 8 several days after election results for Russia’s parliamentary elections were announced, showing a sharp drop in popularity for Prime Minister Putin’s United Russia party, Putin accused the United States and specifically Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of fuelling the Russian opposition protesters and their election protests. Putin stated, “The (US) Secretary of State was quick to evaluate the elections, saying that they are unfair and unjust even before she received materials from the Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (the OSCE international election monitors-w.e.) observers.”

Obama’s hostility against Russia, and his reasons for it, were known to his targets, but in America’s ‘democracy’, were not only kept secret from the electorate, but Obama blatantly lied to them about the matter, and he won re-election on the basis of lies such as this — lies such as his calling Romney on ugly designs that Obama too (though secretly) held.

It’s not enough for America’s voracious aristocracy to control their own country; they’re determined to control all others, regardless of how much bloodshed and misery (all otherwise entirely unnecessary, including in Libya — which, likewise, under Gaddafi, had been friendly toward Russia) they’re creating in the process. And that’s what the most vicious lying is really all about: to hide their psychopathic intent, and their fundamental ugliness, as they go about their dirty-work.

25 Years Of Struggle Building Socialism In Eritrea

Thomas C. Mountain

This coming May 24 marks 25 years since a rag-tag afro coifed army of
Eritrean rebel fighters drove their captured Ethiopian tanks through
the Eritrean capital of Asmara and gave birth to the modern,
“socialist” country of Eritrea.

The birthing process, the “armed struggle for independence”, took 30
years so the modern struggle to build a country based on “scientific
socialism”, as Pan Africanists have called it, is still maturing.

While the lives of the people of Eritrea is still a hard one, a major,
and very popular, step in the development of socialist society has
been introduced in what's known here as the “currency change”, the
calling in of all the old currency for replacement. Eritrea at this
stage of socialism is still a cash based society with bank accounts
something still only for a minority. So changing all the money is a
really big deal in a developing third world country.

Now if you are a black market agent using cash to do your business and
have literally millions of Nakfa, the Eritrean currency, stuffed under
your bed, you got some explaining to do.

Villas in the better parts of the capital Asmara were selling recently
for up to 50 million Nakfa.

Who in this country of hard times is able to explain the legal
acquirement of 50 million Nkf?

So the “currency change” has brought to a halt much of black market
business, a move enormously popular with 95% of the long suffering
eritrean people, especially considering that ordinary citizens are
restricted to withdrawing 5000 nkf a month from an account. Most
Eritreans can only dream of earning 5000 nkf a month so its only the
relatively well to do that are inconvenienced.

In a socialist country the push will always be away from a cash based
economy and initially, at least in Eritrea, towards using checks for
major payments over a few thousand Nkf. The most likely way to get
away from cash use is a mobile phone payment system such as is used in
Sudan and increasingly in Kenya and this is what most probably will be
introduced.

The currency change has also foiled a major plot by Eritrea’s enemies,
mainly based in Ethiopia and Djibouti, to destabilize the economy by
buying up Eritrean currency, which is illegal to take out of the
country. It got so bad in 2015 that only 10nkf and 20nkf notes were
available from banks and with limits on amounts.

Hundreds of millions of US$ of Eritrean Nkf held illegally by foreign
currency banksters were wiped out almost overnight, with the
notification of the currency change being kept a total secret until a
few weeks before its implementation.

This, along with a limit of only 1 million Nkf deposits prior to the
change left the crooks holding the bag, literally, for in a last
minute rush to get their ill gotten gains in the bank, there were
desperate lines of businesspeople with bags stuffed waiting outside
their banks.

Without lots of cash floating in the community the black market price
of dollars quickly dropped from 54 to 1 to 22 to 1 and even lower,
what it was 15 years ago when I first was first here in Eritrea.

The shortage of cash has forced down the price of basic food stuffs as
well, with tomatoes once as high as 60 nkf a kilo now varying between
10nkf and 20nkf a kilo. Goats that were going for up to 2000 nkf are
now around 800 nkf. Wheat is down to 10 nkf a kilo and sorghum even
less (and this while our neighbors in Ethiopia starve).

Of course none of this is happening without learning pains, and the
banks are having to adapt on a day by day basis. Nobody in the banks
knew about the “currency change” until the general public did, so
there wasn't any time to plan what to do.

Transfers between accounts quickly had to be limited to control money
trafficking. Laws making it an offense to refuse checks are now on the
books.

Rent control is being fully implemented with all rents frozen and
having to be registered with the local government and paid directly to
the owners bank account. All evictions have been put on hold for at
least another two years.

A new set of regulations is being implemented using floor space and
location for uniform rates to control the explosion of illegal rent
increases the country has seen with rents costing thousands when they
should be only hundreds per month.

Upscale neighborhoods in the capital saw rents as high as 40,000 a
month, paid for with black market money, but not any longer. A lot of
crooked Eritreans are starting to have to answer from where their
wealth was begotten and facing the loss of it all.

We will have to wait and see what is next but a major step has been
taken in the struggle to build a centralized, popular, socialist based
economy free of corruption, the ultimate cancer in Africa and the rest
of the third world.

This is something that those in the international community that claim
the name “socialist” should be following closely, much like what has
happened in Cuba with the relaxation's in private ownership.

Building socialism means taking care of the poorest, most needy,
first. While many in the cities may complain about lack of water to
take a shower, there are still Eritreans struggling to find water to
wash their hands.

Socialism means free health care for all. Socialism means free
education for all. Socialism means social equality, “democracy” really
(using the dictionary definition), or at least moving in the direction
of such.

Eritrea is a “socialist” country, though leadership doesn’t use the
word. The 25 year struggle has been to build “socialism” as in “ A
rich Eritrea without rich Eritreans”.

For all the talk of “socialism” these day, Eritrea is one of only
three socialist countries on the planet and in all three life remains
a struggle.

Australian rate cut warnings point to economic slump

Mike Head

Major banks and finance houses are predicting further official interest rate cuts in Australia, taking rates to their lowest-ever recorded levels—perhaps even negative—by next year.

These forecasts point to a gathering economic slump, bringing with it deep cuts to working-class living standards, which are already being decimated by falling real wages. Financial commentators are writing of Australia being drawn into a deflationary “vortex” of falling prices, consumer spending and business investment.

This reality is being deliberately hidden from public view, as much as possible, in the campaign for the July 2 double-dissolution election for all members of both houses of federal parliament.

On May 3, just hours before the Liberal-National Coalition government delivered this year’s budget, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) cut its cash rate from 2 percent to 1.75—a record low. It was a desperate bid to stimulate borrowing and also drive down the value of the Australian dollar, giving the lie to the optimistic picture painted by the budget.

The financial markets have now made it plain that sharper rate cuts will be required because economic growth rates will fall far short of the projections offered in the budget.

Last week, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia became the first of the country’s big four banks to predict another two RBA rate cuts in 2016, which would take the cash rate to 1.25 percent. The CBA’s chief economist Michael Blythe said recent data showing price deflation had spread to Australia “shocked the RBA.”

Other financial institutions issued even more dire forecasts. Vimal Gor, BT Financial Management’s Sydney-based head of income and fixed interest, wrote in the group’s April newsletter that “the RBA will be easing to 1 percent” with “a move to 0 percent or lower a distinct possibility.”

Gor said the growth forecasts issued by the government and the RBA lacked “sustainability.” Falling steel production in China would slash iron ore exports, which actually grew in volume and value in 2015 despite lower prices. This would be compounded by a “far from rosy” picture created by an over-construction of apartments, which had partly offset the collapse of the mining boom since 2012.

Gor warned that weak wages growth would add to the downward slide, as would governments’ fear that any increased public spending and debt would risk losing the country’s AAA credit rating on the global money markets.

David Murray, a former CBA chief executive and head of the government’s financial system inquiry, warned of a downward spiral in consumer spending after the benchmark 10-year government bond yield crashed to 2.20 percent—its lowest level in at least 141 years. As well as hurting retirement savers, that plunge also demonstrates that investors foresee a trajectory of deflation and low growth.

These unprecedented trends are producing anxiety in the corporate elite and the financial markets. None of the traditional levers of capitalist economics—such as lowering interest rates—are preventing Australia, like other commodity export dependent economies, following Japan, Europe and North America into stagnation.

Writing in the Australian on May 7, economics correspondent Adam Creighton noted that for the past eight years, the Australian Treasury’s revenue forecasts “optimistically have overshot reality, often significantly.” A “stubborn assumption” that Australia’s economy would “whirr back to ‘normal’” had “proved continually misleading” since the 2008 global financial crisis.

The truth is that both the previous Labor government, in office from 2007 to 2013, and the current Coalition government have perpetrated this deception.

Creighton pointed to the fraud of the May 3 budget forecasts. According to the budget, the growth rate of the dollar value of the economy, known as nominal gross domestic product (GDP), would suddenly rise from 1.4 percent last financial year and 2.5 percent this financial year to 4.25 percent next year and then 5 percent. This generated unrealistic revenue calculations, such as that company tax, which fell 2.2 percent this year, would surge 19 percent across the next two years.

If the growth rate remained at 2.5 percent, Creighton calculated, the annual budget deficit would blow out to $56 billion by 2019, far from the $6 billion forecast by the government on May 3.

Workers’ wages in Australia are already going the way of their counterparts in the US, Britain and Europe, where pay levels have been stagnating or sliding in real terms. In fact, because of the end of the resources boom, and wage-cutting throughout other basic industries, Australian workers have suffered one of the steepest falls in wage growth of any Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) country.

By RBA estimates, wage growth has dropped to an annual rate of just 0.4 percent, meaning a cut in real terms compared to household cost of living rises. The fall was greater than in any other OECD country, except for crisis-ridden Mediterranean and eastern European countries and The Netherlands.

This means that working people are already being made to pay for the worsening economic situation globally and in Australia. Alongside the mining collapse, the car industry is being shut down nationally, steel and other basic manufacturing plants are being wound down and several major retail chains have gone into liquidation, throwing thousands into unemployment or lower-paid and insecure employment.

Amid the fallout, the number of Australian companies entering voluntary administration increased by 18 percent to 10,299 in the 12 months ending March, according to an analysis of official data by FTI Consulting. Default payments have also risen by about 12 percent in value, hitting other businesses and throwing question marks over the bad debt provisions of the major banks.

Adding to the anxieties in ruling circles are mounting signs that a glut of speculative apartment construction, particularly in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, could burst the housing bubble that has kept the economy from officially going into recession over the past four years.

CoreLogic research analysts last week released a New Settlement Risk Report, showing that 231,129 new units are due for completion in Australia’s capital cities during the next two years, many more than the average number of sales over the past five years. Greville Pabst, executive chairman of WBP Property Group told news.com.au: “The figures paint an alarming picture for the new apartment market in the coming 12 to 24 months.”

Many apartment complexes have been sold “off-the-plan” to investors, who usually pay 10 percent deposits. Because of rising debt risks, the banks have been forced to cut back lending to investors, who now may be unable to make settlements on the properties once construction is completed. As a result, prices have begun falling, compounding the alarm.

Once the July 2 election is out of the way, regardless of which party heads the next government, the fraudulent slogans of “jobs and growth” or “putting people first” will be quickly cast aside to bring forward drastic cuts to public spending and living standards.

US department store sales plunge, jobless claims rise

Barry Grey

Major US department store chains reported a further fall in sales and profits last week, reflecting the growth of recessionary trends in the real economy and the impact of declining living standards for broad sections of the US population.

Macy’s, Kohl’s, JCPenney and Dillards, all of which depend largely on mid- and lower-income customers for the bulk of their revenues, reported sharply lower figures for the first quarter of 2016 and did worse than analysts had predicted. Nordstrom, which targets a more affluent clientele, also reported poor results.

The dismal results sparked a sell-off of the firms’ stocks. They followed a wave of store closings and mass layoffs in recent weeks by Macy’s, the country’s largest department store chain, and discount retailers Walmart and Sears/Kmart.

Macy’s, which announced 41 store closings and thousands of job cuts in January, reported its worst quarterly sales since the recession that followed the 2008 Wall Street crash. It was its fifth straight quarterly sales decline and sparked the firm’s biggest one-day stock price loss since 2008.

The company cut its sales forecast for the year to a decline of between 3 and 4 percent from an earlier estimate of a 1 percent drop and announced it would intensify its cost-cutting.

The clothing chain Gap said it was considering closing more stores after its sales continued to drop and Fitch Ratings cut its credit to junk bond status.

While the Commerce Department reported Friday that overall retail sales rose 1.3 percent in April, the biggest monthly increase in a year, the gain was driven mainly by sales of autos and gasoline, along with a boost in online shopping. Mall traffic has continued to slump as most consumers face an increasingly difficult struggle to make ends meet.

The slump in major chain store sales reflects the impact of a vast reordering of class relations in the US, accelerated in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, that has benefited the rich and the super-rich and devastated large sections of the working population. The policies of the Obama administration, Congress and the Federal Reserve—flooding the financial markets with virtually free cash while imposing brutal cuts in social programs and wages—have facilitated a further growth of financial parasitism and speculation.

Corporate profits and CEO pay have soared not on the basis of productive investment, but rather through new forms of financial gambling and the inflation of stock prices. The result is a further growth of social inequality and a deepening of the crisis of the real economy.

As Harvard economist and former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers is quoted as saying in the current issue of Bloomberg Businessweek, “The United States right now has the lowest infrastructure investment rate that it has had since the Second World War.” The further decay of American capitalism and the country’s social infrastructure is reflected in the fact that American workers’ productivity is rising at the slowest five-year rate since 1982.

Global recessionary trends are finding expression in slowing job creation and an accelerating pace of layoffs in the US. Last week, the Labor Department reported that initial jobless claims in the week ending May 7 shot up by 20,000 from the previous week, hitting 294,000, the highest level in more than a year.

The employment report for April recorded the smallest increase in US payrolls in seven months and an actual decline in the labor market. This followed the dismal report on US economic growth for the first quarter of this year, which showed an increase in the gross domestic product of a mere 0.5 percent, the slowest pace in two years.

In the first four months of 2016, US employers announced more than 250,000 job cuts, the highest January-April total since the depths of the economic crisis in 2009.

These indices, along with a raft of reports exposing different aspects of the acute social crisis gripping the country—declining life expectancy and rising mortality rates, record rates of suicide and drug addiction, sinking household incomes for the vast majority of urban regions—did not prevent Obama from declaring recently that “America is pretty darn great right now.”

The political struggle facing Verizon workers

Jerry White

The month-long strike by 40,000 workers at Verizon Communications in the United States is at a critical juncture. Over the weekend, the Obama administration intervened in an effort to wind down the strike and impose the dictates of the telecommunications giant. After meeting with US Labor Secretary Thomas Perez Sunday, executives from the company and the unions are set to resume talks on Tuesday.

Verizon is determined to slash thousands of jobs, shift the cost of health care and pensions onto the backs of the workers, and reduce the workforce to the status of casual labor.

The Verizon strike is part of a resurgence of militant working-class resistance to the relentless attacks of the corporations and the government on jobs, wages and living standards across the United States and internationally. It follows last year’s strike by US oil workers and the mass opposition of auto workers against the sell-out contracts imposed by the United Auto Workers union and the Big Three auto makers. It coincides with job actions and protests by teachers and students in Detroit and demonstrations by working-class victims of lead poisoning of the water supply in Flint, Michigan.

In Greece, workers are carrying out mass strikes against brutal austerity measures imposed by the fake-left Syriza government; in France, workers and students are mobilizing against social cuts and reactionary labor “reform” laws; workers’ strikes and protests are spreading in China and India.

All sections of the working class and youth are under attack, whether in the form of layoffs and contract concessions or the shutoff of utilities and imposition of crushing levels of student debt. What all these attacks have in common is the fact that their source is the bankruptcy and failure of capitalism.

This is what makes them political struggles and demands that they be brought together, uniting all workers, native-born and immigrant, young and old in a single mass counteroffensive against the corporate elite and all of its political parties and representatives.

The intervention of the Obama administration underscores the fact that the strikers are locked in a political struggle against not only a single company, but against the entire class of corporate owners and the capitalist state. The Labor Department meeting follows last week’s intervention by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the courts, which backed Verizon’s request to ban picketing at New York-area hotels where the company is housing strikebreakers.

The picketing ban was granted shortly after a New York City cop, driving a vanload of scabs, rammed through a picket line, running down and injuring a striking worker. The incident highlighted the strikebreaking operation by the New York Police Department (NYPD) under the direction of the Democratic Party mayor, Bill de Blasio.

The unions are part of this unholy alliance against the Verizon workers. As in every previous struggle—oil workers, steel workers, teachers—they are working deliberately to isolate, demoralize and defeat the workers and help the company impose its demands. The Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) do nothing to fight company strike-breaking, work to starve the strikers into submission by doling out completely inadequate strike pay, and promote the Democratic Party, one of the two parties of big business, even as it organizes police attacks and works to suppress the struggle.

The unions have kept work stoppages at the lowest level of any two-term president since the Labor Department began keeping records in 1947. This has allowed the Obama administration to oversee the longest period of wage stagnation since the Great Depression, while nearly all income gains since the fraudulent “recovery” began in 2009 have gone to the top one percent of the population.

The surest sign that the unions are preparing to sell out the strike is the CWA’s calling in of the police to drive World Socialist Web Site reporters from the picket line. As thousands of strikers know, the WSWS is the only publication that has told the truth about the strike, given expression to the views of the workers, and fought for a strategy to mobilize the broadest sections of workers behind the strike.

That is because the WSWS is the genuine voice of revolutionary socialism—as opposed to the phony socialism of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. The unions promote Sanders and hail his token, one-time appearance on the picket line—to drum up votes on the eve of the New York primary—because they know he supports the bureaucrats, not the rank and file workers. Above all, they support Sanders’ economic nationalism, which serves to pit US workers against their fellow workers in Mexico, the Philippines and China, and line them up behind “their” American bosses.

While the forces arrayed against them are powerful, the allies waiting to be mobilized behind the Verizon workers—the masses of workers in the US and internationally—are more powerful. As the candidate of the Socialist Equality Party for US president, I urge rank-and-file Verizon workers to take the conduct of the struggle out of the hands of the unions and fight for the broadest possible mobilization of the working class.

The SEP proposes that Verizon workers set up rank-and-file committees of struggle independent of the unions and the Democratic Party to unite auto workers, teachers, young people, the unemployed and retired workers behind the strike. Organize mass demonstrations! Mobilize the entire working class!

“Every class struggle is a political struggle,” declared the founder of scientific socialism, Karl Marx. What was true then is true today.

It is necessary to develop a mass political movement based on a socialist and internationalist program to put a halt to inequality, poverty and war by putting an end to their source—the capitalist system.

Glyphosate in the EU

Colin Todhunter

On 13 April, the EU Parliament called on the European Commission to restrict certain permitted uses of the toxic herbicide glyphosate, best known in Monsanto’s ‘Roundup’ formulation. Glyphosate was last year determined to be “probably carcinogenic” by the WHO.

The parliament’s resolution called for no approval for many uses now considered acceptable, including use in or close to public parks, playgrounds and gardens and use where integrated pest management systems are sufficient for necessary weed control.

The resolution, however, fell short of calling for an outright ban. Due to the various political maneuverings, a disappointing compromise was reached that called for the renewal of the licence for glyphosate to be limited to just seven years instead of the 15 proposed by the Commission.

The resolution and the vote to re-approve glyphosate for seven years are non-binding, and, on Wednesday 18 May, the European Food Standard Authority Standing Committee on Plants, Animals, Food and Feed will meet to decide whether glyphosate is to be re-registered for use in the EU.

In addition to the World Health Organisation classifying glyphosate as being probably carcinogenic to humans, various peer-reviewed studies have indicated strong links between its use and a range of serious diseases and deleterious environmental impacts, as presented by Rosemary Mason in the documents that are attached to this article.

Rosemary Mason has been campaigning about the harmful effects of glyphosate for many of years. She has sent various open letters accompanied by in-depth, fully-referenced reports to key figures in both Britain and the EU who are responsible for regulating the use of glyphosate and for setting the official narrative about this substance. In the attached downloads provided at the end of this text, you can access some of the documents she has sent to the EFSA, European Commission and other key bodies/figures since November 2015. They provide detailed descriptions of the impacts of glyphosate along with the ongoing saga of deception and duplicity that result in an ultimate failure to regulate.

It would be an understatement to say that Mason smells a rat: the kind of rat recently discussed on the Corporate European Observatory website, which describes the strategic position the biotech lobby has gained within the heart of policy/decision-making processes in the EU. And the kind of rat that underlies the collusion between this lobby and regulatory/policy bodies in Europe, which has been described many times over the years: for example, see William Engdahl’s recent piece here on the “cesspool of corruption” that underpins relations  between the EU, EFSA and the major pesticide companies; read how scientific evidence was sidelined in the EU here to get the use of gylphosate sanctioned; and, just to highlight the type of companies public officials and bodies are all too willing to jump into bed with, read how Monsanto appears to have hidden evidence of the glyphosate-cancer link for decades.

With reports emerging that the EC plans to relicense glyphosate for nine years, should we be too surprised about this when glyphosate sales account for $5.1 billion of Monsanto’s revenue (2014 figure)? The level of collusion between the biotech lobby and public officials suggest that the line between product promoting and regulating was crossed long ago.

In response to the WHO reclassification of glyphosate as being probably carcinogenic to humans, the EFSA responded with its own review and concluded a cancer link was unlikely. The way the review was manipulated to reach that conclusion has been roundly condemned by dozens of scientists.

Mason notes that there is currently a legal case in process against EU regulators, and. if anyone were to be found to be colluding with the pesticides industry over the licensing of glyphosate, there are likely to be severe penalties. Environmentalists have launched the case against Monsanto and EU regulators over glyphosate assessment. Details about this action are provided on the GMWatch website, where it states:

“If there has been deliberate manipulation of the new licensing procedure for glyphosate with the intention of approving a carcinogenic substance, then this would be defrauding 508 million EU citizens,” states Viennese lawyer Dr Josef Unterweger. For this reason Dr Unterweger is pressing charges on behalf of Munich Environmental Institute and the six environmental organisations: Global 2000, Pesticide Action Network (PAN) Europe, PAN Germany, PAN UK, Générations Futures (France), WeMove Europe, and Nature & Progrès Belgique. A report will also be submitted to OLAF, the European anti-fraud office.

The ongoing scenario surrounding glyphosate begs the question whose interests are ultimately being served? Those of 500 million Europeans or those of Monsanto, a corporation that will be put ‘on trial’ as part of a civil society initiative for crimes against nature and humanity and ecocide in The Hague on World Food Day, October 16, 2016 (see Monsanto’s track record here).

The International Criminal Court in The Hague has determined that prosecuting ecocide as a criminal offence is the only way to guarantee the rights of humans to a healthy environment and the right of nature to be protected.

As for the symbolic trial, on the tribunal’s website, it states:

“According to its critics, Monsanto is able to ignore the human and environmental damage caused by its products and maintain its devastating activities through a strategy of systemic concealment: by lobbying regulatory agencies and governments, by resorting to lying and corruption, by financing fraudulent scientific studies, by pressuring independent scientists, by manipulating the press and media, etc. The history of Monsanto would thereby constitute a text-book case of impunity, benefiting transnational corporations and their executives, whose activities contribute to climate and biosphere crises and threaten the safety of the planet.”

How long do the EC and the EFSA think they can continue to play the European public for fools?

Rosemary Mason’s documents contain a great amount of detail on the glyphosate issue and can be consulted here:

Glyphosate causes cancer and birth defects. Humans and the environment are being silently poisoned by thousands of chemicals

Open Letter to the Standing Committee on Plants, Animals, Food and Feed

Open Letter to the European Commission and European Food Safety Authority

British journalists, politicians and farmers are being used as guinea pigs