What Does The EU Stand For: Globalization or Universalism?

William Hawes

What is the purpose of the European Union? This question has been of the minds of everyone following the UK vote in favor of Brexit. Yet in the mad scramble to make sense of the United Kingdom’s rejection of the EU, little lucid commentary has been made. European leaders, the fawning media, and UK citizens alike portrayed the vote as either a refusal of EU austerity, or unhappiness with immigrants and open borders.

So which one was it: a rejection of austerity or immigration?  Were UK citizens fed up with austerity measures, and with unreasonable and onerous regulations and taxes paid to the EU bureaucracy? Or were Brexiters caught up in a fever of anti-immigrant nationalism and populist demagoguery, egged on by the odious Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage?

In truth, this is a misleading either/or question: UK citizens were fed up with both lax immigration controls and EU-imposed austerity. By framing the question this way, political commentators miss the larger picture: it is globalization that is the cause of the disintegration of Western political systems and civil society, and it is globalization, i.e. predatory capitalism, that is the root cause of the anger and rage felt by voters of Brexit.

This rage was displaced: for white, working class UK citizens facing declining living standards and social mobility, immigrants are easy targets for their fury to be unleashed on. The undemocratic, sclerotic, neoliberal rule emanating from the EU also made for a useful scapegoat. No one can doubt the contempt and disregard EU leaders have for ordinary citizens, and for a genuine people’s democracy. Besides each member nation offering citizens their own referendum to stay or leave, what else can be done?

This brings us full circle, back to the question: what does the EU stand for? Reduced to a single word, there can be no doubt that at the moment, the EU’s leadership unflinchingly promotes globalization, the tentacle-like network of transnational capitalism, along with all its militarist, industrialist, oligarchic, and kowtowing media trappings.

What seems to have gone unnoticed, except for a few astute observers, was the lack of talk about the UK and EU’s role in the wider world. As the venerable Andre Vltchek explains:

“Almost no commentator bothered to notice what was truly shocking about the entire referendum process: an absolute lack of progressive ideology, of internationalism and concern for the world as a whole. Both sides (and were there really two sides there) presented a fireworks of shallow selfishness and of pettiness. The profound moral corruption of the West was clearly exposed… Everybody in Europe now wants more, more and more. Screw austerity! ‘Give us more benefits!’ Provide us with better wages, job security, and shorter working hours!”

A cautionary tale was revealed last year when former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis explained his dealings with the Eurogroup, which convenes to discuss Euro currency matters. After the Eurogroup issued a communiqué without him, Varoufakis rightly asked for clarification. Here’s the response:

          “The meeting was briefly halted. After a handful of calls, a lawyer turned to him and said, ‘Well, the Eurogroup does        not exist in law, there is no treaty which has convened this group.’”

Varoufakis elaborates:

          “What we have is a non-existent group that has the greatest power to determine the lives of Europeans. It’s not    answerable to anyone, given it doesn’t exist in law; no minutes are kept; and it’s confidential. No citizen ever knows         what is said within . . . These are decisions of almost life and death, and no member has to answer to anybody.”

This is the new boss, same as the old boss. EU finance leaders are unaccountable to their citizens, just as European and world business leaders are plotting to unravel national and supranational regulatory structures by imposing the TTIP, TISA, and TTP trade deals.

Yet there is another vision of Europe which can supplant the consumerist, neoliberal mold that the EU is turning into, ostensibly in order to compete with the US and China. The idea of a universal world culture, with dignity and egalitarian democracy for all peoples, is what Europeans should strive for. This is hinted at in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which sets the tone for future forms of limited international governance and worldwide social justice initiatives, cultural and environmental rights, and individual liberties.

This sketch of a livable future world confederation, with nonviolent social relations, has its roots in the great Immanuel Kant’s “Perpetual Peace”. Imagine if all EU policy-makers were required to read such a revelatory work, and form legislation based on it.

Of course, the pro-capitalist EU leadership won’t take action without momentum from civil society. For this to happen, what Bassam Tibi calls a Leitkultur (“Leading Culture”) must develop. This means that the postmodern illusions of superficial multiculturalism and cultural relativism must be squashed. For Tibi, Enlightenment values, based on universal rights, secularism, pluralism, and democracy must be protected and expanded for all Europeans, which could re-engage and spark interest among citizens to rework the wider social fabric.

Additionally, this may have the effect of dislodging people in the West from their Eurocentric bubbles. With significant progress, widening empathy for others could foster the internationalism needed to provide poorer countries with the resources, technology, and solidarity to vanquish poverty, improve quality of life, and fight against Western-backed tin-pot dictators in the developing nations.

In his essay “The Idea of Europe”, George Steiner explains the need to rise above our corporate, consumer worldview:

“It may be that the future of the ‘idea of Europe’, if it has one, depends less on central banking and agricultural subsidies, on investment in technology or common tariffs, than we are instructed to believe. It may be that the OECD or NATO, the further extension of the Euro or of parliamentary bureaucracies on the model of Luxembourg are not the primary dynamics of the European vision. Or if, indeed, they are, that vision is hardly one to rouse the human soul… Making money and flooding our lives with increasingly trivialised material goods is a profoundly vulgar, emptying passion.”

While Steiner is in favor of European integration, for him, a proviso is necessary: Europe must not give in to the standardization, to the tyranny of the masses, and the homogeny of Anglo-American culture, or the authoritarianism of the emerging East Asian model. Europeans must embrace their differences, their local traditions, even as they maintain a wider Union to stave off warfare and unbridled economic competition.

For Europe to thrive and maintain global influence, the traditions of great art, literature, and radical humanism should be nurtured, with economic preferences given to small businesses and cooperatives. This is in contrast to the US-UK “merchant model” of the transnational conglomerates, and their Asian counterparts, the Korean Chaebols and Japanese Keiretsus.

We know what the EU stands for now: globalization and all its discontents. The dreary, neoliberal perspective of leaders like Hollande and Merkel must be replaced: it is the most radical ideas of visionaries like Kant, Tibi, and Steiner that should be upheld. In doing so, the myopia and selfishness of the capitalist worldview becomes all too clear. By embracing universalism, the roots of world conflict can be addressed: material poverty in the developing nations would be history within a few short years, if, for example, the West reallocated their military budgets to such ends. Conversely, the spiritual emptiness of rampant consumerism and sensationalist media could be vanquished in the West, if compassion and solidarity is expanded towards Asia, Africa, Latin America, and indigenous peoples across the globe. Capitalism, and the expanded version of globalization are Europe’s past: the only possible future is to embrace universalism.

America’s Recent Achievements In The Middle East

Eric Zuesse


Here are before-and-after pictures, at https://twitter.com/MAL0mt/status/701077438525263873/photo/1, of what the U.S. government has achieved, in the Middle East:

What’s especially interesting there, is that in all of these missions, except for Iraq, the U.S. was doing it with the key participation of the Saud family, the royals who own Saudi Arabia, and who are the world’s largest buyers of American weaponry. Since Barack Obama came into the White House, the operations — Libya, Yemen, and Syria — have been, to a large extent, joint operations with the Sauds. ‘We’ are now working more closely with ‘our’ ‘friends’, even than ‘we’ were under George W. Bush.

As President Obama instructed his military, on 28 May 2014:

When issues of global concern do not pose a direct threat to the United States, when such issues are at stake — when crises arise that stir our conscience or push the world in a more dangerous direction but do not directly threaten us — then the threshold for military action must be higher. In such circumstances, we should not go it alone. Instead, we must mobilize allies and partners to take collective action. We have to broaden our tools to include diplomacy and development; sanctions and isolation; appeals to international law; and, if just, necessary and effective, multilateral military action. In such circumstances, we have to work with others because collective action in these circumstances is more likely to succeed.

So: ’we’ didn’t achieve these things only on our own, but instead in alliance with the royals of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, and other friendly countries, which finance jihadists everywhere but in their own country. And, of course, all of ‘us’ are allied against Russia, so we’re now surrounding that country with ‘our’ NATO partners before we do to it what we’ve previously done to Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Syria. America is becoming even more ambitious, because of ‘successes’ like these in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Ukraine.

The United States has been the great champion of ‘democracy’ throughout the world. And these are are some of the results of that ‘democracy’. ‘We’ are spreading it abroad.

‘Our’ latest victory has been ‘our’ spreading it to Ukraine. No country is closer to Russia than that.

Inside America, the term that’s used for referring to anyone who opposes this spreading of ‘democracy’, is ‘isolationist’, and this term is imported from the meaning that it had just prior to America’s joining World War II against Hitler and other fascists. Back in that time, an “isolationist” meant someone who didn’t want to defeat the fascists. The implication in the usage of this term now, is that the person who is an ‘isolationist’ is a ‘fascist’, just as was the case then. It’s someone who doesn’t want to spread ‘democracy’. To oppose American foreign policy is thus said to be not only ‘right wing’, but the extremist version of that: far right-wing — fascist, perhaps even nazi, or racist-fascist. (Donald Trump is rejected by many Republicans who say that he’s ‘not conservative enough’. Democrats consider him to be far too ‘conservative’. The neoconservative Democrat Isaac Chotiner, whom the Democratic neoconservative Slate hired away from the Democratic neoconservative The New Republic, has headlined at Slate, “Is Donald Trump a Fascist?” and he answered that question in the affirmative.) George Orwell dubbed this type of terminological usage “Newspeak.” It’s very effective.

Studies in America show that the people who are the most supportive of spreading ‘democracy’ are individuals with masters and doctoral degrees (“postgraduate degrees”). Those are the Americans who vote for these policies, to spread American ‘democracy’, to foreign lands. They want more of this — more of these achievements. (Hillary Clinton beat Bernie Sanders nationwide among the “postgraduate” group.) Some of these people pride themselves on being “technocrats.” They claim that the world needs more of their ‘expertise’. Lots of them come forth on the ‘news’ media to validate such invasions as Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, Syria after 2011, etc. Almost all of them possess doctoral degrees. This shows what they have learned. They are the most employable, the highest paid, the most successful, in their respective fields.

After all: ‘democracy’ is not for amateurs. It’s only for people who take instruction, and who do what they are told. But, told by whom? Whom are they obeying? Do they even know? In any organization, when an instruction is issued, is it always easy to know who issued it? And what happens to a person who doesn’t carry it out? There is a winnowing process. The constant survivors are the ones who rise from that process, and who ultimately win the opportunity to issue some of the instructions themselves. These people are the wheat; everybody else is chaff, which gets discarded, in a ‘democracy’.

The Dawning of the Age of Non-Terrorist Terrorism

C. J. Hopkins

Berlin.

Of all the types of terrorist threats we are being conditioned to live in a more or less constant state of low-level fear of, the most terrifying of all has got to be the type we’ve witnessed throughout the Summer — a Summer so terrifying The Guardian is now officially calling it “The Summer of Fear.” Orlando, Nice, Würzberg, Munich, Reutlingen, Ansbach, Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray … the Terror just keeps coming, and coming, like the monster in some blockbuster Hollywood movie. The most terrifying part of it is that these are no ordinary terrorist attacks carried out by ordinary terrorists at the behest of ordinary terrorist groups, but, rather, the work of a new breed of terrorist … a terrorist who has no connection to any type of terrorist groups, is not primarily motivated by Terrorism, and, basically, has nothing to do with Terrorism. Let’s go ahead and call him the “non-terrorist terrorist.”

According to the official narrative being propagated by the Western media, non-terrorist Terrorism officially began in late September 2014 with a statement by Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, a terrorist spokesman for ISIS, ISIL, Daesh, or whatever we’re calling it this week. This statement, which has since been quoted as often as humanly possible by the press, exhorted decentralized terrorist cells, aspiring terrorists, and other random individuals, to launch attacks against innocent Westerners, to wit, to “[s]mash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with a car, or throw him down from a high place …” and so on.

According to the same official narrative, the first attack by a non-terrorist terrorist was carried out in Dijon, France — yes, the place the mustard comes from — in late December 2014, three months after the al-Adnani statement. (The 2013 Boston Marathon bomb attack apparently doesn’t count anymore, as it occurred before the al-Adnani statement and thus doesn’t fit the official narrative.) The prosecutor in the case — the French case, of course — described the perpetrator as a “barely coherent,” mentally unbalanced, middle-aged man who used his car to mow down over a dozen innocent French pedestrians while shouting Islamic stuff out the window.

This, we are learning, is part of the cunning modus operandi of the non-terrorist terrorists, the way they are able to extensively plan and carry out terrifying terrorist attacks while posing as mentally disturbed individuals, or as sexually confused or alienated loners, who have absolutely nothing to do with Terrorism. This ruse was deployed again in Orlando, where the non-terrorist terrorist went as far as to pose as a closeted homosexual; and in Nice, where the attacker maintained his cover for years as a wife-beating petty criminal; and in Würzberg, where apparently the teenage terrorist had been masquerading as an orphaned refugee, but in fact was an insidious sleeper agent sent by ISIS to attack some random train in the middle of the German countryside.

According to knowledgeable Terrorism experts, Western governments, and the mainstream media, we’re going to be seeing more and more of this — these seemingly uncoordinated attacks, both on targets like Nice, which fit the narrative, but also on targets that make no sense, and that terrorists like ISIS have never even heard of, but to which they have nonetheless dispatched their agents to attack Asian tourists with kitchen knives and hatchets while shouting “Allahu Akbar” at the top of their lungs. Who knows where the next attack will take place? Vossevangen, Norway? Demming, New Mexico? Menomonie, Wisconsin? The Outer Hebrides? Your guess is as good as mine.

The point is, as the War on Terror — which, as you probably remember, President Obama officially ended in 2013 — enters this new and more terrifying phase, we will need to prepare ourselves, both logistically and emotionally, for the dramatically heightened level of Terror engendered by the non-terrorist terrorist threat, as well as the invasive “security measures” that will be required to pretend to combat it. Fear, as ever, will be the watchword. Everyone will need to do their part to assist the authorities in identifying, indefinitely detaining, and enhanced-interrogating potential non-terrorist terrorist suspects, and anyone else who looks kind of fishy. Let’s take a look at how that will work.

How to Spot a Non-Terrorist Terrorist

The non-terrorist terrorist is difficult to identify and place on a secret government watch-list as he exhibits few — and sometimes none — of the characteristics of the conventional terrorist. Whereas the conventional terrorist is typically a devout Muslim, and a member of some notorious terrorist group, like ISIS, Al-Qaeda, or Al-Nusra Front (although the latter may not be terrorists, currently, depending on what’s going on in Syria), the non-terrorist terrorist is usually not at all religious, is not a member of any terrorist group, and has absolutely no connection to Terrorism. This lack of any type of terrorist background, or any other ties to actual Terrorism, given the current restrictive limits imposed on anti-Terror professionals by laws, national constitutions, and the like, effectively renders the non-terrorist terrorist undetainable in advance by government agents, anti-Terror police units, and corporate mercenaries, at least in developed Western countries, so they’re going to need all the help they can get in terms of surveilling and profiling everyone. With that in mind, here are some tips for identifying potential non-terrorist terrorists.

The most important thing to remember is that the non-terrorist terrorist is definitely a Muslim, or at least is vaguely Muslim-looking, or has a Muslim-sounding name. White supremacists, neo-Nazis, heavily-armed fundamentalist Christians, and garden-variety white-skinned criminals, unattractive and dangerous though they may be, do not fall into the Terror category, unless, that is, they blow up something like the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, but even that might not count anymore, as it happened before the War on Terror, and … well, once you start calling white people “terrorists,” the distinctions between things get really confusing.

In spite of the fact that he is definitely a Muslim, the non-terrorist terrorist exhibits any or all of an assortment of “non-Muslim behaviors.” He drinks, smokes, abuses drugs, is sexually promiscuous (or aspires to promiscuity), does not attend mosque, rarely prays, and otherwise appears to be just another stressed-out, debt-burdened Western consumer struggling to make sense of late-capitalist society, and to support himself — and, in some cases, his family — with some soul-crushing job at the foreign subsidiary of some global corporation he isn’t even aware of, or as an Uber-driver, or temporary security guard, or with some other type of micro-entrepreneurial activity that’s making his life a living hell, which feeds right into his other cover.

The non-terrorist terrorist often goes to great lengths to create the appearance of having had a long history of psychological and emotional problems. This cover (which the non-terrorist terrorist may begin constructing as early as his late-adolescence) may involve the feigning of a series of nervous breakdowns, or episodes of clinical depression, or suicide attempts, or other such symptoms. Don’t let this “emotionally unstable” act fool you by playing on your empathy for other human beings. If ever in doubt about a disturbed individual, or anyone expressing extremist views, or acting in any way unusual, best to just go ahead and report him, and let the authorities sort it out. You could be dealing with a non-terrorist terrorist in the process of “sudden self-radicalization.”

The “Suddenly Self-Radicalized” Non-Terrorist Terrorist

Unlike the conventional, or “actual” terrorist, the non-terrorist terrorist is often radicalized shortly before the time of his attack, or during his attack, or shortly thereafter. “Radicalization” is a tricky process, which can occur in any number of ways, e.g., over time, in structured settings, but also in purely imaginary ways that only exist in the minds of the terrorists, or the media, or anti-Terrorism experts. In any event, it’s not like the old days, when aspiring terrorists were forced to attend those terrorist training camps out in the desert, and actually get involved with Terrorism. Nowadays all it takes is the Internet, and sincere desire to radicalize yourself.

“Self-radicalization” is a growing problem, and not just among Islamic terrorists. “Radicalism” in any form that opposes or questions global Capitalism, Neoliberalism, and other Western values, is spreading like a mass psychological disorder (see Jonathan Rauch’s recent article in The Atlantic, where he diagnoses the American public’s pathological resentment of the political class). Like the child with Oppositional Defiant Disorder, sometimes even the non-terrorist terrorist — or whatever type of “self-radicalized” person — doesn’t even realize he’s becoming a terrorist, or a non-terrorist terrorist, until it’s too late.

“Self-radicalization” often begins with irrational and inappropriate resentment, which is typically projected onto affluent individuals, major corporations, investment banks, politicians, billionaires, members of the media, or the populations of other countries that happen to be invading or bombing the country of the “self-radicalizing” person in question. This misdirected pathological resentment, if allowed to fester, inevitably leads to the thinking of extremist or terrorist thoughts, which leads to the tweeting of terrorist tweets, and to terrorist Facebook posts, and so on. In no time at all, the self-radicalizing person has transformed into a full-blown non-terrorist terrorist, and is snorting up lines of pulverized Captagon, drawing half-assed ISIS flags on the walls of his apartment with indelible markers, and loading up on weapons at Walmart, or whatever passes for Walmart in his country.

This is just a preliminary check-list of the hallmark features of the non-terrorist terrorist, which the mainstream media will be adding to as The Summer of Fear approaches its climax, and presumably throughout the indefinite future, as the Age of Non-Terrorist Terrorism continues, possibly until the end of Time.

A Word of Warning Regarding Terminology

All right, I know what you’re probably thinking … you’re thinking we’ve finally reached some level of absurdity with this calling people “terrorists” thing where the term completely loses its meaning, and its ability to scare the bejesus out of people. Fortunately, this is not the case. In fact, it’s almost exactly the obverse — the more nonsensical, oxymoronic and utterly meaningless the terms we use to describe the heinous, subhuman enemies (who want to slaughter us because of our freedom) are, the more meaningful, effective and terrifying they are. This is crucial when distinguishing between, for example, our friends in Saudi Arabia and barbarous mad-dog terrorists like ISIS, both of whom chop off people’s heads for crimes like apostasy, idolatry, and adultery … but, of course, the Saudis are not savage terrorists, despite their involvement with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and … well, you can see the danger here, when you start to actually think about things.

The point is, our new “non-terrorist terrorist” designation should not in any way call into question the widely-acknowledged definition, and constant repetition, of the terms “terrorist,” “Terror,” and “Terrorism,” when applied to terrorists, whether of the “non-terrorist” or “terrorist” type. Terrorism is not a word game, or some specious semiotic construct, or an essentially arbitrary made-up label that can be slapped onto any type of violent activity or ideology we want to demonize. Terrorism is Terrorism. The word means exactly what it means … whatever that might be at this point. You can look it up on the Internet, on Google, or Wikipedia, or whatever.

And as for the “non-terrorist terrorist” designation, let’s not get all freaked out about it and make it any more confusing than it is. We can sit around and argue forever over whether the “non-terrorist terrorist” is a terrorist, but, honestly, where is that going to get us? The simple fact of the matter is, as the adjectival in the term denotes, the non-terrorist terrorist is not a terrorist … nevertheless he is a terrorist, and the fact that he is and is not a terrorist simultaneously defines what he is and makes absolutely no difference at all, at least not within the official narrative.

No, despite what terrorist apologists will tell you, calling some terrorists “non-terrorist terrorists” doesn’t mean they aren’t terrorists, or that there isn’t any such thing as “Terrorism,” except within the simulation of “reality” the global capitalist ruling classes need to maintain to keep the masses entertained and borderline paranoid, as they — i.e., the capitalists, not the masses — transform the rest of the entire planet into a combination shopping mall/labor camp.

If that were true, the “War on Terror” would be nothing but an elaborate farce, a simulacrum that was there to distract us from the sociopolitical and economic dynamics of the historical period we were actually living through … which dynamics might have something to do with something a bit more complex than “Terror,” “Evil,” “Hate,” and other empty but terror-inspiring words like that.

As stressful as things are at the moment, imagine how exhausting that would be … having to think about all that stuff, transnational Capitalism’s ideology, the manufacturing of consensus reality, all the childish narratives we would be being fed moment by moment by the corporate-owned media, and the amount of mental energy it would take to try to resist it on a daily basis … but then, seeing as you’ve made it to the end of this piece, I’m pretty sure you already have.

Olympic Chaos: The Rio Games In World Of Global Sporting Corruption

Binoy Kampmark

Wounds have opened; recriminations are all around. The Rio Olympic Games, even before the first act, has already shown how it will be one of the more interesting ones for all the wrong reasons. (Eventually, such wrong reasons tend to seem right.)

A glaring feature of the latest ruckus lies in the administration (or maladministration) of international sport.  Disagreement, for instance, about regulating doping regimes and taking action about them, is particularly fractious.  Multiple deals, often of a trans-national nature, have been made over the years. The cover-up is very much in.

No notable international organisation has been sparred bungling on the issue, or succumbing to the temptations associated with the crooked path.  Football’s world governing body FIFA remains mired in the rot, in search of the redemptive powers of reform. (The current head, Gianni Infantino, was implicated in the Panama Papers scandal, which revealed co-signed offshore deals with an indicted official made by Europe’s football governing body, UEFA.)

The athletics governing body IAAF has not proven itself an angel of cleanliness, having been put through the WADA wringer as well.  Earlier this year, the IAAF former president Lamine Diack was found to have “sanctioned and appeared to have had personal knowledge of the fraud and extortion of athletes carried out by the actions of the illegitimate governance structure he put in place.” This suggests an enduring tension between on-track or field events, which have a dynamic of their own, and the pen pushing, buck passing antics behind the scenes.

Volleys have been traded by the International Olympic Federation and World Anti-Doping Agency, the former claiming they have been left with a mess, the latter that the IOC should have shown more backbone. The ever present issue here is Russia.

The IOC is certainly cutting it fine on the event, having claimed on Sunday night that a final ruling on the expulsion of Russia’s athletes may well be delayed until hours prior to this Friday’s opening ceremony.  Assistance to that end would be provided by a three-member panel of executive board members.

IOC President Thomas Bach suggested that it was “very obvious” that the “timing” of the WADA-commissioned report investigating state-doping allegations on the part of Russia, was poor.  Nor was the IOC responsible for accreditation, or supervision of laboratories tasked with detecting cases of doping.

“The IOC cannot be made responsible neither for the timing nor for the reasons of these incidents we have to face now and which we are addressing and have to address just a couple of days before the Olympic Days.”

The IOC, most notably Bach, has also received a good deal of opprobrium from European papers and various officials in the business, arguing that he has an unhealthy proximity to Moscow.  The Daily Mail speculated about how Bach had “enjoyed a coffee” with the Russian President, assuming sharing such fluids would somehow qualify as evidence why he might be soft on the Russians.

The German paper Bild went in determined fashion for the jugular, calling Bach “Putin’s poodle” while the Daily Mail went for a toothless theme, a coward incapable of throwing his weight around.  Matt Lawton indignantly suggested on July 25 that the IOC had “destroyed the Olympics” by its qualified decision.

Not baring the entire Russian team was deemed by such critics a logical necessity, indispensable for cleaning the sport.  Much of it, in fact, smacked of colossal slothfulness, the classic behaviour of those incapable of exercising the judgment of natural justice.  It also provided another conclusion: having found its bogeyman, international sports could go forth blissfully aware that drug taking was still taking place.  Eventually, things would settle down.

Invariably, the discussion sounds of giddying high morality and principle.  Within the Olympic camp itself, the Australian Olympic chef de mission Kitty Chiller has also taken it upon herself to wage what can only be a crusade against everything connected with Russia. Her mood has not been helped by a fire that started in the basement of the Australian building that forced team members to evacuate the premises, the theft of Zika-protective shirts during that evacuation, and the loss of a laptop.

On Russia, a cranky Chiller had little time for the legal niceties of prizing the drug cheat from the untainted athlete.  A degree of deep, near fire and brimstone puritanism has characterised her approach to the sporting event.  On Thursday, she insisted that Moscow’s efforts to organise a separate event featuring the banned athletes was nonsensical, sending “the wrong message.”

Chiller’s comments have to also be considered as part of a more specific, self-interested exercise.  Australian teams have been on stand-by waiting for a blanket ban on Russia.  Exit Russia, and then, in some cases, enter those teams that would not have otherwise qualified.  The women’s eight rowing crew has already gotten lucky on that score.

Bach’s point, for all the problems typical of the IOC pigsty, is that caution must be exercised.  It was not according the athlete any degree of solid justice to “punish an individual for the failures or manipulations of your government”.  Whether that exercise is done credibly before the opening ceremony is quite another matter.  The waters have already well and truly been poisoned.

The Military-Industrial Complex Of Pakistan

Nauman Sadiq

Before the signing of the Iran nuclear deal last year, BBC’s defense correspondent, Mark Urban, alleged in a report that Pakistan’s military has made a clandestine deal with Saudi Arabia that in the event of Iran developing a nuclear weapon, Pakistan would provide ready-made nuclear warheads along with delivery systems to Saudi Arabia.

Moreover, it should be remembered that Pakistan’s military and Saudi Arabia have very deep and institutionalized links: thousands of Pakistani retired and serving army officers work on deputations in the Gulf States; furthermore, during the ‘80s Saudi Arabia lacked an efficient intelligence set-up, and Pakistan’s ISI virtually played the role of Saudi Arabia’s foreign intelligence service.

Additionally, in the recent years Pakistan’s defense production industry, with Chinese assistance, has emerged as one of the most sophisticated military-industrial complex in the region. Not only does it provides state-of-the-art conventional weapons to the oil-rich Gulf States, but according to a May 2014 AFP report, Pakistan-made weapons were also used in large quantities in the Sri Lankan Northern Offensive of 2008-09 against the Tamils.

Notwithstanding, from the massacres in Bangladesh in 1971 to the training and arming of jihadists during the Soviet-Afghan war throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, and then launching ill-conceived military operations in Pakistan’s tribal areas under American pressure, which led to the displacement of millions of Pashtun tribesmen, the single biggest issue in Pakistan has been the interference of army in politics. Unless we are able to establish civilian supremacy in Pakistan, it would become a rogue state which will pose a threat to the regional peace and its own citizenry.

Regarding the Kashmir dispute, there can be no two views that the right of self-determination of Kashmiris must be respected; and I am also of the opinion that Pakistan should lend its moral, political and diplomatic support to the Kashmiri cause; but at the same time I am strongly against the militarization of any dispute, not just Kashmir.

The insurgency in Kashmir erupted in the fateful year1984 of the Orwellian fame; when the Indian Armed Forces surreptitiously occupied the whole of Siachen glacier, including the undemarcated Pakistani portion. Now we must keep the context in mind: those were the heydays of the Cold War and Pakistan military’s proxies, the Afghan so-called “Mujahideen” (freedom fighters) were winning battle after battle against the Red Army, and the morale of Pakistan army’s top brass was touching the sky.

Moreover, Pakistan’s national security establishment also wanted to inflict damage to the Indian armed forces to exact revenge for their embarrassment in the Bangladesh War of 1971, when India took 90,000 Pakistani soldiers as prisoners of war. All they had to do was to divert a fraction of their Afghan jihadist proxies towards Kashmir to light the fires of insurgency in Kashmir.

Here we must keep in mind, however, that an insurgency cannot succeed anywhere, unless the insurgents get some level of popular support from the local population. For example: if a hostile force tries to foment an insurgency in Punjab, they wouldn’t succeed; because Punjabis don’t have any grievances against Pakistan. On the other hand, if an adversary tries to incite an insurgency in the marginalized province of Balochistan and tribal areas, it will succeed because the local Baloch and Pashtun population has grievances against the heavy-handedness of Pakistan’s security establishment.

Therefore, to put the blame squarely on the Pakistani side for the Kashmir conflict would be unfair. Obviously, the insurgents in Kashmir do get a level of popular support from the local population which has grievances against the Indian Federation. Moreover,Pakistan’s stance on Kashmir has been quite flexible and it has floated numerous proposals to resolve the conflict. By contrast, India’s stance, not just on Kashmir but on all issues, has been quite rigid; because it is negotiating from a position of strength. However, diplomacy aside, the real victims of this intransigence and hubris on both sides has been the Kashmiri people and a lot of innocent blood has been spilled for no good reason.

Coming back to the topic, for the half of its 68 years long history Pakistan was directly ruled by the army and for the remaining half the security establishment kept dictating Pakistan’s foreign and security policy from behind the scenes. The outcome of the first martial law (1958-71) was that Bengalis were marginalized and alienated to an extent that it led to the dismemberment of Pakistan; during the second decade-long martial law (1977-88) our so-called “saviors” trained and armed their own nemesis, the Afghan and Kashmiri jihadists; and during the third martial law (1999-2008) they made a volte-face under American pressure and declared a war against their erstwhile proxy jihadists that lit the fires of insurgency in the tribal areas of Pakistan.

Although, many liberal political commentators in Pakistan nowadays hold an Islamist general, Zia-ul-Haq, responsible for the jihadist militancy in our tribal areas; however, it would be erroneous to assume that nurturing militancy in Pakistan was the doing of an individual scapegoat named Zia; all the army chiefs after Zia’s assassination, including Aslam Beg, Asif Nawaz, WaheedKakar, Jahangir Karamat and right up to General Musharraf, upheld the same military doctrine of using jihadist proxies to destabilize the hostile neighboring countries, like Afghanistan, India and Iran, throughout the ‘90s. A strategic rethink in the Pakistan Army’s top brass took place only after 9/11, when Richard Armitage threatened General Musharraf in so many words: “We will send you back to the Stone Age.”

Thus, the deliberate promotion of Islamic radicalism and militancy in the region was not the doing of an individual general; rather, it was the well-thought-out military doctrine of a rogue institution. The military mindset, training and institutional logic dictates a militarist and offensive approach to the foreign and domestic affairs. Therefore, as a matter of principle the khakis must be kept miles away from the top decision-making organs of the state.

Regardless, the annual budgetary allocation for defense roughly amounts to a quarter of the federal budget, but Pakistan army also operates its own business empire: from myriads of industries like Fauji Fertilizers and Askari bank and cement to the most lucrative real estate business carried out by the Defense Housing Authority (DHA). All the major cities of Pakistan are dotted with numerous sprawling military cantonments and DHA’s housing colonies for the officers of the Pakistan armed forces.

The profits earned from this business empire are not included in the aforementioned budgetary allocation. Apart from that, Pakistan army has also been getting $1.2 billion every year from the American Coalition Support Fund for the last decade or so, for its partnership with the US in the latter’s dubious “war on terror” policy. If we add up all that, our East India Company really is an unaffordable white elephant. And I don’t mean East India Company in a metaphorical sense; they literally are Pakistan’s indigenous colonizers.

The army officers have their own separate barricaded housing colonies and cantonments where the natives aren’t allowed to enter. They operate their own network of schools, colleges and universities for the children of the army officers. They also run their own hospitals like the Combined Military Hospitals in all the major cities of Pakistan. The British colonizers in India also established separate housing colonies and cantonments, missionary schools and hospitals. In more than one ways Pakistan army is like the British East India Company.

Finally, the rule of law, more than anything, implies the supremacy of the law: that is, all the institutions must work within the ambit of the constitution. The first casualty of the martial law, however, is constitution itself, because it abrogates the supreme law of the land. All other laws derive their authority from the constitution, and when the constitution itself has been abrogated then only one law prevails: the law of the jungle. If the armed forces of a country are entitled to abrogate “a piece of paper,” known as the constitution under the barrel of a gun, then by the same logic thieves and robbers are also entitled to question the legitimacy of civil and criminal codes, which derive their authority from the constitution.

It’s high time that all the political forces and civil society of Pakistan present a united front against the foreign and as well as the domestic enemies. Pakistan armed forces are the friends of Pakistan within their constitutionally-ordained limits, but outside of those limits they are the worst enemies of Pakistan. Determining the domestic and foreign policy of Pakistan is the sole prerogative of Pakistan’s elected representatives; and anyone who thinks that they can redefine the national interest to suit their personal ambition, or institutional interests, is a traitor who shall be judged harshly by the history.

Growing opposition in Berlin to exorbitant rents and evictions

Verena Nees

Just weeks before the Berlin state elections, politicians from all the ruling parties repeatedly declare they intend to take action to create more affordable housing. But this is nothing more than hot air and empty electioneering.

Many Berlin residents struggling against exorbitant rents and eviction from their homes are of the same opinion. Berlin is among the German cities with the fastest rising rents. The capital is growing. The Berlin Senate is deliberately appealing to well-off start-up businessmen, so-called creative, independent and hard-working academics, cultural and tourist managers, as well as significant numbers of property speculators.

The city is increasingly divided: discernible poverty and a growing housing crisis for many families–wealth and success for a super-rich glitterati.

The most expensive rooftop apartment in Germany was bought several months ago by the national football team’s goalkeeper, Manuel Neuer—300 square metres of luxury for him and his girlfriend. The loft near the Kudamm cost €3 million. Two years ago, an apartment was sold close to the Gendarmenmarkt for a cool €22,000 per square metre.

By contrast, many tenants are being driven from their long-term apartments. Across Berlin, tenants’ associations are emerging for those affected who are seeking to defend themselves.

In Pankow, thousands of tenants took to the streets over the past week to protest against the municipal property companies Gesobau and Gewobau. They are resisting luxury renovation projects such as the so-called energise building renovation, which the federal government has been promoting since 2014 with tax breaks. While heat retention on 300-year-old buildings with thick walls hardly results in any energy saving, it allows rents to be altered and leads to significant increases.

There is also growing dissatisfaction and resistance to the property firm Deutsche Wohnen AG. This is the largest private landlord in Berlin, which purchased the formerly state-owned GSW and GEHAG property companies.

For example, in Lichtenberg the company is currently trying to increase rents due to modernisation almost three-fold, from €3.09 to €8.20 per square metre. In Kreuzberg, they charge twice as much for the social housing on the Kottbusser Tor as the average in Berlin, €5.50 instead of €2.56 per square metre. The have been taken to court over this.

At the same time, Deutsche Wohnen AG is freeing itself from all social obligations by paying back public loans ahead of schedule. In Zehlendorf, Deutsche Wohnen AG is conducting renovations without energy saving, transforming apartments into investment properties that most renters cannot afford. In its apartments in Pankow rent increases of up to €300 are threatened because of energy saving renovations.

The residents of the Westend estate in Charlottenburg are affected worst of all. They face the threat of all 1,212 apartments being torn down. On this site, next to forested areas with villas and recreational areas, Deutsche Wohnen AG intends to construct 580 new apartments in the expensive price range, in part as investment opportunities. Since these plans became public two years ago, tenants have been resisting and have established a citizens’ initiative that is now aligning itself with other associations in the city.

Deutsche Wohnen AG was founded in 1998 by Deutsche Bank, has been an independent company on the stock market since 2006 and does business not only in property, but also elderly care homes. In 2015, it achieved record profits of €1.2 billion, a little over a third more than the previous year, and now intends to pay out shareholders a dividend with a 23 percent increase, to be paid for by the 100,000 apartments in Berlin alone. The main shareholders and their super-rich clientele will be delighted, including US investment management firm Blackrock Inc., considered the world’s largest shadow bank.

The growing opposition to exorbitant rents in Berlin is universally directed against the policies of the Senate and federal government, which sacrifice the right to housing in the profit interests of such investors and property speculators.

It has become clear in recent months that the rent price brake, implemented on June 1, 2015 to allegedly limit rent rises, has not merely had no impact, but has in fact led to rent increases. The German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) stated at the end of May that landlords were responding to the 10 percent restriction on rent increases by demanding even higher rents from the outset. The law, which justice minister Heiko Maas (Social Democrats) praised last year in glowing terms as tenant-friendly, also contains a clause stating that such landlords never have to pay back these inflated rents.

The state of Berlin immediately implemented the law last year. In an investigation by the Berlin tenants association (BMV) from January 2016, rents were already on average 2 percent higher than prior to the adoption of the law. In some residential areas major jumps were observed, such as city centre districts where a net increase of 10 percent, not counting heating and electricity costs, occurred. An investigation by BMV of properties offered online revealed that requested rents were 31 percent higher than prior to the rent price brake.

The situation in Berlin has, however, been intensified by the policies of the SPD/Left Party coalition government led by Klaus Wowereit, which was voted out of office in 2011. Two years after the SPD and PDS, which subsequently became the Left Party, came to power on a wave of opposition to a banking scandal, they decided to abandon the funding of tens of thousands of social housing units.

In 2004, the coalition initiated the privatisation of the state-owned property association (GSW), which had been founded in 1924 as the city association for housing provision. They sold it to property speculator Cerberus and the Whitehall fund owned by Goldman Sachs, and paved the way for it to be floated on the stock exchange in 2010, where it was swallowed up by Deutsche Wohnen AG (2013). It exists today merely as a formal legal shell.

In the summer of 2011, prior to being voted out of office, the SPD/Left Party coalition adopted a new property law, which enabled landlords to exit their social housing obligations when selling properties. This was the opening shot in a massive wave of property speculation in Berlin.

Homeless under a bridge in Berlin

The number of social housing units, which stood at more than 200,000 in the early 2000s, has now sunk to 120,000. For poor households in Berlin (350,000 households on Hartz IV social welfare and 300,000 on low incomes) there is a housing shortage of 125,000 homes, according to an estimate in a sociological study published in June by Humboldt University academic Andrej Holm.

According to Caritas, the number of homeless people in Berlin, already in the tens of thousands, continues to grow. In winter, sleeping spots in homeless shelters to protect against the cold were full, unlike in previous years. Since early this year, the homeless who find no place in a hostel are having to sleep in parks, under bridges or open spaces.

The daily Tagesspiegel titled a piece in June, “Homelessness in Berlin reaches the middle class.” The official rate of empty and available homes in the capital is just 1.7 percent. But this is not a genuine figure, since owners generally renovate properties and increase the rent, sell off or integrate apartments to make larger properties. Even for better-off income earners in Berlin, it would have been necessary to build 20,000 properties in Berlin. Less than 11,000 were built.

Canadian police “manufactured” terror plot to ensnare couple

Roger Jordan

In a damning judgment, British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Catherine Bruce ruled Friday that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) broke the law and “manufactured” a terrorism plot as part of a months-long entrapment operation that ended in a Vancouver-area couple being arrested and ultimately sentenced to life in prison.

John Nuttall and Amanda Korody were arrested July 1, 2013 and accused of planting bombs on the grounds of the British Columbia legislature in Victoria.

But Justice Bruce found that the couple would never have taken any action had it not been for the active encouragement and coercion of undercover RCMP officers. “This was not a situation in which the police were attempting to disrupt an ongoing criminal enterprise,” declared Bruce in her 210-page judgment. “Rather, the offences committed by the defendants were brought about by the police and would not have occurred without their involvement. By any measure, this was a clear case of police-manufactured crime.”

Undercover officers posing as Islamist extremists, befriended the isolated couple, who were recent converts to Islam, and encouraged them to act on statements they had made decrying the killing of Muslims in US-led wars and threatening to wage jihad and die as martyrs for Islam. Subsequently, the police suggested and facilitated the legislature bomb plot, removing obstacles that the police themselves acknowledged Nuttall and Korody would not have been able to overcome alone, and going so far as threaten them when they appeared reluctant to proceed.

Justice Bruce found that “Operation Souvenir,” which involved over 240 RCMP officers and cost $900,000 in overtime hours alone, breached the Criminal Code and tarnished the administration of justice.

Calling police claims Nuttall and Korody constituted a grave threat to public safety “quite farcical,” Justice Bruce wrote, “I find that the RCMP knowingly facilitated a terrorist activity by providing money and other services to the defendants that helped and made easier the terrorist activities.”

“The spectre of the defendants serving life sentences for a crime that the police manufactured, exploiting their vulnerabilities, by instilling fear that they would be killed if they backed out … is offensive to our concept of fundamental justice.”

The Crown has announced it will appeal Justice Bruce’s ruling.

Despite Bruce issuing a stay on proceedings, with the life imprisonment sentences for both being quashed, Nuttall and Korody were brutally rearrested within a few hours. They appeared before a provincial court judge Friday afternoon and were compelled to sign peace bonds, a draconian power at the disposal of the state to restrict the activities of so-called terrorist suspects even if they have not been convicted of a crime. Nuttall and Korody will be restricted from certain areas, including the legislature grounds, synagogues and Jewish cultural centers, are not allowed to visit certain internet sites, and must regularly report to a bail officer.

In comments to the press, Crown lawyer Peter Eccles claimed Justice Bruce’s decision would undermine the police’s ability to pursue terrorism suspects and sought to link Nuttal and Korody to the recent horrific attacks carried out by lone perpetrators in Germany and France, even though the court had just ruled that there was no evidence to support the suggestion that the couple intended to carry out an attack. He declared, “As we’ve seen even in the last six weeks, lone participants are undeniably the greatest challenge law enforcement faces.” Such scare-mongering neglects to mention the fact that the individuals who have carried out such attacks have frequently been disorientated, alienated and sometimes radicalized by the aggressive policies of war abroad and repression of refugees and attacks on democratic rights at home.

The state’s power to use peace bonds was expanded dramatically under Bill C-51. This sweeping police-state law was rushed through parliament by the previous Conservative government with the backing of the then-opposition Liberals in the wake of attacks on armed forces personnel in Ottawa and St. Jean-sur-Richelieu in October 2014 that killed two people. In fulfillment of an election pledge, the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau has pledged to make cosmetic changes to the legislation, including implementing a parliamentary oversight committee, but intends to leave the peace-bond system untouched.

Nuttall and Korody’s conviction as “terrorists” was itself an important element in the right-wing, anti-democratic campaign whipped up by the political elite and media last year to justify ramming Bill C-51 through parliament without any serious public debate.

More broadly, the constant invocation of the threat of “terrorism” has been exploited to accustom the population to a drastic assault on their basic democratic rights, as well as to legitimize Canada’s expanded involvement in military operations in the Middle East in alliance with the United States.

The Liberal government upholds the key provisions of Bill C-51, including the right of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) to actively disrupt vaguely defined “threats” to public security, the right of the police to detain terrorist suspects for up to seven days without charge, a new criminal offence of promoting terrorism in general, and a catch-all ban on “terrorist propaganda” that could be used to clamp down on social and political opposition to the government.

The fate that befell Nuttall and Korody makes clear the dangers faced by working people from authorities wielding such unchecked powers.

The couple, who lived in a basement apartment in a Vancouver suburb, were extremely socially isolated and recovering drug addicts. They rarely left their home, and were described by the judge as “naive,” “childlike” and “gullible.” Even police briefing notes presented at the original trial acknowledged Nuttall was possibly “developmentally delayed.”

Marilyn Sandford, Nuttall’s attorney, pointed out that her client suggested a number of outlandish ideas for attacks, including hijacking a nuclear submarine and firing rockets across the border at Seattle.

When the couple showed signs of refusing to go through with the legislature attack, they confronted threats from the undercover officers, including warnings they would be killed. They were also induced with offers of jobs and help in an elaborate escape plan.

Finally, when a new primary investigator was appointed to the case a week before the alleged plot was to take place, he had the couple removed from their home to get rid of distractions. Vaz Kassam explained to the court that other officers were frustrated because the pair were not preparing for the attack as planned.

“The police decided they had to aggressively engineer the plan for Nuttall and Korody and make them think it was their own,” Bruce noted.

Maureen Smith, Nuttall’s mother, said the pair would require counseling to recover from the ordeal they had experienced over the past three years.

The media immediately sought to portray the vast undercover sting, which the National Post admitted was ordered at “senior levels,” as simply an error or bungled operation. The Post commented in its article, “It took one clear-headed judge to see through the stupidity and explain to the public the true facts of this policing and prosecutorial affront.”

In reality, the methods employed against Nuttall and Korody are standard practice for the security and intelligence apparatus in Canada, which functions in close collaboration with its partner organizations in the United States.

In a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report published in 2014, the organization noted a worrying trend in Canada of “discriminatory investigations, often targeting particularly vulnerable individuals (including people with intellectual and mental disabilities and the indigent), in which the government—often acting through informants— is actively involved in developing the plot, persuading and sometimes pressuring the target to participate, and providing the resources to carry it out.”

HRW also issued a specific warning related to the prosecution of Nuttall and Korody. Andrea Prasow, HRW’s deputy director in Washington, compared the proceedings in BC to the US government’s determined efforts to entrap vulnerable individuals in concocted “terrorism” plots in the aftermath of 9/11. “What we’ve seen allegations of [in BC] are at least similar practices to what we’ve seen in the US,” she commented last June following the original convictions.

In the so-called VIA Rail terror plot, an undercover FBI agent and other security officials used an elaborate entrapment scheme to implicate Chiheb Esseghaier and Raed Jaser in a plan to derail a passenger train traveling between Toronto and New York. The agent repeatedly refused to answer questions in court, citing the secrecy of his work, and the media was banned from the courtroom and prohibited from reporting his two weeks of testimony.

Even though two psychiatrists ruled that Esseghaier was mentally unfit for the sentencing process, declaring him potentially schizophrenic, the judge ignored pleas from his lawyers to consider delaying sentencing and placing him in a hospital for treatment. Esseghaier and Jaser were sentenced to life in prison last September.

Farm equipment giant John Deere lays off 120 workers as sales plummet

George Gallanis

On July 22, Illinois­-based Deere & Co., the largest agricultural machinery company in the world, announced the laying off of approximately 120 production employees at its John Deere Harvester Works plant in East Moline, Illinois. The layoffs, which will go into effect September 6, are the response by Deere’s corporate board to a slump in revenue. They are the third round of US layoffs this year.

In March, Deere announced the laying off of approximately 125 employees at two factories in Iowa. In February Deere slashed approximately 80 employees from its Davenport Works factory and 20 from its Dubuque factory again both in Iowa. Presently, there are approximately 2000 workers laid off as Deere has been trimming its workforce over the past two years to cut costs. More workers will likely be laid off as Deere’s revenue is projected to continue to decline as a result of the global economic crisis and the decline in commodity prices.

Deere has forecasted an overall nine percent decline in sales and expects a net income of $1.2 billion for 2016. Deere’s net income has seen a downfall from previous years: net income in 2013 was $3.537 billion, in 2014 it was $3.162 billion and in 2015 it plummeted to $1.94 billion.

In May, Deere reported that its net income for its second quarter was $495.4 million, compared to $690.5 million the same period last year. Net income for the first six months of the year was $749.8 million compared to $1.077 billion to the previous year. Deere’s international net sales and revenues dropped by four percent to $7.875 billion for its second quarter and fell eight percent to $13 billion for the first six months.

Its equipment sales also saw a sharp drop, with Deere reporting its net sales for its equipment operations sinking to $7.107 billion for the quarter and $11.876 billion for the first six months, compared with $7.399 billion and $13.004 billion for the same time last year.

Samuel Allen, Deere’s chairman and chief executive officer, commented, “John Deere’s second­-quarter performance reflected the continuing impact of the downturn in the global farm economy and further weakness in the construction equipment sector. In the face of challenging market conditions, Deere's businesses benefited from the sound execution of operating plans, the strength of a broad product portfolio and our success creating a more flexible cost structure.”

The United Auto Workers joined management in imposing a “more flexible cost structure” in the sellout contract of 2015, which was rammed through against the opposition of rank-and-file workers. The UAW gave Deere the green light to eliminate as many jobs as possible while maximizing production, shifting health care costs onto workers and essentially maintaining a years long freeze in real wages. This has ensured that Allen and Deere’s corporate board and investors continue to reap millions.

As contract negotiations began last year, UAW President Dennis Williams made clear his commitment to follow the ruthless cost­-cutting campaign of Deere’s corporate board. “This process of bargaining is not new to any of us,” Williams said, adding, “we have negotiated contracts at John Deere before. Over the years, we have gone through many changes and sacrifices.”

This was echoed by UAW Vice President Norwood Jewell, who said, “We are committed to work as hard as we can to get an agreement in which our members can be proud of, the company can feel good about and our customers can continue to reap the benefits of UAW-­made quality products.”

Indeed, the UAW is working on behalf of Deere to ensure that it continues to “prosper” and “feel good” by making workers pay for every hit to Deere’s profits. Every major reduction in pay, in benefits, in hours made in response to decline in profits has become a permanent feature for Deere’s workers. In 1997, the UAW collaborated with Deere to implement a two-­tier wage system that mandated workers hired on or after October 1, 1997 would receive a large cut in pay compared to those hired before. At the time, the UAW argued it was a necessary to sacrifice for workers to make to maintain the company’s “competitiveness” as company profits slumped.

Since then, the hated two-tier system, which was then imposed by the UAW at the Detroit Three auto companies, has been continued in every contract, regardless of how well Deere has been doing. In 2015, when UAW and Deere negotiated the latest contract, which continued the two­-tier system, Deere posted net revenue of $1.94 billion. Commenting in its 2015 annual report, Deere said, “Net income was down 39% to $1.94 billion but still represented the sixth-highest total in company history.”

Slowdown in US, global economy

Tom Eley

New data for the United States and the eurozone released late last week reveal that the global economy is sinking deeper into stagnation, driven by cash-rich corporations that refuse to make productive investments even as central banks and governments continue to pump hundreds of billions of dollars into the financial markets. Just last week, the US Federal Reserve reassured the financial elite that it had no plans to raise interest rates from their historic lows any time soon.

Gross domestic product (GDP) both in the US and Europe grew at a snail’s pace in the second quarter. In the case of the US, the 1.2 percent growth rate fell well short of economists’ predictions of a 2.5 percent rebound from the miserable 0.8 percent recorded for the first three months of the year. In the first six months of 2016, the US economy grew at an annualized rate of only 1.0 percent.

Over the same period, despite extreme volatility at the start of the year and a sell-off in the immediate aftermath of the British vote to exit the European Union, stocks in the US and in much of the rest of the world have soared to new record highs. The Dow Jones Industrial Average stands at more than 18,400 and the broader Standard & Poor’s 500 index increased by over 5 percent just in the month of July.

The most significant statistic in the report by the US Commerce Department was the sharp fall—minus 9.7 percent—in business investment, the third straight quarterly decline. The second-quarter fall was the biggest since the depths of the financial crisis in 2009.

These developments underscore the fact that there has been no recovery in the real economy since the financial crash of September 2008. The policies of the Obama administration and the Fed, as well as those of their counterparts in Europe, have facilitated an even greater redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top and a further impoverishment of the working class.

What has recovered and soared to new heights is the parasitism that increasingly dominates the world capitalist economy, particularly in the United States. The manic expansion of the wealth of the rich and the super-rich is being achieved on the basis of an ongoing deterioration in society’s productive infrastructure on the one hand and a further inflation of financial assets and buildup of debt on the other.

The stagnation in the US economy has taken on historic proportions. The so-called “recovery” touted by the Obama administration is, a Wall Street Journal analysis notes, “by far the weakest of any since 1949.” Since the recession officially ended in June of 2009, the US economy has grown at a rate of just 2.1 percent per year. No other nominal recovery on record has seen annualized growth rates of less than 3 percent, with the notable exception of the last recovery—that which lasted from 2001 to 2007.

In over seven years of tepid economic growth, corresponding to the two terms of the Obama administration, the US economy has expanded by just 15.5 percent. By way of comparison, the recovery from the late 1950s recession, which lasted from 1961 to 1969, the years of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, saw the economy grow by 52 percent.

The situation is even more sharply expressed in Europe, where the economy grew at a rate of just 0.3 percent in the second quarter, completing the eurozone’s worst six-month performance in two years. France, the eurozone’s second-largest economy, recorded zero growth in the second quarter. Italy, the third-largest, now anticipates growth of less than 1 percent for the year, while fears mount that the country’s banking sector, buried under a mountain of bad debt, could crack and precipitate a new global financial crisis. Second-quarter data for Germany, the largest eurozone economy, has not yet been released.

The British economy, the world’s fifth-largest, grew by 0.6 percent in the second quarter lead-up to the Brexit vote. In the wake of the referendum, the International Monetary Fund cut its 2017 growth forecast for the UK from 2.2 to just 1.3 percent. The European Commission has predicted that British growth could contract by 0.3 percent next year.

In Japan, the world’s third-largest economy, new concerns over deflation had investors hoping that the Bank of Japan (BOJ) would conclude its Friday policy meeting with an announcement of an even deeper descent into negative interest rates or larger “quantitative easing”

bond purchases. The BOJ’s announcement that it would maintain its overnight lending rate at negative 1.0 percent disappointed markets and sent the yen climbing against the dollar, weakening Japan’s export industries.

The dollar was simultaneously driven downward by investors who were reassured that the poor second-quarter growth data would prompt the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates at near-zero. In response to the data, trading in federal funds futures lowered yields on two-year Treasury notes. According to Bloomberg, the betting odds on a Federal rate hike fell from 50 percent on Tuesday to 37.3 percent on Friday.

The latest data demonstrate, once again, the incapacity of capitalist governments and institutions to address the economic crisis.

With roughly $2 trillion on hand, US corporations are awash in cash, as are the bank accounts and stock portfolios of the wealthiest Americans. Yet none of this wealth is finding an outlet in productive investment.

Likewise, Japan’s negative interest rate policy, which aims to “force companies to invest money rather than hoard it” in the words of the New York Times, has failed to generate significant growth. Nor has its policy of “buying government bonds at a rate of 80 trillion yen, or $770 billion, a year to keep banks flush with cash to lend.”

The refusal of corporations to invest is not some sort of business mistake. It reflects the capitalists’ conclusion that they will not realize adequate profit returns from the production of commodities. It is a manifestation of a deepening crisis lodged in the very heart of the capitalist economy.

In the US and Canada, according to Bank for International Settlements data, business fixed capital investment is still 20 percent lower than the figures recorded in 2007. In Italy, the corresponding figure is down 27 percent; and in Japan, down 22 percent.

“[W]hat US businesses have done to increase profits and decrease the volatility of profits is, among other things, cutting back on investment spending, stock buybacks, and not hiring,” notes economist Nick Perna. “They buy back shares in order to keep per-share profits up rather than use the money to invest in plant and equipment.”

The continuing economic stagnation shows that the financial meltdown of 2008 was the expression of a systemic crisis and breakdown in the world capitalist system. As in the 1930s, economic crisis fuels the growth of social tensions and geopolitical conflicts, leading to the alternatives of world war or socialist revolution.