Pro-GMO Scientists Blinded by Technology and Wedded to Ideology

Colin Todhunter

The Oxford Martin School is based at Oxford University in the UK and has set up the ‘Oxford Martin Commission for Future Generations’ (OMC). Bringing together international leaders from government, business and civil society, the OMC aims to address the growing short-term preoccupations of modern politics and business and identify ways of overcoming today’s gridlock in key international negotiations.

The OMC’s website says that this diverse group of highly respected global leaders has called for a radical shake-up in politics and business to deliver progress on climate change, reduce economic inequality, improve corporate practices and address the chronic burden of disease.

Any institution committed to radically shaking up politics and business should be both willing and able to call to account powerful private interests and not be compromised by ideology or conflicts of interest. However, campaigner Dr Rosemary Mason wrote to the OMC last year to state that such things do appear to be undermining its stated aims. She expressed concern that OMC commissioners have allegiances with various global corporations that could undermine the neutrality and credibility of the commission. She went on to name certain individuals and noted their links to corporate power.

For example, there is Sir John Beddington, Professor of Natural Resources Management for the OMC, and his position on the debate about genetically modified (GM) food and crops. Beddington was made Chief Scientific Adviser to the British Government in 2007. In 2012, he declared his faith in GM technology. Mason quotes him as saying, “And among those scientific wonders, the use of genetically modified crops has a particularly rich potential… Just look at the problems that the world faces: water shortages and salination of existing water supplies, for example. GM crops should be able to deal with that.”

A recent report says that during his visit to Australia, Beddington told ABC Rural news that politicians around the globe are ignoring the science relating to GM for the sake of short-term political opportunism.

He is quoted as saying, “If a politician completely ignores scientific advice, then they’re in danger of making policy decisions which will prove to be unutterably wrong.”

Beddington went on to argue for more rapid and sensible responses from policies that engage science and stated, “There is a movement in Europe which is just against any genetically-modified plant used for food [and] that is so naïve. There’s no doubt in the developing world, plants can be modified to be resistant to drought or insect pests and that is going to be very, very important moving into the future.”

He also claimed that the aim of gene editing is to produce plants that are resistant to droughts, pests and diseases, while boosting yields, which would be needed to feed a growing world population.

Beddington told ABC Rural that there was approximately two billion people experiencing malnutrition and these people either lack sufficient levels of nutrients needed for proper development or are eating too much poor-quality food. With 25 per cent of children dying in the first few years of life, he said that children were being robbed of their social and economic potential. In an era of so-called ‘anti-science’, he argued it was more important than ever that scientist ensured their relevancy within society.

Beddington concluded by saying:

“What is sensible is to insist that this is the scientific evidence, you may not like it, but that is the evidence.”

Taken at face value, much of what Beddington says might seem quite reasonable: a growing global population requires food, GM based on scientific evidence can provide it and naïve resistance, which is not based on science, is holding back the technology’s potential.

It’s a line of thought that we have heard many times before from proponents of GM. The purpose here is not to go over old ground and repeat what I or others have written in recent articles that take issue with some of Beddington’s views, especially regarding the science of GM and his wholly erroneous claims about critics holding anti-scientific views.

The wider context: scientists and development   

However, the issue of ‘naivety’ is worth exploring. If there is any naivety around, it is not to be found within the ranks of those who question or oppose GM. In fact, the type of views Beddington expresses are driven by naivety or even worse: a failure to appreciate the reality of hunger, malnutrition, poverty and the nature of a global system of food and agriculture that is tied to corporate power.

Scientists are fond of telling everyone that GM technology can fix the world food problem. This assumes there is a ‘problem’ as they define it (food shortage); but any problem that does exist has less to do with the world’s inability to feed itself and more to do with political issues related to food distribution, access to land, inequality and so on as well as inappropriate models of economic and social development that have adversely impacted indigenous agriculture and regional food security.

As a technology, GM is but a tool. There may indeed be a need for it in certain situations, given proper testing and analyses of specific contexts and circumstances. However, you can roll out a technology and it can have disastrous consequences because of the context within which it operates. And you can roll out that technology knowing it will have many adverse effects but it will be highly beneficial to those who financially profit from that roll-out.

We just have to look at the outcome of GM technology since GM crops were commercialised over 20 years ago. Has it reduced pesticides use? No. Has it increased yields? No. Have companies who control the technology and its associated proprietary inputs (e.g. Roundup/glyphosate) made a financial killing? Certainly (see this and this).

Some 20 years of GM indicate that statements about the efficacy and benefits of GM are based more on wishful thinking than actual reality. GM has been dominated by giant transnational corporations who have used the technology to grow a select handful of crops, which by and large have been used to feed people in richer countries, not poorer regions where hunger and malnutrition persists. Moreover, GM has been integral to a system of food and agriculture in the US that fuels obesity, bad health and monolithic diets that are nutritionally poor. Also, in the US, farmers are squeezed and kept afloat by taxpayer subsidies so that Monsanto, Cargill and the likes of Wal-Mart can rake in massive profits.

People in the US now have a diet dominated by GM corn and soy. And where GM has been grown outside of the US, food security has been undermined, crops are grown for animal feed to be exported to rich countries and the planting of GM has led disease and illness places such as Argentina.

GM is being used by vested interests who seek to irreversibly alter the genetic core of the world’s food and rake in massive profits. This is why GM is not just about science – indeed, science might be a minor issue given the overall context – especially for poorer countries.

If we are to take India as an example, the Green Revolution was promoted by US corporations and interests that uprooted what was a highly productive system of agriculture. That system offered a diverse diet, and system was responsive to local climate and soil conditions. What we now have is drought, degraded soil, less diverse diets, nutritionally deficient crops and farmers placed at the mercy of rigged global trade rules as well as a whole range of other problems.

To say that GM will rectify problems related to drought, yields or climate change fails to acknowledge the damage already done and that GM – the way it is to be rolled out by foreign corporations – is only going to exacerbate things: a damaging corporate-controlled chemical treadmill followed by similar; this time a corporate-controlled biotech treadmill. The Green Revolution was never designed to ‘feed the world’. The same is true for GM. Such rhetoric is designed to mask the motives based on self-interest, geopolitics and profit.

In India, the World Bank and US companies are driving the development agenda. The push to drive at least 400 million from the land and into cities is already underway at the behest of the World Bank: a World Bank that India is seriously indebted to and a World Bank that is, under the guise of ‘enabling the business of agriculture’, committed to opening up economies to corporate seeds and agrochemicals and securing global supply chains.

The drive is to entrench industrial farming and displace the current productive system with one suited to the aims of foreign agribusiness and retail interests. This entails commercialising the countryside and replacing small-scale farming –  the backbone of food production in India (and globally), which is more productive than industrialised agriculture, more sustainable and capable of producing more diverse, nutrient-dense diets.

The ongoing issue to commercialise GM mustard in India is part of a push that seeks to restructure India to benefit foreign capital. By touting for GM, many scientists are (inadvertently) lobbying for a particular model of development. That development agenda regards the peasantry, small farms and India’s rural-based traditions, cultures and village-level systems of food production/processing as backward, as an impediment to ‘progress’. It regards alternative approaches to agriculture that have been advocated by numerous high-level reports as a hindrance: approaches that would in effect build on and develop the current rural infrastructure and not eradicate it.

Do people who promote GM without addressing the issues raised above really think that technology is a silver bullet? Do they think it is the key way to feeding the world – or to feeding an India that is already self-sufficient in key foodstuffs and could be more so if it were not for the effects of politically motivated WTO rules and World Bank directives?

By not addressing any of this, can scientists who tout for GM to the detriment of all else be regarded as ‘objective’? To dismiss all of the issues raised in this article and to ignore the model of corporate power that GM is wedded to demonstrates either gross naivety or an (unwitting) ideological allegiance to the political dogma of neoliberalism.

Rosemary Mason raised a valid point: allegiances to corporate power can and do undermine any chance of neutrality and credibility. Science certainly has a role to play in helping to deal with food and agriculture issues. But the problem is that some scientists feel a need to promote a technological innovation without looking at (or even wanting to look at) the wider context. By doing so, they fail to appreciate that the answer to poverty, hunger and malnutrition first and foremost lies in addressing the context and in not blindly promoting technology.

Gambia: a Very African Coup

Thomas C. Mountain 

Recently the Gambian President, as corrupt and brutal as any in Africa for over 20 years now, was overthrown by a foreign invasion and occupation following a tightly contested election.

To review, there was an election in Gambia which was very close, a difference of 20,000 or so and the “opposition”, a western favorite, declared victory. President Yahyah admitted it seemed he had lost but then announced that after further investigation there were serious irregularities that could have changed the outcome. He suspended the election process until he could figure out what took place, something his handpicked Constitutional Court upheld.

ECOWAS, a mini version of the African Union, flexed its military muscle and the Senegalese Army backed by the Nigerian Air Force, invaded Gambia and forced President Yahyah to flee the country, evidently with all the cash in the National Bank.

To this day the Senegalese Army continues to occupy Gambia, with Senegalese Commandos providing personal protection for the newly installed President, having been sworn in while residing in Senegal?

If the old President wasn’t such a S.O.B. (until recently “our SOB”) one could feel outraged about what can only be described as “a very African Coup”, for where else in the world could one country invade and occupy a neighbor, install the President they support and everyone cheers? Or at least the western media does, though I have yet to hear anyone remotely uncomfortable about such a major violation of international law and non intervention principals anywhere in the international arena.

Of course Ethiopia, ruled by a particularly brutal, genocidal even, western supported regime for longer than President Yahyah regularly steal elections, declare a state of emergency, and yet the African Union goes right on running their dog and pony show from the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa.

In neocolonial Africa it is not the “rule of law” rather the “law of the jungle” where only the strong survive, and what chance does a tiny country like Gambia have against military powers like Senegal and Nigeria. As a result we have Gambia and a very African Coup.

Australian government in disarray over vote-swapping deal with One Nation

Mike Head

A preferential vote deal struck by the Liberal Party with Pauline Hanson’s right-wing One Nation party for the March 11 Western Australian state election has sharpened the political crisis within the Liberal-National Coalition across the country.

Facing a landslide defeat, the state Liberal government has negotiated a pact with Hanson’s party, whose media polling in the state has soared to 13 percent since last July’s federal election. Premier Colin Barnett’s Liberal administration, in the former mining boom state, has slumped to just 30 percent in the polls, as part of a wider collapse in support for the Liberals nationally.

The Liberal Party will direct its second voting preferences in the upper house to One Nation, not to the rural-based National Party, which is part of the Coalition government of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull at the federal level. In exchange, One Nation has agreed to direct its preferences to the Liberals in 35 lower house seats. The Nationals have retaliated in response, directing preferences in some upper house electorates to the Greens, thus endangering Liberal Party seats.

This is not merely a Western Australian development. Senior ministers in Turnbull’s government were intimately involved in the horse-trading with One Nation, notably Finance Minister Mathias Cormann and Employment Minister Michaelia Cash—who took Hanson to dinner in Perth, the state capital, last December.

Turnbull and other cabinet members have strenuously defended the deal. While claiming to disagree with some of Hanson’s anti-immigrant and protectionist policies, Turnbull emphasised that his government was now collaborating with her. “I have to say we work very closely with the One Nation senators,” Turnbull stated.

A previous Coalition government, under former Prime Minister John Howard, vowed in 2001 that it would never swap preferences with One Nation and then railroaded her to jail after her party’s appeal to disaffected voters threatened to destabilise the two-party system.

Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce, the National Party leader, has bitterly denounced the deal, warning it would lead to a loss of government in Western Australia and, eventually, nationally. Tensions between the Liberals and the Nationals are deepening throughout Australia, due primarily to the crisis in rural and regional areas, where most of the National Party’s support base lives. This has been caused by a severe loss of jobs and basic services, from mining-related closures and government austerity cuts.

This political crisis not only raises the prospect of a split in the federal Coalition government. It underscores the level of political disaffection wracking the entire parliamentary establishment. Buoyed by the election of Donald Trump as US president, Hanson is seeking to emulate the American billionaire’s success in diverting the anger and alienation felt by millions of working class, small business and impoverished people into reactionary nationalist, xenophobic and protectionist directions.

After decades of declining living conditions and ever-more glaring social inequality imposed by Coalition and Greens-backed Labor governments alike, Hanson is cynically exploiting the seething hostility that has resulted. In this, she is walking in the footsteps of mining magnate Clive Palmer’s Palmer United Party, which made a similar pitch in the lead up to the 2013 federal election, but has since imploded.

In Hanson’s home state of Queensland, another ex-mining boom state, media polling currently puts One Nation’s support at 23 percent. This may be enough for her party to join a coalition government with either Labor or the Liberal National Party after the next state election, which could be held this year. The same poll reported that more than a third of respondents, while not necessarily agreeing with Hanson’s policies, thought it would be good for One Nation to hold the balance of power in the next state parliament.

Behind the support for Hanson lie dangerous illusions that she represents the interests of ordinary working people, or that One Nation will at least push governments into backing away from their pro-corporate offensive on jobs, working conditions and essential public services such as health, education and welfare.

In reality, as indicated by the comments of Turnbull and Hanson herself, she is actively seeking a prominent position within the parliamentary system, having already assisted the Coalition government to push through socially destructive spending cuts. Not only does Hanson scapegoat Muslims, asylum seekers and foreign workers, in an effort to divide and weaken the working class. She denounces welfare recipients, thus blaming unemployed youth and workers, as well, for the relentless destruction of jobs and conditions by Australian corporations.

The Labor Party, while hypocritically criticising the Liberals for courting One Nation, is also seeking an accommodation with Hanson. Her economic nationalist and protectionist views dovetail with the efforts of the Labor and trade union movement to divert workers’ discontent down divisive anti-Chinese and anti-foreign worker channels.

Report reveals widespread torture of minors in Mexican prisons

Alex Gonzalez

In Mexico, 57 percent of adolescents in prison are tortured, according to a report released by the National Center for Human Rights (CNDH) late last month.

The CNDH, an independent agency, details the background and experiences of youth aged 14-18 who have been accused of committing a violent crime. It is based on interviews and surveys with 730 adolescents in 17 representative states throughout the country.

According to the Mexican Commission of National Security, there are currently over 13,000 adolescents behind bars, of which over one-fifth have been convicted of a violent crime, such as murder, robbery using violence and kidnapping.

The nationwide report documents the systematic abuse of imprisoned adolescents by local and federal police, as well as by sections of the Mexican Army and the Marines. Over half (57 percent) of all interviewed teens reported being tortured—often over the course of several days—after their arrest. Interviewees frequently reported being subjected to electric shocks, stabbed, tasered, drowned, asphyxiated and struck by the police.

One youth told interviewers: “I was undressed and tied up. They put water on me, the put bags on my face, they left me undressed and wet for five hours. They hit me in the ribs and tasered me. When they tortured me, I had to say what they wanted to hear or they would hit me more.”

While Mexican law prohibits using torture to extract confessions, previous investigations by the CNDH have found multiple cases of falsification of medical records that would confirm detainees had been subjected to torture.

Violations by the justice system documented by the study spread beyond torture and abuse at detention centers, including systematic violations of due process. The majority of adolescents reported not being informed of the charges against them (59 percent), not being informed of their rights (69 percent) and not being told they had the right to an attorney (54 percent).

Overall, 16 percent of those interviewed reported being innocent, although this number was over twice as high in some regions (37 and 44 percent in Veracruz and Oaxaca, respectively). The report notes “a particularly high percentage [of alleged innocence] was found among those who, under conditions of poverty, marginalization and powerlessness, also suffered from discriminatory treatment by the justice system due to their ethnic or indigenous status.”

The report tells the story of Wilfrido, a 21-year-old indigenous youth who was charged with murder and was convicted because a seven-year-old relative of the victim cried in court at the sight of him. Despite Wilfrido’s explanation that the young boy had cried because he was frightened and did not speak Spanish, the existence of no other evidence against him and an alibi placing him elsewhere during the crime, the judge found this to be sufficient proof and he was sentenced to nine years in prison.

The study sheds light to the complicit role of the armed forces in the drug trade: about 20 percent of those interviewed said current or former members of the police or the army also took part in the criminal operations for which they were convicted.

Under conditions of violence and endemic poverty, vulnerable youth become entangled in the drug trade in an effort to provide for themselves and their families. The majority (64 percent) of those interviewed reported getting involved in crime to help their families financially. Prior to their arrest, adolescents reported working both in legal (e.g. farmer, daily worker, fisherman, dishwasher) and illegal (e.g. robbery, selling drugs, kidnapping) activities. However, those who worked in the illegal sector could earn up to 10 times as much.

Adolescents who are convicted of violent crimes are among the most vulnerable sections of the Mexican working class. Interviewed teens were three times as likely to live in conditions of extreme poverty than the general population, and 40 percent noted they had been physically abused frequently prior to being incarcerated. Highlighting the predatory role of the drug trade, the majority of those interviewed joined organized crime when they were between 12 and 14 years old.

The CNDH report is a damning indictment of the existing conditions in Mexico more than a decade after the US-backed “war on drugs,” which has claimed over 80,000 lives since 2006. With the military and economic aid of the Bush and Obama administrations, this bloody war has not only led to countless deaths, but has militarized society to the degree that, as the report states, torture “constitutes ‘normal’ behavior that is to be expected from police.”

About half of all murders between 2008 and 2015 can be attributed to the “war on drugs,” according to the Mexican Statistics and Geography Institute (INEGI). Of these murders, 84 percent have never gone to trial.

Despite spending billions of dollars on security forces and military equipment, the drug war has been an abject failure. The US continues to have the highest levels of illegal drug use in the world, and the supply of illegal drugs to the US remains virtually unchanged.

Trump has sought to scapegoat immigrants for both the failure of this policy and for the conditions of poverty in the US that lead many to become addicted to drugs. “We have to keep the drugs out of our country,” he has stated. “We are getting the drugs, they’re getting the cash. We need strong borders. We cannot give amnesty.”

Workers and youth in Mexico and the US must reject this nationalist poison and fight to end capitalism, the social system that breeds the desperation and hopelessness that creates both the demand for and supply of drugs in order to serve the profit interests of corporations, banks and cartels.

Brazilian army sent into streets of Rio amid mounting protests

Bill Van Auken 

Some 9,000 Brazilian troops began to deploy in the streets of Rio de Janeiro Tuesday in the face of mounting protests against austerity and privatizations and the threat of a work stoppage by the Military Police (PM), the force that patrols the country’s second-largest city and the state which bears the same name.

On the same day that Brazil’s right-wing President Michel Temer announced the deployment, calling the threat of a walkout by the PM an “insurrection against the constitution,” workers of Rio’s State Water and Sewage Company (CEDAE) staged another mass protest outside the state’s Legislative Assembly in opposition to a planned privatization of this essential social service.

Last Thursday, riot police violently repressed a similar demonstration, leaving a number of people severely injured.

The military deployment in Rio follows a similar dispatch of federal troops to its neighboring state to the north, Espiritu Santo, where blockades organized by wives, mothers and other relatives outside PM barracks, demanding higher pay and improved conditions, led to the PM staying off the streets and triggered a sharp rise in homicides and other crimes.

Schools, public transportation and businesses shut down in the course of the protests, particularly in Vitoria, the state’s capital. While some 3,000 troops, including armored units and paratroopers, were sent in to restore “law and order,” the return of the PM to the streets at the beginning of this week appeared to be the result of an agreement reached between their representatives and the state government.

The PM, an inheritance from the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil for two decades following a CIA-backed coup in 1964, is under military discipline and legally barred from striking. The force is responsible for killing thousands of Brazilians each year. In 2015, Brazil’s police killed at least 3,300 people, roughly three times the number killed by cops in the US.

Off-duty police have participated in protests against the austerity measures, in some cases calling for a return to military dictatorship and forcing workers to take down their banners. There have also been reports of off-duty cops pulling guns on riot police sent to quell their protests.

The deployment of federal troops to Rio was requested by Rio’s state governor, Luiz Fernando Pezão, who is a member of the PMDB (Brazilian Democratic Movement Party), the same party as President Temer. Under the federal intervention, known as a “guarantee of law and order,” the troops are to be deployed until February 22, when an evaluation will be made by the government over whether they will be kept occupying Rio for a longer period. The following week is that of Rio’s Carnival, which brings visitors from around the world.

The use of the army to carry out policing functions has become increasingly frequent as Brazil continues to face its worst economic crisis in a century, and with the Temer government’s approval ratings falling to the abysmal level reached by former Workers Party President Dilma Rousseff before her impeachment on trumped-up charges of budgetary manipulations last August. Some 47,000 troops were deployed in Rio during the summer Olympic Games, and more recently the government sent troops in to quell bloody prison revolts.

In announcing the deployment to Rio, Brazil’s Defense Minister Raul Jungmann insisted that, as opposed to the events in Espiritu Santo, there was no loss of “control” in Rio de Janeiro nor any “inability of Rio’s organs of state security to maintain law and order.” He claimed that 95 percent of Rio’s Military Police was operating as normal. Instead, he said, the deployment was of a “preventive” character, designed to “free members of the PM on account of demonstrations.”

Jungmann’s estimate of the percentage of Military Police going out on patrol is no doubt overly optimistic, even though the stoppage has reached nowhere near the level seen in Espiritu Santo. Still, wives and relatives of police have sought to block the entrances to nearly 30 of Rio’s 50 PM barracks, including that of the Shock Battalion used to repress demonstrations. In some cases, the police have resorted to changing shifts outside the barracks and even opening up new entrances to circumvent the pickets.

Police, like civilian public-sector workforce, have still received neither their January salary nor the so-called 13th salary, a legally mandated year-end bonus that should have been paid out at the end of last year.

The state and federal governments are particularly concerned about mobilizing sufficient repressive force to hold a vote February 20 on the privatization of CEDAE, the state-owned water company. Previous attempts to enact legislation on the sale of the public service have been blocked by protests. A vote had been scheduled for Tuesday, but was postponed for fear that the protests outside the PM barracks could deprive the Rio Legislative Assembly of an adequate security force.

The sale of the state water company is a key piece in the austerity program being championed by Governor Pezão in the face of Rio’s desperate fiscal crisis, which has been deepened by the fall in the price of oil, a commodity that had previously fueled the local economy. The privatization is supposed to secure a loan of 3.5 billion reais (approximately US$1.1 billion) from the federal government designed to prevent the state’s complete default on debt payments.

Even as the Temer government was deploying army troops to quell opposition to capitalist austerity and privatization, it also moved in a manner unprecedented since the days of military rule to impose censorship on Brazil’s two most prominent daily newspapers—both of which had supported the impeachment of Rousseff that brought Temer to power.

Temer sent a government lawyer to court to obtain an injunction ordering Folha de S.P. to withdraw an article it had posted on its website reporting on an attempted blackmail of the president’s wife, Marcela. The piece described some of the messages sent by the blackmailer, a hacker who had cloned the Brazilian first lady’s iPhone. This included a threat that unless she paid him 300,000 reais, he would make public information that would drag the president’s reputation “through the mud.”

The Rio-based O Globo announced Monday that it had been subjected to a similar censorship order secured by the Palácio do Planalto, Brazil’s White House.

This state censorship is particularly onerous in that it is preventing the dissemination of information that was revealed in the public trial of the hacker, who was prosecuted, convicted and sent to prison.

Temer’s actions reflect the extreme crisis of the government he heads and fear of any further public reference to scandals surrounding his administration The Petrobras bribes-for-contracts corruption scandal that engulfed the entire political establishment could still bring down his own presidency as well. Temer is reportedly still under investigation over testimony by a top executive at the Odebrecht construction conglomerate that he solicited nearly US$3 million in illegal campaign donations during the 2014 election.

Given the crisis and instability gripping the government, the increasing resort to calling out the army to deal with social unrest carries with it the real threat of laying the foundations for a return to military rule in Latin America’s largest country.

UK schools decimated by funding cuts

Tom Pearce

Across the UK, teachers are drawing attention to the impact of the Conservative government’s slashing of funding to schools.

The government had pledged to protect school spending, but this was a façade. Successive UK governments have failed to stop the austerity cuts on schools and the Conservatives’ proposed fairer funding formula is a further attack on the education system. A desperate situation has been created as cash-strapped schools look to face even further cuts from proposed funding reforms.

The National Audit Office (NAO) reports that schools faced £3 billion in spending cuts and a forecast from the Institute for Fiscal Studies said this equated to an 8 percent real-term cut to funding. This means that schools face the worst reduction in funding since the mid-1990s.

The situation is so dire that MPs recently debated the schools funding crisis. At the Education Select Committee on January 31, Minister of State for Schools Nick Gibb admitted that 5,500 schools are on the funding “floor.”

This was in stark contrast to previous comments by the Education Secretary Justine Greening who claimed that “schools were already receiving record levels of funding. We recognise that schools are facing cost pressures, which is why we will continue to provide advice and support to help them use their funding in cost-effective ways, including improving the way they buy goods and services, so they get the best possible value for their pupils.”

Greening’s response covers up the truth that schools will be forced to find detrimental ways to cope with the coming cuts on spending. Pressures of funding are compromising the education of every child, with schools being treated as businesses. The most expensive part of a school’s budget is teachers’ pay. School head teachers will ultimately be forced to decide between allocating funding for staff or resources.

This will only exacerbate the existing crisis. Cuts in funding have already led to a desperate situation where class sizes have increased substantially.

There are many cases across the UK where, even before further attacks take place, schools are struggling and are already considering extreme measures to survive. Schoolchildren face the prospect of a four-day week in the county of West Sussex, and the same is now being considered in the north-west county of Cheshire because of a shortage in funding.

School principals from Cheshire have warned that some subjects could be scrapped, while teaching assistants and mental health support workers could face redundancy.

While facing this crisis, Prime Minister Theresa May has nevertheless pledged that schools will take on a larger role in dealing with mental health issues. This is due to cuts of at least £600 million to mental health services since 2010. Previously paid for by central and local government funding, schools will have to pay for these additional responsibilities out of their own budgets.

This attack on school budgets is not sustainable, with school leaders forced to consider unprecedented measures. The BBC reported Denis Oliver, head teacher at Holmes Chapel Comprehensive School in Cheshire, saying he was investigating the possibility of “having children working at home with their teachers online as virtual support, [thereby] saving on heating, lighting, cleaning and transport costs. We are looking at everything.”

He added, “Class sizes will rise, services for children with high needs will drastically reduce, school libraries may have to close. It’s draconian. It will destroy some schools.”

This is not an isolated case but the emerging reality nationwide, with the Independent reporting, “40 percent of small rural schools are set to lose funding.”

The impact is being felt across the board. North Devon schools are likely to go bankrupt due to proposed funding changes. Member of Parliament for Liverpool West, Stephen Twigg, said, “80 percent of schools in Liverpool are set to have budget cuts.” In the area of Kirklees in West Yorkshire only one school is set to benefit from the new funding formula changes, with the rest losing money. In Oldham, each school is set to lose £438 per pupil.

Not only are schools worried about the coming changes, but growing numbers of secondary schools are over-spending and deficits are growing. Their average deficit during 2015/16 increased from £246,000 to £326,000. Schools Week magazine reported, “Schools are now at the point where they have cut all they can from non-staff budgets.”

In this situation, the only solution left to head teachers is to cut money from staffing.

The government’s strategy in response to funding problems in Academy schools has been to intervene to give them notices to improve. There is no evidence that this process has helped improve a school’s financial situation. In fact, the NAO found that 70 out of 322 academy trusts ended back on financial concern lists even after receiving Education Funding Agency (EFA) support.

The National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT), who asked 1,000 schools about their funding situation, substantiates these statistics. They found that 71 percent of head teachers polled were only able to balance their budgets by making cuts or dipping into reserves. Seventy-two percent of head teachers fear budgets will be unsustainable by 2019 and 85 percent save money by spending less on new equipment.

The greatest cost pressures on schools, according to head teachers, are government changes, which have passed the costs of employing staff on to schools; the decline in local authority services; and the abolition of a central government grant that enables councils to support schools with pupils with mental health issues.

According to the NAHT, almost 80 percent of schools are providing support for children with mental health issues from general school budgets. Schools are “stepping in where cuts in health and social care funding have failed to meet the growing demand for support.”

As wider cuts to social care and children’s services continue, schools have to deal with the effects by taking over the care systems that have been wiped out. This situation only exacerbates the school funding situation and directly affects the care of children, with fully funded and dedicated services no longer available.

Schools are forced to cut hours of speech therapy sessions, and specialist staff who used to work in areas such as drugs, gangs and counselling have disappeared or had their hours cut. Head teachers complain that there is no help outside school for children with mental health issues and schools are now being asked to take on even heavier burdens, but without extra funding.

Schools cannot afford family liaison workers, yet are being judged on the attendance records of children. Head teachers are cutting training budgets at a time when the government has changed every course and every exam curriculum. Money for resources and training for these courses cannot be found by some schools. Some head teachers have followed a policy of not replacing staff where they do not have to.

Parents are increasingly being asked to contribute to school funding. One example is Beechen Cliff, a state school in Bath, which sent a letter to all parents—several years before the new funding formula came in—asking for a regular voluntary financial contribution. Noting the “bleak governmental funding future,” it said that maintaining existing standards “will only be possible with help and support.” The letter continued, “At Beechen Cliff education is free but, if parents are willing to give a fraction of that money, we could achieve so much more.” It added, “We are asking ALL families for a voluntary contribution of £30, £20 or £10 per month to the new Top-up Scheme.”

Many schools are heading towards bankruptcy and will be forced to go to the wall. The aim of the government’s attacks is to force schools to become businesses that compete, with the privatisation of school-age education the goal.

German Chancellor Merkel promotes harsher deportation policies

Martin Kreickenbaum 

German Chancellor Angela Merkel told the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) parliamentary group at the end of August that in refugee policy “the most important thing in the coming months is repatriation, repatriation and again repatriation.”

Last Thursday, the chancellor met with the minister presidents of Germany’s states to put this slogan into practice. In place of the so-called “welcoming culture” a “deportation culture” has emerged which could certainly be compared to the policies of US President Donald Trump.

Prior to the summit in the chancellor’s office, Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière (CDU) urged a “joint pooling of forces” to deport refugees in large numbers. The minister presidents then agreed on a 15-point plan which drastically curtails immigrant rights, and supports more frequent and quicker deportations.

The measures were supported by state presidents from all political parties. Only the President of Thuringia Bodo Ramelow (Left Party) stayed away from the summit out of tactical considerations.

The 15-point plan includes the following measures:

The reasons for detention pending deportation will be increased. In the future, rejected asylum seekers can be interned if they are accused of endangering public security or order. Such preventive detention violates current laws, and the utterly unclear concept of a “threat” in criminal law opens the door wide to police arbitrariness.

“Custody pending departure,” a euphemism for the detention of entire families, is being lengthened to 10 days. This violates EU law, which bans arbitrary measures without constitutional review.

The police and intelligence surveillance of foreigners required to leave will be significantly expanded. The smart phones and SIM cards of refugees who are not cooperative enough during identification checks can be confiscated and examined. In addition, the federal office for migration and refugees can also pass sensitive data to the police authorities.

Rejected asylum seekers can have stricter residency requirements imposed upon them so that they are not permitted to leave the area or city in which they live. Refugees can also be sanctioned more strictly with benefit cuts and employment bans.

Until now, refugees who had held tolerated status in Germany for at least a year could challenge a deportation order within one month. This option shall be restricted so that tolerated refugees can expect to be deported at any time.

Asylum seekers who are deemed not to have a “perspective of staying” prior to their first hearing can be compelled to stay at arrival centres. They “are to be sent back from the arrival centre as soon as possible after the commencement of the requirement to depart.” In this way, the permanent internment of refugees will become the norm. The refugee camps will thus become “centres of organised hopelessness,” as refugee support organisation ProAsyl has noted.

The heads of government at the federal and state levels have also agreed to create “a sufficient number of detention pending deportation places within close distance of central departure institutions.” In addition, “a centre to support return” will be established to coordinate deportation measures between the federal and state governments and press ahead with mass deportations, especially to Afghanistan.

The Interior Ministry also intends to expand the number of the so-called Dublin regulations. Refugees will be sent back to the country where they first entered European Union territory. According to Interior Minister de Maizière, there will soon be “Dublin transfers” to Greece, Hungary and Bulgaria, even though refugees are abused in those countries and there is no functioning asylum system or adequate accommodation.

And finally, the so-called “voluntary repatriation” of refugees will be intensified. An additional €90 million is to be made available for this. In this procedure, refugees will face pressure already during asylum hearings to return “voluntarily” to their homeland in exchange for a small incentive. The repatriation programme “Starthilfe plus” listed countries gripped by civil war, including Afghanistan, Syria and Eritrea as targets for voluntary repatriation.

If one includes the refugee deal with Turkey, the systematic sealing off of the Balkan route and the Mediterranean as well as the attempts of the European Union to build detention centres in North Africa for refugees, these measures hardly differ from the bullying, internment and deportation of refugees adopted by the Trump administration. Constitutional principles are being thrown overboard and human rights trampled underfoot.

The right to asylum has been restricted several times in Germany since the autumn of 2015 to deter refugees. Benefits have been cut, residency requirements reintroduced and toughened, family reunification made more difficult and deportations pushed forward.

Now the criteria for the acceptance of asylum seekers is to be arbitrarily intensified. The decision paper from the heads of government meeting states early on, “In the coming months, the BAMF [Federal Office for Migration and Refugees] will in the future reject a high number of asylum applications from people who do not require protection in Germany.”

Chancellor’s office Minister Peter Altmeier (CDU) told Bavarian Radio, “We assume that deportations will be more frequent and quicker from all states, including to Afghanistan.” This should also result in fewer people setting out to Germany.

It is significant that the government has hired the consultancy firm McKinsey, which is normally tasked with rationalising business operations, to produce a study on the deportation of refugees. Refugees are being treated like cattle whose deportation is a mere matter of feasibility and cost-effectiveness.

Even though only 150,000 tolerated refugees who currently live in Germany are obliged to leave the McKinsey study assumes that the number could rise to 485,000 in 2017.

The stepped-up actions against refugees was agreed to by an all-party coalition. For the Social Democrats, Justice Minister Heiko Mas praised the package of measures, “Only if we enforce our regulations can we permanently achieve acceptance for migration.”

A despicable role is being played by the Left Party. Their interior policy spokeswoman in parliament publicly described the measures as “competition of shamelessness in deportation policy” and attacked the expansion of federal authority in deportations for suppressing “humanitarian considerations, which luckily are still employed in some states.”

However, the Thuringia state government noted its readiness in the protocol to the 15-point plan to enforce the obligation to return for rejected asylum seekers. It merely intends to rely more heavily on the so-called “voluntary” repatriation, because “the support of voluntary return [is] an efficient instrument.” And in Berlin and Brandenburg, where the Left Party is also in government, the party has not raised any principled objections to the measures.

Trump administration to expand India-US military-strategic alliance

Deepal Jayasekera & Keith Jones 

The Trump administration has served notice that it intends to expand the Indo-US military strategic alliance. This is not surprising, but nonetheless highly significant: first, because it underscores the new administration’s intention to pursue confrontation with China; and second, because Washington’s drive to harness India to its military-strategic offensive against China has dangerously destabilized the region, fueling tensions between India and both China and Pakistan.

US Secretary of Defense, General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, telephoned his Indian counterpart, Manohar Parrikar last week. Mattis, according to the Pentagon readout of their Feb. 8 conversation, hailed the “tremendous progress” made in “recent years” in Indo-US “defense cooperation” and said the new administration is eager to “sustain the momentum” and “build upon it.”

The readout made specific mention of the bilateral Defense Technology and Trade Initiative (DTTI) under which the US and India are codeveloping and coproducing advanced weapon systems.

Mattis placed his call to Parrikar shortly after returning from a trip to East Asia, during which he reaffirmed Washington’s longstanding strategic alliances with Japan and South Korea. He also reiterated the Obama administration’s commitment to go to war with China if Beijing were ever to threaten East China Sea islets (known in Japan as the Senkaku and in China as the Diaoyu) that are currently held by Japan, but claimed by China.

Mattis’s call came the day after officials in Washington had said that all the legal changes necessary to give effect to India’s recent designation as a “Major (US) Defense Partner” have now been completed. As a quid pro quo for New Delhi agreeing to allow the Pentagon to use Indian military bases to service its warplanes and battleships, the Obama administration last year conferred “Major Defense Partner” status on India. This gives New Delhi access to US weapons on a par with Washington’s most trusted treaty allies and Indian companies “a presumption of approval” when they seek to buy most US Commerce Department-controlled military and “dual use” goods.

Since the turn of the 21st century, Republican and Democratic administrations alike have prioritized strengthening strategic ties with India, viewing it as critical to US efforts to contain and, if need be, thwart China’s rise. India’s size, large nuclear-armed military, and strategic location are all reasons India has been touted by the Pentagon, CIA, and US foreign policy think tanks as a “strategic prize.” From the standpoint of the strategists of US imperialism, India is China’s western underbelly. Moreover, it juts far out into the Indian Ocean, providing a prime vantage point for controlling the sea-lanes that convey much of China’s oil and other natural resource imports, and almost all its exports to Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

Since the Obama administration launched its “Pivot to Asia” in 2011, and especially since the Indian elite propelled Narendra Modi and his Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to power in May 2014, India has been integrated ever more completely into Washington’s military-strategic offensive against China.

In their parting addresses, both Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and Secretary of State John Kerry characterized the enhanced Indo-US military-strategic ties as one of the major achievements of Obama’s eight-year presidency.

Under Modi, India has been transformed into a veritable frontline state in Washington’s anti- China offensive.

In addition to opening its military bases for routine US use, India—as revealed by the head of the US Pacific Command, Admiral Harry Harris, last month—is now exchanging intelligence with the US Navy on Chinese submarine and ship movements in the Indian Ocean.

New Delhi has also dramatically expanded its bilateral and trilateral military-security cooperation with America’s closest Asia-Pacific allies, Japan and Australia.

Beginning with the January 2015 “India-US Joint Strategic Vision for the Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean Region,” the Modi government has consistently parroted Washington’s provocative position on the South China Sea dispute, painting China as the “aggressor.” This stance is encouraging the US to act ever more recklessly. The Trump administration has gone so far as to threaten to block China’s access to the South China Sea islets it currently controls, an act that would be tantamount to a declaration of war.

The extent to which India is being integrated into the US war build-up against China has been further underscored by this week’s announcement that the Pentagon has decided to make India a hub for servicing and repairing battleships and other vessels attached to its Seven Fleet—the force that would play the lead role in implementing the US military’s Air-Sea Battle plan against China.

The ever-tighter Indo-US alliance has overturned the balance of power in the South Asian region, leading to the dangerous intensification of geopolitical tensions between India and its principal rivals, China and Pakistan. One expression of this is a nuclear and ballistic missile arms race, involving all three states.

Emboldened by the many strategic “favors” Washington has showered upon it, New Delhi has launched a campaign of diplomatic, economic and military pressure aimed at forcing Islamabad to stamp out all logistical support from Pakistan for the anti-Indian insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir. Last fall, South Asia was plunged into its gravest war crisis in over a decade, when India mounted commando raids inside Pakistan in retaliation for an attack on an Indian military base carried out by Islamist Kashmiri separatists.

For more than four decades, India did not publicly admit to attacks inside Pakistan for fear of triggering a dynamic of escalating strikes and counterstrikes that could quickly lead to all-out war. The Modi government has dashed this policy. It has celebrated the commando raids as the throwing off of the shackles of “strategic restraint” and has vowed that it will continue to punish Pakistan until it “renounces” terrorism even if that leads to the first-ever war between nuclear-armed states.

The Modi government has been encouraged in this provocative stance by Washington. Eager to demonstrate to New Delhi the value Washington places on their strategic partnership, the Obama administration supported India’s illegal and highly provocative “surgical strikes” inside Pakistan, first implicitly and then explicitly.

Even before Mattis’s phone call to his Indian counterpart, Parrikar, New Delhi was calculating how it could exploit the harder line the Trump administration is expected to adopt with Pakistan, which Washington has repeatedly criticized for not doing more to stamp out Taliban safe havens inside Pakistan. In reality, if Islamabad, or at least sections of Pakistan’s military-intelligence apparatus, have maintained ties with some Taliban factions it is because they are hedging against the impact of the Indo-US alliance, which has drastically increased the strategic imbalance between Pakistan and India, a country with a six times larger population and an eight times larger economy.

Pakistan’s principal military-strategic response to the burgeoning Indo-US ties had been to deepen its longstanding alliance with Beijing. This in turn has further exacerbated tensions between Beijing and New Delhi.

In a statement to the Indian parliament last week, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj reiterated the Modi government’s hardline policy of refusing all substantive contacts with Pakistan until it abandons any material support for the Kashmir insurgency. Swaraj proclaimed India’s policy was “no dialogue, until peace” and boasted about Islamabad’s growing diplomatic isolation.

Up until 2015, China adopted a cautious approach to the Indo-US military-strategic alliance, based on the calculation that a strong reaction might backfire and push New Delhi further into Washington’s embrace. But over the past two years, Beijing has taken an increasingly confrontational stance, as exemplified by its decision to make the $50 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor a cornerstone of its One Belt, One Road initiative.

Significantly India figures large on the list of key strategic concerns Beijing has reportedly given to the Trump administration. According to Michael Pillsbury, a Trump advisor and China expert, Beijing listed six top “sensitivities”: Taiwan; the One China policy; the antiballistic missile system Washington is building in South Korea (THAAD); US arms sales to India; the Sino-Indian border dispute; and the Dali Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile, which is located in India.

At Modi’s invitation, the US Ambassador to India, Richard Verma, made a high-profile visit last October to Arunachal Pradesh, territory China claims as South Tibet. On a similar visit earlier last year a lower-level US diplomat said Washington considers Arunachal Pradesh an indisputable part of India.

Syria talks restart in Astana as fighting continues

Jordan Shilton

Talks to resolve the Syrian conflict organized by Russia, Turkey and Iran are set to begin today in the Kazakh capital, Astana. The second round of discussions has been overshadowed by renewed tensions between Russia and Turkey, and the possibility that an opposition delegation could refuse to attend.

An announcement was made Tuesday by the Kazakh government that the meetings would take place behind closed doors.

The initiative to reach a peace agreement to end the civil war was taken by Russia and Turkey after US-backed rebels suffered a disastrous defeat in eastern Aleppo at the end of last year. The retaking of the country’s second major city by forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad, with the support of Russian air strikes and Iranian fighters, was a severe setback to Washington’s six-year-long war for regime change in Damascus. Washington has been left sidelined in the Astana talks, although Moscow and Ankara extended an invitation for the US to attend as an observer.

US President Donald Trump ordered senior military personnel January 28 to propose plans for the US intervention in Syria, giving them a one-month deadline. The administration has continued a brutal air war in collaboration with an international coalition, which is ostensibly targeting ISIS positions. According to the latest statistics, US air strikes in January killed over 250 civilians.

Over 400,000 Syrians have lost their lives since the outbreak of the conflict and at least 11 million, around half of the country’s population, have been forced to flee their homes.

In contrast to the Obama administration, whose Syria strategy of backing Islamist rebels dominated by the al-Qaida-affiliated Al-Nusra Front suffered a debacle in December with the fall of Aleppo, Trump has indicated his readiness to consider “safe zones” in the north of the country. This policy would aim to keep the millions who have been forced from their homes within the country and would at the same time serve as the pretext for a vast escalation of US military personnel in the country. It has already been pointed out by several commentators that defending such zones would entail a far larger US military commitment.

There is little prospect that the peace talks over the coming days can avert a further escalation of tensions in the region. After the two-day meeting in Astana, the parties will reconvene next week under the auspices of the United Nations in Geneva, where the United States and other Western powers are expected to participate.

Over the weekend, Turkey continued to advance on the ISIS-controlled town of al-Bab and currently has approximately 40 percent of it under its control. The offensive came following a telephone call last week between Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and a visit to Ankara by new CIA head Mike Pompeo.

The seizure of al-Bab heightens the risk of renewed clashes between Turkish and Kurdish forces organized in the People’s Protection Units (YPG). The YPG is at present engaged in operations to retake Raqqa, the de facto capital of ISIS territory, but control over al-Bab would increase Turkish influence on the military offensive. Erdogan even suggested last week that Turkish troops could move east to attack the ISIS stronghold. Trump, who initially expressed the hope that Turkish and Kurdish forces could be persuaded to collaborate in combatting ISIS, appears to have abandoned this position in the face of stiff opposition from Erdogan, who opposes any expansion of Kurdish autonomy in northern Syria for fear that it will encourage separatist sentiments across the border in the Kurdish-majority areas of southeast Turkey.

Turkish-Kurdish hostilities could yet trigger frictions between Ankara and Moscow. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov invited representatives of the Democratic Unity Party (PYD), the political arm of the YPG, to Moscow for a briefing on the last round of talks in Astana. Turkey has not criticized this move so far, but it rejects any cooperation with the PYD, which it denounces as terrorists and being linked to the separatist Kurdish Workers Party (PKK). While Moscow has spoken out in favor of a federal settlement for Syria, this is rejected by Turkey.

The Turkish push further into Syrian territory also threatens to trigger clashes between Turkish-aligned Syrian militia and Assad’s forces, which are advancing on al-Bab from the south with Russian support.

An Amnesty International report released last week, “Human Slaughterhouse: mass hangings and exterminations at Saydnaya prison,” documented the brutal repression employed by the Assad regime against political opponents. The yearlong investigation uncovered a systematic program of extrajudicial killings under which groups of up to 50 prisoners were taken to the basement of the jail and hung without prior notice, let alone legal proceedings. This practice went on between 2011 and 2015, and Amnesty noted that there is strong evidence to suggest it still continues.

The report went on to detail how prisoners were systematically abused from the moment they entered Saydnaya prison, with frequent beatings or so-called “parties” organized by the prison guards.

Predictably enough, the US media, led by the New York Times, seized on the findings of the Amnesty report to renew its campaign for confrontation with Russia over Syria and an intensification of the war for regime change fomented by the United States in 2011. The Times followed up its coverage of the report with a lengthy article on Sunday drawing on research carried out for the Atlantic Council by the US government-funded Bellingcat research group in the UK. The report provided information on Russian air strikes in Aleppo that targeted civilians and hospitals.

There is no doubt about the brutality of the Assad regime, or the fact that the months-long bombing campaign conducted by Damascus and Moscow to retake Aleppo claimed many civilian lives.

However, the task of overthrowing such dictatorships and putting an end to the scourge of imperialist war, which has devastated Syria and the entire region, cannot be outsourced to the United States and the European major powers. US imperialism and its allies have been responsible for death and destruction on a much broader scale, as the one million civilian lives ended by the intervention in Iraq, the tens of thousands killed in the brutal NATO air war in Libya in 2011 and the hundreds of thousands who have died in the US-instigated Syrian conflict tragically testify. Only by constructing an international antiwar movement, based on a socialist program to unite workers in the advanced capitalist countries with their brothers and sisters in Syria and throughout the entire Middle East, can an end be put to the wars and dictatorships that have ravaged the region.

The chief responsibility for the atrocities that have been committed in Syria lies squarely with Washington. The destabilization of the country and the entire Middle East region, including the incitement of sectarian violence, is the product of more than 25 years of virtually uninterrupted military conflicts led by the United States and its European imperialist allies, beginning with the first Gulf War in 1990.

For his part, Assad used an interview last Friday with Yahoo News to appeal to the Trump administration for support in his government’s efforts to regain control of territory held by the Islamic State.

Referring to Trump’s repeated pledges to focus on fighting “terrorism” and eliminating ISIS, Assad commented, “We agree about this priority. That’s our position. In Syria, it is to fight terrorism.”