Why Turkey Can’t Stop ISIS

Patrick Cockburn

The killing by an Islamic State (Isis) gunman of 39 civilians in a nightclub in Istanbul is the latest massacre in Turkey, where such slaughter is now happening every few weeks. The perpetrators may differ but the cumulative effect of these atrocities is to persuade Turks that they live in an increasingly frightening and unstable country. It is also clear that the Turkish government does not know what to do to stop the attacks.

These are likely to continue with unrelenting savagery whatever the government does, because Isis is too big and well-resourced to be eliminated. It is well rooted in Turkey and can use local militants or bring in killers from abroad, as may have happened at the Reina nightclub and was the cae in the assault on Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport earlier in the year.

As in France, Belgium or Germany, it is impossible to stop attacks when ordinary civilians are the targets and the killers are prepared to die. Their success is often blamed on “security lapses” but in practice no security will provide safety.

What makes “terrorism” in Turkey different from Europe and the Middle East is not the number of dead – more are killed by Isis in Baghdad every month – but the diversity of those carrying them out. Three weeks ago, the killing of 44 people — mostly policemen — outside a football stadium in Istanbul was claimed by the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK), allegedly an arm of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). The assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey in Ankara on 19 December was blamed by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on a third group, the followers of Feithullah Gulen, who are held responsible for the failed military coup on 15 July.

All these are powerful groups with thousands of committed members inside and outside Turkey and none of them are going to go out of business soon. The government in Ankara is making the usual noises about tracking these different groups “to their lairs”. but this will be easier said than done. Both Isis and the PKK have established powerful de facto states in Syria and Iraq, something that could only have happened because of Erdogan’s ill-conceived involvement in the Syrian civil war after 2011.

Isis, which once used Turkey as a transit point and a sanctuary, now denounces it as an enemy and has calibrated its assaults to cause maximum divisions. A striking feature of Turkish reaction to the attacks over the last two years is that it has not led to national solidarity but has, on the contrary, provoked pro and anti-Erdogan forces to blame each other for creating a situation in which terrorism flourishes.

There is another menacing aspect of the attack on revellers in a nightclub: it is evidently levelled at seeking the sympathy or support of puritanical Islamists. The Salafist creed is spreading in Turkey and providing fertile soil for Isis cells established over the last few years.

Erdogan makes threats to crush Isis and the Syrian Kurds by advancing further into northern Syria. Turkish forces are close to the Isis stronghold at al-Bab, North-east of Aleppo, but are meeting stiff resistance and suffering significant casualties. For all Erdogan’s tough talk, it is not at all clear what the Turkish army and its local allies hope to achieve in northern Syria where they have few real friends and many dangerous enemies. They are being sucked into a battle which they cannot hope to win decisively.

Venezuela on the Brink

John Wight

The crisis engulfing Venezuela appears to have reached the point of no return. Inflation is heading for 1000% while shortages of food and other essentials are now widespread. It has prompted many to speculate that it is just a matter of time before President Maduro is forced from office and Chavism is consigned to the dustbin of history.

The legacy of Hugo Chavez

When Hugo Chavez first came to prominence in the early 1990s, as a young military officer leading a failed coup attempt, Venezuela was a country that appeared ripe for revolution. Despite possessing some of the largest oil reserves in the world, it recorded some of the worst social indicators anywhere in Latin America. This was in contrast to its status in the 1970s as the richest and most stable country in the region, boasting high growth and low inequality compared to its neighbours.

But then came the eighties and the onset of instability – reflected in three failed coup attempts and one presidential impeachment – which sent economic growth south and with it social justice, as the rich and wealthy sought to maintain their wealth at the expense of the poor.

External factors were key in this regard, specifically the arrival of Ronald Regan onto the global political and geopolitical stage. The neoliberal reforms he introduced, authored by a clutch of ideologically driven madmen emanating out of the now infamous Chicago School – associated most prominently with the work of free market fundamentalist guru Milton Friedman – were a disaster not only for working people in the US but throughout the world, particularly the Global South. Countries such as Venezuela, despite its enormous oil wealth, were vulnerable to capital flight, particularly to the US, predicated on the role of the dollar as the world’s international reserve currency. The process of dollarization, in which those who could preferred to hold most of their money in dollars rather than their domestic currency, effectively reduced countries such as Venezuela to the status of US neo colonies, led by governments whose overriding priority was to appease Washington rather than serve the needs of their own people.

When Hugo Chavez came to power in 1999, having abandoned force and embraced democracy, it seemed the region was witnessing its political and economic rebirth, one that involved breaking the chains of servitude that had bound them to Washington’s agenda since the Monroe Doctrine laid claim to the region in the interests of US domination in the 19^th century. Not only was Chavez a man of the left who took inspiration from the life of the continent’s Great Liberator, Simon Bolivar, he had risen to power as a member of the country’s much maligned indigenous population. This breaking of centuries of racial prejudice was of enormous historical significance, helping to lay the political ground upon which Evo Morales, likewise of indigenous heritage, was elected President of Bolivia in 2005.

Indeed prior to Chavez becoming Venezuela’s president in 1998, under the auspices of his United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), it was almost impossible for left wing leaders to win elections in Latin America. Afterwards it became almost impossible for them to lose. Inspired by his example and popularity with the poor, progressive governments arrived in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru in the years following, producing a seemingly unalterable shift to the left in a continent that had long been accustomed to right wing dictatorships, military juntas, and proto-fascist governments in the decades previous.

Achievements of the Bolivarian Revolution

Chavez was intent on utilizing Venezuela’s oil wealth to transform the lives of the masses of the people, instead of allowing it to remain in the hands of the nation’s oligarchs, who used it to fund exorbitant lifestyles redolent of Miami Beach, Monaco, and Beverly Hills. The Venezuelan president undoubtedly kept his word, as over the next decade a social transformation took place in the country, measured in vast improvements in literacy, healthcare, housing, and the overall share of the nation’s wealth redistributed to the poor. Social spending doubled under Chavez from 11.3 percent of GDP in 1998 to 22.8 percent of GDP in 2011. The Gini coefficient, measuring income inequality, improved from one of the highest to one of the lowest in the region.

These achievements should be considered in the context of a relentless attempt by the forces of the right in Venezuela – the oligarchs in control of the private media, big business, and other economic interests – to block, derail, and even overturn the country’s democracy with an attempted coup in 2002, followed by a politically orchestrated strike within the oil industry in 2002-03.

The current crisis

Eighteen years on from 1999 and the crisis that has enveloped the country under Chavez’s successor, Nicolas Maduro, shows no sign of abating. A sharp decrease in global oil prices has had a grievous impact on an economy whose one export of note is oil. It is a factor commonly found in oil rich countries, wherein the abundance of oil can distort rather than enhance economic development.

However the real question is who or what is responsible for the price of crude plummeting a mammoth 60 percent since 2014? For the answer look no further than Riyadh.

In an article that appeared on the website of Forbes magazine in January 2016 – ‘Why Saudi Arabia Won’t Cut Its Oil Production’ – Yassin K Fawaz opines that the answer is to be found “in the global climate change accord agreed to by 195 nations in Paris”, which was reached at the end of 2015.

Fawaz goes on to assert that “Each step they take toward reaching that goal (ending the world’s reliance on hydrocarbons for energy) diminishes the value of Saudi Arabia’s vast crude oil reserves–the economic lifeblood of the kingdom. The Saudis apparently figure that they might as well sell as much as they can now for whatever they can get, rather than leave it in the ground and see its value wither.”

The key example of how energy production and use is transforming away from a reliance on oil is the shale gas revolution that is underway in the US, along with an upswing in domestic production of crude. The result is a sharp decrease in US oil imports, down 60 percent since 2008, from OPEC countries, with Saudi Arabia and Venezuela prime among those.

For good or bad, oil was the economic foundations of the Bolivarian Revolution inspired and led by Hugo Chavez. It is a commodity whose price is so volatile that it can only leave economies dependent on it vulnerable to global factors outwith their control. But this oil dependency cannot be laid at the door of either Chavez or his successor Nicolas Maduro. The country’s underdevelopment had taken root long before they arrived on the scene, a consequence of generations of Venezuela’s unofficial status as US neo colony controlled by a small clique of oligarchs who benefited from this state of affairs.

Those oligarchs and vested interests never went away. On the contrary, exploiting Chavez’s determination to uphold the most advanced example of mass participatory democracy Latin America has seen, the right in Venezuela has been hyperactive over many years in its efforts to undermine, oppose, and ultimately end everything to do with Chavez and Chavism. In this they have enjoyed Washington’s unflinching support.

It is capitalism not socialism that has failed the people of Venezuela. However it is socialism that is carrying the can. Consequently, as things now stand, the Bolivarian Revolution is teetering on the brink.

The Biggest Underreported Stories Of 2016

 Eresh Omar Jamal

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society…is the true ruling power…we are governed, our minds are moulded, our tastes formed…it is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”

Thus wrote Edward Bernays in his book Propaganda, the nephew of Sigmund Freud and the father of modern propaganda, at whose suggestion, the United States’ War Department, at the time called the National Military Establishment, was renamed the Department of Defence in 1949.

In the ‘age of the corporate media’, where 90 percent of the American media is owned by six corporations — General Electric, News Corp., Disney, Viacom, Time Warner and CBS — down from 50 back in 1983, it is not difficult to understand how what the majority of the ‘public sees and doesn’t see’ depends and is controlled by the agenda of a small number of corporations and ultimately, by those who control them. This is especially the case as it is also the ‘age of the repeater journalists’. Where you have the majority of mainstream journalists worldwide simply ‘repeating the narrative’ portrayed in the powerful quarters of the world media, namely the Western (American) media, and the information they receive from the biggest news agencies (Western mostly), instead of doing their job — ‘questioning what happened’ and ‘investigating how’ it did.

When such impervious power rests in the hands of a handful of individuals, you will of course have a select number of stories being regularly reported by the media. And some stories, never. So what were some of those stories worthy of being covered in the news that were not?

Well one of them is related to the story perhaps most covered in the world media — the US elections. Or rather one who contested the elections — Hillary Rodham Clinton. Throughout 2016, as she was campaigning to become the next US President, Wikileaks constantly proved to be a thorn in her side. But the revelations made public by Wikileaks have largely gone unreported in the mainstream press.

And one of the main reasons is because they involved the media itself. For example, according to Wikileaks, 65 mainstream reporters were working “hand-in-glove with the Hillary Clinton campaign to rig the US elections” (Wikileaks exposes secret list of 65 mainstream media reporters who are part of the Clinton mafia, The Duran, October 28, 2016). And for those who find it hard to believe that she, or the Democratic Party itself, would dare to do something so un-democratic, 20,000 e-mails released by Wikileaks also showed how the Democratic Party worked against Bernie Sanders and “derailed his campaign” (Wikileaks Proves Primary Was Rigged: DNC Undermined Democracy, The Observer, July 22, 2016). Despite the near media blackout, the incident was so scandalous that the Democratic National Committee Chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, was quietly forced to step down from her position.

The leaks also revealed that CNN’s political commentator Donna Brazile had sent Presidential Debate questions to Ms. Clinton prior to the debate which, again, forced CNN to drop her. But, perhaps the most important revelations came during an interview of Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, by John Pilger, when he said that Hillary Clinton had urged John Podesta, the then advisor to Barack Obama, to “bring pressure” on Qatar and Saudi Arabia, “which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL [Islamic State, IS, ISIS] and other radical Sunni groups”.

He further said, “All serious analysts know, and even the US government has agreed, that some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIS and funding ISIS… But that email says that it is the government of Saudi Arabia, and the government of Qatar that have been funding ISIS.” In the same vein, he added that what is most ironic is that some of the biggest donors to the Clinton campaign also happen to be the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

The next story which has criminally gone underreported also involves the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It is the war being waged ‘on’ Yemen. Journalists Rose Delaney wrote on September 2, 2016, for the Inter Press Service that “The sheer gravity of Yemen’s conflict should subsequently ignite a deafening global cry for justice, however, as long as the public are ‘strategically’ kept in the dark, little change can realistically be implemented.”

I have already written a piece highlighting the scale of the violence taking place in Yemen in a previous article titled ‘The Tragedy in Yemen’ published by The Daily Star on August 29, 2016. The article also includes facts and figures which show the massive amounts of weaponry being supplied by the US and the UK to Saudi Arabia that have been used on the Yemeni people. But what I would like to highlight now is the fact that no Saudi airstrikes would be possible without the help of the US and UK as Saudi Arabia has no means to refuel its own warplanes (also US and British manufactured) mid-air. Once you understand how damaging it would be for the US to have people learn about what is really going on in Yemen, it is not difficult to unravel why the media has so blatantly failed to cover it.

And while underreporting is what is most often used to shape public perception, one which is even more effective, is misdirecting the public through false reporting. And 2016 revealed further, the extent of the misconception created in the public mind by the media, in regards to the Syrian crisis.

And this relates to another topic that has gone underreported — the mountain of evidence that has come out in 2016 showing that the Syrian crisis, rather than being a civil war, is a proxy war being waged against Syria by outside forces. Some of these ‘evidences’ were presented at the United Nations on December 9 by activist Sara Flounders, lawyer and human rights and peace activist Donna Nassor, Member of the Coordinating Committee for the Hands Off Syria and Organisation Secretary of US Peace Council Dr. Bahman Azad, and independent Canadian journalist Eva Bartlett, ‘who have all visited Syria’ themselves, including Aleppo, recently.

At the conference, Bartlett, who has visited Syria six times in the past two years and has spoken with Syrians in Arabic, in agreement with the other panellists said, “whatever you hear in the corporate media is exactly the opposite of reality [of what is happening in Syria]… our media and the Gulf media has made Syria out to be sectarian which is something the Syrians themselves have denied…it’s a tool to make people confused…believe it’s Sunnis against Bashar al-Assad.”

When the truth, according to the panellists, was that people in Syria overwhelmingly support the government and the army. And they “are tired of the lies and are very well aware of the lies that our [Western mainstream] media and human rights groups are reporting”.

The last, but not least, important topic that has not been reported in the mainstream press has been the collapse of public confidence in the mainstream media. People across the world, as more and more stories are underreported or falsely reported by the media, have shown, more than ever in 2016, that they have lost all faith in the sincerity of the mainstream press to be truthful and unbiased.

Hence, we have had organisations such as Wikileaks filling the vacuuming created by the absence of an unbiased press, attracting more and more people to look towards it for information. And although it is a real shame that these stories and so many others have gone unreported in 2016, what 2016 has taught us is that they can no longer be blacked out completely, largely because of organisations such as Wikileaks and others. And that, dear reader, is the biggest story of 2016, regardless of whether it was reported, or not.

Some significant scientific developments of 2016

Joe Mount

Scientific advances during the past year shed light on a variety of topics, from the nature of space and time to the increasingly dire state of Earth’s environment. The exploration of our solar system continued and work in paleontology and genetics has deepened our understanding of the development and origins of life.

At the same time, research is still affected by the past year’s political events: the conflict in Syria, the near-coup in Turkey, the anti-Russian hysteria of the American media, Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. Rising tensions among various countries make it more difficult to do work across national borders even as more and more scientific endeavors are by necessity international. Funds and personnel are increasingly scarce as resources around the world are diverted to preparing the world’s militaries for war.

In spite of this, groundbreaking research has still occurred. In February, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Collaboration announced the measurement of tiny ripples in spacetime caused by the merger of two black holes over a billion light-years from Earth. The observations confirmed predictions made by Albert Einstein in 1916.

The three stages of the collision of two black holes - inspiral, merger and ringdown - illustrated above. The signal detected by the two LIGO instruments is superimposed across the bottom. Credit: LIGO, NSF, Aurore Simonnet (Sonoma State U.)

As shown in Einstein’s General Theory of Relatively, space and time are not separate, but rather a unified spacetime throughout which matter travels. At the same time, matter itself distorts spacetime, causing ripples that sometimes become gravitational waves. As a result of this discovery, the new field of gravitational wave astronomy has begun, allowing for more detailed investigations into previously more difficult areas of research such as black holes, the moments after the Big Bang and dark matter.

Research by an international collaboration of astronomers using more traditional methods to study outer space have discovered a potentially Earth-like planet found in the habitable zone of Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our Solar System. The exoplanet, Proxima b, was discovered by observing tiny variations in the light emitted by its parent star caused by gravitational effects as the planet orbits around the star.

The astronomers calculated that Proxima b is at least 1.3 times the Earth’s mass, though we have no knowledge yet of its size, its composition or the nature of its atmosphere (if any). Our limited knowledge of solar systems suggests that such a planet would be of rocky composition and retain some sort of atmosphere. The planets characteristics are likely to be very different from Earth’s due to its close orbit to the star, which is much smaller and dimmer that the sun, which results in an inhospitable combination (to humans) of low temperatures with high levels of stellar radiation.

While a large number of exoplanets have already been catalogued, the major significance of this discovery is that a potentially Earth-like world has been discovered at a close enough distance to make it potentially traversable within a single human lifetime.

Closer to home, studies of climate change have determined that 2016 was the hottest year on record and that the overall temperature rise since the industrial revolution, currently 0.8 degrees Celsius, is “very unlikely” to remain below 2 degrees. This warming, almost entirely produced by human activity, is causing rising sea levels, more common extreme weather patterns, and mass coral death, and poses an increasing threat to ecosystems and cities across the planet.

In particular, Arctic sea ice levels reached a new historic minimum, as part of a long-term trend of sea ice thinning due to warmer climate conditions. Decades-old ice formations are melting so that seasonal ice structures form an increasing proportion of the ice pack. This in turn speeds up warming as there is less ice to reflect sunlight back into space.

The Arctic sea ice extent during September 2016. The yellow contour represents the area of the average sea ice levels. Credit: NASA

Alongside the growing dangers of climate change are the increasing numbers of animal species being threatened with extinction. The Red List maintained by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature grew from 755 to 1,199 endangered species during the last three years while a total of one-sixth of all animals and plants on Earth are threatened with extinction due to global warming.

This year, cheetahs were among the most recognisable creatures to be added to the list. The global cheetah population fell to approximately 7,100 individuals, covering a geographical extent ten times smaller than its original range. It is already extinct in most of Asia and only a few dozen survive in an Iranian refuge. They are dying off due to a number of factors, such as the increasing use of their African habitat for farming and the hunting of their food sources. Their cubs are also trafficked to meet demand for furs in the Gulf states where they are sold for up to $10,000 on the black market.

The 0.1 percent of species driven to extinction each year is between 1,000 and 10,000 times greater than the natural rate as calculated through fossil records. Up to half of all species are threatened with extinction during this century. The number of vertebrate species has dropped by three-fifths since 1970, mainly due to human activity.

Even as growing numbers of species go extinct, biologists may have uncovered what allowed for the proliferation of so many forms of life in the first place. The origin of multi-cellular life is a major unsolved problem in evolutionary biology. Single-celled organisms are the oldest and simplest form of life, which evolved into multi-celled organisms independently many times at different points in the development of complex life. Early in 2016, researchers announced the discovery of an ancient molecule that likely played a key role in how multi-cellular organisms originally evolved.

The data suggests that approximately 800 million years ago, the GK-PID molecule evolved and allowed for the formation of tissue structure, in which cells must divide in the correct position relative to adjacent cells. The molecule is effectively a “scaffolding” protein that assists in the formation of complex organic structures. The researchers used “ancestral protein reconstruction” to extrapolate from the properties of modern proteins using computer models to recreate ancient proteins for experimental study.

Different research in this field of study has given biologists the most up-to-date estimate of the properties of the common ancestor to all life on Earth, an idea first developed by Charles Darwin in 1859: “Therefore I should infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed.”

This is the outcome of the genetic sequencing of huge numbers of species during recent decades that has added an incredible amount of detail to the evolutionary history of life. The scientists analysed this data to find 355 genes that are common to all current species. These genes suggest that this last universal common ancestor may have been a single-celled organism adapted to the environment surrounding deep-sea hydrothermal vents, where water erupts due to heating by volcanic activity. This is consistent with the hypothesis that life originated in such underwater habitats approximately 3.8 billion years ago.

Other notable developments in 2016 include research on into the effects of the Agricultural Revolution on human evolution, the discovery of a dinosaur tail preserved in amber, evidence hinting at the existence of a fourth neutrino and the measurement of the spectrum of anti-hydrogen.

At least 23 dead, 17 missing in Indonesian ferry disaster

Oscar Grenfell 

A fire, which engulfed an Indonesian passenger ferry travelling from North Jakarta on Sunday morning, has killed at least 23 people. Another 17 passengers remain missing, prompting fears that the death toll will continue to rise over the coming days.

At least 32 survivors were taken to hospital to be treated for injuries, including the effects of severe smoke inhalation and burns. Nine remain in hospital.

While information is scanty, there are already indications that the tragic toll from the blaze was likely compounded by an excessive number of passengers, a lack of life jackets and other lax safety practices.

According to officials, the Zahro Express, which was transporting holidaying Indonesian nationals to Tidung Island, a popular tourist destination, left the port of Muara Angke at around 8:50 a.m. on New Year’s Day. Within half an hour of its departure, a fire began on the vessel and spread rapidly. The ship was just 1.6 kilometres from shore.

Spokespeople for the ministry of transportation have stated that the fire may have been caused by a short circuit in the craft’s engine room. Passengers said that they first saw smoke coming from the engine.

Officials have said that the speed with which the blaze spread may have been due to flames reaching the vessel’s fuel container, causing an explosion. It is not clear if the ship was equipped with fire extinguishers or whether they were used.

Survivors have described scenes of chaos and panic as the ship was rapidly engulfed by flames, leaving them with virtually no time to escape.

Evi, a female passenger told the local media outlet Metro TV: “Fifteen minutes after the boat set sail, people at the back of the boat started making noise... Then I saw smoke, there was more and more, the boat was crowded and people were fighting for life jackets.”

One passenger, quoted by Reuters, said: “All passengers panicked and ran up to the deck to throw floats into the water. In a split second, the fire becomes bigger coming from where fuel is stored.”

Juju Rukminingsih, another survivor, indicated that there were not enough life jackets for all of the passengers. “When we wanted to go, I panicked because I saw my son jump off the boat without a [life jacket] because somebody else had taken it,” she said.

Despite the chaos, survivors have reported stories of bravery and heroism, with passengers assisting one another during the disaster. According to Jakarta Coconuts, one of the victims, Jackson Wilhelmus, gave his life-jacket to a pregnant colleague, before drowning.

Other passengers reported having to leave the vessel without a life jacket. Many of them, including children, did not know how to swim. Between 194 and 224 survivors were plucked from the sea, the bulk of them by private boats fishing in nearby waters. Rescue operations have continued.

The wreckage of the boat was towed to shore on Sunday. Twenty of the 23 people who perished in the blaze received burns that were so severe that they could not be identified without an analysis of DNA and dental records. Some had been trampled or overwhelmed by smoke.

On Sunday, the Jakarta Disaster Mitigation Agency revealed that while the ship was carrying upwards of 200 passengers, its manifest had registered just 100 people and six crew members. The practice, which is common in Indonesia, allows private ferry operators to take full fares, without having to pay port operators or government taxes. Port officials are often involved in the scam.

It appears that the government is moving to scapegoat the captain and crew of the vessel, in order to prevent a broader examination of the widespread conditions that gave rise to the tragedy.

On Monday, the captain, Mohammad Nali, along with three other crew members were detained by Jakarta. Port officials are also reportedly being questioned.

On Tuesday, Nali was identified as a suspect over the discrepancy between the manifest and the ship’s actual number of passengers. The captain and some crew members have also been accused of being among the first to leave the ship after the fire began. Nali faces possible charges carrying substantial financial penalties and up to 10 years in prison.

In a bid to assuage mounting anger over the accident, Transportation Minister Budi Karya Sumadi announced on Tuesday that the government would provide survivors and families of the deceased with compensation. He gave no further details. Sumadi also declared that state-owned shipping lines would begin passenger services to the Thousand Islands, an island chain to the north of Jakarta that includes Tidung Island.

Ferry accidents, often involving substantial casualties, are a regular occurrence in Indonesia, with private operators slashing costs and neglecting the most basic safety practices, in order to maximise profits. Workers and the poor have no choice but to undertake the perilous journeys on faulty vessels to travel between the archipelago’s islands, which number more than 17,000.

Last December, 20 people were killed in a speed boat explosion in Bali, thought to have been caused by a malfunctioning battery near a fuel tank.

In December 2015, at least 80 people died after a ferry sank off the island of Sulawesi when its engine was overwhelmed by large waves in heavy seas.

Other disasters have claimed even more lives. In 2009, over 200 perished after a ferry went down between Sulawesi and East Kalimantan. Relatives held protests denouncing the limited search and rescue operations conducted by the government. In December 2006, 400 died in a sinking off the coast of East Java. Ferry disasters in 2000 and 2003, each claimed up to 500 lives.

There is no indication that these disasters have had any impact on safety practices or government policy. According to the National Transportation Safety Commission, the total number of maritime accidents increased from 15 in 2015 to 28 in 2016. A report by the Worldwide Ferry Association in 2015 found that since 2000, Indonesia had experienced a higher number of ferry accidents than any country, aside from Bangladesh.

Maritime deaths are one tragic expression of a broader transport infrastructure crisis. Over 30,000 Indonesian nationals are estimated to perish in traffic accidents each year. A McKinsey report in 2011 pointed to the culpability of successive governments, noting: “In Indonesia, infrastructure investments dropped from 5 percent to 6 percent of GDP in the early 1990s to 2 percent to 3 percent of GDP for much of the last ten years.”

Peru’s president facing mounting crisis after six months in office

Cesar Uco

After six months in office, Peruvian President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (PPK) is facing a mounting threat to his ability to govern after failing to fulfill his promises regarding the slow economy, government corruption, street violence and a political stalemate with rival Keiko Fujimori’s Fuerza Popular, which controls Congress.

Peruanos por el Kambio (PpK) came in second in the first presidential vote, narrowly beating bourgeois pseudo-left candidate Veronika Mendoza of Frente Amplio, FA, guaranteeing a second round opposite Fujimori of Fuerza Popular (FP).

With the elimination of Veronika Mendoza, who won in the most impoverished departments located in the Andean southern region, the choice in June’s second round was between two right-wing pro-Wall Street candidates.

Both PPK and Keiko Fujimori are part of the right-wing wave that has supplanted a series of center-left bourgeois governments in Latin America. Kuczynski’s predecessor, Ollanta Humala, begun as a Chavista and ended up as a faithful defender of foreign capital, particularly the transnational mining corporations. He left office facing popular rejection from virtually all sectors of Peruvian society.

PPK’s professional life has been a mixture of government posts—minister of energy and mines under President Fernando Belaunde in the early 1980s, minister of economy and finance, and then prime minister to President Alejandro Toledo (2001-2006)—and a lucrative career as a veteran Wall Street investment banker, specializing in private equity funds.

Keiko Fujimori is the eldest daughter of former President Alberto Fujimori, who in 1993 executed a coup d’état, closing Congress and writing a right-wing Constitution—still in place—that put an end to labor stability and placed virtually all of the country’s resources on the auction block for foreign and national investors.

The right-wing fujimoristas are hated by a large section of the Peruvian population that remembers the corruption, assassinations and dictatorial rule imposed by Keiko’s father in the 1990s. After fleeing to Japan in 2000, Alberto Fujimori was eventually extradited and sentenced in 2009 to 15 years in prison for having ordered the Grupo Colina death squad to carry out massacres in Barrios Altos (1991), a poor working class neighborhood, and of teachers and students at La Cantuta (1992).

The pseudo-left candidate Veronika Mendoza called on her constituency to vote for the Wall Street banker as the “lesser of two evils,” in this way helping PPK defeat Keiko Fujimori in the second round by just over 41,000 votes, the narrowest margin of victory in Peru’s history.

PPK began his mandate arrogantly promising that, with his experience as a Wall Street banker and with his small team of technocrats, he could singlehandedly solve Peru’s social and economic problems.

Bloomberg Businessweek wrote last October: “Mr. Kuczynski has persuaded the opposition-controlled Parliament to back his economic platform, travelled to China to drum up interest in a US$70 billion portfolio of infrastructure projects, and pulled off Peru’s biggest-ever sale of local currency bonds in the global market.”

In the 2016 APEC Forum (Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation) annual conference last November, he played host to more than a dozen heads of state, including those of the US, Russia, China, Japan, Australia and Canada, along with most Latin American presidents.

But as soon as the APEC Forum closed, the long-awaited confrontation between his administration and the fujimorista -controlled congress and began to take shape.

In spite his early successes that were praised by the financial media, PPK inherited a country with a declining economy, due in large part to the diminishing growth of China and global capitalism, which has driven down commodity prices.

Peru had won a reputation for being one of the fastest growing economies in the world. In 2010 alone GDP grew 8.3 percent, according to the World Bank, while the US and the European Union were still suffering from the near meltdown of the world credit system, following Wall Street’s collapse in September 2008.

For the last five years. Peru’s economy has been slowing down. By 2014, growth had fallen to 2.4 percent. In 2015, GDP growth was 3.3 percent, less than the 3.6 percent inflation. The World

Bank forecasts GDP growth of 3.5 percent for 2017 and 3.2 percent for 2018.

An impasse between the executive branch and Fuerza Popular (FP) emerged as a result of the FP-led Congress impeaching Jaime Saavedra, minister of education, after finding him guilty of embezzlement. Days before, a Sunday news program established that the minister’s trusted personnel had embezzled part of the budget of 150 million soles (US$45 million) intended for the purchase of computers and other equipment.

The resignation wounded the executive and PPK. It created confusion, paralysis and loss of the initial confidence within the country’s ruling sectors in the president’s ability to govern relying on his team of technocrats.

Two weeks before Christmas, the archbishop of Lima, Juan Luis Cipriani, a despised arch-reactionary, summoned PPK and Keiko Fujimori to meet at his house. After a one hour meeting, the president declared: “I do not doubt that we can work together to promote a Peru that reaches 2021 with prosperity and modernity,” while Fujimori called PPK “president” for the first time.

Speaking to the press, Prime Minister Fernando Zavala said, “PPK will meet with the leaders of the Aprista party and César Acuña, leader of Alliance for Progress. Also, he will set a date for meeting with Frente Amplio (FA) and Acción Popular (AP).”

The accusation of embezzlement against the former minister of education was not an isolated event. Since the beginning, corruption has been a constant in PPK’s presidency.

The most notorious case involved a former adviser on health issues, Carlos Moreno, who faces seven accusations of corruption. The TV news program Cuarto Poder revealed corruption in other branches of government, including Regional Affairs, and Prevention and Control of Social Conflicts. By October, PPK’s popularity rating had dropped 8 percent.

At present, there are new accusations involving the “Lava Jato” (carwash) mega-corruption scandal surrounding Brazil’s state-run oil giant Petrobras, which fatally undermined the Workers Party and set the stage for President Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment.

The business daily Gestion reported: “Via a report addressed to the US justice system, the Brazilian company Odebrecht said it paid US$29 million in bribes ‘under the table’ in three presidential terms [Toledo, Garcia and Humala] from 2005 to 2014.”

“In December, the Attorney General’s Office,” continued Gestion, “opened a preliminary investigation into the relationship of former President Alejandro Toledo and PPK because it could have benefitted Odebrecht’s infrastructure contracts to build national highways.

“The Brazilian company has a significant presence in Peru, where public works contracts valued at more than US$10 billion have been given out.”

Gestion reported last week that the Peruvian president “rejected many requests to remove Odebrecht from Peru and noted that some of its managers are guilty, but not the company itself.”

PPK denied claims that he accepted the $20 million in bribes from Odebrecht that were awarded to an unidentified official for a public work contract in 2005, when PPK was minister of economy and finance under President Alejandro Toledo.

Peru’s largest construction company, Graña y Montero (GyM), was a partner of Odebrecht in a US$400 million contract to build the Lima Metro Line 1. Odebrecht acknowledged having paid US$1.4 million to a high-ranking government official for that project.

GyM said it never knew anything about the Odebrecht bribe.

As political crisis engulfs the PPK government, class conflict in Peru continues to escalate. Much of the recent social unrest has been generated by the development of large-scale mining projects by foreign companies in impoverished regions of the countries. The situation is aggravated by the high level of police brutality and corruption of regional presidents, mine and peasant leaders, who have more than once been taped soliciting millions of dollars in bribes.

Last July, the daily Correo and America Economia reported: “The southern part of the country, especially in Apurímac and Cusco, is the most conflictive, with 32 percent of all social conflicts in the country. Additionally, 72 percent of Peru’s conflicts are active while 28 percent are latent.”

This is the region that in 2011, Ollanta Humala, then espousing a vague left nationalist and populist program, won by more than 80 percent of the vote, and Veronika Mendoza won by more than 50 to 60 percent in 2016.

PPK and his technocrats are particularly ill equipped to deal with the immensity of the social conflicts in the interior of Peru, where the president’s party has no presence at all. It is this growth in the class struggle that that has forced PPK to seek alliances with the right-wing Fuerza Popular, on the one side, and the bourgeois pseudo-left Frente Amplio, on the other.

Cuba turns to austerity and foreign investment to counter economic contraction

Alexander Fangmann 

At a session of Cuba’s National Assembly held last week, Cuban President Raúl Castro and Economy Minister Ricardo Cabrisas disclosed that the country’s economy contracted nearly 1 percent in the past year. This is the first time a recession has officially occurred since 1993, following the dissolution of the USSR and the collapse of the economic relationships that had subsidized the Cuban economy for several decades. Remarks by Castro and Cabrisas made clear that the Cuban government aims to accelerate its program of laying off public sector workers and throwing them to the growing private sector while inviting foreign investors to take advantage of Cuba’s low-wage labor force.

The main reason for the contraction is the continued low price of commodities, particularly oil, nickel and sugar, resulting from the ongoing global economic crisis. This has manifested in Cuba as a massive drop in economic support by Venezuela, as that country’s economy reels from the impact of low oil prices that supply nearly all of its export earnings and a substantial portion of its state revenue.

In particular, Venezuela has not been renewing contracts for medical services provided by Cuban doctors and other professionals—Cuba’s main source of export earnings—and has even reportedly fallen behind on payments. In addition, estimates are that shipments of Venezuelan oil to Cuba have dropped from 90,000 barrels per day (bpd) to 40,000 bpd toward the end of the year.

The drop in oil supplies has led to cutbacks in public lighting and bus service and the imposition of large decreases in fuel usage by state workers, including through reductions in working hours, and may also lead to the closure of a refinery in Cienfuegos resulting in the loss of hundreds of jobs. The reduction in oil shipments has also led to a further fall in hard currency income, and thus imports, as Cuba was reselling a portion of its subsidized oil for desperately needed dollars.

The Cuban government’s strategy to deal with the collapse in support by Venezuela is to turn to austerity and an expansion of market relations, particularly through foreign investment. Aside from cutbacks in energy consumption and imports, including of food, austerity is also being pursued under the guise of “efficiency” and the cutting of “dispensable” expenses. More and more workers are being shed from the public sector and turned into cuentapropistas, or “self-employed” workers. The number of cuentapropistas has skyrocketed since they were legalized in 2010, and now amount to some 550,000, or around 10 percent of the labor force.

All told, roughly one-third of Cuba’s labor force is now involved to some degree in private sector employment, with 50,000 or so employed in joint ventures with foreign investors. One theme repeated by Castro during his speech at the National Assembly was that Cuba needs to get over its “obsolete mentality, full of prejudices” against foreign capital and investment and eliminate the “excessive delays in the negotiating process” that have hampered growth in this area. Just recently Haier, a Chinese company, announced it would open a factory in Cuba to manufacturer low-cost tablet and laptop computers.

Castro’s speech further indicated that the country has been delaying payments to suppliers while it works on renegotiating its external debt, having restructured around $50 billion in the past few years. Even so, Cabrisas stated that Cuba would look to sell bonds in the coming year to help overcome a deficit in the just-approved budget that he said amounted to 12 percent of GDP. If increased revenue targets from exports and tourism are not reached, social spending will likely be slashed to make up the rest of the budgetary shortfall.

The Cuban government is also looking to increase its own domestic oil production capabilities in the future, and has been working closely with Australian and Russian companies to expand existing operations. It is also exploring the possibility of expanding drilling operations in the Gulf of Mexico, thought to potentially harbor the equivalent of billions of barrels of oil, and has hired a Chinese firm to conduct a seismic exploration of the area.

The situation in Cuba would be much worse were it not for a large increase in the number of tourists, especially Americans who are now more easily able to travel to the island following the normalization of relations and relaxation of travel restrictions. A report by the Ministry of Tourism indicated 4 million tourists visited Cuba in 2016, a 13 percent increase over the previous year, with 137,000 Americans visiting in the first half of the year alone. The increase in tourists has, however, also reportedly exacerbated shortages of food stemming from reduced imports.

Despite Castro’s claims that with these measures Cuba is “not going, and will not go, toward capitalism,” the ruling strata around the Cuban Communist Party hope to use the expansion of foreign investment to move Cuba towards a system more like China’s, in which their rule and privileges are secured while they offer up the impoverished Cuban working class to be exploited mercilessly by US and global capital.

US police killed more than 1,150 in 2016

Gabriel Black 

At least 1,152 people were killed by police in the United States in 2016 according to the tracking site killedbypolice.net. While the total number of killings documented is slightly down from 2015’s total of 1,208, police continued to kill at the rate of three people every day.

The number of people killed by police every year in the United States far dwarfs those killed by police in every other major advanced capitalist country. In 2015, for example, US cops killed 100 times more people than German police, despite the US having only about four times Germany’s population. Meanwhile in the UK only 14 people were killed by police in 2014.

Paul Hirschfield, a sociologist at Rutgers University, found that the US police shot and killed at a ratio of 3.42 people per million inhabitants per year. In contrast, Denmark had a ratio of 0.187; France, 0.17; Sweden, 0.133; Portugal, 0.125; Germany, 0.09; Norway, 0.06; Netherlands, 0.06; Finland, 0.034; and England and Wales, 0.016.

The overwhelming and often deadly violence meted out by American police is, among other things, an expression of the brutal and tense state of class relations in the US. Large sections of the working class live in or near poverty with basic needs like clean water, nutritious food, a job, healthcare, a good place to live and an education beyond reach.

The state, in turn, has responded with brute force, cutting access to basic social services and spending billions of dollars upgrading and militarizing the nation’s police force. This has included the mobilization of the National Guard and the imposition of states of emergencies to quell protests against police violence in recent years.

The United States is a country where fraud, bribery, deception and outright theft, all on a massive scale, are standard business practices for the major banks and corporations. Meanwhile the working class is held to an entirely different standard, in which execution without trial by a police officer is an increasingly common punishment for the smallest of misdemeanors.

The end of the year is an opportunity to assess this mass loss of life and clarify the political issues at stake in this state sanctioned murder.

According to the Washington Post, which runs its own database on the amount of people shot and killed by police (not just killed), 24 percent of the victims of police shootings and killings were black in 2016. That is 232 people out of 957 total shot and killed. In 2016 African Americans were shot at a rate double their percentage share of the total population.

While the media discussion around police killings and the protests by the Black Lives Matter organization has focused on the disproportionate rate at which blacks are killed by police, the largest share, 48 percent, are white.

As the World Socialist Web Site has emphasized, “Blacks are killed by police at a much higher rate than their proportion in the population, an indication that racism plays a significant role, but the number of white victims demonstrates that class, not race, is the more fundamental issue.”

The exclusive focus on race by the pseudo left and the Democratic Party establishment conceals the most fundamental issue, that of class.

While the Post does not track the class of those killed going through each killing, though, case-by-case, one would be hard pressed to find people from the upper classes, let alone better off sections of workers and professionals, regardless of the color of their skin. Those who are killed are often from the lowest sections of the working class, and often its most vulnerable layers: the unemployed, the mentally ill, those living in the poorest neighborhoods, both rural and urban, and the homeless.

For example, of the 957 killed, 240 had clear discernible signs of mental illness—that is, 25 percent of the victims.

Of the victims, 441 were not armed with a gun, 46 percent of those killed. One-hundred seventy people were armed with a knife. And, 44 had a toy weapon of some kind. Forty-seven were neither armed nor driving a car in a way the police deemed dangerous.

Sixty-five were driving cars, causing the police to categorize the vehicle as a weapon. However, in many instances there is no evidence to show that a vehicle acted as a weapon. For example, Christian Redwine, a 17-year-old white male, was shot after a car-chase in which Redwine crashed. He was unarmed and was suspected of stealing the vehicle.

Another notable fact is that 329 of the victims were fleeing, about 34 percent of the victims.

These cumulative statistics show the willingness of police to quickly kill people who pose little to no threat to them.

Police killings should be considered in the broader context of punishment for the most vulnerable and impoverished. In the United States, over 2 million people are in federal or state prisons. Furthermore, 4.75 million are on probation or parole. This means that about 7 million people, 3 percent of the adult population, have been or are in prison.

As in the case of police killings, many of these people have been locked up for shoplifting, grand theft auto and robbery. Many others are incarcerated for drug possession and use.

While millions of destitute and hopeless people in the US are brutally punished for relatively minor infractions, the real criminals, those in the Bush and Obama administrations responsible for wars of aggression that have cost the lives of hundreds of thousands in the Middle East, as well as the bankers who crashed the economy in 2008, have reaped the benefits of their much more serious crimes.

No amount of police training, community engagement or racial bias classes will end police killings. The deaths are borne out of much more fundamental political and economic realities than what this or that police officer feels and thinks. In 2017, amidst a worsening political and economic crisis, the state will be even more ready to kill, harass and imprison the poorest section of the population.

The class struggle in the US in 2017

Jerry White

The year 2017 promises to be one of increasing class struggle in the United States and around the world. In every country, the ruling elites and their political servants want to make the working class pay for the global economic crisis and the costs of war.

In the US, the working class will confront a government unlike any other in American history, which will continue and intensify a decades-long social counterrevolution overseen by the Democrats and Republicans. The incoming Trump administration is manned by billionaires, generals and arch reactionaries. It is a government of, by and for the oligarchy, committed to destroying every remaining gain won by workers over the past century.

Trump wants to “Make America Great Again” by eliminating any restrictions on corporate profit, from minimum wage laws and occupational safety, health and environmental protections, to bedrock social programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Workers will fight against these attacks, and any illusions sections of workers may have had in Trump are already being rapidly dispelled.

While hardly reported by the mass media, 2017 opens with a series of strike threats and labor contract expirations in the US. These include:

•  145,000 workers at the largest US railroads who have been working without a new contract for a year. The workers are opposing sweeping health care cuts, cuts to vacation time and unsafe working hours. They could face a strikebreaking intervention by Trump.
  
•  More than 30,000 transit workers in New York City who are holding a mass meeting this weekend and have a January 15 contract expiration date with no agreement in sight. Another 460 bus drivers and mechanics for the regional transportation system in Dayton, Ohio have voted to strike on January 9 over health care and work conditions. In addition, 10,000 Chicago Transit Authority workers face a contract fight this year.
  
•  4,000 General Electric Appliance workers in Louisville, Kentucky, who rejected a wage-cutting deal recommended by the local and national leadership of the International Union of Electrical-Communications Workers of America in November. The same month, 1,200 airline mechanics at UPS’s super-hub in Louisville overwhelmingly voted to strike against health care cuts.
  
• 38,000 Illinois state workers who are in a contract impasse with Republican Governor Bruce Rauner’s demands for sharp hikes in health care costs and changes to overtime rules.
  
• 700 workers at Momentive Performance Materials in Waterford, New York, north of Albany, and Willoughby, Ohio (near Cleveland) who have been on strike for three months. It was recently revealed that a key advisor to president-elect Donald Trump, Blackstone Group founder and CEO Stephen Schwarzman, owns a stake in Momentive.

The assault on health care, pensions and wages was at the center of Obama’s economic policies. This will only be intensified under Trump. Some 120,000 retired coal miners and their dependents face the cut off of health and retirement benefits, some as early as April, because of the near-bankruptcy of the United Mine Workers funds.

Thousands of General Motors workers are facing the elimination of their jobs over the next few months, as the giant automaker, working with the UAW, seeks to slash jobs as car sales slow. Trump has appointed GM CEO Mary Barra to his corporate competitiveness board.

With great fanfare on Tuesday, Ford and the UAW announced that the company was canceling plans to build a new $1.6 billion plant in Mexico and would invest instead in expanding a plant in suburban Detroit. Ford CEO Mark Fields said the decision was made because, “One of the factors we’re looking at is a more positive US manufacturing business environment under President-elect Trump and some of the pro-growth policies he said he’s going to pursue. And so this is a vote of confidence.”

Indeed, the Ford executives and wealthy investors will certainly reap the benefits of tax cuts, deregulation and other anti-working class policies the Trump administration will pursue, while the UAW bureaucrats are more than willing to offer their services.

The growth of class conflict poses basic political questions for every section of the working class.

First, the struggles of workers must not be subordinated to the pro-capitalist trade unions, which in the United States and around the world function as instruments of corporate management and the state, not as workers organizations.

The past two years have already seen a significant increase in the efforts of workers to resist decades of declining real wages. In every case, they came into conflict with or were smothered by the pro-corporate, anti-working class trade unions, which worked closely with the Obama administration.

In late 2015, autoworkers rebelled against sellout contracts pushed by the United Auto Workers, which were only rammed through with a combination of lies, threats and fraud. Last year began with a series of wildcat sickouts by teachers in Detroit. The action of teachers was in defiance of the Detroit Federation of Teachers and its parent organization, the American Federation of Teachers, which shut them down and facilitated the passage of laws that deepened the attack on public education.

These actions were followed by the strike by 39,000 telecom workers at Verizon, a strike by 5,000 Minnesota hospital workers and a walkout by Philadelphia transit workers. All were isolated by the unions, which pushed through contracts that attacked jobs and living standards.

Workers must build new organizations of struggle, democratically controlled by the rank-and-file, and based on the methods of the class struggle. Every division used to weaken the working class must be overcome and a common struggle waged to defend the social rights of all workers.

Second, a real struggle to defend jobs and living standards must reject the economic nationalism that has long been promoted by the unions to subordinate workers to the profit interests of their “own” corporate bosses.

The growth of the class struggle must and will take on an increasingly international form. Over the past year, major strikes and demonstrations broke out throughout Europe, including in France against reactionary labor “reforms,” and in Portugal and Greece in opposition to austerity measures dictated by the banks. India saw one of the largest one-day strikes in human history against the right-wing agenda of Narenda Modi, while in China the number of strikes and protests in the first half of 2016 was up 20 percent from the year before.

Strikes by teachers, oil workers and other sections of workers in defiance of state violence also took place in Mexico, Venezuela and Brazil. In Canada, the year ended with 9,300 teachers in Nova Scotia, Canada walking out over wage freezes and to demand increased educational funding.

Finally, the defense of the basic rights of workers is fundamentally a political struggle. In the incoming Trump administration, the reality of the state as an instrument of class rule is exposed in naked form. Yet anyone under the illusion that a Clinton administration would pursue a pro-worker policy need only look at the record of the past eight years and the response of the Democratic Party to the election of Trump. Rather than criticizing Trump for his right-wing agenda, the Democrats have denounced him for not being aggressive enough against Russia while pledging to work with him on imposing his policy of economic nationalism.

The political radicalization of American workers and youth in 2015 was expressed in support during the Democratic Party primaries for Bernie Sanders, who presented himself as a socialist and opponent of social inequality. Sanders’ carried out his assigned task of channeling this opposition behind the candidate of the status quo, Hillary Clinton. However, millions of people backed Sanders not because of his political treachery, but because they are seeking some way of opposing an economic system dominated by the corporate and financial aristocracy.

The essential question confronting workers in 2017 is the development of a socialist leadership for the momentous battles ahead. The Socialist Equality Party is fighting to unite every section of the working class and every struggle, for jobs, decent living standards, against police violence, war and the attack on democratic rights, into a single political movement to fight for socialism.