Anger, uncertainty as layoffs hit Fiat Chrysler Sterling Heights Assembly

Shannon Jones

Workers at the Fiat Chrysler Sterling Heights Assembly Plant (SHAP) north of Detroit expressed anger and uncertainty over their fate, with the final elimination of a full shift of 1,300 workers at the facility last week. The job cuts are the first permanent layoffs by Fiat Chrysler since it emerged from bankruptcy in 2009.

SHAP workers contacted by the World Socialist Web Site said the company and the United Auto Workers (UAW) were telling them very little about their future. Even before the official date of the layoff workers were being reassigned to other Fiat Chrysler plants in the area, often without regard to plant-wide seniority.

Fiat Chrysler set a July 5 date for the termination of the second shift at the facility, which builds the slow-selling Chrysler 200 mid-size sedan. The company has said it plans to end production of the vehicle in the United States and perhaps outsource its manufacture to a third-party supplier. Another 120 related jobs are scheduled to go at the nearby Sterling Stamping plant.

Workers at SHAP have faced periodic temporary layoffs since the beginning of the year due to poor sales of the Chrysler 200. Sales of the vehicle are down 58 percent from the same period last year.

By phasing out smaller car production Fiat Chrysler is betting everything on continuing strong sales of its larger, less fuel-efficient vehicles. That presupposes that gas prices will continue at their current relatively low level.

SHAP will reportedly be closed later this year and retooled to build the Dodge Ram pickup truck, with production starting sometime in the summer of 2017. The Ram is currently built at the nearby Warren Truck Assembly Plant. That plant is slated to start production of the low-volume Jeep Wagoneer, which means their jobs and perhaps the entire plant—one of the oldest owned by FCA—may be imperiled.

Workers at Sterling Heights Assembly Plant

Meanwhile, the Jeep SUV currently built at the Belvidere, Illinois assembly plant will be built in Toluca, Mexico. Fiat Chrysler has said it also plans to phase out production of the Dodge Dart, another small size vehicle, at the Belvidere plant. The plan is then to start production there of the Jeep Cherokee.

Out of all this shifting of production Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne claims there will be no net loss of jobs. However, Kim, a veteran tier one SHAP worker, told the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter, “What they are trying to do is downsize by merging different plants. Jefferson (Jefferson North Assembly in Detroit) will end up down to two shifts. A lot of those being laid off won’t come back. It all seems like a strategy to me.”

SHAP workers contacted by the newsletter said both the UAW and management were stonewalling them about their employment status. In addition, some workers indicated difficulties in receiving unemployment benefits.

A second tier worker with three years at SHAP said, “You don’t really know where you are going. Lower seniority workers are getting placed first.” Under terms of the UAW contract agreement workers earning the second tier earn less money than veteran workers and currently take eight years to reach top pay.

She said it was difficult surviving on unemployment benefits, which, even with supplemental benefits paid by the company under terms of the UAW agreement, are well below normal base pay.

“We are only getting about 75 percent of what we normally get with sub pay and unemployment benefits. I think we have only worked three months so far this year. It is hard on everyone. It is very stressful, especially for the tier-two workers.

“It doesn’t make any sense for me to try to stay at SHAP because the plant will only be in operation a few more weeks before they shut down in December until the Ram comes in.

“Everyone is getting letters in the mail. Once you are sent to a new plant you have to work there at least six months. You have to put in a request if you want to come back to your home plant.

“You either try to bump someone out of first shift or you put your name in a labor market pool.

“You have the choice of requesting to be sent to a plant inside your labor market, but the Detroit labor market includes Toledo, so you could be sent there, which is more than 60 miles from Detroit.”

Kim added, “The UAW doesn’t tell you anything. You have to find out through rumors. That is because I think they don’t know themselves; all they do is go along with the management program.

“People are really getting fed up with it. The employees are not as uneducated as they think. They know when they are being misled.”

Amy, another tier-two worker with three years seniority, said, “I know of seven people who came in June 2015, after me, who are working at Warren Truck and I am still laid off. That is not sitting well with me. My last day of work was June 17. Next week will be one month on layoff.

“When you call human resources no one wants to talk to you and the union doesn’t return your call.

“My unemployment benefits were held up because I was in school. I have to wait for a waiver. So in the meantime I haven’t received anything. There are quite a few people in the same boat. I know another young lady who hasn’t received any unemployment benefits.

“You can’t survive at all. It is not fair that people under me in terms of seniority have been placed and I am not working. It is to management’s benefit to do it that way because those who have been here less than one year are also earning less money.

“I am sitting here right now filling out job applications. My friend works at Jefferson and she also tells me that there are SHAP workers there with less seniority.”

Kim continued, “After this week the plant will be down six weeks. I am hearing that after September we will be down the rest of the year. People are running out of their unemployment benefits so they are paying them sub to make up the difference. How long that will last, I don’t know. Will they place us somewhere else if our sub runs out?”

A dangerous turn to economic nationalism

Nick Beams

A comment by former US Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers published in the Financial Times on Monday is indicative of two emerging developments in ruling circles: growing perplexity over the state of the global economy and a turn toward protectionism and economic nationalism.

The article, published under the title, “Voters deserve responsible nationalism not reflex globalism,” is significant because during his period in the Clinton administration Summers was one of the foremost advocates of the “free market” agenda and a booster for the benefits of capitalist globalisation.

In the recent period, amid the failure of all efforts to promote an economic revival after the financial crisis of 2008, Summers has warned of the dangers of “secular stagnation,” a condition in which global demand continues to fall, leading to permanent low growth and recession, despite record low interest rates.

According to Summers, the Brexit vote and the victory of Donald Trump in the Republican primaries show that “voters are revolting against the relatively open economic policies that have been the norm in the US and Britain since the second world war.” This is coupled with the rise of populist opposition to economic integration in much of Europe, as well as in Latin America.

Over the past period, what Summers calls the “mainstream approach” has consisted of “inflated rhetoric about the economic consequences of international integration.” But now “the willingness of people to be intimidated by experts into supporting cosmopolitan outcomes appears for the moment to have been exhausted.”

Summers suggests that “a new approach has to start from the idea that the basic responsibility of government is to maximise the welfare of citizens, not to pursue some abstract concept of the global good.”

There is an underlying crisis of the entire perspective of the bourgeoisie, which proclaimed that the “free market” and globalisation would bring continuous economic growth and rising living standards for the world’s people—a doctrine promoted as a kind of secular religion in the 1990s and the first decade of the new century. This crisis is also underscored in a recent article in the Wall Street Journal noting that the 2016 presidential election is being propelled by the “American economy’s failed promises.”

In an open admission that the previous perspective lies in tatters, the article states: “The past decade and a half has proved so turbulent and disappointing that it has upended basic assumptions about modern economics and our political system. This string of disappointments has resulted in one of the most unpredictable and unconventional political seasons in modern history with the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.”

It cites a string of US statistics that reveal the impact of worsening economic conditions, including: the fall in real median income by 7 percent since 2000, the decline in labour’s share of national income from 66 percent to 61 percent, the loss of jobs in manufacturing industry, the failure of new technologies to produce a growth in jobs or incomes and the “hollowing out” of professional jobs from librarians to engineers.

These economic shifts have produced a deepening alienation of masses of people from the entire political and economic establishment. According to recent polls, seven out of ten Americans believe the country is on the wrong track and some 61 percent of Trump supporters and 91 percent of Sanders supporters believe the economic system is “tilted towards powerful interests.”

The focus on the Trump and Sanders phenomena in both articles points to two overriding fears in the political establishment. On the one hand, there is growing concern over the rise of working-class opposition to the present economic and political agenda, reflected in the vote of millions, especially young people, for the self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” Sanders and, on the other, over the rise of extreme right-wing nationalist and semi-fascistic political tendencies, personified by Trump.

Summers points to the danger of an extreme right-wing outcome at the conclusion of his comment: “Reflex internationalism needs to give way to responsible nationalism or else we will only see more distressing referendums and populist demagogues contending for high office.”

However, the turn to “rational” economic nationalism that he proposes is not an antidote to the rise of right-wing populism. It merely provides a theoretical rationalisation for largely identical policies. It should be noted, in this regard, that the “progressive” Democrat Sanders supports a protectionist trade policy that differs little from that put forward by Trump.

The fact remains that for all his criticism of the disastrous consequences of the economic agenda of the past three decades, which Summers so assiduously promoted, neither he, nor anyone else in the ruling political economic and political establishment, has any program to reverse its effects.

The turn to economic nationalism, “responsible” or otherwise, has a historical parallel. In his article Nationalism and Economic Life, written in 1934 in the midst of the Great Depression, Leon Trotsky wrote that after decades of preaching the virtues of trade and the international division of labour, the bourgeoisie issued the call, “back to the national hearth.”

It should be recalled that this perspective was not only advanced by openly right-wing and fascist forces, such as Adolf Hitler. It was the doctrine of “progressives” such as John Maynard Keynes, regarded as one of the founders of the “modern” bourgeois economic doctrine, whose analysis has been invoked by Summers in his warnings of “secular stagnation.”

The result of economic nationalism in the 1930s, whether cloaked in fascistic or “progressive” garb, was the outbreak of World War II in 1939—the most barbarous event in world history—just 25 years after the outbreak of World War I in 1914. The outcome will be no different in the present epoch, the signs of which are becoming ever-more apparent.

In a warning of the danger of war, Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, commented in a recent interview with the Financial Times that the world faces the increasing prospect of a “1914 moment” amid a rising tide of nationalist and protectionist economic measures.

The open promotion of economic nationalism by establishment figures such as Summers raises fundamental questions of political perspective for the international working class.

The attacks on living standards, the development of increasingly authoritarian forms of rule and the rising danger of war arise not from globalisation as such, but from the fact that this inherently progressive development takes place within the reactionary and outmoded system of capitalist social relations, based on private profit and the division of the world into rival great powers and nation-states.

The essential problem facing mankind is that, in Trotsky’s words, “capitalist development as a whole is faced with insurmountable obstacles and contradictions and beats in frenzy against them.”

The international working class is the sole social force that can provide a solution to this historic crisis. Workers must reject all forms of economic and political nationalism and take up the fight for the program of international socialism, in order to liberate the productive forces they have themselves created from the reactionary fetters of the capitalist mode of production. Only then can these resources be utilised to meet human need, through the development of a planned world socialist economy.

Countering IS: Should India be More Assertively Involved in West Asia?

Ranjit Gupta

In the context of conflicts raging across West Asia, a region of vital importance to India, many in India’s strategic community and media have criticised India's utterly passive hands off attitude. Suggestions have been made that India should have joined the international coalition fighting in Syria against the Islamic State (IS) and even of sending troops. The past few weeks have witnessed a particularly animated debate about the IS posing a serious terror threat to India. 

India has faced thousands of deadly terrorist attacks over the decades in Kashmir and the Northeast; Naxalite/Marxist type attacks in many parts of India; and, random politically motivated attacks. Such attacks continue on a regular basis even today. In strong contrast there has been no IS related terrorist attack in India. India has not been mentioned in statements listing IS’ branches around the world. Episodic arrests, detentions, deportations, interrogations, etc, involving a maximum of 150 or so persons constitute the overall IS related footprint in India; this number includes Indians reportedly fighting in Syria. Compared to the devastating mayhem it has and continues to unleash in many countries, IS activity in India does not constitute even minor pinpricks. If IS is making an effort to foment terrorism in India it has very clearly failed miserably. 

The US, Russia and many other countries are heavily involved in the war against the IS which is finally succeeding. The IS has lost a substantial part of the territory it controlled, casualties and desertions are mounting, it is facing an increasing financial resources crunch,and though the ideology it represents will remain a long-term global challenge, as a political entity in a specific geographical location, it is well on its way to defeat. Its resultant anger and desperation will be directed against its tormentors, not countries like India. In any case, the ideological threat has to be combated domestically not abroad.

Prime Minister Modi has paid extremely successful visits to the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Qatar in the past eleven months. These countries are deeply involved in the wars that are going on; while the conflicts in the region were discussed none of the leaders of these countries asked for India’s involvement, being fully aware of and respecting India’s wise traditional policy of non-involvement in wars abroad. Why therefore should India get involved at its own initiative? 

It is because of this reticent non-partisan attitude that India is the only major country in the world that has excellent relationships simultaneously with Israel, Iran, Palestine, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE apart from China. China has turned down all suggestions to join the international coalition against IS. 

India was not remotely involved with the actions and policies of the countries that led to the creation of the IS – in fact India opposed these policies. The Frankenstein monster that they created is now fighting them. Why should India voluntarily invite a blowback from global jihad by getting involved?  

Merely declaring that India is joining the international coalition will not make the slightest difference to the IS’ fortunes on the ground but cause India to be put on the IS hit list. It is worth noting that even Pakistan, a client state of the US and Saudi Arabia for decades and having extremely close military relations with them, has refused entreaties by them to join the ground or aerial war against the IS - one of the very rare wise decisions it has made.  

Given India’s unique demography, the historical baggage associated with it, the rampaging spread of extremism and militancy within Islam, and Pakistan’s 7-decade old ceaseless efforts to foment communal discord in India, India’s deploying troops in Muslim countries against a Muslim entity in a region torn apart by vicious sectarian warfare is an enterprise fraught with potentially hugely dangerous consequences both domestically and for its excellent relations with all countries in the Gulf region. 

For all these reasons there is no case whatsoever for India waging war or joining the international coalition against the IS or in any way getting intrusively involved in conflicts in West Asia. India’s hands off, low profile, and pragmatic approach based on mutual benefit has yielded very satisfying results and there is absolutely no need to change this policy.

A truly impressive fact is that no Muslim community of the world has kept itself further away from extremism and militancy than India’s Muslims. It is the world’s third largest Muslim community. There was not a single Indian who went to fight in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Hardly any Indians joined al Qaeda. The IS has served as an ideological beacon to radicalise hundreds of thousands of misguided Muslims around the world. Only a tiny number of Indian Muslims have gone to Syria and Iraq to join Islamist fighters. In the context of 180 million Muslims in India, all this is very impressive. This author knows from personal interactions that these realities are greatly admired, even envied, in West Asia. All Indians should be proud of these facts. 

Every single Indian Muslim entity of repute, theological institution and prominent Muslim leader in different parts of the country, including separatist leaders in Kashmir, has strongly denounced the IS and also the so-called Caliphate. In September 2015, over 1,000 clerics ratified a 1,100-page religious ruling that declared the IS as un-Islamic and that its actions were against the basic tenets of Islam. Signatories included the Imam of Jama Masjid and the heads of Ajmer Sharif and Nizamuddin Auliya. On 24 February 2016, about 300 top Indian ulema passed a similar resolution in Hyderabad and also declared IS a terrorist organisation. Last week, the IS was condemned in a massive public gathering of Muslims in Kerala. A prominent scholar, Muhammad Qasim Zaman, the author of South Asian Islam and the Idea of the Caliphate has written, "The Muslims of India have, for the most part, seen the promises of a secular state as the best hope for the preservation of their culture and identity." As they have so successfully done so far, leaders of and family elders within the Muslim community will ensure that India’s Muslim youth are not led astray. 

However, it is necessary to maintain the utmost vigilance. India’s intelligence, investigative and security agencies are doing whatever is necessary quite well. However, it is a cardinal principle of counter-terrorism that the fight against terrorism is always more effective away from publicity. Therefore, newspaper reports detailing results of investigations of people being arrested for ostensible IS links are not helpful; counter intuitively, they help radicalisation, provide useful information to potential recruits, serve to exaggerate the so far distinctly manageable dimensions of the problem and contribute to spreading panic. 

India’s greatest contribution to the world has been its tolerant pluralistic civilisational ethos that has, over the centuries, nurtured inclusiveness consciously treating equally and with respect people of different customs, ethnicities, languages, religions, traditions, etc. At the November 2015 West Asia conference organised by the Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), participants from Iran (repeatedly), Saudi Arabia, UAE and Yemen made specific reference to this, suggesting that West Asia has a lot to learn from India. It is imperative that India maintain this globally admired, iconic and sacrosanct civilisational heritage. This is by far the best guarantee against radicalisation and potential threats posed by the likes of IS or even Pakistan’s ISI, which, in fact, poses far more danger for India than the IS.

The Wars Have Come to U.S. Soil

Patrick. T. Hiller

The tragic night of July 7, 2016 was the most visible manifestation of U.S. wars reaching our own soil. To be clear, I am not talking about the absurd and insulting notion that there is a war between the #BlackLivesMatter Movement and the police. This racist intellectual nonsense has been spewed by commentators like Rush Limbaugh labeling #BlackLivesMatter a terrorist group, former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) tweeting “This is now war. Watch out Obama. Watch out black lives matter punks. Real America is coming after you,” or in the New York Post’s headline of “Civil War”. These reactions are not only despicable in their tone and message, they are entirely missing the point.

#BlackLivesMatter is a call by black activists to end violence, not escalate it. The movement aims to “fight anti-Black racism, to spark dialog among Black people, and to facilitate the types of connections necessary to encourage social action and engagement”.

#BlackLivesMatter understands that the most effective form of social protest is creative nonviolence, in fact in adverse conditions like the U.S status quo it is the only path toward success. It is a very necessary form of participating in democracy to challenge unjust status quo, not some sort of war on the police.

The war that has come home is that of unchallenged U.S. militarism. While easily identifiable in wars abroad, the sometimes subtler forms of militarism played out in six ways over the last days.

First, there are too many weapons in the hands of too many people. These weapons killed Philando Castile in a very minor traffic stop (broken tail-light, not even a complaint about his driving), they killed Alton Sterling for selling CDs outside of a convenience store (neither of these men had a gun in their hands), and they killed officers Brent Thompson, Patrick Zamarripa, Michael Krol, Michael Smith, and Lorne Ahrens at the hands of a sniper identified as Micah Johnson. Johnson was killed by robot armed with explosives. The entire US is “gun country” and every effort to create meaningful change is undermined by the NRA and their anti-factual propaganda and the virtually sanctified Second Amendment.

Second, there is an ongoing glorification of violence. Hollywood Blockbusters glorify snipers, the top grossing computer games and cell phone apps are war games, sports events nationwide and TV ads promote the military, and the U.S. Army Marketing and Research Group National Assets Branch maintains a fleet of semi-trailer trucks whose highly sophisticated, attractive, interactive exhibits glorify warfare, are designed to recruit impressionable youth.

Third, media often valorizes violence, nearly worships warriors, is often seduced by war-fighting gear, and ignores analysts who offer cogent transformative paths to peace.

Fourth, the 2.7 million Iraq and Afghanistan combat veterans have unprecedented rates of physical, mental, and abuse disorders, as well as high rates of suicide, homelessness and unemployment. The studies are abundant and they are worrisome. Veterans don’t receive the necessary support in any of the areas in a severely under-resourced veteran care system. The suspected sniper was a Veteran who served in Afghanistan.

Fifth, there is a troublesome militarization of police with regard to equipment and tactics visible in armored carriers, grenade launchers, and sniper rifles to name a few. In the Dallas shootings, police used a robot armed with explosives to kill the suspect while he was hiding out in a parking garage. This move was criticized heavily by legal experts as a dangerous precedent in the wrong direction and contradicts the entire notion of policing and law enforcement. The influx of combat veterans into society in general in the past 15 years, plus the police hiring preference for veterans, plus DoD distribution of military armaments to domestic US police guarantees further police militarization.

Sixth, the social injustices and inequalities cannot be addressed sufficiently due to missing resources. Public debates on entitlements and minimum wage neglect the elephant in the room – a bloated military budget where almost half of the taxpayers’ money in federal taxes goes to the military. #BlackLivesMatter certainly has a focus on injustice against black people in the U.S., but that takes place within a broader narrative of inequality, “security” spending, and war profiteering.

To be sure, this is not a specific analysis of these specific incidences over the last days. At this point little is known about the victims and perpetrators. It is clear, however, that the events took place under certain social conditions which were conducive to those and many more to unfold.

If we start focusing on fixing the factors outlined here, we might actually change the future course of events. We need to get rid of too many weapons in too many hands. Gun control, and gun control now. Stop glorifying violence in TV and in the media and be inspired by movies like “Selma,” not “American Sniper.” Move away from the violent media bias and instead toward truth, people, and solution-oriented journalism. Give our veterans all the support needed – ideally beginning with not waging wars. Insist that policing is a necessity in our society where citizens are protected and the police are respected out of admiration, not fear. See, respect, and support #BlackLivesMatter for what it is – a movement that advocates dignity, justice, and freedom for all in the face of oppression against black people. We can do this.

Unintended Consequences and the Warfare State

Mel Gurtov

“The danger is, as ever with these things, unintended consequences.” So wrote Prime Minister Tony Blair to President George W. Bush in 2002, as Bush prepared to invade Iraq.  Blair’s unstinting support of US policy, notwithstanding numerous unknowns and acknowledged large-scale obstacles, is more than a case of over-optimism or misplaced friendship.  For as the Chilcot Commission has just concluded after a seven-year long investigation of British policy, bad judgment was multiplied by hubris, a deeply flawed decision-making process, and an unquestioned faith in the ability of military power to resolve political and economic problems.

The essential message from the Chilcot Report goes well beyond British policy in Iraq, or even beyond US policy under Bush, which suffered from the same problems.  The report, to my mind, is a commentary on certain diseases that infect foreign policy decision-making processes everywhere.  Decision-making groups are always subject to misjudgments, blunders, and misperceptions; but the bigger picture has to do with what Sen. J.W. Fulbright called “the arrogance of power.”  Powerful likeminded members of a leader’s inner circle (far more often men than women), meeting in secret, with enormous destructive power at their disposal, and believing their country is invincible and their arguments infallible, make for a dangerous combination.

In 2002-2003, we know for a fact that Bush and Blair were determined to go ahead with invading Iraq regardless of any evidence or argument to the contrary.  The decision for war, far from having been due to an intelligence failure, was predetermined.  War was the answer to “getting” Saddam Hussein, the first and last resort, and the job of both governments’ leaders was to sell the war, in large part by massaging intelligence concerning weapons of mass destruction and outright lying to the public.  Opposition to war—in legislatures, in public opinion, in the UN, in domestic and international law, among allies and other friendly governments—was simply a problem to be overcome.  This was the Vietnam story for 30 years.  It is likely to be the Afghanistan story (if the US ever gets out of there), China’s South China Sea story, and Russia’s Crimea story—if we ever gain access to the relevant documents.

The Chilcot Report points up another policymaking failure that is fairly universal when it comes to questions of war and peace: an unwillingness to consider alternatives to the use of force.  The inner circle of decision makers simply never goes there.  Peace is unthinkable, at least not until victory has been achieved.  That means avoiding planning for negotiations and post-conflict rebuilding.  It’s a time for warriors, not diplomats.  Officials who argue against aggressive policies thus find themselves sidelined; they are “soft,” hence no longer useful members of “the team.”

At least one writer, Trevor Timm in The Guardian, has already called for a Chilcot-style report on George W.’s Iraq policy.  But we all know that such an investigation is not going to happen, even under a Democratic leadership.  As Barack Obama has made clear in not pursuing criminal charges against CIA and other torturers, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the lot are free to enjoy their retirement. After all, Iraq is history, and besides, we must always value social stability over punishment when the criminal behavior of state leaders is concerned.  The International Criminal Court is for others.

The Chilcot Report provides a public service by reminding us that there will always be “unintended consequences,” and that those consequences may prove considerably greater than the policy problem everyone had originally addressed. One look at the Middle East today compared with 2002 makes that assessment plain enough.  Failing to stop the war train long enough to consider what those unintended consequences might be, and whether they might be formidable enough to keep the train in the station, is the Achilles heel of great powers.  How to overcome that dilemma requires much more than tinkering with the decision-making system, for at bottom the arrogance of power is the enemy, and the Chilcot Report provides no antidote for it.

Killing and Our Current American Crisis

John Grant

Kill one person, it’s called murder.
Kill 100,000, it’s called foreign policy.

– A popular bumper sticker

Everybody seems angry and frustrated these days. What’s important is what people do with that anger and frustration. It’s also important to understand the roots of all this anger.

A black preacher who was part of the peaceful Black Lives Matter street protest in Dallas the night when five cops were killed told an MSNBC reporter after the killings he was still angry over the killings by police of black men in the last three days and in previous months. He carried a baseball bat over his shoulder. Likewise, in a separate but related realm, Iraqi exile Sami Ramadani confessed on Amy Goodman’s news program that being asked to comment on the recent Chilcot Report detailing the culpability of the British government for the Iraq War was difficult for him because of the incredible anger the subject incited in him.

These two men are not a problem. They were able to channel their anger into constructive paths, one a preacher/protester, the other a writer/commentator. I share the anger expressed by these men, as I share their devotion to peaceful modes of expression.

The problem we face in this nation comes from another quarter: It comes from those who, for one reason or another, feel compelled to address their frustrations, fears and sense of insulted self-image by using violence. This category involves people of all classes and levels of status. I would put former President George W. Bush and others like him in this category of resorting rashly to senseless violence. The category would also include Jeronimo Yanez, the cop who shot Philando Castile in St. Paul, and Micah Johnson, the military veteran who murdered five cops in Dallas.

I think I hear someone crying “foul!” Let me explain. First, I include the former president in such a category to make a larger point about the state of America circa 2016. I’m a realist, so I don’t expect Mr. Bush will be arrested anytime soon. The point is to actually think about what it means to kill people and to mourn for loved ones. The killings in Dallas were heart-wrenching; on the media, there were endless references to the mourning families of the killed officers. Again, heart-breaking and infuriating to ponder. But what angers me most is the mourning relatives of undeserving African Americans killed by cops and the hundreds of thousands of relatives of the dead in Iraq whose on-going grief should be on the conscience of George W. Bush and “killers” like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell. The dead in Iraq never seem to get much attention, and the crimes of the ruling class seem to just slip away into some obscure memory hole. The Iraq War opened up a Pandora’s Box and let out a host of horrors. ISIS is one of these horrors. Another is a deepening distrust of government. Official forgetting is epidemic.

On MSNBC, Fox and CNN, I listened to one self-righteous TV talking head after another wring their hands in disbelief over Micah Johnson’s shooting of Dallas cops. I think it was a woman on Fox who said: “I can’t understand why someone would do a thing like this.” Is this woman mentally deficient? I don’t think so. Instead, she’s assuming a style of public media thinking that has become part of the problem, something we need to grow out of and move beyond. I have no trouble understanding the anger that motivated Micah Johnson, as I can understand how his military weapons training boomeranged in his head into a misguided terrorist act. It’s called empathy. Which is not the same thing as sympathy; to empathize means to put yourself in someone else’s shoes — even into their head. It’s an effort to understand, not excuse — versus the usual demonization process and intensifying cycle of violence. There’s a tradition of black veterans as justice-seeking vigilantes. John Singleton’s film Rosewood is about a massacre of blacks in 1923 in Rosewood, Florida, and a WWI black vet played by the imposing Ving Rhames leads an effort to fight back. There’s a couple blacksploitation films from the 70s with the same theme utilizing black Vietnam vets as heroes fighting “the man” back home.

I can also understand what motivated George W. Bush to invade Iraq and take the lives of hundreds of thousands of human beings there. The plot doesn’t seem difficult to grasp: As a leader, he was caught with his pants down on 9/11 and he reacted with “shock and awe” in an unrelated place to bolster a fearsome image. It all went south from there. The point is, while I empathize with both Johnson’s and Bush’s decisions and their accompanying actions, I repudiate them both as criminal. As the Chilcot Report makes very clear about British Prime Minister Tony Blair, these leaders knew what they were doing. They lied their way into an invasion; they were not “misled” by poor intel. Unfortunately, something with the partisan-transcending integrity of a Chilcot Report is unlikely to happen in our culture at this time.

The types of killing being discussed here — state mass killing, individual police killing and individual pay-back killing (some might call it terrorism) — are treated differently in our criminal justice system for obvious reasons, most of them political and involving the relative status of the killer and the victim. On a pure existential level where the meaning-establishing narratives of politics and status we take for granted are removed and life is nothing but a Jackson Pollack confusion of chaos, killing is killing, dead is dead and mourning loved ones hurts.

The Muslim spiritual leader who spoke at the very moving grieving ceremony in Dallas on the day after the police killings earnestly asked the crowd why we so often have to wait for such violent and tragic events in order to do something about our problems. He’s right. It may have something to do with our philosophy of profit and the free-market and holding out until the absolute last moment lest we make a premature “deal” and give away too much. In that case, violence becomes a punctuation in the process. Everybody at that ceremony in Dallas — white and black, Jew and Muslim — stressed, often with emotion in their voices, we had a real problem in America. The evidence was a week of two senseless police killings of young black men and the inklings of an armed civil war in the making. The fact good people have been screaming ‘til they’re blue in the face for years about this kind of crisis didn’t matter. At the Dallas ceremony, the consensus was if something wasn’t done and done quickly, the nation was in deep trouble. We can only hope this urgency endures beyond the usual mourning period following such incidents.

The remarks made by Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings truly surprised me. My anti-Texas prejudice was not ready for this man, a large white guy who had been CEO of Pizza Hut, a Democrat, who spoke movingly about the need for racial healing, how slavery and other abuses in our history (including the two killings that week) were real — and finally, that there was a need for forgiveness as a way forward. Granted, in his narrative it was white people who needed to be forgiven, but with forgiveness comes atonement, and the mayor seemed inclined to do some needed atoning. Likewise, Dallas Police Chief David Brown carried himself with great humility whenever he showed up before the cameras in the midst of leading the effort to capture or kill Micah Johnson. He spoke of police vulnerability and the need for public support. There was none of the strutting, macho braggadocio made famous by the former president from Texas. The traditional, old-west tenets of vengeance and violent response did not seem to be working anymore in this western urban collective. Something different had to be worked out. And we learned it was already happening: Dallas was in the process of de-militarizing its police into a more community-oriented force. Protesters told of friendly cops in non-SWAT outfits accompanying the Black Lives Matter protest; some cops had their pictures taken with protesters. Dallas cops were actually “protecting and serving” their community — not patrolling it like it was Falluja.

As the Muslim religious leader emphasized, it’s at these difficult junctures that people join together to figure out a better way. It’s an uphill struggle, but we can encourage the spirit of forgiveness Mayor Rawlings spoke of. Forgiveness, despite what its slanderous detractors say, is a two-way street focused on difficult dialogue and change; it’s about moving-on with life for the benefit of everybody. It doesn’t work in all cases, but it’s the way of love, a word the mayor and others emphasized over and over that afternoon. Hate gets us nowhere.

I have no need to see George W. Bush in prison; I just want his actions officially recognized as a national disgrace for Americans and, more important, the people of Iraq — so nothing like it will ever happen again. Officer Jeronimo Yanez clearly should be indicted and convicted of homicide; but maybe more important than prison would be some kind of atonement work and the development of a nationally-driven effort to more effectively train police officers like Yanez to better manage their fears. As for Micah Johnson, he chose to avoid trial and went the route of suicide-by-cop, which may be the best justice in his case.

Norm Stamper, the former police chief of Seattle, has a new book out called To Protect and Serve: How To Fix America’s Police. He shows how virtually all police departments are used to collect revenues. Was this a pressure on officer Yanez? The word “quotas” is never used; instead, it’s called “the numbers game.” That is, a cop is told he must deliver two “movers” (moving violation tickets) every day — and more if he’s ambitious to move up in the department. This process was taken to an egregiously oppressive level in Ferguson, Missouri. Stamper also says “the discipline of recognizing and managing one’s fears is not taught in the police academy. Perversely, recruits are taught the opposite. They’re taught to be afraid, very afraid.” He advocates, instead, teaching “the value of knowledge, and wisdom, and self-discipline.” He also points out that police work “does not crack the top ten of the country’s deadliest occupations.” Truck drivers, construction workers and roofers are killed at a greater rate.

Many agree this amazing week is a crisis moment; but it’s also an opportunity to examine the many roots of that crisis. Donald Trump is dead wrong: There’s no going backwards to greatness — except in one’s mind. Life only moves forward toward an uncertain future. Anything else is arguing for a form of mass mental illness that would require even more violence to sustain than the crazy state of exceptionalism we’re in the grip of now. Greatness comes with real self-knowledge.

Towards Recognition And Identity: The Plight Of Transsexuals in Kerala

Sunil Kumar K

The allegations came recently in newspapers that two transsexuals are brutally attacked by the police in Kochi. This is the current situation of transgender life in Kerala albeit the existence of the transgender policy the state triumphs.  They are being faced discrimination continuously in various forms. Apropos to this incident the allegation is charged against those who should actually assure the security of so-called sections.  Why this happens in Kerala where society is enlightened by education and reform movement?  It reveals the fact that, now a day, the right to life with dignity apropos the transsexuals are being crushed in the mainstream sphere of Kerala.

The transsexuals have been excluded from effectively participating in social, cultural, economy, politics and in decision-making sphere. The primary reason of the exclusion is perceived to the lack of recognition of the gender status of this people. It is a key barrier that often prevents them in exercising their civil rights in their desired gender. So far there is no single comprehensive source on the basis of which an evident based advocacy action plan can be prepared by transgender people or possible legal solutions can be arrived at by policy makers. Reports of harassment, violence, denial of services and unfair treatment against transgender people in the spheres of employment, housing and public accommodation have been discussed in media from time to time.

However, these people are fall under the group named LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender). They constitute the marginalized section of society in India and so in Kerala. They have been facing legal, social and economic difficulties. These people shunned by family and society alike. They have restricted access to education, health services and public spheres. Politics and decision-making processes have been out of their reach. They have very difficulty in exercising their basic civil rights. Sexual activity between two persons of the same sex is criminalized, and is punishable in incarceration. Reports of harassment, denial of services and unfair treatment against this section have come to light frequently.

The Supreme Court, in a landmark judgment in 2014, passed the ruling that in view of the constitutional guarantee the transgender people is entitled to basic rights such right personal liberty, dignity, freedom of expression, right to education and empowerment, right against violence, discrimination and exploitation and right to work. Further, every person must have the right to decide his/her gender expression and identity. This is violated by the attack of the police in Kochi unfortunately. Again in 2015, the then state chief secretary of Kerala unveiled the document of the state policy for transsexuals in Kerala by handing over its copy. Thereby the life of transsexuals is a relevant issued being discussed in Kerala society. They are bringing themselves to the mainstream sphere through their organizational efforts and assure their demand of the right life and personal dignity. Apropos the 2016 budget of LDF government may be wiped out toxicity of the existing plight being faced by transgenders in Kerala.

What Is NATO — Really?

Eric Zuesse

When NATO was founded, that was done in the broader context of the U.S. Marshall Plan, and the entire U.S. operation to unify the developed Atlantic countries of North America and Europe, for a coming Cold War allegedly against communism, but actually against Russia — the core country not only in the U.S.S.R. but also in Eastern Europe (the areas that Stalin’s forces had captured from Hitler’s forces).

NATO was founded with the North Atlantic Treaty in Washington DC on 4 April 1949, and its famous core is:

Article 5: The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

However, widely ignored is that the Treaty’s preamble states:

The Parties to this Treaty reaffirm their faith in the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and their desire to live in peace with all peoples and all governments. They are determined to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law. They seek to promote stability and well-being in the North Atlantic area. They are resolved to unite their efforts for collective defence and for the preservation of peace and security. They therefore agree to this North Atlantic Treaty.

Consequently, anything that would clearly be in violation of “the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and their desire to live in peace with all peoples and all governments,” or of “the rule of law,” would clearly be in violation of the Treaty, no matter what anyone might assert to the contrary. (As regards “the principles of democracy,” that’s a practical matter which might be able to be determined, in a particular case, by means of polling the public in order to establish what the public in a given country actually wants; and, as regards “individual liberty,” that is often the liberty of one faction against, and diminishing, the liberty of some other faction(s), and so is devoid of real meaning and is propagandistic, not actually substantive. Even the “rule of law” is subject to debate, but at least that debate can be held publicly within the United Nations, and so isn’t nearly as amorphous. Furthermore, as far as “individual liberty” is concerned, the Soviet Union was a founding member of the UN and of its Security Council with the veto-right which that entails, but was never based upon “individual liberty”; and, so, whatever “rule of law” the UN has ever represented, isn’t and wasn’t including “individual liberty”; therefore, by the preamble’s having subjected the entire document of the NATO Treaty to “the principles and purposes of the Charter of the United Nations,” the phrase “individual liberty” in the NATO Treaty isn’t merely propagandistic — it’s actually vacuous.)

The NATO Treaty, therefore, is, from its inception, a Treaty against Russia. It is not really — and never was — a treaty against communism. The alliance’s ideological excuse doesn’t hold, and never was anything more than propaganda for a military alliance of America and its allies, against Russia and its allies. Consequently, the Warsaw Pact had to be created, on 14 May 1955, as an authentic defensive measure by Russia and its allies. This had really nothing to do with ideology. Ideology was and is only an excuse for war — in that case, for the Cold War. For example, a stunningly honest documentary managed to be broadcast in 1992 by the BBC, and showed that the U.S. OSS-CIA had begun America’s war against “communism” even at the very moments while WW II was ending in 1945, by recruiting in Europe ‘former’ supporters of Hitler and Mussolini, who organized “false flag” (designed-to-be-blamed-against-the-enemy) terrorist attacks in their countries, which very successfully terrified Europeans against ‘communism’ (i.e., against Russia and its allies). As one of the testifiers in that video noted (at 6:45), “In 1945 the Second World War ended and the Third World War started.” The ‘former’ fascists took up the cause against “communism” but actually against Russia; it wasn’t democracy-versus-communism; it was fascists continuing — but now under the ‘democratic’ banner — their war against Russia. This operation was, until as late as 1990, entirely unknown to almost all democratically elected government officials. The key mastermind behind it, the brilliant double-agent Allen Dulles, managed to become officially appointed, by U.S. President Eisenhower in 1953, to lead the CIA. Originally, that subversive-against-democracy element within the CIA had been only a minority faction. Dulles had no qualms even about infiltrating outright Nazis into his operation, and his operation gradually took over not only the U.S. but its allies. His key point man on that anti-democracy operation was James Angleton — a rabid hater of Russians, who was as psychopathic an agent for America’s aristocracy as was Dulles himself. But the CIA was only one of the broader operation’s many tentacles, others soon were formed such as the Bilderberg group. Then, the CIA financed the start of the European Union, which was backed strongly by the Bilderbergers. This was sold as democratic globalism, but it’s actually fascist globalism, which is dictatorial in a much more intelligent way than Hitler and Mussolini had tried to impose merely by armed force. It relies much more on the force of deception — force against the mind, instead of against the body.

Mikhail Gorbachev failed to recognize this fact about NATO (its actual non-ideological, pure conquest, orientation) in 1990, when he agreed and committed to the dismemberment and end of Russia’s established system of alliances, without there being any simultaneous mirror-image termination of America’s system of alliances — including NATO. He wasn’t at all a strategic thinker, but instead tried to respond in a decent way to the short-term demands upon him — such as for immediate democracy. He was a deeply good man, and courageous too, but unfortunately less intelligent than was his actual opponent at that key moment, in 1990, George Herbert Walker Bush, who was as psychopathic as Gorbachev was principled.

Legalized Murder And The Politics Of Terror

Chris Hedges

Police officers carry out random acts of legalized murder against poor people of color not because they are racist, although they may be, or even because they are rogue cops, but because impoverished urban communities have evolved into miniature police states.

Police can stop citizens at will, question and arrest them without probable cause, kick down doors in the middle of the night on the basis of warrants for nonviolent offenses, carry out wholesale surveillance, confiscate property and money and hold people—some of them innocent—in county jails for years before forcing them to accept plea agreements that send them to prison for decades. They can also, largely with impunity, murder them.

Those who live in these police states, or internal colonies, especially young men of color, endure constant fear and often terror. Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” calls those trapped in these enclaves members of a criminal “caste system.” This caste system dominates the lives of not only the 2.3 million who are incarcerated in the United States but also the 4.8 million on probation or parole. Millions more are forced into “permanent second-class citizenship” by their criminal records, which make employment, higher education and public assistance, including housing, difficult and usually impossible to obtain. This is by design.

The rhetoric of compassion, even outrage, by the political class over the police murders in Baton Rouge, La., and near St. Paul, Minn., will not be translated into change until the poor are granted full constitutional rights and police are accountable to the law. The corporate state, however, which is expanding the numbers of poor through austerity and deindustrialization, has no intention of instituting anything more than cosmetic reform.

Globalization has created a serious problem of “surplus” or “redundant” labor in deindustrialized countries. The corporate state has responded to the phenomenon of “surplus” labor with state terror and mass incarceration. It has built a physical and legal mechanism that lurks like a plague bacillus within the body politic to be imposed, should wider segments of society resist, on all of us.

The physics of human nature dictates that the longer the state engages in indiscriminant legalized murder, especially when those killings can be documented on video or film and disseminated to the public, the more it stokes the revenge assassinations we witnessed in Dallas. This counterviolence serves the interests of the corporate state. The murder of the five Dallas police officers allows the state to deify its blue-uniformed enforcers, demonize those who protest police killings and justify greater measures of oppression, often in the name of reform.

This downward spiral of violence and counterviolence will not be halted until the ruling ideology of neoliberalism is jettisoned and the corporate state is dismantled. Violence and terror, as corporate capitalism punishes greater and greater segments of the population, are, and will remain, theessential tools for control.

No one, with the exception of the elites, champions neoliberal policies. Citizens do not want their jobs shipped overseas, their schools and libraries closed, their pension and retirement funds looted, programs such as Social Security and welfare cut, government bailouts of Wall Street, or militarized police forces patrolling their neighborhoods as if they were foreign armies of occupation—which in many ways they are. These policies have to be forced on a reluctant public. This is accomplished only through propaganda, including censorship, and coercion.

Unfortunately, all the calls by the political class for reform in the wake of recent murders by police will make things worse. Reform has long been a subterfuge for expanded police repression. This insidious process is documented in Naomi Murakawa’s book “The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America.” [Click here to see excerpts at Google Books.]

Murakawa wrote that lawmakers, especially liberal lawmakers, “confronted racial violence as an administrative deficiency.” Thus, they put in place “more procedures and professionalization” to “define acceptable use of force.” They countered the mob violence of lynching, she points out, with a system of state-sanctioned murder, or capital punishment. “The liberal’s brand of racial criminalization and administrative deracialization legitimized extreme penal harm to African-Americans: the more carceral machinery was rights-based and rule-bound, the more racial disparity was isolatable to ‘real’ black criminality.” In other words, the state was “permitted limitless violence so long as it conformed to clearly defined laws, administrative protocol, and due process,” while those who were the victims of this violence were said to be at fault because of their supposed criminal propensities.

The so-called “professionalization” of the police, the standard response to police brutality, has always resulted in more resources, militarized weapons and money given to the police. It has been accompanied, at the same time, by less police accountability and greater police autonomy to strip citizens of their rights as well as an expansion of the use of lethal force.

If the state of siege of our inner cities were lifted, if prisoners were allowed to return to their communities and if evictions, which destroy the cohesion and solidarity of a neighborhood, were to end, the corporate state would face a rebellion. And the corporate state knows it. It needs to maintain these pod-like police states if it is to continue the relentless drive to further impoverish the country in the name of austerity. The continued cutting or closing of the few social services that keep people from facing total destitution, the massive unemployment that is never addressed, the despair, the hopelessness, the retreat into drugs and alcohol to blunt the pain, the heavy burden of debt peonage that sees families evicted, the desperate struggle to make money from the illegal economy and the forced bankruptcies all are about social control. And they work.

The state insists that to combat the “lawlessness” of those it has demonized it must be emancipated from the constraints of the law. The unrestricted and arbitrary subjugation of one despised group, stripped of equality before the law, conditions the police to employ brutal tactics against the wider society.

“Laws that are not equal for all revert to rights and privileges, something contradictory to the very nature of nation-states,” Hannah Arendt wrote. “The clearer the proof of their inability to treat stateless people as legal persons and the greater the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police.”

The miniature police states are laboratories. They give the corporate state the machinery, legal justification and expertise to strip the entire country of rights, wealth and resources. And this, in the end, is the goal of neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism, like all utopian ideologies, requires the banishment of empathy. The inability to feel empathy is the portal to an evil often carried out in the name of progress. A world without empathy rejects as an absurdity the call to love your neighbor as yourself. It elevates the cult of the self. It divides the world into winners and losers. It celebrates power and wealth. Those who are discarded by the corporate state, especially poor people of color, are viewed as life unworthy of life. They are denied the dignity of work and financial autonomy. They are denied an education and proper medical care, meaning many die from preventable illnesses. They are criminalized. They are trapped from birth to death in squalid police states. And they are blamed for their own misery.

Disenfranchised white workers, also the victims of deindustrialization and neoliberalism, flock to Donald Trump rallies stunted by this lack of empathy. The hatred of the other offers them a sense of psychological protection. For, if they saw themselves in those they demonized, if they could express empathy, they would have to accept that what is being done to poor people of color can, and perhaps will, be done to them. This truth is too hard to accept. It is easier to blame the victims.

Our political elites, rather than addressing the crisis, will make it worse. If we do not revolt, the savagery, including legalized murder, that is the daily reality for poor people of color will become our reality. We must overthrow the corporate state. We must free ourselves from the poisonous ideology of neoliberalism. If we remain captive we will soon endure the nightmare that afflicts our neighbor.

The Brexit Verdict: Failure Of The Idea Of Common Markets

T.Navin

The Brexit verdict brings out the weakness of the concept of European Union. It raises questions whether integration based on the concept of common markets and free flow of capital and goods, services and people can be transformative for all the social classes. Whether integration based on supremacy of finance capital and markets and designed at promoting their profitability at the cost welfare of the working poor sustain this integration for longer.

The exit of Britain from European Union is a reaction of people to cuts in social expenditure which has affected them drastically. The pattern of voting favoring exit reveal those social classes at the lowest of the class hierarchy consisting of semi and unskilled manual workers, casual or lower grade workers had highest preference for exit. As one moved up the class hierarchy, the preference was for remaining in European Union. Professionals and managers largely voted to remain. The choicesof working classes were determined by the affect of three decades of economic policies which tended to be pro-rich starting from Thatcherism and which emphasized on deindustrialization and privatization. From secured and well paying employment, working classes were reduced to being in jobs which were low paying employment with limited job security. This was followed by 2008 economic crises which threatened their jobs. Efforts in introducing austerity measures for post recession recovery hit them still further as the welfare measures reduced particularly the National Health Service.

The concept of European Union while it may have provided some sense of larger identity, it was largely a market integration where the beneficiaries were the classes at the top of the economic hierarchy. The social classes at the bottom were seen either as passive consumers or the servers of a system based on supremacy of finance capital. The welfare needs of social classes at the bottom such as on basic health care and education, a decent employment for their well being were seen of less of a priority.

Hence while the integration served the interests of the corporate elite very well by enabling their increased access to markets and thus their profits, but on the other hand austerity and fiscal measures has worked against working classes. The reducing employment prospects, falling wages, insecure employment and job security, reduced social welfare services such as on education and health have become patterns which has affected the masses. The neo-liberal measures, an integral feature of the European Union thus has been more beneficial to economic and corporate elite.

Though the cause of economic distress was the pro-rich economic model of European Union, the far right wing UK Independent party (UKIP) of Nigel Farage campaigned for exit based on the thesis of threat from immigrants. The downturn in Britain was attributed to immigrants and thus called for stringent control against entry of immigrants was given. It tried to argue that the idea of European Union was making it easier for immigrants to enter Britain.

The Brexit verdict has shown that the idea of common markets being a solution is a failure.