Rail companies Bombardier and Siemens plan merger

Gustav Kemper 

Since the beginning of 2017, the two companies Bombardier and Siemens have been engaged in secret merger negotiations behind the backs of their employees. According to reports by the financial news agency Bloomberg, the two firms want to merge their train-building and signal technology operations into a joint venture to compete with Asia, above all China, in the important export markets. The consolidated corporation could achieve estimated annual revenues of €13 billion.

Thousands of jobs would hang in the balance if there were a merger, since the range of products manufactured by the two corporations overlap in many areas. Bombardier produces various regional and high speed train models in its plants in Görlitz, Bautzen and Henningsdorf, and Siemens Mobility produces similar models in the plants in Krefeld and Munich.

Bombardier is already engaged in negotiations with IG Metal and the works councils to cut 2,500 jobs at its German plants. The largest layoffs would take place at the Görlitz and Henningsdorf locations.

In Austria as well, where Bombardier employs 550 workers in Vienna in competence centres for trams, many jobs are in danger. Siemens also runs a plant in the same city, which produces trams and subway cars with a workforce of 1,200. If the Vienna plants were merged, an unknown number of the jobs at Bombardier and Siemens would be endangered.

While thousands of jobs at both corporations as well as supply industries are in danger, shareholders of both companies are rejoicing over the prospects if the merger succeeds. The Wirtschaftswoche quoted analysts of the French financial service provider Kepler Cheuvreux, according to which “Siemens shareholders alone could profit from the merger in five years by €1.5 to €2 billion.”

The merger plans are a reaction to the growing competitive struggle worldwide, and are part of preparations for global trade war. Siemens and Bombardier have asked the German government to support them against European Union cartel laws that currently stand in the way of the merger.

The unions are integrated into the merger talks at the highest level, but are maintaining a policy of absolute silence with their own members. The works councils and IG Metall union representatives have already been in talks with the management of Bombardier for weeks over the so-called “necessary” restructuring, and increase in the efficiency and profitability of the corporation.

Henningsdorf works council head, Michael Wobst, openly admitted that the works council has no objection to cuts “even if it is painful here and there.” Behind the scenes, a tooth and nail struggle over advantages for individual locations is taking place. A Bombardier works council in Görlitz confirmed this to the WSWS: “There is already a small internal competition taking place.”

Likewise, the IG Metall head in Krefeld at Siemens, Ralf Claessen told the Westdeutsche Zeitung: “I say this quite openly: the Krefeld location is so well equipped with regard to technique, organization and manpower that it could even be strengthened by such a fusion.”

This local patriotism of the unions is totally reactionary and only serves to play the workers against one another at a time when the growing cooperation and the merger of the corporation urgently requires an international collaboration of employees in all locations.

Bombardier and Siemens are preparing themselves for an increasingly competitive struggle and trade war. For decades, the leading producers of rail cars have been engaged in outsourcing production to countries where railway traffic is sharply on the rise, above all in India and China. In these countries, they can profit from the prevailing low wages.

The statements made by Peter Spuhler, the CEO of the family-owned small Swiss producer Stadler Rail AG (with a 2014 revenue of 1.87 billion Swiss francs), provide an indication of the situation on the world market. In March, he spoke with the Swiss Business Club Mittelland about the demand for the localization of the production of trains in the country of each purchaser. “That always has to be weighed. If we don’t want it, someone else wins, and if we do it, we cannibalize our existing plants in Europe.”

He said that Chinese producers have already won contracts in Asia with price differences of 30 percent. Margins were too small for developing new products and technologies, Spuhler complained. In January 2016, Stadler Rail ordered an increase in weekly working time for Swiss employees from 39.5 to 42.5 hours without overtime pay. In order to secure contracts abroad, Stadler had already bought up production and service locations in Berlin, Budapest, Siedlce (in Poland), Prague, Kouba (in Algeria) and Minsk.

Bloomberg reported several days ago that PricewaterhouseCoopers projects that investments in subway projects in Asia will reach a volume of $230 billion in the next 15 years. Bombardier and the French corporation Alstom already opened plants in 2008, which are supposed to serve the Asian markets from now on. They want to “exploit India’s large pool of engineers and cheap skilled labour,” according to one report.

India has already become an important country for export to Africa, South America and Europe for auto producers such as Hyundai, Ford Renault SA and Suzuki Motor Corp. In the past year, 3.5 million automobiles were exported from India. The case of the Maruti Suzuki workers, sentenced to life in prison because they fought for their rights, demonstrates the conditions under which workers are exploited there.

On the Chinese market as well, the leading European corporations, Siemens and Alstrom, are vying with Bombardier, Kawasaki Heavy Industries and Hyundai Retem for contracts with the Chinese state railway.

When the Chinese market opened in the mid-1980s, joint venture corporations began collaborating with Chinese producers:

* Alstom is engaged in production in single and joint venture operations in the states of Shanghai, Qingdao and Xi'an.

* Siemens collaborates with partners in Tianjin and Beijing.

* Bombardier runs its own plants in Shanghai, Beijing, Qingdau and Suzhou as well as carrying out joint ventures in Qingdao, Changchung, Changzhou, Shanghai and Nanjing. It signed a cooperation agreement in September 2016 with the Chinese producer CRRC.

* Kawasaki cooperates with CSR Sifang Locomotive and Rolling Stock Co., Ltd. in Qingdao.

If the trains manufactured in China were then used in Chinese railways, the obligatory technology transfer of common operations with the Chinese producers would lead to a rapid technological development of their own products.

The China Railway Rolling Stock Group (CRRC), which is the product of a mid-2015 merger of northern and southern Chinese producers, has emerged as a serious competitor on the world market. In 2014, the CRRC, which has 180,000 individual workforces, branches or production facilities in over a hundred countries, had a revenue of $34.5 billion, more than double the revenue of Bombardier and Siemens put together in this branch.

Thousands of workers are closely bound up together in the daily worldwide process of production of the joint venture corporations, or in projects that require the cooperation of competing corporations. For example, the new intercity bus ICE 4 for the Deutsche Bahn involves collaboration in development and production between Siemens (two thirds of the order volume) and Bombardier (a third of the volume). The Bombardier plant in Görlitz produces bodies for the ICE 4 and delivers them to the Siemens plant in Krefeld, where each train is manufactured by a workforce of 2,500 workers.

US defense secretary makes crisis trip to Afghanistan

Bill Van Auken

US Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis arrived in Kabul Monday in what amounted to a crisis intervention under conditions of mounting disintegration within Afghanistan’s puppet government and military.

Mattis’s arrival came just two days after an attack by the Taliban on one of the Afghan National Army’s largest bases, in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, that inflicted what Afghan officials are admitting is a death toll that could climb to 200 soldiers.

Even as the US defense secretary was arriving, his Afghan counterpart, Abdullah Habibi, as well as Army Chief of Staff Qadam Sha Shahim, were resigning their posts over the disastrous attack, which was carried out by gunmen wearing Afghan army uniforms, some of them apparently Taliban supporters who had joined the military.

Habibi was trained in the Soviet Union and fought on behalf of the Moscow-backed government against the CIA-funded mujahideen Islamist forces, while Shahim’s background was as a commander in Jamiat-e-Islami, one of the more powerful mujahideen groups.

Three other top commanders along with at least a dozen other officers were also reportedly sacked by the government of President Ashaf Ghani over what was the most punishing attack suffered by the US puppet forces since the US invasion of October 2001 and the toppling of the Taliban government.

At a press conference in Kabul, Mattis denounced the attack and described the Taliban as a “barbaric enemy” that had to be defeated. This, from the head of a military that has carried out countless massacres in Afghanistan, its occupation having left hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded, while turning millions into refugees.

The “barbaric” character of the US military operation was spelled out barely a week and a half before Mattis’s arrival in Kabul with the dropping on Afghanistan’s eastern Nangarhar Province of the Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB), the most destructive weapon used anywhere since the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Mattis’s unannounced trip to Afghanistan comes less than a week and a half after President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Gen. H.R. McMaster, made his own visit to Kabul. The stepped-up attention to Washington’s longest-ever war appears to be bound up with plans for another escalation of the US troop deployment there.

Currently close to 9,000 US soldiers are deployed in Afghanistan, including both those described as trainers and advisers of the Afghan National Army and Special Operations units that are involved in search and destroy missions both unilaterally and alongside Afghan puppet forces.

US commanders have reportedly asked for an additional 3,000 to 5,000 US troops to be sent into the fighting to reverse what they have described as a “stalemate”—in reality a steady loss of territory by the US-backed regime to insurgent forces.

Last Friday’s attack came amid a deepening crisis of the Afghan security forces, which are reportedly suffering a 33 percent annual attrition rate due to casualties, desertions and declining re-enlistments.

A report released at the beginning of this year by the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction made clear that, despite the Pentagon pouring some $70 billion into arming and training the Afghan National Army, the force is steadily losing ground to insurgent groups, while suffering record casualties. The report found that casualty rates soared by 35 percent last year, with the Afghan army suffering 6,700 deaths, three times the number inflicted on US forces during nearly 16 years of the American occupation.

“The numbers of the Afghan security forces are decreasing, while both casualties and the number of districts under insurgent control or influence are increasing,” the report stated.

It also pointed to wholesale corruption in which “ghost soldiers” are kept on the rosters so that senior officers can pocket their pay, leaving many units grossly undermanned. It added that “soldiers at outposts don’t always get ammunition, food, and water they need” because higher-ups divert and sell supplies.

Among the most significant elements in Mattis’s press conference in Kabul Monday was the intervention by the top US commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John Nicholson, who was asked about allegations made by US military officials, speaking not for attribution, that Russia was supplying the Taliban with support, including arms. Nicholson responded that he was “not refuting” such reports, an oblique statement that was headlined by the US corporate media as a direct charge of Russian intervention.

Mattis sounded a similar note, declaring: “We’re going to have to confront Russia where what they’re doing is contrary to international law or denying the sovereignty of other countries. For example, any weapons being funneled here from a foreign country would be a violation of international law unless they’re coming through the government of Afghanistan for the Afghan forces, and so that would have to be dealt with as a violation of international law.”

Again, for the Pentagon chief to indict Russia for “denying the sovereignty of other countries” or having “funneled” weapons to non-government forces is indeed rich, given the US history in Afghanistan itself during the CIA-orchestrated war of the 1980s, as well as the subsequent invasion of Iraq and the US regime change operations in Libya and Syria.

Russia has denied providing any military aid to the Taliban, and the real source of Washington’s ire appears to be Moscow’s attempt to mediate a peace settlement between the insurgent forces and the Kabul government. On April 14, the day after the US military dropped the massive bomb on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, Russia hosted a conference to that end in Moscow that was attended by all the countries of the region, including Pakistan, India and China, but boycotted by the US. There is every reason to believe that the use of the MOAB was directed at Russia as much as it was at ISIS.

Launched nearly 16 years ago in the name of fighting terrorism and avenging the attacks of September 11, 2001, the war in Afghanistan had as its strategic aim to further US hegemony over the region of Central Asia, which boasts the second largest proven reserves of oil and gas in the world, in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Just as the war, waged at an estimated cost of $800 billion, has failed to secure the US-backed puppet regime in Kabul, it has also done nothing to further US imperialism’s broader aims. Russia continues to dominate energy exploitation in the region, while China is steadily increasing its own role, with the building of pipelines directing these vital resources to the east, rather than the west.

Under these conditions, an escalation of the US intervention in Afghanistan will be carried out as part of a broader buildup toward military confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia and China, from eastern Europe, to Syria, the South China Sea, the Korean peninsula and beyond.

French ruling elite rallies around Macron

Anthony Torres & Alex Lantier 

After the historic elimination of both of France's major parties, the Socialist Party (PS) and The Republicans (LR), in the first round of the presidential election, the bulk of the French ruling elite is trying to rally behind ex-banker Emmanuel Macron to stop the neo-fascist National Front (FN).

The PS and LR national committees both met yesterday to vote resolutions supporting Macron. The PS national committee voted it unanimously. In a decision underlining its own bankruptcy, this body postponed drawing any balance sheet of its historic defeat, in which the PS received 6.12 percent—the lowest score for a French social-democratic party since Gaston Defferre's 5.01 percent in 1969, shortly before the foundation of the current PS.

“The time for explanations has not come. Today, it is time for action,” said PS First Secretary Jean-Christophe Cambadélis. “On May 7, I will vote, we will vote for Emmanuel Macron. I will do it without hesitation, without ambiguity, without conditions, as we did for Jacques Chirac faced with Jean-Marie Le Pen” in 2002.

The LR committee supported a statement without a vote, after tense discussions between those who wanted to call for a Macron vote and those who wanted to call to defeat Le Pen. The second line won out, and LR formally declared: “Abstention cannot be a choice faced with the FN. We call for a vote against Marine Le Pen so she loses in the second round of the presidential elections, and we will launch immediately thereafter our legislative campaign to present our alternate program, the only one capable of improving the situation in France.”

Jean-Luc Mélenchon's Unsubmissive France (UF) and allied petty-bourgeois parties are entertaining a similar ambiguity, implying that they would understand if their voters backed Macron on the second round without explicitly endorsing him. UF leaders Clémentine Autain and Pierre Laurent of the Stalinist French Communist party (PCF) both called to “beat” Le Pen.

By supporting Macron ostensibly to block a neo-fascist dictatorship, or asking their voters to do it without them, the traditional parties of the French bourgeoisie and the post-1968 petty bourgeois student movement are committing a monstrous political fraud.

Macron is not a democratic alternative to Le Pen. He wants to extend France's state of emergency that suspends basic democratic rights, impose drastic austerity, and re-establish the draft, claiming that war is now “a possible outcome of politics.” To impose such a program, he would intensify attacks on democratic rights and repression of mass protests carried out under current PS President François Hollande. These policies are not ultimately compatible with bourgeois democracy.

There is no question that the FN descends directly from the tradition of French fascism and is a mortal threat to the working class. However, it would also be a fatal error for workers to align themselves with the perspective of a Macron presidency, based on the ruling elite's proclamations that it is a “lesser evil” compared to Le Pen.

If the bulk of the ruling elite backs Macron, this does not signify that they intend to “block” a neo-fascist dictatorship, as they claim. Rather, they would prefer a dictatorship imposed by Macron, an ally of the European Union (EU) and the NATO military alliance, to one imposed by Le Pen, who hopes to by an ally of Trump and the Kremlin against Berlin.

The reluctance of Mélenchon or Nathalie Arthaud, the candidate of Lutte Ouvrière (LO-Workers Struggle), to immediately endorse Macron reflects their consciousness and fear of the opposition he will provoke among the workers. Their sympathies lie with the PS-backed candidate—they endorsed Hollande in 2012 and Chirac in 2002—but they fear exposing their left flank if they now endorse a banker and ex-PS minister after Hollande's disastrous presidency. They are thus maneuvering to try to preserve what remains of their “radical” reputation, the better to mislead and strangle workers' struggles against Macron and the PS.

The fact that the French electorate faces a choice between Macron and Le Pen, like the election of Trump as US president, testifies to a deep crisis of democracy, with revolutionary implications. The essential question posed by the disintegration of the PS is the building of a party that represents the working class. However, this requires a ruthless break with Mélenchon, Arthaud and similar forces and the struggle for genuine Trotskyism, the perspective advocated by the Socialist Equality Party in France.

Since the 2002 election crisis, the hostility of the different PS satellites to building a working class party is unmistakable. In 2002, Lutte Ouvrière, the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR, today the New Anti-capitalist Party) and the Workers Party (today the Democratic Independent Workers Party) received 3 million votes.

They rejected, however, the call of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) for an active boycott of the Le Pen-Chirac second round after the elimination of PS candidate Lionel Jospin. This would have laid the basis for a political movement of the working class against the wars and social attacks Chirac was preparing. They aligned themselves with the PS' campaign for a Chirac vote, demonstrating their hostility to millions protesting the Chirac-Le Pen second round in France, and internationally the millions protesting the looming war in Iraq.

Since then, the PS and the pseudo-left parties have backed attacks on Muslims, including laws against the veil and burqa, imperialist wars in the Middle East and Africa, and austerity in France under Hollande and in Greece under Syriza (the “Coalition of the Radical Left”). Hollande invited Le Pen to the Elysée and thus helped “de-demonize” the FN.

A broad radicalization of workers has taken place since 2002 in France. Two-thirds of the population says it feels that the class struggle is a daily reality of life. However, due to the political void on the left reflected by the rallying of LO and the LCR to Chirac's camp, the FN has been able to present itself as the main oppositional tendency with populist attacks on the PS and demagogic, law-and-order pledges to defend the French people.

Today, the ongoing political collapse of the PS and its allies is the product of the decades of betrayals and reactionary policies they have carried out against the workers.

Running Benoît Hamon, the PS was wiped out in virtually every locality across France. Hamon's 6.12 percent after Hollande's presidency is comparable to the collapse of Pasok in Greece after Prime Minister Giorgios Papandreou's drastic austerity policies. While they hope to unite in the short term behind Macron, PS leaders openly speak of a disintegration of their party. One said he feared the period after the legislative elections: “On June 18, there will be one PS legislative group in the National Assembly. But six months later, I don't know.”

Macron did best in western France, outside the main industrial centers, and in central urban areas where the upper-middle class is concentrated. He got over 30 percent in only three of France's 100 departments, Ille-et-Vilaine in Brittany, plus the wealthiest parts of the Paris area, downtown Paris and the Hauts-de-Seine.

Mélenchon did best in southern France. In traditional PS strongholds like Ariège and Seine Saint Denis, the working class northern suburbs of Paris, he received over 26 percent of the vote. He came first with 30 percent among youth aged 18 to 24 and the unemployed. Many youth decided to vote for Mélenchon after US strikes on Syria, to oppose the rising danger of war.

Among manual workers, however, Marine Le Pen came first with 37 percent to Mélenchon's 24 percent. The FN candidate took 43 percent of the vote among households earning less than €2,000 monthly, far ahead of Mélenchon (22 percent). Her best scores were in rural areas and in the old industrial areas of eastern and particularly northeastern France—former PS and Communist Party bastions, where these two parties oversaw massive de-industrialization in order to crush militant sections of the working class, particularly miners, steelworkers and auto workers.

University of Winnipeg President’s Scholarship for International Students 2017/2018: Canada

Application Deadlines:

• 2nd June, 2017 and
• 2nd October, 2017.

Eligible Countries: International

To be taken at (country): Canada

About the Award: The University of Winnipeg President’s Scholarship for World Leaders will be given to international students entering any of the University’s divisions for the first time  through the following ways –

1. Undergraduate,
2. Graduate,
3. Collegiate ,
4. PACE or
5. ELP

Type: Undergraduate, Postgraduate

Eligibility: Candidates must meet the following criteria:

• Have a minimum 80% admission average or equivalent
• Be an international student
• Entering first year of any program
• Demonstrate exceptional leadership qualities
• Apply for admission by the scholarship deadline date

Number of Awardees: 

• English Language Program: 3
• Professional, Applied Continuing Education: 3
• Undergraduate: 3
• Collegiate: 3
• Graduate: 3

Value of Scholarship:

• English Language Program: $3,500
• Professional, Applied Continuing Education: $3,500
• Undergraduate: $5,000
• Collegiate: $3,500
• Graduate: $5,000

How to Apply: Please submit your completed form and documents to:

Awards and Financial Aid
The University of Winnipeg
515 Portage Avenue
Winnipeg, Manitoba R3B 2E9
CANADA

Only complete applications received on time will be considered. Documents sent with your application will not be returned. Scanned applications are accepted in PDF or JPG format.

Scanned applications and associated documents should be sent to awards@uwinnipeg.ca.

Visit Scholarship Webpage for details

Award Provider: University of Winnipeg

United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) Fellowship for Young Leaders 2017

Application Deadline: 21st May 2017

Eligible Countries: Countries in Europe, North-America (EUNA), the Middle East and North-Africa (MENA).

About the Award: The UNAOC Fellowship Program was launched in 2010 with the aim to build bridges between cultures and societies through dialogue and cooperation, and to reinforce the global commitment to live together in mutual tolerance and respect. The Program was created to recognize the need for better understanding between peoples and societies from the Middle East, North Africa, Europe and North America.

By exposing participants to new ideas and perspectives, and by immersing them into culturally diverse environments, the Fellowship Program aims at challenging perceptions and deconstructing stereotypes. Building on that, participants become then better equipped to position themselves as informed stakeholders and to develop cross-cultural partnerships while bridging divides between peoples from different faiths and cultures.

Type: Fellowship

Eligibility: Applicants have to meet two eligibility criteria in order to apply. They have to be nationals of EUNA or MENA countries and be between 25 and 38 years old.

Selection Criteria: Candidates have to show a level of professional accomplishment in intercultural dialogue and in the theme chosen by UNAOC, through their involvement in politics, civil society, media, local community organizations, faith based associations, grassroots initiatives, academia, think-tanks, arts, and any other fields relevant to the objectives of the Fellowship Program.

Selection Process: Participants are selected for their potential in shaping opinion and taking strong initiatives within their community. In their applications, candidates have to demonstrate a strong interest – backed by concrete ideas – to engage with peers and partners from the countries they are going to visit, and propose positive and innovative models of intercultural cooperation.

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Program: The Fellowship provides participants with first hand exposure to diversity and with the opportunity to experience cultural immersion while interacting with a wide range of local actors and partners. In every country visited, participants are being provided with crucial comprehension tools to help them understand the plurality of their surroundings, and to get an extensive grasp of host countries’ culture, politics, society, religion, media and more.

Duration of Program: 18 days in October or November 2017

How to Apply: 

• Apply
  • Call for Applications to candidates from EUNA countries
  • Call for Applications to candidates from MENA countries

Visit Program Webpage for details

Award Provider: UNAOC

XL Africa Business Acceleration Program for Digital Startups in Africa 2017

Application Deadline: 12th June 2017

Eligible Countries: Africa countries

To be taken at (country): South Africa

About the Award: If you are accepted into the program, you will be asked to:

• Engage regularly with mentors (4-6 hours a month) over five months. Remember it’s a two-way street – both mentors and mentees learn and commit to this relationship. In many cases, we expect these relationships to last long after the program has ended.
• Over 5 months, participate in four virtual webinar sessions run by global experts with inputs from leading African and US investors and successful entrepreneurs.
• Participate in the residential program in South Africa for two weeks in November 2017.
• Engage with 19 other African enterprises, along with mentors, investors and strategic partners.
• Come with an open mind and be willing to learn and collaborate.

Type: Entrepreneurship

Eligibility: 

• Your startup is for profit and registered, with a team of at least three people
• Your team is based in one of the countries of Sub-Saharan Africa
• You have a very strong management team
• You have a digital product or service available on the market right now, with demonstrated tangible traction and evidence of revenue
• You have potential to achieve scale
• You are seeking investment capital in the range of $250K – $1.5m
• While there will be exceptions, mostly likely your startup has already received investment capital, structured as either debt or equity, or received grants from donor organizations.

Selection Criteria: To select the top 20 start-ups, we will consider:

• Commercial Value of your Product/Service (25%): Your company addresses a real problem in the market. The digital solution is different to others in the industry. Your product or service is catalyzing social change.
• Strategy for Growth (25%): There is potential to expand into new markets or expand at home. We can see demonstrable progress, and your startup is scalable.
• Management (25%): The team have the qualifications needed to make the business successful.
• Market Traction & Financials (25%): We will evaluate your market traction and look at the potential market size. We’ll also look at your business model, revenue streams and unit economics, and if any outside funding has been raised before.

Number of Awards: 20

Value of Program: We will help your company access capital, expand market share, and refine its business model through tailored mentorship, coaching, and networking opportunities. Here’s what we offer:

• Structured access to investors throughout the program and at a Venture Showcase Day in South Africa.
• Mentoring from at least two successful entrepreneurs or investors (global and local) to develop accurate company valuations, financial forecasts, risk management and customer acquisition strategies. Access to other expertise is provided based on your specific needs.
• The opportunity to meet with investors, potential customers and partners as well as peers at an all-expenses paid residency in Cape Town, South Africa.
• Support in developing investment packages so you’re ready for investment following the program.
• Knowledge through curated content designed to teach you everything you need to know about marketing, financing and market expansion.

Duration of Program: August 1 – December 31, 2017

How to Apply: APPLY NOW

Visit Program Webpage for details

Award Provider: XL Africa

Treating Mental Health Patients as Criminals

Patrick Cockburn

The criminalisation of the mentally ill is one of the cruellest and most easily avoidable tragedies of our era. In the next few days, the state of Arkansas is intending to execute by lethal injection a 60-year-old man called Bruce Ward who showed signs of insanity at the time of his conviction for murder and was diagnosed by a court-recognised psychiatrist in 2006 as being a paranoid schizophrenic.

Ward is one of seven men facing execution in Arkansas after the first death sentence in the state since 2005 was carried out on Thursday. “He appears not to understand that he is about to die, believing instead that he is preparing for a ‘special mission’ as an evangelist,” says a report by the Harvard University Fair Punishment Project. A second man scheduled for execution is Jason McGehee who suffers from bipolar disorder and possible brain damage.

The prison systems in the US and UK have replaced psychiatric hospitals as the place where people suffering from severe mental illness are most likely to find themselves. It is a process that has been going on since the 1960s, fuelled by a desire to save money, a belief that medication would replace hospitalisation, and a liberal reaction against what was seen as unnecessary incarceration. Between 1955 and 2016, the number of state hospital beds in the US available to psychiatric patients fell by over 97 per cent from 559,000 to just 38,000. An expert noted despairingly that the biggest de facto psychiatric institutions in the US today are Los Angeles County jail, Chicago’s Cook County jail and New York’s Riker’s Island. Those who are not in prison or hospital “become violent or, more often, the victims of violence. They grow sicker and die. The personal and public costs are incalculable,” says a report by the Treatment Advocacy Center in Virginia. Mentally ill people, usually poor and unemployable because of their condition, are sometimes advised that the only way they will get even the crudest treatment is by being sent to prison.

The same process is happening in Britain. One of the justifications for closing down the old asylum system was that they were too much like prisons, but the paradoxical result has been that psychiatric patients are now ending up in real prisons. The number of beds available for mental health patients in the UK has dropped by three quarters since 1986/87 to about 17,000, while the Centre for Mental Health says that 21,000 mentally ill people are imprisoned, making up a quarter of the prison population.

For many mentally ill people, the prospect of incarceration is becoming probable in an unexpected reversion to eighteenth century practice. Some are left to wander the streets but most are looked after by their families who may not have the resources to do so. Deceptively progressive sounding words, like ‘deinstitutionalisation’ in the US and ‘care in the community’ in the UK, are used to describe the ending of the vast system that once catered for psychiatric patients.

Some of these institutions were hellholes, and others became unnecessary because medication was available from the 1950s that controlled some of the worst symptoms of mental illness. But the old system did at least provide an asylum in the sense of a place of safety where people who could not look after themselves were cared for. Supposing ‘care in the community’ had been more than an attractive slogan, it might have provided something of a replacement for the old asylums, but the care it provided was always inadequate.

The reality of the new system was best described by the detective-story writer P.D. James, an administrator in the NHS in London whose husband was a long-term patient in a mental hospital. She wrote that since the 1970s community care “could be described more accurately as the absence of care in a community still largely resentful or frightened of mental illness.”

Not much has changed for the better since P.D.James was writing, as was made plain this week by the report of the Sir Thomas Winsor, the Chief Inspector of Constabulary, who complained that the police are increasingly being used as the “first resort” for people with mental health problems. He said that sometimes they ended up spending the night in police cells even though they had committed no crime because no hospital beds were available. He added that the “inadequacy” of mental health provision should “disturb everyone”.

Marjorie Wallace, the founder and chief executive of SANE, a mental health charity, explains that governments have every incentive to keep mental patients out of hospital, since “providing a single bed costs the same as ‘treating’ 44 people in the community.” She welcomed Theresa May’s intention expressed in a speech earlier this year to do something about “the burning injustice of mental health and inadequate treatment”, but says that this will remain a Utopian vision unless there is more ring-fenced money for psychiatric services which are already close to breakdown.

There is more open discussion than there used to be about mental illness, with a campaign against stigmatisation and exhortations for people to seek counseling or simply speak up about their mental troubles before they become chronic and irreversible. Prince Harry spoke movingly about the negative consequences for himself of repressing his grief over the death of his mother when he was twelve years old. Celebrities reveal their anxieties and breakdowns. Such openness is important because it reduces personal isolation and makes people feel that they will not be treated as pariahs if they speak up.

When I first began to write about schizophrenia in 2002, I found that my friends and relatives divided into those who knew nothing about mental illness and those who knew all too much about it. But the latter had often never mentioned previously that they were looking after a sister with schizophrenia or a brother who could not leave his flat without having a breakdown. One friend disclosed a terrible story of a sister-in-law who had poured petrol over herself and set it alight, suffering burns over three quarters of her body from which she took weeks to die in agony.

Openness and discussion are important, but they skirt the heart of the problem, which is that a proportion of people who are mentally ill cannot look after themselves. The severity and incurability of a mental illnesses are often underestimated and there may be exaggerated expectations of preventing their onset by early intervention. The precise causes and nature of mental illness remains very much a mystery so a large number of people are always going to become desperately ill. Schizophrenia, for instance, is to mental illness what cancer is to physical illness. When Prince Harry talked about psychological troubles, debilitating though these may be, they are still not the same as full blown psychosis or, in other words, madness.

The present system has failed and the result is the creeping criminalisation of madness. The only way to reverse this is to build a core of dedicated hospitals that will care for and protect psychiatric patients who cannot do this for themselves and are a potential danger to themselves and others.

US prepares military response to world-historic famine in sub-Saharan Africa, Arabian Peninsula

Thomas Gaist 

Widespread and deepening famine is threatening the lives of tens of millions across large parts of sub-Saharan Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. Analysts describe the outbreak of mass hunger as completely historically unprecedented and warn that record-breaking levels of malnourishment and starvation are overwhelming the capacity of existing humanitarian infrastructure.

Tens of millions people, including 17 million Yemenis, 7 million Nigerians, 3 million Somalis and 1 million South Sudanese, are in imminent danger of dying from lack of adequate nutrition, according to United Nations (UN) estimates. Countries impacted by famine and food shortages include South Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Angola, Botswana, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia and Zimbabwe.

In Somalia, where the Trump administration announced the deployment of regular US ground troops for the first time since 1994, the price of a 20-liter can of water increased from 4 to 40 cents during the past few weeks alone. Somalia is experiencing record rates of child malnutrition and faces the die off of 75 percent of its livestock, according to Save the Children.

The Yemen war, waged by the United States and Saudi Arabia since April 2015, has transformed one of the most ancient societies in the world into the ground-zero of world famine. Some 20 million Yemenis are now on the verge of starvation. The naval blockade of Yemen’s ports, enforced by American and Saudi ships, is strangling the flow of goods into a country that depends on imports for 90 percent of its food supply. The US-Saudi bombing campaign has relentlessly targeted Yemen’s social infrastructure, completely paralyzing its economy and turning 80 percent of its population into paupers. The approval by Trump of a Navy SEALs raid into Yemen, as his first official military action, has signaled his intention to expand direct US participation in the war.

The response of Africa’s national elites to the famine has been intensified social attacks against their own populations. The US-backed governments of Djibouti, Tanzania, Rwanda and Ethiopia have slashed food rations in recent months. The US-backed South Sudanese government is employing starvation as a weapon against ethnic minorities, and has “actively blocked and prevented aid access” to famine-stricken areas, the UN said.

In the teeth of a world-historic famine, instead of food deliveries, the White House is organizing expanded war throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Trump has approved “increasing American military pressure” in Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger, Central African Republic, Chad and Somalia, according to Breitbart News, a web site with close ties to the American President.

Last week, Trump approved the sale of fighter jets to Nigeria, signaling his intention to escalate the US proxy war in Nigeria. Now in its seventh year, the war has already displaced some 2.5 million, and transformed northern Nigeria into one of the worst famine hotspots on the continent.

The American military is deploying “advisors, intelligence, training, and equipment” throughout West Africa, US Africa Command (AFRICOM) commander General Thomas Waldhauser announced in comments March 24.

Last week, Waldhauser hosted dozens of African military officers for discussions at the AFRICOM headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany. The purpose of the US Africa Command Chiefs of Defense (CHoD) meetings is to recruit “liaison” officers from African governments who will be permanently stationed alongside US commanders in Europe, coordinating joint US-African military operations on the continent.

AFRICOM’s military presence in Africa is geared to crush the mass social opposition to Africa’s national governments and militaries that will inevitably arise out of the famine and other manifestations of the deepening economic and social crisis.

“On the African continent, when you have, you know, the top 50 poorest countries on the planet. Obviously the migrant problem is a huge issue,” Waldhauser remarked.

The American military is “war-gaming procedures to work in a famine-type environment,” the top US Africa General said.

Aside from its role in policing the increasingly restive African population, the continuous expansion of AFRICOM’s war operations on the continent is aimed at seizing the continent’s most strategic resources and infrastructure. The huge potential profits to be coined out of the labor-power of Africa’s working class, and the untold trillions in mineral wealth buried in its lands, are greedily sought after by the American and European ruling elites. Africa has been at the center of the military and strategic aggression waged by the Western powers against the entire former colonial world since the end of the USSR.

The past two-and-a-half decades of the so-called “post-colonial” era have witnessed a renaissance of colonialism. Thousands of US and European troops and commandos now rampage freely on the continent, establishing proxy armies and organizing the toppling and murder of numerous African leaders considered insufficiently compliant with US imperialism’s line.

The alternative between socialism and a new round of imperialist barbarism is posed most starkly on the African continent, the birthplace of the human species. Only a unified mass movement of the entire African working class, leading behind it the oppressed peasantry, can drive the imperialists from the continent and resolve the urgent social problems facing the masses. Such a movement requires the building of sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International, the only genuine socialist leadership in existence, in every country of Africa.

Hundreds of Afghan soldiers die in Taliban attack

Jordan Shilton

At least 140 soldiers of the Afghan National Army were killed Friday in the deadliest Taliban attack since the Islamist regime’s overthrow in the US-led invasion in 2001. Some local sources in the northern Afghan province of Balkh placed the death toll as high as 200.

The attack was conducted by a group of ten fighters, who managed to penetrate the army’s largest base in the north of the country. The manner of the attack strongly suggests that the Taliban enjoyed inside support and demonstrates the increasing inability of the US puppet government led by President Ashraf Ghani to maintain control over the country.

The assailants, dressed in Afghan army fatigues, gained entry to the base in military vehicles before opening fire on the unarmed soldiers as they emerged from Friday prayers. Some of the attackers blew themselves up, with one blast killing 80 people, according to one source. It took a five-hour intervention by special commando forces to restore control over the base and kill all of the Taliban members.

Friday’s attack is only the latest in a number of insurgent assaults on government institutions over recent months. In March, militants linked to ISIS entered the main military hospital in Kabul dressed as doctors and launched an attack that claimed more than 50 casualties. A dozen officers in the Afghan army, including two generals, were subsequently removed from their posts due to lapses prior to the incident.

Following Friday’s attack, a number of parliamentary deputies and former security officials called on several senior figures to accept responsibility for the attack and resign, including Major General Mohmand Katawazai, the commander of the 209 Army Corps that occupied the base, Balkh Governor Atta Mohammad Noor, and Defense Minister Abdullah Habibi. The group also accused President Ghani of nepotism in his appointments of leading military personnel.

The insurgency against the US-led occupation has continued to grow. According to information from the US special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction (SIGAR), the Afghan government controls just 52 percent of the country, with more than one third of provinces contested by insurgents and around 10 percent under the control of the Taliban. These figures come ahead of the Taliban’s anticipated spring offensive, and show that despite investing hundreds of billions of dollars to establish a pro-Western puppet regime in Kabul, Washington has failed to establish a viable government.

The attack on the Afghan army base came less than a week after President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, General H.R. McMaster, visited Kabul for talks with the Afghan government. The main purpose of the talks was to consider whether additional US military personnel would be required to turn the tide of the conflict. Currently, some 8,500 US troops operate in Afghanistan, nominally in the capacity of advising and assisting Afghan troops.

The latest attack, which has exposed once again the fragility of the US-trained forces, will only intensify calls for further US deployments.

The request for additional forces was made by the US commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John Nicholson, to a congressional committee in February. Although no decision has yet been made about such a deployment, the comments of McMaster indicated that this is the direction the Trump administration will take. He said in a ToloNews interview that fighters who did not accept the Afghan government’s offer of peace “will have to be defeated on battlefields,” adding that Washington was “committed to give the Afghan state, the Afghan security forces, the strength they need.”

A stepped-up US presence is even more likely given the deepening crisis facing the Afghan army and the mounting alienation felt by ordinary Afghans towards Washington’s corrupt client regime in Kabul. As well as the apparent existence of elements that are facilitating the Taliban attacks within its ranks, the Afghan National Army is also suffering dramatic casualty rates. In 2016 alone there were more than 6,700 deaths.

Indicating the deep unpopularity of the Kabul government, many relatives of those killed in the latest Taliban attack and other Afghans expressed anger and frustration with the authorities. “Mothers lost their sons, sisters lost their brothers and wives lost their husbands. What is the government doing to prevent such atrocities, only condemning? I am so tired. I can’t do anything but to cry,” Zabiullah commented, according to Al-Jazeera. “We always thought our house was safe because of the base,” a local resident added, “but now we are shocked. How could this have happened? I can’t believe we lost all these young men.”

McMaster’s visit came just days after the US military dropped its largest nonnuclear bomb, the Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB), in the east of the country, ostensibly to target a few hundred ISIS supporters operating in a cave network. The blast killed an estimated 94 ISIS fighters and an unknown number of civilians, with reports of houses being destroyed some three miles away from the blast site.

US politicians and media outlets applauded the strike as a demonstration of US military power and a warning to Russia, China and North Korea as to the methods to which US imperialism is prepared to resort in pursuit of its drive for global hegemony.

The decision to drop the MOAB, together with remarks by various think tanks, point to a deliberate effort by Washington to escalate tensions with Russia and other regional powers over Afghanistan.

Stratfor, which has close links with the US intelligence apparatus, described the Central Asian country in an April 20 analysis as “an increasingly important theater for the US-Russia competition.” It complained that Moscow was working to deploy additional troops in Tajikistan on the Afghan border as part of a military cooperation agreement with the Central Asian country.

US and Afghan officials have also made provocative allegations that Russia is aiding the Taliban, claims the Kremlin has dismissed as “fabrications.”

On April 14, Moscow held peace talks with the Afghan government and other regional powers. While an invitation was extended to Washington, the Trump administration refused to attend and instead dropped the MOAB a day prior to the meeting.

During his Afghan trip, McMaster also took a swipe at Pakistan, suggesting that the Trump administration was no longer willing to tolerate Islamabad’s refusal to confront Taliban fighters based in the border regions between Pakistan and Afghanistan. “We have hoped that Pakistani leaders will understand that it is in their interest to go after these groups less selectively than they have in the past,” he said, before traveling to Pakistan, where he delivered a similar message. “The best way to pursue their interests in Afghanistan and elsewhere is through the use of diplomacy and not through the use of proxies that engage in violence.”

The escalation of the Afghanistan conflict by the Trump administration will intensify the already horrific conditions faced by the country’s long-suffering population after more than fifteen years of war. Hundreds of thousands have lost their lives as a result of US imperialist aggression and millions more have been forced to flee their homes. Civilian deaths reached a record high in 2016, when close to 11,500 noncombatants were killed or wounded. According to the United Nations, one third of these casualties were children.

IMF meeting signals descent into global trade war

Nick Beams

In another step toward world-wide trade war, the International Monetary Fund over the weekend became the second major global economic organisation to back away from a commitment to “resist all forms of protectionism.”

In the wake of the decision at last month’s meeting of the G20 finance ministers to drop the phrase from its communiqué, the IMF adopted the same course at its spring meeting in Washington. In both cases, the “free trade” commitment was removed as a result of pressure from the Trump administration, in line with the White House’s “America First” agenda.

The statement issued by the IMF’s International Monetary and Financial Committee (IMFC) said it sought to “promote a level playing field in international trade,” dropping the previous wording.

The current chair of the committee, Agustin Carstens, the governor of the Bank of Mexico, sought to cover over the significance of the decision by suggesting that the previous wording had been removed because “the use of the word protectionism is very ambiguous.”

In reality, the omission of any disavowal of protectionism is an unmistakable expression of mounting trade tensions, fueled above all by the Trump administration.

These conflicts could not be completely suppressed at the meeting. In his statement to the IMFC, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble said Germany “commits to keep the global economy open, resist protectionism and keep global economic and financial cooperation on track.”

This statement stood in stark contrast to the remarks of US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. He said the US would “promote an expansion of trade with those partners committed to market-based competition, while more rigorously defending ourselves against unfair trade practices.”

He directed his comment in particular against the two major countries, China and Germany, that have the largest trade surpluses with the US. Washington insists that the Chinese economy is not market-based, while members of the Trump administration have asserted that Germany enjoys unfair advantages because the value of the euro is lower than where its former currency, the deutschmark, would have been.

While not directly naming Germany, which recorded a record trade surplus last year, Mnuchin said that “countries with large external surpluses and sound public finances have a particular responsibility for contributing to a more robust global economy.”

The decision of the IMF to bow to US pressure came just days after the Trump administration announced a major initiative aimed at imposing sweeping restrictions on steel imports, which, if carried through, will have far-reaching implications for the global market in this basic commodity.

Under a little-used law dating from 1962, Trump signed an executive order to launch an investigation into the impact of steel imports on US national security. Describing the decision as a “historic day for America,” he declared that steel was “critical to both our economy and military,” and that this was not “an area where we can afford to become dependent on foreign countries.”

The invocation of “national security” has clear connections to the militarist drive of the administration. But the use of this legislation is also part of a broader strategy on protectionism laid out by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Peter Navarro, the head of Trump’s National Trade Council, in a submission to Congress earlier this year.

It is based on using previous US legislation to circumvent international trade laws enforced by the World Trade Organization, enabling the United States to impose protectionist measures with impunity. Significantly, in their paper, Ross and Navarro invoked the infamous Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930, widely credited with being responsible for the trade conflicts of the 1930s that contributed to the outbreak of World War II.

Commenting on the latest Trump move to the Financial Times, Chad Brown, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute and a former economic adviser to President Obama, said that citing “national security” to justify restrictions on steel imports amounted to carrying out the “nuclear option” on trade.

“This is one more piece of evidence in the worrisome trend that Trump seems to be turning over every rock and investigating each tool available under US law to stop trade,” he said.

In recent years, the US has launched 152 anti-steel dumping cases and has another 25 in the pipeline. But the latest move represents a major escalation. According to Commerce Secretary Ross, the present system is too “porous” and allows only for narrow complaints against particular countries, which can be easily skirted.

The new measures are intended to bring about a “more comprehensive solution with a very wide range of steel products and a very wide range of countries,” which could “conceivably result in a recommendation to take action on all steel imports.”

This would cause chaos in international markets, as steel exporters sought to shift their output to other markets, leading to accusations of dumping, the imposition of tariffs and other restrictions—in short, a full-scale trade war.

There are two essential driving forces behind the actions of the American government: First, the ongoing economic decline of the US, which it now seeks to overcome by political and military means—a process that has accelerated in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent decline in world economic growth and contraction of world markets.

Second, the striving by the Trump administration to deflect rising social tensions caused by low wages and growing economic hardship, and channel them along reactionary economic nationalist lines. In this, Trump has the full support of the trade union bureaucracy, with key union leaders standing beside him as he signed his executive order on steel. It is also backed by the economic nationalists of the Democratic Party, whose most prominent representative is the self-styled “socialist” Bernie Sanders.

The inherent, objective logic of these processes is economic and military war, to which the capitalist politicians can offer no progressive alternative, as the impotence displayed by the IMF in the face of what it recognises as a great danger once again underscored. This is because the growth of economic nationalism and protectionism is rooted in the very foundations of the socio-economic system based on private profit and the division of the world into rival nation-states.

One hundred years ago, the world was embroiled in the carnage of World War I. It was not the “war to end all wars,” but only the start of a more than three-decade-long struggle to decide which of the imperialist powers would achieve global dominance. Eventually, after tens of millions of deaths and untold horrors, including the Holocaust and the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan, the US emerged as the preeminent global power.

Now the world is being brought face to face with the even more explosive consequences of America’s economic decline.

But this year also marks the centenary of the greatest event of the 20th century, the Russian Revolution, and the successful conquest of political power by the working class, led by the Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolshevik Party on the basis of the program of world socialist revolution. That must be the perspective that animates the international working class in the struggles it now directly confronts.